my script
im hoping to shoot this sunday, and I would fully appreciate anyone's comments or criticism. the numbers after some of the sentences are footnotes. and if you want I cant explain that, but I'd rather have you guys come in cold at this point.
Tyler Henry
Shooting Script for "The Divider King" (tentative title)
[perhaps a better title is, "On We"]
INT. - BLANK ROOM (THE ETERNAL DAY)
A room is empty yet unkempt. The unpainted walls are painted white. The walls are thus brick, and through the cracks - actually, rotten holes - in the wood, ink shadows engulf trains of thought, steaming monotonously miraculously through a shining single window frame.
Option #1:
Camera is outside the window, looking in through the sash: sees a man, empty yet unkempt, sitting in muted rags, naked. He clenches his knees and pulls his mouth into his elbow, rocking back and forth by his heels. He stares away from the camera, disgusted. Close up of his eyes (he shuts them), and mouth, which cannot be seen. Camera is outside the window, looking in through the sash: sees a man, empty yet unkempt, sitting in muted rags, naked. He clenches his knees, rocking back and forth by his heels, and turns his mouth from his elbow in order to babble silently, his eyes closed as he knows that he is unaware that he is seen. Jump cut: the camera takes a step closer through the window (it in fact zooms, but the zoom is cut). The man is no longer speaking. His eyes are closed, but ours are not, and we watch in silence as he turns his head left and right and rocks back and forth by his heels. We feel no pity. We are disgusted.
A long time later, many frames from then, he begins to speak:
MAN:
'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo.
[whispers] Gotta do something.
He scratches his hairline and runs his hair back through his hand until he finds a suitable strand, and he plucks it without flinching and drops it with a roll of his opposable thumb. He is stupid and therefore contemplates himself. He plucks another hair in the same motion.
MAN:
[sighs]
Gotta do something.
He licks his upper lip in an odd animal manner. Again, and again and again he licks it in quick plops. His eyes glaze over and diverge. He blinks. He blinks and blinks and blinks in quick snaps.
MAN:
[clears his throat with his mouth closed so that his nose is aggravated and forced to expel air and mucous]
Gotta do something.
The man's breathing becomes labored. He breathes as if the air is cigarette smoke and he's been trying to quit. The man stands slowly, harshly, and stretches his arms out and whimpers, and that shot is then played in reverse so that the man sits back down again. He is motionless. He neither breathes nor holds his breath. Breathing has become as stupid as it is overt, and the memory of it fails successfully, as if it were anything else. Silence. What's the difference between a palindrome and a chiasmus, anyway?
MAN:
What's the difference between a palindrome and a chiasmus, anyway?
Silence.
MAN:
[whispers]
Silence.
Silence.
MAN:
[whispers]
Silence.
Silence.
MAN:
That's it. It's time. It's past time. I should have done it already. [groans] I can't anymore. I haven't any inspiration. [breathes in and out] Nope, not even an inkling. What's it worth anyway? Wouldn't it be better just to sit and do nothing. [pause] Tell me, isn't that impossible? Sitting is doing something. And I'm talking, that's something - isn't it? Am I talking? [quoting] "Any ING is someth-ING." If only somebody was listening, they'd give me a prize. A congratulations. Jobs well done. Awards ceremonies, in fact. Honor even. Indeed: justice. The problem is - obviously - not here, then. It's in this old trap of a system. I'm caught in it. I'm lost. I'm lost in it. [pause] Aren't we all.
Silence.
MAN:
Yes, yes we are. Just rambling around rambling, that's for sure. The only sure. That's only for sure. That's the only sure... sureness... sure-ity.... sure-thing, I guess.
Silence.
MAN:
That's it. It's time. I'm gonna do it. No more gotta, just gonna. I'm gonna do somep thin. [carefully] I - am - going - to - do - some - thing.
Long silence.
MAN:
Has it been long? What have I done? What have I... produced? [strokes his chin] Hrrmmmm... [strokes his chin, squints his eyes] Hrrmmmmmmmmm... [strokes his chin, squints his eyes, cocks his head] Hrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Silence. He closes his eyes.
MAN:
I've lived my life searching for something to say. And now it's come to this.
DISEMBODIED VOICE:
Come to what? Come to what? What has it come to? What are you going to do? You've done no searching. You've done nothing your whole life, and now you have the utter indecency, the utmost presumptuousness, the unfettered flatulence to say - out loud, mind you - that you are going to actually do something about this, this abominable patheticism into which you have graciously ingratiated yourself.
MAN:
I didn't say I was going to do anything. I just said, "it has come to this."
VOICE:
Thus implying that this is in fact a moment of action for you, our beloved, yet pitiful protagonist.
MAN:
No! I didn't imply. You see, that's the problem with you.
He looks away from the camera out the window, as if he were a member of an audience heckling a performer.
MAN:
You always assume. Implications, insinuations - [pauses, searches for another word] - so on, and so forth. Innuendo. It's all just babble. None of it's real. You're only hearing what you already think. Can't we just have a real conversation for once? You know, really express ourselves? Our utmost being? Why does it always have to be meaningless vibrations and pissed away opportunities?
VOICE: [pauses]
[matter-of-factly] Well, you said earlier you were going to do something.
[awkward pause]
MAN:
Did I? I don't remember.
VOICE:
Yes, yes you did exactly that. Your problem is that you can't remember - you don’t know whether it’s now or before or after! So much repetition - inanity - absurdity! Insanity! It’s enough to make us seasick!
MAN:
[has been rocking back and forth, now stops and loses balance momentarily - remains motionless for a few beats]
[moment of clarity] Ah! But how you’ve missed the point! The point is... you... were here... then... Weren’t you? [considers this] And yet... Well, shouldn’t you be congratulating me... for what I’ve done? Aggrandizing me for the achievements I’ve accomplished!
VOICE:
[angrily] You’ve done nothing!
MAN:
Haven’t I?
VOICE:
How should I know? There’s no way to tell now... it's too late.
Silence.
MAN:
Too late now. Now... [considers now] Well, now we’re having this conversation - [proudly] And consequently, I must have done something to instigate it! [pause, snorts] So grant me credit1 - where credit is due.
VOICE:
How do you expect me to grant you credit if you're already so busy taking it? [saving face, quickly] Besides, instigation is nothing, unto itself - it’s merely the precedence to something. Even you should be able to follow that.
MAN:
Perhaps if you told me something I don't already know...
VOICE:
And how am I supposed to know what you don't?
MAN:
Must you ask such stupid questions? They require such stupid answers. If you must know, here's where I'm amiss: What comes before something? [pause, motionless] And then, what comes after? [strokes his chin, as before] Credit. Where credit is due. After all, isn’t taking credit doing something? [raises his forefinger] "Every ING is someth-ING." Certainly it's all the rage these days.
Silence. Inertia.
VOICE:
Then we live in dangerous times. How can we know the truth if we can't be sure where it comes from?
MAN:
Truth? - My good fellow, I must say I don't follow. I speak merely of expression. Allow me that, at least.
VOICE:
How can I prevent it?
MAN:
It's all you're good for.
VOICE:
I expect nothing from you.
MAN:
Precisely my predicament. Now I can't stop doing nothing long enough in order to do something. Why don't you expect something from me instead?
VOICE:
If I expected it, I wouldn't be able to give you credit for it afterwards.
Nonsense.
MAN:
Nonsense.
My friend, let me tell you something - and I've thought long and hard about this - as much thought as I've been able to muster in this old grey bucket of mine. [pauses, thinking, scratches above his left eyebrow] That is...
[pauses]
You see, I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking - to the external act of its materialization into words - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer - but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely.2
VOICE:
The man who thinks expends himself utterly.3
The MAN is pissing in the corner.
MAN:
May I, at the risk of importuning you, recur to a few matters which we discussed this afternoon?
VOICE:
With all best wishes.4
MAN:
Then I will continue. [stops pissing, shakes, continues pissing] You see, I have felt and accepted these phrases, these ungainly expressions which you criticize. Bear in mind: I have not questioned them. [he is sitting] They come from the deep uncertainty of my thinking. Fortunate indeed when this uncertainty is not replaced by the absolute inexistence from which I sometimes suffer.5
Silence. Inertia. He shakes his leg.
Yet is the substance of my thought so tangled and is its general beauty rendered so inactive by the impurities and uncertainties with which it is marred that it does not manage to exist literally? The entire problem of my thinking is involved. For me, it is no less than a matter of knowing whether or not I have the right to continue thinking.6
VOICE:
As I told you at the very beginning, there are awkward things and disconcerting oddities in your composition.
It is revealed that the man is looking into a mirror and speaking to himself.
MIRROR:
But they seem to me to be due to a certain quest on your part rather than a lack of command over your thoughts.
Reverse shot of the man listening to himself.
HIS VOICE DISEMBODIED:
Obviously you do not, in general, achieve sufficient unity of impression. But I have enough experience to sense that it is not your temperament that prevents you from focusing your abilities upon a simple object, and that with a little patience you will succeed.7
Silence. Inertia.
MAN:
You have just cause for having forgotten me. Before, I made a little confession to you. I hope you will allow me now to complete that confession, to continue it, to plumb my very depths. [shot of mirror image, silently listening to the man] I am attempting to justify myself in your eyes. [shot of man] I care very little whether I seem to anyone to exist. [2 shot] The distance that separates me from myself suffices to cure me of the judgement of others. [to the camera, i.e. mirror POV shot] Please do not regard this as insolence, but rather as the very faithful confession, the painful statement, of a distressing state of mind.
[over the shoulder shot into mirror]
My question was perhaps specious, but it was of you that I asked it, of you and no one else, because of the extreme sensitivity, the almost sickly perceptiveness of your mind.8
Close-up of mirror image listening. Close up of MAN's mouth speaking.
There is something that destroys my thinking, a something which does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me, if I may say so, in abeyance. A something furtive which takes away from me the words which I have found, which diminishes my mental tension, which destroys in its substance the mass of my thinking as it evolves, which takes away from me even the memory of the devices by which one expresses oneself and which render with precision the most inseparable, most localized, most existing modulations of thought. I shall not labor the point. There is no need to describe my state.
I should like to say only as much as is needed for you finally to understand and believe me.
So grant me credit. Recognize, I beg of you, the reality of these phenomena, recognize their furtiveness, their eternal repetition. And so once again here is my question:
Are you familiar with the subtlety, the fragility of the mind? Restore to my mind the concentration of its forces, the cohesion that it lacks, the constancy of its tension, the consistency of its own substance. (And all that is objectively so little.) And tell me whether what is lacking may not be restored all at once?9
MIRROR:
In any case, it is, I think, a fact that a whole category of men are subject to shiftings of the level of being. How often do we not suddenly discover, when mechanically placing ourselves in a familiar psychological attitude, that it has transcended us, or rather that we have become surreptitiously unequal to it! How often does our most habitual personage not appear to us suddenly to be factitious and even fictive, owing to the absence of the spiritual, or 'essential,' resources that were supposed to feed it!
Where does our being go and from where does it return? It is an almost insoluble problem.
He who never feels his soul being broken by the body, invaded by its weakness, is incapable of obtaining any insight into man. One must go below, must look at the underside. One must no longer be able to move, to hope, to believe, in order to perceive. How shall we distinguish our intellectual and moral mechanisms if we are not temporarily deprived of them? The consolation of those who thus experience death gradually must be the fact that they are the only ones who have some notion of how life is made up.
There is no absolute peril except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.10
READ ALOUD:
A CRY
The little celestial poet
Opens the shutters of his heart.
The heavens clash. Oblivion
Uproots the symphony.
Stableman the wild house
That has you guard wolves
Does not suspect the wraths
Smouldering beneath the big alcove
Of the vault that hangs above us.
Hence silence and darkness
Muzzle all impurity
The sky strides forward
At the crossroad of sounds.
The star is eating. The oblique sky
Is opening its flight toward the heights
Night sweeps away the scraps
Of the meal that contented us.
On earth walks a slug
Which is greeted by ten thousand white hands
A slug is crawling
There where the earth vanished.
Angels whom no obscenity summons
Were homeward bound in peace
When rose the real voice
Of the spirit that called them.
The sun lower than the daylight
Volatilized all the sea.
A strange but clear dream
Was born on the clean earth.
The lost little poet
Leaves his heavenly post
With an unearthly idea
Pressed upon his hairy heart.
Two traditions met.
But our padlocked thoughts
Lacked the place required,
Experiment to be tried again.
Tyler Henry
Shooting Script for "The Divider King" (tentative title)
[perhaps a better title is, "On We"]
INT. - BLANK ROOM (THE ETERNAL DAY)
A room is empty yet unkempt. The unpainted walls are painted white. The walls are thus brick, and through the cracks - actually, rotten holes - in the wood, ink shadows engulf trains of thought, steaming monotonously miraculously through a shining single window frame.
Option #1:
Camera is outside the window, looking in through the sash: sees a man, empty yet unkempt, sitting in muted rags, naked. He clenches his knees and pulls his mouth into his elbow, rocking back and forth by his heels. He stares away from the camera, disgusted. Close up of his eyes (he shuts them), and mouth, which cannot be seen. Camera is outside the window, looking in through the sash: sees a man, empty yet unkempt, sitting in muted rags, naked. He clenches his knees, rocking back and forth by his heels, and turns his mouth from his elbow in order to babble silently, his eyes closed as he knows that he is unaware that he is seen. Jump cut: the camera takes a step closer through the window (it in fact zooms, but the zoom is cut). The man is no longer speaking. His eyes are closed, but ours are not, and we watch in silence as he turns his head left and right and rocks back and forth by his heels. We feel no pity. We are disgusted.
A long time later, many frames from then, he begins to speak:
MAN:
'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo, 'llo.
[whispers] Gotta do something.
He scratches his hairline and runs his hair back through his hand until he finds a suitable strand, and he plucks it without flinching and drops it with a roll of his opposable thumb. He is stupid and therefore contemplates himself. He plucks another hair in the same motion.
MAN:
[sighs]
Gotta do something.
He licks his upper lip in an odd animal manner. Again, and again and again he licks it in quick plops. His eyes glaze over and diverge. He blinks. He blinks and blinks and blinks in quick snaps.
MAN:
[clears his throat with his mouth closed so that his nose is aggravated and forced to expel air and mucous]
Gotta do something.
The man's breathing becomes labored. He breathes as if the air is cigarette smoke and he's been trying to quit. The man stands slowly, harshly, and stretches his arms out and whimpers, and that shot is then played in reverse so that the man sits back down again. He is motionless. He neither breathes nor holds his breath. Breathing has become as stupid as it is overt, and the memory of it fails successfully, as if it were anything else. Silence. What's the difference between a palindrome and a chiasmus, anyway?
MAN:
What's the difference between a palindrome and a chiasmus, anyway?
Silence.
MAN:
[whispers]
Silence.
Silence.
MAN:
[whispers]
Silence.
Silence.
MAN:
That's it. It's time. It's past time. I should have done it already. [groans] I can't anymore. I haven't any inspiration. [breathes in and out] Nope, not even an inkling. What's it worth anyway? Wouldn't it be better just to sit and do nothing. [pause] Tell me, isn't that impossible? Sitting is doing something. And I'm talking, that's something - isn't it? Am I talking? [quoting] "Any ING is someth-ING." If only somebody was listening, they'd give me a prize. A congratulations. Jobs well done. Awards ceremonies, in fact. Honor even. Indeed: justice. The problem is - obviously - not here, then. It's in this old trap of a system. I'm caught in it. I'm lost. I'm lost in it. [pause] Aren't we all.
Silence.
MAN:
Yes, yes we are. Just rambling around rambling, that's for sure. The only sure. That's only for sure. That's the only sure... sureness... sure-ity.... sure-thing, I guess.
Silence.
MAN:
That's it. It's time. I'm gonna do it. No more gotta, just gonna. I'm gonna do somep thin. [carefully] I - am - going - to - do - some - thing.
Long silence.
MAN:
Has it been long? What have I done? What have I... produced? [strokes his chin] Hrrmmmm... [strokes his chin, squints his eyes] Hrrmmmmmmmmm... [strokes his chin, squints his eyes, cocks his head] Hrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Silence. He closes his eyes.
MAN:
I've lived my life searching for something to say. And now it's come to this.
DISEMBODIED VOICE:
Come to what? Come to what? What has it come to? What are you going to do? You've done no searching. You've done nothing your whole life, and now you have the utter indecency, the utmost presumptuousness, the unfettered flatulence to say - out loud, mind you - that you are going to actually do something about this, this abominable patheticism into which you have graciously ingratiated yourself.
MAN:
I didn't say I was going to do anything. I just said, "it has come to this."
VOICE:
Thus implying that this is in fact a moment of action for you, our beloved, yet pitiful protagonist.
MAN:
No! I didn't imply. You see, that's the problem with you.
He looks away from the camera out the window, as if he were a member of an audience heckling a performer.
MAN:
You always assume. Implications, insinuations - [pauses, searches for another word] - so on, and so forth. Innuendo. It's all just babble. None of it's real. You're only hearing what you already think. Can't we just have a real conversation for once? You know, really express ourselves? Our utmost being? Why does it always have to be meaningless vibrations and pissed away opportunities?
VOICE: [pauses]
[matter-of-factly] Well, you said earlier you were going to do something.
[awkward pause]
MAN:
Did I? I don't remember.
VOICE:
Yes, yes you did exactly that. Your problem is that you can't remember - you don’t know whether it’s now or before or after! So much repetition - inanity - absurdity! Insanity! It’s enough to make us seasick!
MAN:
[has been rocking back and forth, now stops and loses balance momentarily - remains motionless for a few beats]
[moment of clarity] Ah! But how you’ve missed the point! The point is... you... were here... then... Weren’t you? [considers this] And yet... Well, shouldn’t you be congratulating me... for what I’ve done? Aggrandizing me for the achievements I’ve accomplished!
VOICE:
[angrily] You’ve done nothing!
MAN:
Haven’t I?
VOICE:
How should I know? There’s no way to tell now... it's too late.
Silence.
MAN:
Too late now. Now... [considers now] Well, now we’re having this conversation - [proudly] And consequently, I must have done something to instigate it! [pause, snorts] So grant me credit1 - where credit is due.
VOICE:
How do you expect me to grant you credit if you're already so busy taking it? [saving face, quickly] Besides, instigation is nothing, unto itself - it’s merely the precedence to something. Even you should be able to follow that.
MAN:
Perhaps if you told me something I don't already know...
VOICE:
And how am I supposed to know what you don't?
MAN:
Must you ask such stupid questions? They require such stupid answers. If you must know, here's where I'm amiss: What comes before something? [pause, motionless] And then, what comes after? [strokes his chin, as before] Credit. Where credit is due. After all, isn’t taking credit doing something? [raises his forefinger] "Every ING is someth-ING." Certainly it's all the rage these days.
Silence. Inertia.
VOICE:
Then we live in dangerous times. How can we know the truth if we can't be sure where it comes from?
MAN:
Truth? - My good fellow, I must say I don't follow. I speak merely of expression. Allow me that, at least.
VOICE:
How can I prevent it?
MAN:
It's all you're good for.
VOICE:
I expect nothing from you.
MAN:
Precisely my predicament. Now I can't stop doing nothing long enough in order to do something. Why don't you expect something from me instead?
VOICE:
If I expected it, I wouldn't be able to give you credit for it afterwards.
Nonsense.
MAN:
Nonsense.
My friend, let me tell you something - and I've thought long and hard about this - as much thought as I've been able to muster in this old grey bucket of mine. [pauses, thinking, scratches above his left eyebrow] That is...
[pauses]
You see, I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking - to the external act of its materialization into words - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer - but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely.2
VOICE:
The man who thinks expends himself utterly.3
The MAN is pissing in the corner.
MAN:
May I, at the risk of importuning you, recur to a few matters which we discussed this afternoon?
VOICE:
With all best wishes.4
MAN:
Then I will continue. [stops pissing, shakes, continues pissing] You see, I have felt and accepted these phrases, these ungainly expressions which you criticize. Bear in mind: I have not questioned them. [he is sitting] They come from the deep uncertainty of my thinking. Fortunate indeed when this uncertainty is not replaced by the absolute inexistence from which I sometimes suffer.5
Silence. Inertia. He shakes his leg.
Yet is the substance of my thought so tangled and is its general beauty rendered so inactive by the impurities and uncertainties with which it is marred that it does not manage to exist literally? The entire problem of my thinking is involved. For me, it is no less than a matter of knowing whether or not I have the right to continue thinking.6
VOICE:
As I told you at the very beginning, there are awkward things and disconcerting oddities in your composition.
It is revealed that the man is looking into a mirror and speaking to himself.
MIRROR:
But they seem to me to be due to a certain quest on your part rather than a lack of command over your thoughts.
Reverse shot of the man listening to himself.
HIS VOICE DISEMBODIED:
Obviously you do not, in general, achieve sufficient unity of impression. But I have enough experience to sense that it is not your temperament that prevents you from focusing your abilities upon a simple object, and that with a little patience you will succeed.7
Silence. Inertia.
MAN:
You have just cause for having forgotten me. Before, I made a little confession to you. I hope you will allow me now to complete that confession, to continue it, to plumb my very depths. [shot of mirror image, silently listening to the man] I am attempting to justify myself in your eyes. [shot of man] I care very little whether I seem to anyone to exist. [2 shot] The distance that separates me from myself suffices to cure me of the judgement of others. [to the camera, i.e. mirror POV shot] Please do not regard this as insolence, but rather as the very faithful confession, the painful statement, of a distressing state of mind.
[over the shoulder shot into mirror]
My question was perhaps specious, but it was of you that I asked it, of you and no one else, because of the extreme sensitivity, the almost sickly perceptiveness of your mind.8
Close-up of mirror image listening. Close up of MAN's mouth speaking.
There is something that destroys my thinking, a something which does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me, if I may say so, in abeyance. A something furtive which takes away from me the words which I have found, which diminishes my mental tension, which destroys in its substance the mass of my thinking as it evolves, which takes away from me even the memory of the devices by which one expresses oneself and which render with precision the most inseparable, most localized, most existing modulations of thought. I shall not labor the point. There is no need to describe my state.
I should like to say only as much as is needed for you finally to understand and believe me.
So grant me credit. Recognize, I beg of you, the reality of these phenomena, recognize their furtiveness, their eternal repetition. And so once again here is my question:
Are you familiar with the subtlety, the fragility of the mind? Restore to my mind the concentration of its forces, the cohesion that it lacks, the constancy of its tension, the consistency of its own substance. (And all that is objectively so little.) And tell me whether what is lacking may not be restored all at once?9
MIRROR:
In any case, it is, I think, a fact that a whole category of men are subject to shiftings of the level of being. How often do we not suddenly discover, when mechanically placing ourselves in a familiar psychological attitude, that it has transcended us, or rather that we have become surreptitiously unequal to it! How often does our most habitual personage not appear to us suddenly to be factitious and even fictive, owing to the absence of the spiritual, or 'essential,' resources that were supposed to feed it!
Where does our being go and from where does it return? It is an almost insoluble problem.
He who never feels his soul being broken by the body, invaded by its weakness, is incapable of obtaining any insight into man. One must go below, must look at the underside. One must no longer be able to move, to hope, to believe, in order to perceive. How shall we distinguish our intellectual and moral mechanisms if we are not temporarily deprived of them? The consolation of those who thus experience death gradually must be the fact that they are the only ones who have some notion of how life is made up.
There is no absolute peril except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.10
READ ALOUD:
A CRY
The little celestial poet
Opens the shutters of his heart.
The heavens clash. Oblivion
Uproots the symphony.
Stableman the wild house
That has you guard wolves
Does not suspect the wraths
Smouldering beneath the big alcove
Of the vault that hangs above us.
Hence silence and darkness
Muzzle all impurity
The sky strides forward
At the crossroad of sounds.
The star is eating. The oblique sky
Is opening its flight toward the heights
Night sweeps away the scraps
Of the meal that contented us.
On earth walks a slug
Which is greeted by ten thousand white hands
A slug is crawling
There where the earth vanished.
Angels whom no obscenity summons
Were homeward bound in peace
When rose the real voice
Of the spirit that called them.
The sun lower than the daylight
Volatilized all the sea.
A strange but clear dream
Was born on the clean earth.
The lost little poet
Leaves his heavenly post
With an unearthly idea
Pressed upon his hairy heart.
Two traditions met.
But our padlocked thoughts
Lacked the place required,
Experiment to be tried again.
posted by Sturgeon General at 11:03 PM
5 Comments:
more thoughts:
Culture is the clothes we wear. Our clothing is the reflection of our culture. The apparel of our internal mirror. Culture is the organic and we are its thoughts. In the same sense, "we" is thought and are cultural. Infinitesimal dots in the expanse of dimensional nothingness.
The art of today is the dream of tomorrow.
Artistry is mental motherhood; it is the father of the future.
It is the sin before time, yet it is also what makes possible the virginity of generation.
It is an eternal truth, but which takes a temporary form, neither in past nor present, but in the conjunction of the two.
VOICE:
If you were to create what you wanted, you yourself would cease to exist.
MAN:
I believe that's what I'm after. My existence is a painful and awkward extension of nothingness.
VOICE:
Yet you are afraid of your own mortality.
MAN:
And so to be happy, I must cease to exist without actually dying.
I've been thinking about the power relationships in the piece, and haven't yet untangled them. Would you regard the "voice" as an external authority/superego-type-social controller?
so did you already shoot this, and/or do you still want comments? i've only gotten through about half of it so far (sorry), but a few thoughts: I think the language in your script (very poetic wording/phrasing) is a great strength, and i'm wondering how that will translate in the film. for example, the very first paragraph: "The unpainted walls are painted white. The walls are thus brick,... ink shadows engulf trains of thought..." I love these lines, but I'm struggling to imagine how you'll be able to maintain their integrity on screen. integrity is really too strong and trite of a word, but you get the idea. this is not a criticism, but more of a question... i'd love to hear your thoughts about how or if you want those things to translate, or i'd love to see bits of [or the entire] film when it's done. i'm also wondering about the man's lines... from the way you've written it, it seems he's essentially speaking stage directions about himself in some places, which i assume is your intent (and which i think is great, by the way). i just wanted to make sure that I was reading that properly, since I know that I've never been able to get italic formatting to work on blogger, and there are a few spots where i find it ambiguous. sorry i haven't had time to give better feedback, good luck filming!
"Nietzsche is dead." - God
love this/you, brother.
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