The Migration Patterns of Imaginary Birds

The Resurrection

I tend to write somewhat intuitively, which means sometimes I get things stuck in my head that I tend to turn into one or two stories (never fully written, because I dislike doing things I won't be paid for). My last post on this newly revived blog deals with what I've been thinking about for the past few months: The Resurrection.

The subject has a few charming spots, but the first thing I always think of is the synopsis of a short story my friend wrote in High School, about "the first man to ever live through death."  I never actually read the story (perhaps fortunately), but the synopsis always fascinated me, as the existence of things in two mutually contradicting states I always found to be a stunningly beautiful concept (such as Borges' "fabulous Irish bird which exists in two places at once.")

The idea also deals with some rather bizarre concepts of time, which are complicated enough that I should probably get into them later (lived time, epic time, eternal time - which is anti-time - historical time, chronological time, etc. etc.). Generally though, with no end to life, actions obtain a completely different meaning, which stories can exploit.

The story outline I posted uses a number of typical tropes from "reincarnation" literature, which is something I ran across when I was studying Buddhism through rather untrustworthy evangelical Buddhism books. The stories read almost exactly like the "white light" near death stories from evangelical Christian literature, which I made me realize the book I was reading was untrustworthy. But the theme stuck with me, as I began to grow fonder of a certain nervous type of memory, and voila.

I think the below story would be worthwhile for a novel treatment, and I'm hoping to come back to it in the nearish future.

The Art of Being Someone Else

A theme I continually go back to in my more casual writing is the sudden loss of identity. The idea lends itself to a variety of other concepts that I like.

The most simple of these ideas is the removal of context for an object. You are sitting with a person for a while, then all of a sudden you forget who this person is. Ignoring the most likely sense of panic, the person who has lost his identity can only comprehend the person in some relation to the physical presence in front of him, and not to some pre-conceived notion got through interaction. In such a context all things have to be understood as somehow vaguely worthwhile (or at least all imaginary things in my world).

A more complex usage of the idea is where a person has to take on the role of someone else in order to express something about themselves. For example, there is a mini-genre of Chinese Opera movies which use the gender bending present in the theater as a way to express the complexities of a persons sexuality (to be fair I'm only speaking of Fairwell My Concubine and some almost amateur short film I saw). I try to focus on dealing with facts about a persons existence, particularly the progression towards death and have the lines between the assumed identity and the persons born identity blur. As can be seen in the fairy tale I published yesterday.

Though this theme will be present in my later review of Faust, I should note two heavy utilizers of this technique are Shakespeare and Borges. Hamlet famously merged a play with real life with a play, all trying to get at the questionable nature of what Hamlet was thinking and trying to do. Similarly Henry the 5th was given the task of forgetting who he was in order to become King.

The uncertainty of identity was a major theme of Borges' work through from beginning to end, but the story that I'm remembering at the moment is the one about the group of outlaws who turn on their leader in the same way that Brutus turned on Julius Ceaser, a death, Borges said, that just happened "so the scene could be repeated."

Zoopraxography: The study of art and life

This is the first post I am doing on concepts in art (please come up with a better name for this segment if you can), and since this segment was originally supposed to be part of a related blog called Zoopraxography, I thought I'd start by writing about Zoopraxography, and why I thought it was important enough to try to name a blog after it.

Zoopraxography is a term invented by the photographer and inventor Eadweard Muybridge, who is now best known for inventing several of the precursors to the moving picture camera, the first being a rotating disc called the Zoopraxiscope, which recreated the appearance of movement (like a flip book), and the second more famous one being a set of cameras attached to an electronic trigger, that took a series of pictures of an animal in motion.

The latter machine, which would become the basis for the first cinema cameras, was originally developed in order to resolve a bet as to whether a horses legs are ever completely off the ground while running, but Muybridge followed up the project with a number of studies of human and animal movement.

While Muybridge never was particularly interested in animation, his pictures are still used as reference points for animators, he was also inspired Etienne-Jules Marey to do his own movement studies, who inspired the use of movement in early 20th century french art. Compare:

Marey:

Duchamp:

While there is a lot interesting about Muybridge, Enough that it makes me rather angry that the documentary "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer" has never been released on DVD, in more recent years he has gotten something of a fan club based around the understanding of his photos as recordings of the process of existence. Or to put it more succinctly, his movement studies are beautiful because they are one of the only pieces of art specifically about the fact that the way people move is beautiful. 

The idea fits very well into the ideology of the "long take" brand of film making and the philosophies surrounding it (mostly existentialism and post war humanism), as can be seen by the film critic Andre Bazin explicitly praising the films of Vittorio De Sica, because he cast people not for their acting, but "the way they walked."

Muybridge has always been a personal hero of mine, because I've always considered existence to be the fundamental issue in art, and should be the core issue of any decent story/artwork (and it usually is). Muybridge was able to successfully, and quite beautifully, make existence in to an art.

Also, the main issue behind existence is that it is bound in time, and therefore not constant. Nothing exists as it once does, and many things that once exists now don't. Muybridge's movement studies are essentially, because they are reminders of things we have lost.