Monday, September 08, 2003
Nothing is ever finished, merely no longer worked on…
What am I…
The romantic or the realist… The romantic without realism (cynicism) is just a dreamer, carrying notions in his heart without any intention of ever setting them free, knowing that he wants them close because they’re fragile and special. He needs the dispassion and resignation, the bloody-mindedness or the realist in order to bring those dreams about, to act on them, to let them go and offer them the space that would give them life. Some of them will die, but some of them will fly. And none of them will go anywhere if you keep them to your chest. Perhaps. Likewise the realist needs dreams to add colour and sound, to reveal pathways…
This is storytelling, what I do. Each time I write here I am telling the story of me, the story of how I felt about a record, an idea, a person, a strange event. A dream or an imagining. The structure and placement of the words has no more import other than to keep you (me) reading, smiling, furrowing the brow. Nothing really beautiful exists in complete abstraction; it all needs to come back somehow to stories, the stories we tell each other with words, with songs, sounds, images, colours, cloths, tastes, scents, kisses… Science has pushed us to deny the Grand Story and instead see our lives as series of anecdotes, tales and comments, and this is fine. This is better. Because once the scale of the story is reduced it becomes controllable, in part, by the person at the centre of it. Stories are how we understand, how we progress, how we enjoy. A beat can be a story, a wave can be a story. A dasein is a story. Stories move through and over and between one another and they never end, they simply stop being told, or become another story, or are forgotten for a while.
The opposite of the story is the spectacle, the image without narrative, the object without history. The spectacle can be beautiful but it cannot be profound. It can only have the appearance of profundity. This is because the spectacle does not move, it is a stasis, and a stasis is a lie and a figment. All real things have movement, all real things change and decay; it’s by changing and decaying that they help us learn. By touching something and eroding it we take from it and learn from it, and continue its own story as well as our own. The spectacle cannot be touched because it has no substance. Substance is movement; even if only internal, and the spectacle has no movement because it has no animation and no story. Anything without a story is still and dead and forgotten.
The writer is interested in the creation of spectacle, of the freezing of imagined perfection, capturing something and holding it forever. Denying it movement. Removing its story. The pleasure for the writer comes in the placement of the words themselves, in the arrangement of the spectacle, the manipulation of their poses to assume aesthetic loveliness. The storyteller is interested in the telling, not the placement. Telling must necessarily involve communication, parlance, discourse; all of which are antithetical to the spectacle because they encourage movement and decay and change and would therefore corrode and alter the aesthetic of the spectacle.
The romantic holds his notions to his chest as the writer arranges words into beautiful shapes and stills them of movement. The realist casts away notions to allow them to become stories.
I want to be a storyteller, not a writer.
9/08/2003 12:00:00 am
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