From Stan Brakhage Remembrances:
Bruce ElderPrinted in MFJ No. 41 (Fall 2003) Lesbian and Gay Experimental Cinema/Stan Brakhage RemembrancesFor as well as a poet, Novalis was a writer with philosophical interestsphilosophical according to the understanding of the time, that is, as offering commentary on the realm of the spirit, which is the repository of all truth, and which is disclosed through self-understanding. Brakhage shared many convictions with Novalis. For both, truth is as much an ethical as an epistemological concept (truth consists not in conformity to an external standard, but in acting in accordance with ones deepest convictions). For both, the most profound sort of truth was a form of magical truth rather than natural truth (to use a distinction that Novalis made in Logological Fragments 1:78). For both, knowledge culminated in a sort of mystical understanding of reality (in Brakhages case, evident in works as far apart in time as Dog Star Man and The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him). But most important of all, both share a belief in the importance of an investigation conducted on an ordo inversus, through which a subjects intuitive and cognitive functions are fused (the first several times I heard Brakhage speak, the falsity of the distinction between emotion or intuition and reason was his central topic), and the self achieves consciousness of itself, allowing subject and object to become one. As Novalis conceived it, through the ordo inversus, the subject becomes object, the self becomes non-self, the symbol becomes the symbolized. I think that Brakhages method of what he called trance is similarthe internal process becomes the object of observation and scrutiny (even the photographed object). But for Novalis, the key to transformation of the subject into the object, the self into the non-self is language. That is something that Brakhage would never have agreed to. On the other hand, I would. Arguing that difference was one of the keenest pleasures I had. |