One of the great puzzle films of the last few years: Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. A puzzle of potential meaning, that is. Just what, exactly, is the film about? This isn’t the puzzle game of Inception, or the fragmentation of Resnais et al. This isn’t about a later act of reconstruction on the viewer’s behalf. Instead, it feels like a calm renunciation of the obvious, or any obvious point, so to speak. The film is so controlled, so hermetic in tone, and so beautiful from moment to moment that it’s easy to jettison expectations of plot or consequence. A man has an ill-defined mission and he pursues it without excitement, a semi-numb watcher of the world. Throughout the film, he is immensely disciplined. When a naked and immensely tempting Paz de le Huerta offers herself to him, he gently refuses her. Not when I’m working he says. In the next shot he’s still wearing his immaculate suit while she lays next to him, still naked. He is the ideal figure of calm, tranquility, focus, rigour. Or, to use a lazier and more fashion-oriented word, cool. In the film’s penultimate scene, Isaac de Bankolé, the film’s lead sits in front of an all-white painting by Antoni Tàpies, a sheet nailed to a canvas, and, for a second, is lost in its Kazimir Malevichian blankness, the white on white.
The denial of overt theme is a kind of silence upon the audience. It quells the temptation to reduce art to journalism, the ready trading of fading topicalities.
Wilde’s immortal quote: ‘Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true’. This, somehow should be the case for essays, political speech and abuse yelled from cars.
NaNoWriMo – The National Novel Writing Month – occurring every November. Crap is better than the blank page, they say, so get writing. At the end of the month you’ll have something to work with, and feel good about yourself too! And anyway, bolstered self-esteem beats the agonies of silence, right? A rhetorical question not posed entirely cynically. The cult of Flaubert, of Beckett, of the overwhelming difficulty (bordering on impossibility) of writing can go too far. Worship the Gods who wrought spare perfection from the impossible battle too long and you can pray yourself right into a personal space of unbreakable silence.
The epigraph of The Limits of Control, from Rimbaud’s ‘Le bateua ivre’: ‘As I descended into impassable rivers / I no longer felt guided by the ferryman.’
My one attempt at NaNoWriMo, many years ago, and not too seriously: large chunks of uselessness. My story involved a businessman dying a mysterious death in a hotel room, and the investigation that followed. It truly was a mystery, as beyond my potentially engaging setup I had no idea where to go with it beyond my desire to keep writing, and get words on the page. At some point, you know you’re padding – mine came during the third or possibly fourth lengthy conversation between the security guards of the new-dead businessman in one of the many hallways of the hotel of the aforementioned passing. They were chatty, digressive, real, and pointless. I never got close to 50,000 words.
Art criticism, frequently, doesn’t know when to leave art alone. The standard line on art world talk is that its ceaseless obfuscation is somehow contemptuous of ordinary people; this belief lies at the heart of that standard bugbear claim of elitism. This is wrong, however. Instead, the obfuscation works to hide the paucity of life in the work. The words stand in front, to take the blame. The work itself hides out of a shame it barely realises it’s experiencing. ‘The more words there are on a gallery wall next to a picture, the worse the picture,’ Flaubert once wrote. Let him loose on our current era, if you can get him to stop writing letters and working on his novel.
Nothing quite as striking and self-justifying as a stand-alone quotation.
‘Behind the appeals for silence lies the wish for a perceptual and cultural clean slate. And, in its most hortatory and ambitious version, the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic project of total liberation. What’s envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular art work, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations.’
Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’
If Glück’s work (and this is a point up for debate, sure, though just not here) is narcissistic, then the book by my left hand, Poems 1962-2012, is 50 years of analysis and inward gazing that has yielded dozens and dozens of exceptional pages. I don’t have to sit on the train next to her, hear her drunken stories. Just over 600 pages, take what you need. There’s always someone else who’ll sing a song of the people. Coming up next: ‘Rainer Maria Rilke’s Monumental Narcissism.’
The cover of Savages’ Silence Yourself – three band members look away or off camera, with only the bassist, Ayse Hassan, looking ahead. And then some: the gaze, straight at the camera, and at us, is totally forthright and defiant, without at all looking like a self-conscious pose. She looks majestically unfuckwithable. The imperious look she gives you is the slogan on the cover, is the content of the band’s song – harried, dogmatic, pained, cold, tetchy. She and they stare you down, into silence. Enough now, her eyes say.
A vision of the cultural clean slate positioned somewhere between deleting a social media account and taking a monk-like vow of silence. George Steiner fetishises this kind of thing: the eternal solitude of the artist, a radical aloneness from the culture. From the position of anyone younger than him, this dream of High Art seems like a beautiful and distant dream. But it has its failings too. Its radical aloofness towards even the most unpopular popular culture for example (speaking impossibly generally). Reading Adorno, one should always take into consideration his utterly misguided views on jazz, for example. And maybe just for starters.
The rapturous reception of new music from My Bloody Valentine and Burial, our awe at their non-participation in the culture. Art really is our better selves. We respect it for not adding to the daily noise of the world, for choosing it moments and narrowing its focus. We, hopelessly skedaddled, use it to centre ourselves. And yes, ‘centering ourselves’ is horribly touchy-feely language. It won’t stand. Of course, once upon a time they had to mail out to journals or send demos to friends with that same trembling uncertainty, clogging up mailboxes.
On the Rolling Stones’s 1964 self-titled debut, all five members of the band had the face you find on the Savages album. The meaning, though, was radically different. In 2013, the request comes after nearly half a century of uproar and social turmoil, endless revolutions winding from noble ’68 to weekly revolutions in the size of a smartphone. Back in 1964, the gloriously impudent face of Jagger and band was a trigger for the post-WWII world to detonate – a call to noise. In 2013, enough now. Enough now. You’ve forgotten how to behave properly.
I know too much about Lorine Niedecker’s life. This knowledge makes me admire, or perhaps respect, her. A pure approach would focus on the words alone, but I’m not allowed the pure approach. I can’t wind back on what I’ve read in the biographical entries. And so in those perfectly formed, tight, chiseled lines I read the fight and solitude of the life, and see the validation of the life in the perfection of the lines, until neither the work or the life gets a sane, sober, adult reading. This is adolescent stuff.
Whistler was the first painter of adults in American art. He often let the backgrounds threaten the subject, so they might become shades or moods, thick blocks of colour playing hard to get behind already imposing blacks and browns, moving into abstraction. Looking at his work in a gallery surrounding by dozens of other jobbing portraitists bring the company in faint dispute. Not here the fussily detailed faces of other painters, where all the laborious work has gone, perspiring in anticipation of future delight of their patrons. So much so, in some cases, that the head in these lesser paintings can float free in an eerie manner, overworked, in comparison to the carelessness of the body, other details, those things which shine no glory on the patron or payer. Easy now to see how Whistler would move to Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket, and even easier, glib with history’s mistakes from our vantage point, to see how Ruskin and so many others would misunderstand it. The mess and darkness and deliberate lack of clarity.
Second daydream: A mansion almost totally divested of furniture and possessions, maybe a small shelf of books and a record player, its cords exposed in the large room, and only four or five records to play, forever. What could you hear in them, given long enough? Assuming you picked the right ones, or had them chosen for you.
