so i have perhaps a different reading than most of this final scene of ‘my blueberry nights.’ first, this is a repetition of a much earlier scene before she leaves new york. in essence, the two scenes bookend the film and provide her “crossing the street” transition. it is necessary for her to forget the former instance or at least for it to play itself out while she was asleep. this is her affirming the very thing that already happened “behind her back.” second, her quip that crossing the street wasn’t so difficult because it depends on who’s waiting for you on the other side is not, i believe, a reference to jude law’s character but to herself. indeed, he comments just before on how she seems to be different, and in fact, she is not the same character that she was previously (her acting has also improved tremendously as the film was shot in order). she crossed the street to find herself, to affirm her dissolution and reconstitution as a different character altogether. this is her affirming the very thing that destroyed her in the first place, the very thing that reeked havoc on all the characters who were unable to affirm their own destruction but instead hung on to a dead past.
Rhizomic Dreams
Obsessed with the intersection of memory and dreams -- in film particularly.
Currently studying philosophy in graduate school -- Hegel and language.
Forgetting, which slides along the nodes.
Are concepts intersections of various temporal and atemporal series?
Following
Approaching cinema from a philosophical perspective is always a difficult endeavor, for concepts and artistic expressions are often taken to be incommensurable, warning against the deployment of one to conceptualize or express the other. Yet Deleuze has no qualms about employing concepts with respect to art in general, particular art forms, and even individual artworks. He views their respective media as feeding into one another: philosophy creates concepts and artworks preserve “bloc[s] of sensations.”[1] Philosophy and art are distinct yet interactive modes or practices of thought that provide to the other modes material for conceptualization or sensuous preservation.[2] In other words, philosophy can give us concepts of sensations, and art can give us sensations of concepts. In terms of the relation of philosophy to cinematic art, Deleuze claims, “the theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema.”[3] These concepts “are not given in cinema” even though they “are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema.”[4] To philosophize about particular films, then, is not to map onto them alien conceptual schemas, but to produce and examine concepts that are not given in the films, yet are of the films and are those concepts they give rise to.
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 164.
[2] On their relation as modes of thought, cf. WP pp. 197-9. On their relation as distinct but interactive practices, cf. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 280.
[3] C2 p. 280.
[4] Ibid.
been listening to this soundtrack obsessively. this is a reprise, the last song of the film. incredibly tragic. penetrates to the bone. goodbye bob. you will be forgotten.
finally got around to watching ‘enter the void.’ it is important. space and time tethers that progressively unravel. the past remains tied to space, to a body, and lets time flit in and out at will. the future splices time together and lets us travel untethered through space. the past is memory, the future is dream. we get a nightmare that gives birth to new life, to new dreams. we get light that binds the dreams together. we get strange freudian time linkages. we get merely a mirage of reincarnation, and what we actually get is a new way to dream. we get a film more about film, more about the moving image, that almost any other i’ve come across.
i’m taking a graduate seminar on the philosophy of art. to be more specific, it deals exclusively with so-called “analytic” philosophy of art, mainly in the attempt to define the concept of art (or claim it’s undefinable) and deal with side issues like forgeries, kitsch, crafts, ugliness, etc. i’ve decided it’s a rather bankrupt philosophical arena (and it really has not been around for very long). they’re looking in the wrong places for answers to their questions. more importantly, they’re asking the wrong questions. to understand art you must first understand the nature of concepts. understand their structure and how that structure informs their connection with other concepts. go back people. go back to the basics. go look up hegel’s logic for a start. stop twiddling your philosophical pricks in the wind trying to get a hard-on. it just makes you look foolish.
some classy dance moves. listen to your heart.
some of my work for my thesis. i’m tracking the moves in the representation section of hegel’s “philosophy of mind” so i can counter an objection of paul de man’s. so first i must understand the dense moves of hegel. needless to say, it’s proving difficult difficult lemon difficult.
i’ll grit my teeth and bare the world. it ends at my ends. i’ll be its negativity, as hegel says. i’ll make it my own. its fire will exhaust in my stream. its concept will be overrun in my mind. it will run out among the clouds and dream up a new world.
new radiohead album, “the king of limbs”? the announcement came out of the blue for me. now i’m jumpin’ outta my skin.
to understand the rhizomic nature of dreams and how they stretch into and out of memories, one cannot understand them as ever being united into one. nor can one conceive of them as being wholly separate. they weave into each other, confusing the temporal nature of experience, and bind inextricably together. one cannot come without the other. it is equally wrong to conceive of one coming prior to another. one cannot be thought of in its entirety, in the way it spatializes the non-spatial, without the other tied to it. the concept of memory is incomplete without the concept of dreaming and vice versa. yet they remain distinct, running out along lines of flight into actualized perception. they stretch out, intersecting at nodes, bleeding into our waking vision. it makes non-motion motion. it makes the non-spatial spatial. temporality becomes twisted and warped. to understand this relation between memories, dreams, and waking life is to understand experience itself. for then we can understand the true nature of concepts in their open bloodiness, the way thought cannot help but seep out from the boundary of the world.
every time i shut my eyes. it’s always the same.
kaneda! what do you see?
re-watched ’sunshine’ again last night. it still changes me. enough said.
