Tuesday 2 September 2008

NOTATIONS ON A CAVERN CINEMA (READING CLARK COOLIDGE)












In thinking about how to respond to,  think about, and activate the cavern cinema, I select as one model three passages from Clark Coolidge's book Mine: The One That Enters The Stories: 



But all my dreams are color as the  caves again furl on beyond the ceaseless drenching wall. They pick up again at the god tone of the flattened stone. It calls without cease approachless since all the words are there. Each sheet transparent to the further's beat, a wetness to prevail on reception's ache. A point is always reached. Doubts in tireless process of sharpening themselves. But the sentence never ends. Whatever moons and suns and the laps of material filing that scratch in passing. The bumping of the wind in night's restless grade. Thought the dream makes a loggia of Field's stacked porches and a gift of the toy complexities there, only a tissue of the covering letter survives on waking: "Your crystallized piss..." (49)


I became fascinated with precisely where things were missing in the world. Actions after all leave gaps to ponder, the slightest empty crack as the place where something happened. If it were a move they were making, everything possible would be taken away. These rocks were filmed. That swathe of cement. Those chairs. No, not that one, these over here. Then they were taken away. Now they are here. Since that time some of my hairs have come loose. Others have stayed. You want to be the master of what you say and do, you want to be the boss of tooth decay. You want to shoot horses far from their stable. You must delay the filming of the film. (61)


Then Philip said, the stalactites felt such an urge to come into contact with each other that they filled every surface with a prickle of tiny points. Millions of men in a room scratching and shouting at each other. They do not agree that the situation truly is as it has just been described. The surface would come apart otherwise, bringing down accusations and hands full of a glassy ham.  The concert could not proceed, the wires had been removed, the listeners stitched to their seats. On the stage all that could be seen was a pair of wings, like harps constructed of moldy satin from an old sofa.(107)



Clark Coolidge, MINE: The One That Enters The Stories (The Figures, 2004, first published 1982). ISBN 0-935724-14-1