Metaphors on vision (1963)

pan by the multiple shapes of 'drops of water (in slow motion and extreme close-up) and infiltrations of dirt and grease substance (photographed through clear glass tanks of water) vie for supremacy in the turbulence of dishwashing, and ideal cities rise in soap bubbles to vanish as swiftly as dreams. At the same time, behaving according to the relative laws which govern the formation of microscopic creatures, king's crowns are also hydroid polyps and church spires the shapes of Cordyphoras, idear cities being worlds of cell division, etc. From a psychological standpoint, for example, memory (represented by single frame shots interrupting, at almost subliminal speed, a sequence of movement) would also serve to reveal symbolic relationship of an object or action to a field of thought rather than personal experience. For instance, while watching birds in flight, I may wear their wings for fractions of a second; leaves may instantaneously sprout from my wife's uplifted arms while walking in the forest and as instantaneously vanish again. As she sews, my wife may find the two other fated aspects of herself flashing. about her, weavings and cuttings may subtly surround her, and the weave of her pattern may (subliminally superimposed) affect the movements of our child in play. And I will be working on the very film in the making, the statement that this is a work of art being integral with the work itself, and in so doing will be directing the movements of wife and child and will be directed by their movements, with all our actions integrated until we return to the chaos of sleep out of which we are born each day and to which we inevitably return. There is no state of being we inhabit, no action we perform, which is meaningless. My wife and I have directed our visual sensibilities toward understanding, making conscious, all meanings. There is no object we encounter, nothing entering our periphery of vision, which doesn't affect us profoundly, and we believe that only by comprehending each influence as deeply as possible can we discipline our reactions sufficiently to call them our own and direct all responses toward the realization of our ideals. This endeavor is the most integral inspiration for this, or any other film. ft u It should be meant shunned that THE FALL OF EVEREST and THE DAILINESS FILM were factually never photographed due to (in the first place) lack of funds and (in the second) the outright rejection of a foundation. They were actually never photographed because I scraped my skies to a slate in the act of writing, all script being in-right my own rejection slip to my-eye-self, but needing the external rejection of the foundation to fortify my own-intemal motiv-evation. Even the notes on NIGHTCATS (which significantly enough was made for the Creative Film Foundation instead of the too expensive, expansive, FALL OF EVEREST) were written only to be rid of past, passed, techniques so that the visual experience could project itself and eventually be projected. As I know of no foundation which will support an artist without a blue-print (limiting the sky as they all do) nor one whose funds are even fertilizer for the artist's growth (being, as the name implies, concerned with foundation from the base meant to the sealing) I think I have discovered the only service a foundation has to offer the developing artist ~ a coresponding Negative. (A Final Word Or Two 0're...,1963) I was twice in the Graveyard of Pere Lachaise, first in the company of friends, myself and Marie Menken as American tourists, Kenneth Anger our guide, the three of us, as film-makers, eye orienting ourselves, but (of OrienO creating the exotic (in comp.) prehension re: childhood - (the tour) nascence meant to be (re: our guy): follow the leader — (membering: the first) game: to see as the other — to see "other, " by direction, to see "over there, " where the lines of the many gestures converge, to see "0 —there, the vanishing point, to see "0 " the point, to see 'There, " its vanishing ... so as to say "There?", the first quest shunning one's own vision, to say then "Oh, there! ", the cognition which gears one's sight to the other's gesture, to say "Oh?, the second question" being of the other's gesture wherein it vanishes at the point, to say "There! ", the drawing of all gestures to oneself, a play of planes wherein one makes marionette of one's eye's sight for the vanishing of lines into perspective, to say "0! ", to have x-changed one's owned sight for the first ring of a chain of other vision. And we e-voked, x-changing each vis for viz: this for that, here for there, wording our ways a-way to haunts in which the ghosts of our children-selves could hunt as we were used ... each search contracted to) struct (the) tour (re: tum)ing. And cats were there, where here lost flowers to their eyes, where this lost (sun) flowers to that ^moon) cat's eyes, wherein un-sound symbols flourished (to the x-pense of papier-mache) paying out a fee line space-wise (trans parent flesh), governing the person (all) sight, as any G-host (spirit) will will will withingsuch con-(struct-tour)-text: —as here, all Wo-Rds.