I have just watched, by chance, ten seconds of a film released this past year. I count an impressive eight shots in this meager interval and immediately think of Andrei Tarkovsky. According to this great artist, the substance of cinema is time, and the filmmaker’s job is to print time on the screen. According to this prudent vision of the seventh art, a work that madly superimposes eight shots in ten seconds is anything but art. It seems to me that cinema, like music, is on its knees before an audience incapable of concentration. The work—and perhaps work is no longer the appropriate word—needs to stimulate, all the time, the adrenaline, needs to deliver instant emotion and generate expectation for a new emotion in the next second, otherwise attention simply disperses, and the audience starts to yawn. No doubt this is a generational trait, and it seems increasingly difficult to shake off this terrible modern reality that resembles this unbearable bombardment of shots.a
Category: Notes
The Agreement With the Poet
Thanks to Pessoa, I open a volume on astrology. The author, already in the introduction, warns me: “If you don’t believe in the principles of what will be exposed in this work, then it will be of no use to you.” I gratefully close the volume and move on to the next. There is no doubt that astrology works: one just has to open a dating app. But, in short, a belief? Studying to confirm, to support a belief? Why not the opposite? Despite my efforts, the agreement with the poet does not seem to come. It is in dismay that I notice: the mosquito of belief has not bitten me.
It Is Impossible to Read Latin Without Being in an Absolute State of Concentration
It is interesting to note how impossible it is to read Latin without being in an absolute state of concentration, without the mind turning entirely to understanding the text. The eyes, if they run dispersed through Latin lines, do nothing but waste their time. And what about these classics? Add to the need for uninterrupted effort any kind of divine illumination—this, of course, after a few years of daily study. Oh, language…
Astrology…
It is with amazement that I read Jung’s conclusions and Pessoa’s lines about astrology. Two modern minds, two minds that I hold in tremendous esteem. Modern, and immediately I see attacked the prejudices of an individual that grew up at the end of the 20th century, trained according to the ideology of his time. The reaction is to excite the newfound curiosity, by the desire not to be like the mediocre and to try to follow the path of the great. Then I come across an area that seems immersed in the most terrible confusions, when not dominated by the cheapest philosophy. Well done! Dozens of centuries give credence to the attention. But what can be gained from all this? Come on… the poet was an astrologer.