Blood Warhols

More Warhol-style collages made in Photoshop, from photos made during my most recent blood transfusion.


Blood Warhol 1


Blood Warhol 2


Blood Warhol 3

The blood is the life.

Hands into hearts filled with blood.

Three collages made in Photoshop from photos taken during my most recent blood transfusion, in the hospital outpatient ward, a needle in the back of my hand, not always pleasant, sometimes painful, but worth remembering.

When you sit down to make art out of your life experience, sometimes it's worth it to make art you don't like to look at. I get a lot of flak for making this kind of art, and even more flak for writing poetry about it. (Particularly from poets, when those poems challenge them in ways they don't like to be challenged, formally, or in terms of content, or with ways of writing poems alien to their own. Poets, probably because they're so insecure in the market-driven world, are often very intolerant of difference. Gays and lesbians, too, can be intolerant of difference, and sometimes for the same reason: we can be very uncertain of our place in the world.)

But that is the essence of Tantric practice: facing directly those things you don't like to look at, whether they are fears, toxic patterns, death, life, love, sex, hate, or other sometimes corrosive emotions and situations. It's a list of things we'd all rather avoid, most of us, and the list is as long as your personal list of phobias and neuroses. At the root of most or all of these lies fear.

The point is to embrace those things you'd rather flee from, use that power they generate in you when you face them, and redirect it towards your own greatest good. Betterment. Enlightenment. Whatever you want to call it.

Most people run from their fears. The Tantric practice is to run towards them.

In Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, a monk was sometimes sent to practice graveyard meditation, which is the practice of going to the burial yards, and meditating all night long while sitting on a fresh corpse. If that doesn't push your buttons, bring out every feeling of fear and revulsion you've ever felt, then you're not human. It's supposed to push your buttons. That's the point: When your buttons are pushed, then you're engaged with your whole being with the moment.

And that's only one short step away from what enlightenment really is, which is not what most people think it is. It's not nirvana, it's not some magical blissful cessation of all upset, chaos, or drama. It's not the end of strife. What it is, is living in the present moment, without emotional or mental baggage, with a sense of being one with everything, and being able to sense the connections. The Lakota say "All My Relations" at the end of their prayers, invoking and connecting to all of Creation. The Navajo finish many sacred songs with the phrase "It is finished in beauty," which is one translation of the word "hozho," which means "balance" and "peace" as well. See the pattern yet? At the culmination of the corpse meditation, after you have contemplated your own death and the ephemeral and groundless nature of your own emotions, there arrives a peacefulness and tranquility and detachment wherein you realize what matters in life and what doesn't, what's worth paying attention to, and what's not worth getting upset about. Which is most things. Most personal dramas get put into perspective when you're meditating all night while sitting on a corpse.

Which is why I keep coming back to the photos I have taken of my own medical procedures, of the blood transfusions in particular. Remembering what the needle feels like in the back of your hand while looking at the photo: that is a Tantric practice. It's like meditating while sitting on your own corpse, on the temporary nature of your own incarnation, on the limitations and short duration of their lives.

The Universe will go on a very long time after we're all dead. That puts your drama into perspective.

I might not survive another day, another week, another year. The medical treatments I still have to undergo, not the least of them a life-changing surgery, could be the death of me. Each blood transfusion could kill me as well as save me: it is always a risk. Even if a small risk, because the medical technicians are really good at what they do, it's still a risk.

I've never thought of myself as particularly brave or heroic or as anything special, and I've always run towards the fears instead of away from them. I learned very early in life that that's what you have to do. I've never felt there was a choice, even when I didn't really want to do it. There are just some things you have to do, and you can't avoid doing them.

I learned that by growing up a gay boy in a hostile culture: we all learn to navigate dangerous waters very early, we learn to be observers of life and people, almost the same way an anthropologist in the field observes the people in the culture she is studying, we learn to hold back our personal truths from public scrutiny, and public discourse. We learn early that we have to cope with doing things we'd rather not do. I learned a lot of life-lessons from being bullied for many years in school. One of them was to always turn towards the lion's roar, rather than to try to run away from it. If you try to run away, you get eaten.

I don't want to get eaten. I'm the spiritual predator, the Black Dragon, not the sheep, the spiritual prey. I'm the Warrior who can be killed but never defeated. And I'm the Vampire, the dark archetype that even at the last fights to his utmost to survive. I'm in love with the world, and with life, and I'm not ready to let go of it. Not yet. I won't be here forever, so every moment is all the more precious. The preciousness of life is in direct proportion to our awareness of its short, ephemeral nature. This, too, you learn from sitting on the corpse all night: That what cannot less is therefore all the more rich.

So I run towards the fears. Nothing in life terrifies me more, right now, then the surgery and recovery and life-changing things about to happen to me. The outcome may very well be a real improvement to my life. But I'm not there yet. Today, that hasn't happened yet, and there's no guarantees. There is no "reward" for good behavior, for doing everything right, for thinking the right thoughts, for following good advice, for right livelihood. You cannot think your way out of these problems. Sometimes you can only endure.

If I must face this fear, I will. It doesn't seem like there's a choice. Avoidance and denial are not valid choices. Running away only postpones the inevitable. My aunt who avoided and denied illness and death her entire life was not in the end able to avoid either, and her last illness killed her. Nobody here gets out alive. When you fight back against the bullies, they stop. Well, first they escalate, but once they figure out you're not easy prey anymore, they go in search of easier prey than you—that's because bullies are fundamentally lazy, stupid, and ignorant: they are ruled by their own fears, and they always run away from the corpse. Facing up to it is the last thing they want to do. So when you run towards your fears, the bullies scatter. Another thing I learned early in life.

So I make art, and poems, out of this illness, out of these fears. And the fears scatter. At least for awhile. For tonight is good enough. And if you don't want to stare at this corpse, don't: no one is forcing you to look. You can make your own choices, and they don't have to be mine.

Waters Rising

Waterline I, San Gregorio, CA, 2005

I’ve been having dreams of waters rising, several times over the past weeks. Last night, the last image before waking of was looking over a deep wind-rippled pond or lake at dusk, lights reflected in the water; the surface of the pond was restless, but there were deep waters underneath, half-revealed, half-concealed by the lights reflecting on the water. A week ago, I dreamed of flood waters rising, making the land where I lived into mud, and threatening to flood the dwellings where we lived. Inn the past week, I've dreamed more than once of sleeping outdoors, under the stars, sometimes in group urban tent-camp settings (which you sometimes do during a weekend art fair in university towns); each of these dreams of sleeping outdoors, on the land, has ended with imagery of waters rising.


Willow River State Park, WI, circa 2001

I’ve learned to associate these dreams as harbingers of the rising of the waters of the deep mind, the unconscious. The deep waters of the unconscious are a source of mystery, wonder, power, and healing, for me. (This is actually a Jungian archetype of the collective unconscious, not only my personal symbol.) Sometimes the rising waters appear as flood waters; sometimes as deep wells in the earth, sometimes in a cave, full of cold, clear, sweet-tasting water. (The well of wisdom in a cave is also an ancient Celtic religious symbol, I've discovered.)

There was one dream that was so unique I've never forgotten it: In that instance, the waters appeared as lines inscribed into a red stone patio; the red stone was of the red sandstone type found in the Southwest, vivid red; the patio was hot underfoot in the sunlight; the water was moving through inscribed lines and patterns and channels in the flagstones of the patio, like a labyrinth made of water; and the water lines reflected the pure blue of the sky overhead. Blue lines of water flowing through hot red stone, going somewhere I couldn't see, perhaps to a pool nearby and out of sight; but it was clear the waters were not still nor stagnant, but constantly in motion, flowing through the stone.

When such images and/or symbols appear in your dreams, especially several times within a short period of time, it's wise to pay attention.

The rising up of dark waters into the light of day is associated, for me, with the rising up of power, of creativity, of intuition, of information. Waters rising from the depths and flooding out over the land, over me. Every time I’ve had dreams like this, something big has moved upwards inside me, or some block has been opened, or new insights are gained, or I’ve experienced a huge surge in creativity combined with insight and intuition. The waters of that black underground river which is the power under life, which sustains me, which is the river of creative force that feeds my ability to make art. The black river underground that rises up through the wells, that flows into the creative work I'm doing, no matter what medium I'm working in at the time.

I welcome these dreamtime events, when they happen. They are a gift of grace and power from the gods, and not to be ignored or dismissed lightly. As I said, they have often been harbingers of change in the waking world.


Water drop in pothole, Interstate Park, MN, circa 1998

Water is a constant theme in my visual art. I make many photographs of water in nature. I love reflections in water and glass, that give a sense of depth and movement to an otherwise static scene. I spend a lot of my time out in the world making nature photographs near bodies of water. Rivers, lakes, the ocean. Ponds, streams, sheets of water making tidal flats into mirrors. Many of my own favorite photographs have water in them, in one form or another. We live on a planet that is mostly covered with water; and our blood has the same mineral mix and acidity as seawater, from which we arose.



I was once invited to present an exhibition of my photographs in a community center in the Twin Cities. I chose water as my theme, and made the logo above to represent the show. I set the type in Illustrator, then turned it into an art object in Photoshop, chromed it, and built the water reflection underneath. The show was a critical success (albeit not a financial one).


Water Gateway, unused image from Spiral Dance

Waters rising. I wonder what they will bring forward, this time, out of the depths.

The Rite of Spring

We will soon approach the centennial of three of the great ballets of the 20th C., music and dance that changed everything followed. It will soon be the centennial of the three ballets of Igor Stravinsky that changed all of modern music: Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).

The latter, which was premiered in 1913, was titled in Russian by the composer Vesna svyashchennaya, or "Holy Spring." The French title, Le Sacre du Printemps, was given to the ballet during production, and is the title by which the work is known outside of Russia: The Rite of Spring.

The premiere of the work, as performed by Ballet Russe, was greeted with derision and hatred, and was a notorious fiasco—probably as much for Nijinsky's provocative choreography and costuming as for the music. Stravinsky experienced this early pinnacle of his career in his early thirties—"such as composers rarely enjoy," he said many years later.

Few works of modern music, either "pure" music or for the ballet have had more myths built around them. Legends and stories, misunderstanding and deliberate misreadings, anecdotes and myths—all have revolved around this score since its original performance. Even the composer made myths and stories around his work.

As music historian Richard Taruskin has written:

In 1920 he [Stravinsky] told a reporter that the ballet had been originally conceived as a piece of pure, plotless instrumental music ("une oeuvre archetectonique et non anecdotique"). In 1931 he told his first authorized biographer that the opening bassoon melody was the only quoted folk-song in the score. In 1959 he asserted, through his musical and literary assistant Robert Craft, that the work was wholly without the tradition, the product of intuition alone. "I heard and I wrote what I heard," he declared. "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed." These allegations and famous words have passed into the enduring folklore of with-century music.

In fact, however, the ballet's scenario reflects its oft-suppressed subtitle, "Scenes of Pagan Russia," and except for the human sacrifice at the ballet's conclusion is highly detailed and ethnographically accurate. The composer planned the work in extensive detail in collaboration with Russian archaeologist and painter Nikolai Roerich, to whom the score is dedicated. The music quotes a minimum of nine identifiable Russian folk-songs, all of them selected with the same eye towards accurate ethnographic detail as went into the scenario.

Did Stravinsky lie about The Rite, or rather make myths, because of prideful vanity or faulty memory? No, I don't believe so. Along with the centennial of the premieres of his great Russian ballets, we need to remember that the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution comes soon after. As Taruskin reminds us:

Having renounced Russia in the wake of the revolution and the Bolshevik coup d'etat, Stravinsky wished frantically not only to attach himself to the Western musical mainstream, but to become its leader. He zealously distanced himself from the parochial lore of his birthright and embraced an aggressively cosmopolitan ideology. Hence his insistence that his music—all his music—was "pure," abstract, (neo)classical, unbeholden to any specific time or place for its inspiration. And hence the legend of The Rite as a violent rupture with the past, when all the while it was an exuberantly maximalist celebration of two pasts—the remote past of its [pagan] subject and more recent past of its [Modernist] style.

Stravinsky largely succeeded in remaking himself as a cosmopolitan master of the new style of music. His influence was universal, and after he emigrated to the United States and began to teach composition, he was the influential teacher of two generations of Modern composers. He remains one of the most highly-regarded of Modern composers, and his place is assured in music history as an innovator, inventor, and stylist.

Stravinsky was also a master orchestrator, with a gifted ear for tone color and subtle orchestral shadings. If you listen carefully to The Rite's notorious pounding rhythm sections—shocking to early listeners in their lack of tuneful melodies—you can hear how each apparently identical repetition of a phrase or theme is in fact subtly reorchestrated each time: there are in fact rather few exact repetitions anywhere in the score, the orchestration is always changing.

Stravinsky's orchestral voice is always recognizable to my ear. I can always tell it's one of his pieces, just from the orchestration. Stravinsky is part of that lineage of composers, many of them great orchestrators with signature tone-color styles, that ranges from France (Debussy, Messiaen, etc.) to Russia (Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Shostakovich) to Japan (Takemitsu, Mayuzumi, etc.). There is a lineage of influence here, of ideas going back and forth across these borders, or composers learning from each other, and of musical idioms creating one of the great threads of the modern international style.

The Rite of Spring has a historical context for its inception and creation. Between the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, Russia went through a period of powerful nationalistic fervor, during which pagan antiquity was very popular, and was reconstructed and reimagined both ethnographically and creatively. All three of Stravinsky's great early ballets—Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring—were part of this period of foment. Each of them is based in its own way on Russian folklore, myth, legend, and ethnography. Each of these three ballets is uniquely Russian, a modern expression of a deep nationalistic past.

But this wasn't an altogether bright period, between the Revolutions. There were the horrors of World War I. There was a growing conceptual divide, imagined or not, between the citified and educated intelligentsia (kul'tura) and the vaster "elemental spontaneity" (stikhiya) of the folk peasantry. Poverty and work became serious daily issues in both city and countryside. There was a great exodus of Russian Jews, a second diaspora that had begun during the last years of the Czarist rule, and continued far into the Revolutionary years. Many Russian Jews were forced to leave their villages, and fled to Western Europe, to Palestine, and to the United States. The mood of Russia was turbulent, frightened, determined to be proud, yet afraid of its own shadow.

A Russian-born acquaintance of mine, many years ago, gave me an insight into Russian psychology that I have never forgotten. He reminded me that the Rus have been a conquered and tragically enslaved people for over seven centuries. The very word "Rus" originally meant "slave" in Old Norse, the language of the Viking conquerors—those how left their blond genes among the folk of city and steppe alike; those who founded the silver-trading city of Kiev. So, the Russians have been conquered or resisting conquerors for centuries. As my Russkii friend put it, "No matter how good things seem to be, right here and now, we never forget that the wolves are always chasing the sleigh." The wolves never stop chasing the sleigh, no matter how far behind they fall, temporarily; they are still chasing the sleigh, even now.

The Russians of a century past felt the wolves to be very close behind the sleigh indeed.

The Rite is still a shocking piece of music and dance. It still has the power to slap us around, activate some very old ancestral memories that live deep in our bones and blood, and make us remember how thin our proud veneer of civilization truly is. The Rite retains its potency, its ability to shock us, to make us remember our darker halves. It is an archetypal, profoundly mythic work; it's no wonder so myths and legends have grown up around the work itself, from the spillover of psyche into creativity that The Rite represents.

The Rite of Spring will soon be a century old. It reminds us that there are even older, more pagan, aspects to ourselves, than perhaps we are comfortable about admitting to ourselves. In viewing and listening to this work again, as it approaches its centennial, it's startling how fresh and new it still feels to us.

Here is a complete performance of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring as conducted for the dance by the great composer and conductor of 20th Century music, Pierre Boulez.

Visionary Artwork 4

A few notes on method.

As with poetry-writing, I don't find endless tinkering to be all that useful or important to the process of making visionary art. The more you tinker, the more you risk the image losing its power, and going stale and overly-familiar. Most often, I do my best to work quickly, as spontaneously as possible, so as not to over-think an artwork and possibly risk killing its energy.

There are two or three larger, overlapping impetuses towards making a new piece, which can be categorized roughly as:

1. inspired by dreams, and records of dreams
2. inspired by waking visions; things I see, and ways I see things, made in Photoshop so others can see them too
3. made by playing around with elements and techniques in Photoshop till something ignites and tells me what it wants to become

The first two categories contain spontaneous as well as more "planned" or "deliberate" pieces. Many of these pieces are deliberate attempts to recreate what one has seen, in a dream, in a waking vision, in the imagination. The intention is to bring into the visible realm what one has seen, so that others might see it too. It's a way of sharing your unique vision of the world with others.

These images are "planned" mainly in the sense that one has the image very quickly, and the rest of one's effort lies in the execution: going to find the elements needed; putting it together, like a painting, which can take some time; finishing it up and polishing it, making it come as close to the original vision as possible. Occasionally this yields very strong work, which acquires more energy when you complete it, and keeps growing. (Which certainly renews my faith in the importance of incorporating our dreams into life.) I practice keeping my analytical mind in check—keep the inner editor or critic turned off—for as long as possible, at least till the basic conception is done. I might spend considerable time on the technical execution, if drawing in Photoshop, or editing certain parts of an image becomes necessary.

The following piece was made immediately upon waking, after seeing, in the last dream before waking, this image of multiple moons above the road. The feeling in the dream was that the sky had opened up like a window or a gateway, revealing another world, another universe, another place and time:



The following image was made this way: a quick imaginative waking vision, I knew what I was going to do when I made the photo of the huge willow tree, followed by a lot of work in Photoshop to get everything to look right. The lighting effects alone took several layers to make look right:


Arrival, from Spiral Dance

In Photoshop, as in painting, subtlety goes a long way. Underpainting layers, layers with slightly different lighting effects and opacities, multiple repetitions of a layer each with a slightly different blur to add depth—these are all typical techniques one can use. I find in practice that using a lot of layers with subtle effects looks far more realistic, more like what the eye actually sees, no matter what the subject matter is. Remember that the camera eye sees more things, in sharper focus, than does the human eye. That's a property of photography that can be used to create super-realism and sharp depth of field; and since the real world is often fuzzy around the edges, it can be an effect we need to tone down, to give an image heart and breath.

The third category, above, actually accounts for over half of the visionary art I make. Sometimes I get inspired by an element of what becomes the final piece, which leads me to go looking for the rest, to pull it all together. Sometimes the mood of a basic photo inspires me in a certain direction, and seems to call for something specific to go along with it. Sometimes it's pure play, which ends up revealing something archetypal. Fooling around with one's art materials is a time-honored way of finding inspiration, which is really no different in Photoshop then it is with colored pencils on paper.

None of this is accidental or random, however. It's a kind of active imagination, to use Jung's term, that goes spelunking for the contents of one's unconscious, and translates them into imagery, poetry, dream-narrative, and other creative materials. One reason I like working with wood is that it retains the feeling of being alive; Jung worked often with stone.

Photoshop for me is a tool in which active imagination can happen; the key to active imagination is putting oneself into a meditative, receptive, numinous state, to await what is brought forward by the unconscious for you to examine. This is dream-logic, and the logic of the Dreamtime: it's not rational logic, and it's not a process of art-making in which the intellect is "in control" of the process, or even present. None of that artist's ego beforehand saying that it knows what it's going to do down to the last millimeter; it's more important to set out with no idea of what's going to happen. You actually have to get your ego-mind to "step aside," to get out of the way. The discipline is to create a field of receptivity in oneself, then wait to see what comes forward. You might end up with a doodle rather than finished piece—a risk you take anytime you play with your artistic tools—and you might find something that needs to sit and percolate awhile, before you come back to finish it. Or it might all come together suddenly and complete itself. All this is as true for poetry-writing as for making images.

There have been many times when, sorting through photos made recently, I run across one that hadn't left much of an impression on me before, but which now seems to be surrounded with a powerful, glowing aura of importance. It can stop me in my tracks. When that happens, I start working with the image, trying out different tools and techniques to see what might happen—very like a jazz player riffing on a theme, trying out different ways of improvising till something starts to take form. Improvisation in Photoshop can very much be a way to activate the imagination.

There have been other times when I knew the photo was going to be important as I was making it, because the moment of its making was surrounded by something liminal, something numinous and non-ordinary. You get a feeling, a sense that something important is going to happen, and you set up the camera then wait for the exact moment when your intuition tells you to release the shutter. You know what's going to happen before it actually does—or rather, not exactly what, but that something special is going to happen. Some people call that feeling a hunch; others call it intuition. If it's luck, it's not random luck, but the luck of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence when everything lines up just so, and sings.

This photo was made at one of those moments:



Sometimes, when you catch the light of spirit just right, just so, you want to jump up and down and yell "Yes! Yes!" to celebrate everything in the Universe converging, just so, to make the photo happen.

This leads me to mention a curious paradox: There have been numerous occasions when a viewer of my artwork thinks that a pure photo was manipulated in Photoshop, and when a heavily-worked image in Photoshop is taken to be a pure photo. The two processes are confused for one another; I grant that it's not always obvious. Yet that this confusion of means keeps happening is very interesting to me as the artist.

There is another, related paradox, too, in which someone sees something numinous and archetypal in an artwork which I myself view as fairly mundane; just as there are times in which I see a lot of liminal power in a finished piece that no one else seems to see. That line between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, wherein live the archetypes, is an apparently fuzzy and movable line.

I leave these paradoxes unexamined, without trying to force them towards a resolution. As the artist involved, I find it very interesting, and make note of it, without necessarily needing to force it towards intellectual understanding.

Avatar: some meditations

Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron, 2009.

This isn't that kind of review. I'm not interested in writing that kind of review, here or ever. I am not going to spend time picking apart the technical details and elements of the movie, or presenting myself as some sort of film critic. I'm going to spend my time focusing on the mythopoetic and archetypal aspects of the plot, the context, and the characters of the film. On the mythopoetic level—all other debates about its merits aside—this film succeeds very well indeed.

1.

Criticisms have been made that it's not all that original a story. (Remember, originality is the Modernist golden calf, to be worshipped and honored before all others.) There are in fact many similarities to existing story types. John Smith meets Pocahontas and is educated in the ways of survival in the New World. Aliens vs. natives; natives vs. invaders. The US Cavalry vs. the Comanches or Apaches (cavalry films are a particular subset of the Western genre, with unique tropes). Giant heartless corporate greed vs. compassionate independence, which prevails against all odds. The alienated or wounded war veteran, formerly an outsider, who becomes an insider among those he is supposed to be oppressing. The mere soldier becomes a spirited Warrior. Echoes of Vietnam, echoes of the Middle East conflicts. The hero's journey to come of age, to come into his own adult sense of responsibility and power. And of course the love story: the deep encounter with Other. Disaffected, alienated soldier, sick of and sickened by his own militaristic culture, meets the natives, and "goes native." (Perhaps Dances With Takara might be a fitting title.)

Why does the film resonate with so many other stories? Because each point of resonance is a mythic or archetypal turn. The film is built on archetypes, not on conventional dialogue or character or plot. It's a human story, but it's not a human-centric story. (Except of course that all stories are human stories, if not human-centric. As poet Muriel Rukeyser once said, "The universe is made up not of atoms, but of stories.")

We can talk all we want about the technical or purely filmic aspects of the movie; we can decide which succeed and which might have been done better, or differently. I have some thoughts on those points, which I may not get to here. But the issue of originality is a bit disingenuous. Other famous and influential films have been equally based on older stories, older myths, to no harm, and in many ways to their virtue. It doesn't matter: sometimes hte oldest stories are still the best. The point isn't that it's the most original script ever written, but how well it was executed on film. And this particular version of these mythic stories is very well-executed indeed.

Those who insist that this isn't an original enough script are looking to find fault. While on one level they might be right, they're also completely wrong. Movies, like novels, are myths: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories told in Avatar are myths.

There are worldwide myths (Greek, Hindu, etc.) in which "avatar" is the word used to describe a god embodied in human flesh: the divine spirit enters the body. This myth in two senses comes literally true in this movie: through the Avatar technology, which is neurologic telefractoring into another (cloned or genetically manipulated) body; and the moment in the plot when the Hero attains the pinnacle of the natives' achievements, by bonding with the most wild and powerful and dangerous of the planet's flying beasts. (Whose name translates as "Last Shadow," meaning the last shadow you see crossing over you, before you are taken. In other, older myths, what has sometimes been called a Deathbird.) The hero is both an avatar, and becomes a divine avatar; his journey of self-discovery, of empowerment, is a journey also of becoming divinely blessed. In the case of Pandora's sentient ecosystem, Eywa, quite literally.

The archetypal stories and situations of Avatar are numerous. To my mind they're the reason for the film: more of a reason than the ostensible plot, which is admittedly thin at points, the characters (some of whom admittedly are not very 3D), or the somewhat predictable chain of events. Predictability is no sin, by the way, unless you worship at the altar of originality. Children want to hear the same stories told to them over and over again in part because they are predictable. I saw many plot turns coming a long time before they actually arrived; but that didn't bother me, as they were the necessary enacting of the archetypes and myths in operation. The pleasure of the retelling of the old stories is in the details surrounding the predictable, though, in the precise workings out of each archetype, in the little character moments and throwaway lines that flesh out the people in the story who are acting out the archetypes.

2.

I didn't watch the film in 3D. (Yes, I know, I missed out, dude.) I never got to the theatre during it's 3D release, largely because I was on the road at the time, and no theatrical-release films had my attention, for several weeks. I never watched the film in theatrical release at all, to be honest. I was traveling. I was making my own art at the time, on a creative roadtrip. (Isn't it interesting how judgmental some people can get when you don't keep up with the latest cultural trend or tickle of the moment, as though you were missing out on all of life by missing out on what's the newest popular entertainment? One wonders at times if that isn't overcompensation for a deep, unacknowledged sense of the hollowness and soullessness of such pursuits and trends.)

And anyway I'm not sold on even the newest 3D technology. I'm still not sure that it isn't just another fad, another gimmick, experiencing a wave of popularity that won't endure past the "gee whiz!" period into a genuinely artistic period. (Not that there have no good 3D films made recently; Coraline was sublime.) I am turned off by the cheap tricks that a lot of films use. I tend to like to wait for a new technology to be used to make art, not just used to show off.

I'm told that Avatar uses it's 3D conservatively: as though you were looking through a window onto a world. There are no intrusions that break the fourth wall into the movie theater's space over the heads of the crowd in front of you; my least favorite gimmick of 3D, to be blunt. The choice in Avatar was to create depth of field, not make the audience gasp in their seats with a cheap trick. Knowing the filmmakers involved, I accept the probability of this being true.

3.

I tend to be a quiet fan of James Cameron films. I tend to like most of what he does, most of the time. The first time I saw Terminator, I felt changed, if only for an evening, the way a great film is supposed to get under your skin and change you. (Cameron has always worked with grand archetypes in his stories.) I came out of the movie theatre with my friend, unable to talk—about anything, not just the film—which happens to me after the most moving times watching a film. I let myself get immersed in the film, and the shift back to the "real world" can take some time, when the film is particularly immersive or overwhelming or life-changing. (My DInner WIth André shut me up for a whole week, more or less.) I came out of the movie theater, after watching Terminator, at night: down the street was an idle road construction site, lit surreally by the sodium and mercury vapor streetlights, with a few big diggers and tractors parked next to the broken road and the revealed dirt beneath: a miniature post-apocalyptic sketch of dread. I kept my eye on the digging machines, afraid they might come to dangerous life, and attack, like the technology is the movie. I skirted around them and stayed on the other side of the street. My friend laughed in sympathy, but that's how much the film got under my skin, that first time.

I never watched Titanic, and I doubt I ever will. In some ways it says a great deal about our culture that Cameron's most popularly conventional love story film has been his most commercially successful. (The stories we like to tell ourselves about ourselves are not always life-changing, but re-affirm the status quo.) I have no doubt it's a very well-made film. Yet I find myself uninterested in Titanic, the popular movie, and far more interested in Cameron's documentary work, alongside Dr. Robert Ballard, in discovering and filming the actual Titanic wreck in the deep waters of the cold North Atlantic. The side-films, the documentaries, the preparation work, the undersea filming that Cameron did for the actual discovery of the lost ship—all these are more compelling to me than the love-story movie. I'm just not conventionally sentimental or nostalgic, I guess.

I think Cameron's masterpiece is probably The Abyss. In its own way, as deeply an innovative a film as has ever been made, both in terms of the undersea setting and filming, and of the encounter with the alien Other. (Are all Cameron's films about the encounter with the Other? A case could be made for that, even for Titanic, which is also a story critiquing social-class stratigraphy.)

Strange Days, which Cameron wrote but did not direct, is an interesting little film, that I think often gets overlooked. It exemplifies what Cameron films often do: blend genres. Strange Days is a film about the apocalypse in both its positive and negative connotations, and it's also a murder mystery. Terminator is the modern (postmodern) Frankenstein, while also being a meditation on love and death and impermanence.

The newly released DVD of Avatar is no-frills. It's just the movie, with a commentary track. There is no second DVD of special features, making-of documentaries, and so forth. And the DVD release is not the 3D version of the film. One wonders if there will be an extended director's cut released later. Cameron has done that before: The Abyss was a full half hour longer in extended release, and that actually made it a much better film. Perhaps a similar version of Avatar will someday be released, with special features, and the option to view it in 3D at home. Maybe even a digital copy of the 2D version, for your portable player; those have become very popular lately. The gods forbid we should not be able to go one moment, or to one location, where we could not be somehow entertained.

If I were to wish for an extended cut of Avatar, what I would want would be: more of the small character moments that flesh out the film; some more on the science behind the film (is that flux vortex which creates the region of floating mountains a geomagnetic or gravitational/tidal or even more exotic phenomenon?), including some more on the biology of Pandora; and more scenes of Jake learning to go native. That part of the film I would have liked to see a lot more of, at least another ten minutes or so of film-time. The process of learning to live in a foreign culture is always interesting for me—having done so myself a number of times. It would also have been interesting to see more of jake's video logs, in which he begins to question himself, and lose his former sense of self, the process during which he becomes made anew; this process of losing the self to gain the self is another deeply mythic part of the hero's journey. It's sketched out in the film, but my own peculiar constellation of interests made me want more.



4.

Entertainment is not art. It's the dead detritus of art congealed by marketing and the economy of scale to maximize profits for some at the expense of everybody else. Art is life: entertainment is death.

I don't think Avatar has pretensions towards being High Art rather than entertainment. Yet it is artfully done, and at times is so breathtakingly beautiful that it approaches the threshold of art, even toes over it. The night scenes in the planetary jungle, with many colors of bioluminescence, some of them activated only by touch, are particularly lovely. The sheer profligacy and variety of species and elements at times overwhelm the foreground action, and I lose track of the love story because I'm watching the background. The realization of the world, the power of the details, are what give it believability and resonance. It is truly a Paradise: an Eden, an unspoiled place in which all beings live in relative harmony.

It is at night, in the film, that the message becomes most obvious that everything on this planet is connected by the neural bonding fibers: the entire ecosystem is sentient. Eywa is Gaea writ large. One short speech even makes the comparison between the living Eywa, the soul of Pandora, and the Gaea spirit of Earth, which humans in their manic exploitation have perhaps succeeded in murdering. The ecological message is rather blunt, then; yet within the action's context, I don't feel preached at, just strongly reminded that maybe, just maybe, it isn't too late for Gaea after all.

5.

Yes, there's a bit of exoticism in the film—the encounter with the Other—which I have to say has been emphasized in the way the film's been marketed. Merchandising makes the producers of any film a lot of money, especially in science fiction. So there are lots of Navi trinkets and action figures available. Did Dances With Wolves get so much exotic marketing? Not much, because the producers intended to be respectful of the First Nations depicted in the film. The Avatar merchandising is more akin to Star Wars style merchandising, even while the film's marketing posters and graphics echo Dances With Wolves: the Other who is ourselves, we who appear to be so different but whose hearts are one.

Exoticism and colonialism go hand in hand: the dominating colonial forces are always in conflict with the Other, in part because they project onto the other all their own dark, repressed traits. Hence the natives get called "savages" or "primitives." They are technologically inferior to the colonizing paramilitary forces, certainly; on the other hand, the more complex the toy, the easier it is to break. Technological civilization has often been seen as the dominator, colonial force; and it has often been successfully resisted by the natives. There are echoes of the unhealthy US Cavalry incursions into First Nations geographical and conceptual space presented in the last act of Dances With Wolves. Again, these are mythic echoes, not literal quotes or references.

One plot-point the movie leaves open, at the end, when we see the lines of humans being force-marched into the space shuttle to be evacuated—or to be exiled from Paradise—is the tendency of large corporations, when the natives win a battle, to return later with overwhelming force. The British Empire was built very much by the British East India Tea Company, ruthless in their suppression of local uprisings that interfered with their profits.

So Pandora remains a threatened Paradise, not a permanent one. A subtle nuance of the film is that there are no permanent Paradises: the Hometree is destroyed, a sacred site where the natives can connect with their ancestors via bonding with the ecosystem's neuro-fibers is also destroyed. An entire tribe is made homeless. We can only live in the moment, with the ones we have right now, today.

6.

I have no grand conclusive statements to make. no quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down recommendations (with all their subtle echoes of Nero's gladitorial coliseum). I leave other viewers to decide for themselves how well they enjoy the film. For myself, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the DVD, and expect to watch it again soon, picking up more subtle details that I missed the first time through.

James Cameron continues to make films I want to watch. As I said above, a case could be made for all of his films being mythic encounters with the Other—both the Other out there, the truly Other, and the Other we find within ourselves. The question as to which Other, the inner or the outer, is the more alien, lies at the heart of Cameron's films, as it does here in Avatar.