looking well at "Never Look Away"

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Hi, Lisa,

I saw ”Never Look Away,” after so many evenings when I wanted to, but couldn't fit 3 hours of viewing into available time. So, I'm glad that the occasion of your essay caused me to make the time. 

I didn't read your discussion of the film (or, rather, that scene) until today, since
I avoid reading about a film that I want to see, before I've seen it.

The film disappointed me, though again I'm glad I saw it. Auteur von Donner-
smarck did a masterful essay, as the film, about art in mid-20th century Germany, though anchored by cardboard characters' changing eras of life relative to box office-sure contexts of struggle and tragedy (as if Germany needs more), done with compelling cinematic expertise. It's great enter-
tainment! Von Donnersmarck did great service to art history. My disap-
pointment is no discredit to the film. (I want psychological depth—insightful plausibility between characters—beyond another proper indictment of satanic nazi minds.)

whose mind am i reading?

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In the beginning, there were no words, but we know now that there was caring: good enough attachment of infant to mother…In the beginning, there was no other, just the caring, so-called “relationality,” primal inter-ing. Everything was interal—unrepresentable interality, what Antonio Damasio, decades ago, called “the feeling of what happens” (though he wasn’t primarily oriented by relating-ness).

Then, one day—or gradually emerging from all nebulosity—there was an other: mother, which is first primal personification.

One, two, three,…infinity: Everything is personified.

enthralling appeal

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Being drawn into experience (of a person, a phenomenon, a text, etc.) responds to appeal as if being enacted by the appellant, rather than (as if not) by oneself.

It is oneSelf, of course: already receptive to experience of who (or what) evinces response—but one’s not being thrown by the experience (which would be impositional, like surprise, albeit welcomed).

A serenity may precede the drawing or be instilled by it. A play of engagement may be evinced by phenomenality, to be savored, maybe evincing enchantment
or a delicate entrancement.

As: a history, an outline

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“As: a history, an outline” is a set of poems I’ll share by link here (at the end), composed 45 years ago.

During the summer of my 29^th year, I got involved with a largely-disappointing tome of poems, The Young American Poets, a very thick thing which had been published nearly a decade earlier (1968, Paul Carroll, ed.). It had many good lines in its lot of forgettable verse. Nearly each poem had some good lines—“good” there mirroring my preferences. I underlined each.

Next, I copied each preferred line by typewriter (years before consumer “word processing” platforms came along), and cut each line from its page, resulting in many hundreds of short textual noodles. Then, during episodes of entrancement,
I grouped the lines on my floor, first as regions of tens of lines (piles of text noodles) that shared an emergent spirit of sensibility, as if each line had its own integral gravity.

an ended call is called the ending

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The week has been a crazy series of exchanges between me and ATT Internet employees who don’t know how to solve the problems they’re employed to address, re: why I didin’t have connectivity most of the time anymore—which is an irony of human being: needing connectivity in order to fruitfully complain about its absence.