Marsha -
as probably one of the girls they couldn't get I hated being viewed from
the biological point-of-view.
That bios-drive is difficult to avoid. : ) As Goethe said, "One is either
anvil or hammer"! (Heraclitus made a good pun on "bios" meaning both "bow" -
the deadly bow that shoots the arrow - and "life" itself.) And it's not so
much being seen as being felt. The visual is just the beginning of the
trouble.
I longed for someone interesting to talk to.
Nerds are cool now, partly for that reason. And they know it.
I throw this out, to any interested. The question "How can we make a movie
of ZAMM?" is the wrong question to ask. Wrong question. The question to ask
is, "How do we make a movie of Bob's artistic beauty and deep insights?"
(The beauty of his writing is awfully underappreciated these days. He not
only wrote some of the best landscape-sensory descriptions in the century in
"ZAMM," but he wrote one of the most glorious descriptions of subjective
erotic experience in "Lila." There are sections throughout where he is just
perfect.)
I'll never forget the flash that came to me about the movie: the two books
have to be filmed together.
They have to be filmed together, intercut in some way, as a kind of fugue.
They're natural complements!
Note how he covers the four elements perfectly: "ZAMM" is earth and fire,
"Lila" is water and air. Both are journeys through the elements. (Doesn't
"ZAMM" start in rain?) "Lila" is the question of ethical applicability that
comes after the revelation has settled a bit: how does one do Quality in
daily life? [How do D and S Quality intertwine? Obviously it's like flesh
and bone. Surely the MOQ will become real when we fuse them. The third,
never-written book in the journey: the book of dance? Lila dances a bit.
Isn't that touching, the slight sadness of their courtship? Anyway, I hope
one day to contribute to that fusion.] So , by the end of "ZAMM" the ox has
been brought back to marketplace, the narrator/Bob/Phaedrus (yeah, I know
they're not the same) has come back to earth, Zarathustra's down-going and
all ... so what next? Theory and practice. Isn't it neat how the world
brings to the narrator, via Lila, another person perhaps on the verge of
madness? Bob's world, in which quivering madness or dull sanity are always
threatening, reminds one of Nietzsche saying that Hamlet goes mad out of too
much sanity. Is this not Phaedrus' pleasure in coming up with an infinity of
rational hypotheses? Oh, the trouble hidden in the seed of that pleasure!
And In "Lila" our man is ... on a cruise. No more motor on wheels hurtling
along. The water buoys him up sweetly, the breeze blows him along. Yet there
comes that madness problem again! He lives in interesting times.
So. Two movies. The thousands of feet in vertical elevation traversed in
"ZAMM" and the horizontal miles traversed in "Lila" - shot the right way,
could make it all become 3D. "ZAMM" by itself won't do. Neither will "Lila."
[ A private hypothesis, surely heretical here, no offense meant to any: that
the MOQ is secretly a fiction. It pleases me to create the idea that Bob
wanted to get us thinking/feeling *as if* the MOQ existed. Does it exist?
Where? Has it been written down - or can it? Does a kind of Godel trap kick
in, with trying to write the MOQ down? If not, just what/where/when/how is
it? What category of reality would Bob/narrator/Phaedrus, master
categorizers, assign it to? Or assign to it? Or is the MOQ indefinable? Can
you kind of, sort of, tell these things? ]
A private story, to round out. In 2004, I was walking outside a drug
rehab'ish place that had opened in the neighborhood, and a girl was hanging
around the outside. We got to talking, then walking. I don't think she was a
druggie - more a bird of passage, Gen Y hippy, a traveling sort. And there
she was with tats and piercings and funky hair, and a kind of easy sway to
her walk, and she asked my name.
"Michael. What’s yours?"
"Lila."
I looked at her with a grin and raised my finger, pointing. "I've heard
about you!"
She laughed. And I don't think she had ever heard of the book.
Love, to all the best friends of the MOQ,
MRB
http://www.fuguewriter.com
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