Broken Lines, Broken Ground, a collection of poems, is concerned with the information age and the mechanization of our lives. Machines, from the simplest fulcrum to the most complex computer, serve ...as metaphors for the human condition and for the working processes that de-individualize the human being. Ironically, the increased flow of information in our time has not resulted in more meaningful communication; rather, the lines of communication have been broken in ways heretofore unseen. In an age of groundbreaking technology, one cannot ignore the negative side-effects of growth, expansion, and artificial rejuvenation.
The novels I discuss promise a revelation of the Absolute, in which a subject identifies with the New World nation in an imaginary identification and fusion only to undermine this notion of ...apocalypse. Using the Lacanian model of the subject and Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytic interpretation of nationalism, I define apocalypse as a promise of plenitude which would overcome symbolic castration by healing the wounds and gaps which render both subject and nation incomplete and fragmented. In each novel, racial or cultural otherness interferes with apocalyptic plenitude. The subject projects his or her internal split onto the nation, creating the illusion that if the other can be erased, the nation and the subject can reveal themselves as unified wholes. But the undermining of apocalypse breaks any absolute identification between the individual and the nation, insisting that the subject recognize the other. Melville's Moby-Dick shows the failure of Ahab's sovereign individualism as a model for the United States, replacing the absolute individual with a finite one who must depend upon others. Atwood's Surfacing and Cohen's Beautiful Losers deal with two threats to a unified Canadian identity. Atwood's novel deals with the external threat to Canada represented by the United States, critiquing the fantasy of cutting Canada off from U.S. incursion, while Cohen's focuses on internal struggles between the English, French, and Indians, showing that Canada is founded upon a shared wound rather than the plenitude of any group. Fuentes' Terra Nostra shows Mexico's inability to resolve the collision of European and Indian cultures to produce a coherent identity. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow illustrates the failure of American exceptionalism. Rather than representing a clean slate, the U.S. remains entangled in the European death drive, exemplified by white America's desire to eradicate blackness. By illuminating the dangers of apocalyptic thinking, these novels suggest that both subject and nation can avoid disaster only by renouncing absolute identity, recognizing otherness, and accepting a finite identity constantly subject to redefinition.
The use of Zen – advertent or inadvertent – in the practice of artistic creation is not new. From Japanese Haiku poetry, the early poetry of Wordsworth and even aspects of Shakespeare's Hamlet, to ...the paintings of Cezanne and Dali, to the novels of Ben Okri and the work of Samuel Becket and Peter Brooke, we see differing efforts to transcend the dominant mode of understanding ourselves and the world around us: namely that of the duality of thought, of the kind our conscious, logical intellect can comprehend. One could even point to contemporary physics – and in particular the physics emerging out of quantum mechanics' – to see that efforts to transcend the limitations of our own intellect in the quest to understand the phenomena of life are not confined to artists. One could describe this quest as spiritual, in that it is concerned with understanding life predominantly through feeling.As a relatively young art form, first conceived and developed within a mechanistic paradigm, the film medium does not have a tradition that both filmmakers and audience alike can relate to in terms of transcending modes of dualistic thought and exploring our spiritual nature. With some notable exceptions who remain on the whole on the fringes of popular film culture – Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer and Tarkovsky being the most prominent of these – filmmakers have been confined to working predominantly within the idiom of cause and effect, conflict and resolution, and the logic of psychologically explicable character motivation and consequent plot development. With relatively few reference points, the process of examining and exploring the film form beyond this psychological realism is difficult, not least because of the economic restraints that have traditionally hampered innovation within filmmaking. While our conscious thoughts and emotional lives are amply studied within the bounds of largely Freudian and humanistic psychology, there remain aspects of human experience – feelings connected to our transcendental natures – which film does not adequately explore or express.Here, I shall seek to illustrate and evaluate the efforts I have made as a practicing filmmaker through three films – One Day Tafo, Reunion and Signs of Life – to explore and develop a film form which seeks to reveal a truth about myself and the world in which I live: a truth which goes beyond what may be psychologically and intellectually explicable, a truth which is essentially experiential and devoid of traditional concepts of meaning. I am tempted to refer to this as 'Zen and the art of filmmaking'? For me, this work is only the beginning of a life-long process, the outcomes of which I hope others may be able to use for further research and exploration.
The Yardbird Suite is still crucial for that actual concert experience, but Bellamy's Lounge at the (host Chateau Lacombe) hotel was another highlight for the way it brought out players and listeners ...for after-show jams." ...the final Friday packed terrific sets from Igor Butman's more traditional hard-swinging 17-piece Moscow Jazz Orchestra, from New York's cerebral, textured Claudia Quintet, and from Toronto saxophonist Jane Bunnett's infectious, grooving, all-female Afro-Cuban jazzsong sextet Maqueque, just three of seven...
