The Silent Confucius, The Confetti Trees, Hollywood, Who
Else but Barbara Guest
by Robert Mueller


Barbara Guest’s books are won­der­ful because of how they come to us with their boun­ti­ful co-​​valencies and lay­er­ing.  The Confetti Trees, a series of short-​​short sto­ries or quasi-​​filmmaking anec­dotes that qual­ify as prose poems (Sun & Moon, 1999), has this impli­cat­ing char­ac­ter, so that when it takes its mea­sure in the rich play of glit­ter and arti­fice that are Hollywood, one of its expound­ing lay­ers is a blend­ing cos­mic plot.  Guest’s sto­ries, deft and trothfilled-​​wacky in their fab­u­lous causes, pro­pose cir­cum­stances that con­cern none other than the com­ing to America of Confucianism.  By way of mak­ing and divin­ing not only events on the set but their twice-​​felt reflec­tions, they are the out­pour­ing of sub­lime Tao (tak­ing the con­cept “uni­ver­sal law” to be the appli­ca­tion thereof), and thus the cream of informed under­stand­ing of uni­ver­sal order­li­ness as ever-​​changing mobil­ity, and even chanci­ness, all fig­ured, if you like, in a con­cept labeled I Ching, the title of the famous trea­tise that has a com­men­tary believed to be by our Confucius who is much-​​endeared (just as Guest’s sto­ries may be).

Our Hollywood mir­a­cle, in this prospect and for­ma­tion, is not, how­ever, a torchbearer’s or a spectator’s or a lover’s feat.  Rather, it car­ries the stamp and fleet trade, a beau­teous fleec­ing, of his­tory — in the form of Europe as abet­tor and medium, in the form of dis­placed film­mak­ers from cen­tral Europe who pop­u­lated Hollywood and lent their magic, as Barbara Guest her­self did, bring­ing mon­u­ments of unage­ing wis­dom and glory.

Thus we note how a German scholar, Richard Wilhelm, con­veyed the secrets of I Ching to the West, and fur­ther (with the help of Cary F. Baynes’ ren­der­ing of the German into English) to the American West.  Thus we observe how Guest, in going west, col­lects and dis­tills the Confucian or Confucius-​​linked con­cepts, those of flow and progress within the changes, of the pre­dictabil­ity of unpre­dictabil­ity, and pins them, in one of her sto­ries, on another “Wilhelm,” who, with an annoy­ing per­sonal flaw, his cough­ing, pro­vides the prin­ci­ple of depar­ture, and hence of change and growth and order­ing, for a film that will inevitably bear the title “The Cough.”  So insists his col­league on the project, all sub­tly Japanese and with­held and coy of approach.  So infers and observes the inclin­ing poet.

It all begins with this Wilhelm the film­maker and, thanks to his Japanese co-​​director, Wilhelm the unwit­ting insti­ga­tor of the film as its con­cep­tion rolls for­ward.  He is a sort of bum­bling foil to one of supe­rior dis­cern­ment.  How can this be?  None need care, if the delight be oth­er­wise.  But really Wilhelm for exam­ple appears not to know if he should in fact be “Wilhelm,” aptly named for want­ing to be in con­trol and for being deter­mined to place his own stamp on cre­ative nature.  Or should he be the other guy, now and then spelled as “Wilhem,” whom we would rec­og­nize as the willing/​unwilling vic­tim of the ten­dency (as men­tioned, plenty annoy­ing) too much to pause, to “cough,” to catch him­self up with a “Hem” or two, to go about as if not so well put together though repeat­edly try­ing?  The sig­ni­fi­ca­tions col­lide but are clear.  “Wilhelm” or “Wilhem” is one of Freud’s vic­tims of the Pathology of Everyday Life, of an ordered and explain­able behav­ioral form of rank dis­or­der.  Only now with Guest’s vision of the fan­tas­ti­cal pro­jec­tions that are Hollywood and are full of odd­i­ties and visu­ally cap­tured won­ders and pos­si­bil­i­ties, the Pathology has become Tao, has become the knowl­edge of con­vert­ing the many changes, or chances, or for­tu­itous dis­or­ders with their inevitable mis­for­tune, into suc­cess and for­tune by way of under­stand­ing the signs, or, as Confucius might say, by dint of inter­pret­ing and pred­i­cat­ing upon the so-​​called oracles.

Hollywood mir­a­cle, there­fore, based now and then on the unlikely sorts of mis­takes and mis­for­tunes, not chance encoun­ters but chance (let us say) hap­pen­ings, becomes the joy and pen­e­tra­tion of Confucian ora­cle, wis­dom and play.  The “con­fetti” are the “mak­ing up,” for the project and the appeal, out of the shreds of ordi­nary and once-​​ordinary exis­tence.  And Guest’s story “The Cough” trans­forms the ordi­nary by mak­ing it anec­do­tal sub­ject of film­mak­ing wherein the vehi­cle of bemused metaphor attracts glam­our and impor­tance, regard­less (at least here) of the film’s own beauty or artis­tic successes.

So Guest goes to Hollywood to become a star; and because she has a star’s qual­i­ties she gath­ers to her every­thing of any impor­tance.  On the way she meets Confucius. And it is not a ques­tion of sim­ple near­ness, and it is cer­tainly not an insignif­i­cance.  As the world of Hollywood, and film­mak­ing, are charmed by the tem­pera­men­tal, by char­ac­ters pos­sess­ing big or lit­tle faults, and big reac­tions, so a wis­dom of com­pos­ing this world, of per­form­ing these analo­gies, adds to and even com­pletes the charm and wis­dom of being here.   Thus Guest may well sym­pa­thize with the actress who is to be cajoled and tol­er­ated in “Falling in Love.”  This actress tip-​​toes to cor­rect a fault in stature, and then in form and deed actu­ally falls.  The falling of the actress, caught on film, is the cre­ation out of a moment of mis­for­tune of the film “Falling in Love”; and her unpre­dictabil­ity scores, is made to form; and moments, mobil­ity, “momen­tuum” (from another story in the col­lec­tion) link to con­fi­dence, sagac­ity, the cre­ation of the changes.

In this other story the sagac­ity, as poten­tial­ity and moti­va­tion of silence, pro­tects its gains by way of nego­ti­at­ing light and dark, and, adven­tur­ously, light and dark show they well know to dis­perse, to project and play them­selves out in the appear­ance of “the del­i­cacy of piec­ing together snow floes,” that is to say “the sce­nario, how snow rinses her wrists slowly,” “the mean­ing of the snow on the wrists of the actress.”  The cheek­i­ness of such chiaroscuro in cam­era, of dark par­tic­i­pat­ing as halo and sur­round of image con­text, is cru­cial.  So is the time ele­ment.  Obedience to the pres­sures of time, expressed in “slowly,” makes all the dif­fer­ence; and just as light stead­ies quiet snow, so time’s pos­si­bil­i­ties are implied in so many aspects of the idea of “snow.”  So it may be easy to pass over the empha­sis on “time” as a com­po­nent of the struc­ture of the hexa­gram in Wilhelm’s fully devel­oped tran­scrip­tion and expla­na­tion of the I Ching.  But it may be that the point is not lost on the judi­cious learner, just as snow on cam­era slowly does not melt for the sen­si­tive film­maker.  The title of the story is “Confucius,” and its uptake springs forth under caress, and under delight and assured mystery:

There seemed to be no mis­un­der­stand­ing as to who indeed was the star and what role the cam­era played, each sub­sisted on snow.  Within the screen­play orig­i­nally fixed solely on the abil­ity of the actress to flex her wrists (cam­era shot of wrists) (cam­era preys on face above her wrists) a sec­ondary plot was now begin­ning to develop as snow and light crossed the face of the actress.

The action of the film sim­pli­fies to a cam­era shot wherein the odd “momen­tuum of white­ness” (empha­sis mine) is its link to coun­ter­bal­anc­ing the thought of “per­petuum mobile” (phrase mine, not in story), a notion that varies, with lim­ited sophis­ti­ca­tion, the for­mal “I Ching,” and there­upon together with “momen­tuum” may form the proper expres­sion of “I Ching.”

These touch­ing cousins of momen­tuum and per­petuum (alter­na­tively, “con­tin­uüm”) are again seen, and again cap­tured, in the image referred to in the story “The Utmost Unreality” as “Die Glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand).”  Like much of the mate­r­ial in The Confetti Trees, the ref­er­ence, in German, plays the card of cen­tral Europe as the music of Guest’s favorite, Schoenberg, emanates from a lac­er­ated spir­i­tual gloom, “allow[ing] a new genii to escape from under the aged veils of [Schoenberg’s and Kandinsky’s] magic.”  The filmmaking’s progress is dark and ambigu­ous but hints in its warn­ing motion at the roles of for­tune and change in dis­or­derly order­li­ness, with “[a]tonality” at its pilot­ing beck and call.  Guest has else­where touted such thought­ful con­tra­dic­tion in the aes­thetic terms of Schoenbergian dis­so­nance vis-​​à-​​vis con­so­nance.  Hollywood is her claim to make this appari­tion pros­per; her revamp­ing of a time in his­tory is her Europe, and her Yale and her Harvard, and her felt music.

Returning to “Confucius,” the story that appears to imag­ine this (or a dif­fer­ent) “lucky” hand while “momen­tuum” par­leys the emo­tions of light and dark, we dis­cover that the actress with the for­tu­nate appeal is a reader of who else but Confucius.  The saga­cious direc­tor who (con­tin­u­ally) reads these chance ora­cles is a Swede, a cen­tral European on the upper half, and he rec­og­nizes, or let us say the film rec­og­nizes, the great­ness of the moment in its near-​​miss qual­ity.  That is what is seen in the flow and flow­ing after, after what he films as the cold-​​sinking, gor­geous lyri­cism of turn­ing wrist in snow and light.  That is what is seen after­wards, after hav­ing com­posed the exalted moment, after hav­ing placed the slowed “momen­tuum” as homage to the lessons of Tao.  The changes and chances and Hollywood, the silent glo­ries com­ing again and again from near miss, are Pathology altered to Potentiality, are Annoying Habit altered to Personality:

The Director is a dif­fi­cult man.  His sud­den changes of mood often cause alarm.  In exas­per­a­tion he picks up a book lying on a table nearby and throws this book hit­ting the sink where the actress washes, nar­rowly miss­ing her wrists.  It is silent film so we do not hear a plain­tive voice, or the sound of the book striking.

We see the trem­bling of the actress as the book nar­rowly misses her wrists.  Without any prompt­ing she picks up the book (no sound to delude us) and guides the book up to her face where we see writ­ten on its cover The Sayings of Confucious.  “She is read­ing Confucius!” we repeat over and over, as we savor the Director’s silent applause.

 

New York City
July-​​August 2008


_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

Robert Mueller reports that his main occu­pa­tion is that of proof­reader. He fur­ther notes that the pres­ence of unusual spellings and unex­pected incon­sis­ten­cies of var­i­ous kinds in poetry books authored by Barbara Guest led him to won­der how much of this con­trary prac­tice was cre­ative and mean­ing­ful and beau­ti­ful, or helped to invoke cer­tain aes­thetic charms and mys­ter­ies. Such ques­tions sparked the cur­rent dis­cus­sion and its hope­ful thoughts about how this prac­tice may play out. Mr. Mueller has writ­ten on other aspects of the orig­i­nal­ity and bril­liance that is Barbara Guest, as well as on such adven­tur­ous poets as Susan Wheeler, John Ashbery and Edmund Spenser. You may find his poem “Bubble or Tripod Which” here in Spinozablue and two new poems on-​​line in sugarmule.com.

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

Copyright© 2008, Robert Mueller and Spinozablue. All Rights Reserved.

Be Sociable, Share!

Related Posts: