The Visitor. Overture Films

Watched a very good film on DVD last night. The Visitor is a story about an emotionally repressed college professor in Connecticut, a widower who seems to have settled into his own level of depression and is just going through the motions. Until. Until he is forced to give a paper at a conference in New York City and discovers squatters living in his apartment. Two illegal immigrants, seeking a better life. A gifted drummer from Syria, played by Haaz Sleiman, and his girlfriend from Senegal, played by Danai Jekesai Gurira. Tarek and Zainab think they are living in the apartment legally, having sublet from a conman. Apparently, this is all too common. After some commotion, the couple leaves, but Walter, the professor, played by Richard Jenkins, goes after them and asks them to come back and stay. In subtle and profound ways, his life is altered from that moment on.

The title is magical, ironic, ambiguous and knowing. Walter Vale is the visitor into another culture. Tarek teaches him how to drum in the African style, and little by little, Walter loosens up and embraces that new culture. What makes this all the more powerful is the incredible subtlety of the Jenkins performance. You actually have to watch him closely to notice the changes. It’s not the typical bombastic, all too obvious, 180 degrees of change Hollywood often brings us. As if all too many directors simply don’t trust the audience to observe. Observe closely. Notice things. Note small differences, careful change. So, Tarek and Zainab are vistors to America, to New York City, and so is Walter. He visits a new culture and seeks a return to his own musical roots. His wife was a concert pianist, and he wants to somehow pay homage to her through his own musical awakening. A vistor to himself and to others. Everyone is a visitor in some way.

Enter the next pivot point. Walter and Tarek have become fast friends and are on their way to play drums together in the city. Tarek is stopped in the subway by INS employees, arrested and taken away. Walter finds out where he’s been taken, tries to help, gets a lawyer and visits him in the detention center. Along comes Tarek’s mother (played by Hiam Abbass), all the way from Michigan, seeking her son. Their relationship is again something we the viewer need to watch closely, carefully, note the changes, note the small alterations in behavior, their connection, moods and concern for one another.

The ending is not typical of Hollywood. But it’s real. The movie is profoundly sad in many ways, but filled with joy. It is provocatively realistic in the best sense. It makes us think. It should make us rethink current policy. But it is also “art” because it deals with difficult, complex things in a difficult, complex way that doesn’t wear that on its sleeve. It is a completely unpretentious film and open to so much. It’s open to the visitor in all of us.

Previously published in the September 2008 Arts & Culture issue of Our Neighbourhood Magazine.

Desi Di Nardo’s work has been published in numerous North American and international journals and anthologies, performed at the National Arts Centre, featured in Poetry on the Way on the Toronto Transit Commission, selected by Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and displayed in the Official Residences of Canada. See www.desidinardo.com

Copyright ©2008, by Desi Di Nardo. All Rights Reserved.

Master Po and Kwai Chang Caine

What’s the mystique about mysticism? (Or is the question itself just a misleading fork in the road, excluded middle term, dun leaves dead on a worm-ridden tree, as in “not seeing the forest for the … ”, regarding spirituality).

When I watched Kung Fu as a young child, then as now I was entranced by the mixture of action and the ambiance of a kind of deep inner peace that drove it. I think I missed the master-pupil “grasshopper” dynamic, but I was only two or three years old. But then again, I have never really been content with the notion of master and pupil, either in being a student, or in being a teacher. Of course, then I had absolutely no idea what the show was about on an intellectual level and would not have begun to be able to articulate it until late in high school, possibly. There was a kind of scary and alluring negative space about it for me.

Bizarre side note on “Pizza Space.” One of the kid shows I watched had a recurring film segment about a man making pizza crust from scratch. As he tossed it into the air in slow motion, and the crust sort of percolated and flapped around in space, it seemed to me that it actually left the room and hung in the void for a while, and then returned. This was only an optical illusion created by the camera angle, and probably not one intended by the film-makers. But “Pizza Space” — which I did not name until a couple years ago — then existed for me as an archetype of the creative void, the emptiness in which artistic craft occurs, possibly ex nihilo. (In fact, I think now, never ex nihilo, because there is always some antecedent, but that has not always been my thinking on the subject…)

I find myself also thinking about religion in general in parallel to mysticism. They are not identical, but they always inform one another. Even those who pursue mystical experience from a secularist perspective — or materialistic, empiricist angle — are to some degree relying on the insights of those operating from within a religious tradition. (Even to use the term “mysticism” is to repeat a meme that originates within religions.)

Where does art fit in? For many of us, artistic experience is our primary engagement and appropriation of the numinous. And perhaps, in many instances, where the numinous grabs us. (To be “raptured” after all, does not always imply literal translation of the body into heaven … to be “caught up” is maybe not the province of just one spiritual tradition.)

Why did I in two instances above reach back into childhood to lay hold of some dimension of mystical experience? Is it because the impact of the numen in my life then was more intense because of my developmental stage, and because less crowded out by other concerns in life? Is this related to what Jesus meant when he said, “Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God”?

Just ramblings late at night as my stomach rumbles unquiet at the thought of a long work week, and my cat paws my leg for attention. Not unlike the numinous, either in the cat’s paw, or the work week, or the indigestion.

W.B. Yeats. 1923.

An older poem of mine reminds me of the biography of Yeats I’m reading now. The biography of Yeats reminds me of an older poem. Not so much for what resides inside the poem or inside the book. But the act of writing itself. The act of being a poet. The act. The context of that act.

The bio is R. F. Foster’s two volume masterwork from the 1990s. I read Richard Ellmann’s essential biography many years ago, which set the standard. So far, after 100 pages, the Foster bio reads almost as well, is far more detailed, but lacks the sense of capturing Yeats as quickly as did Ellmann’s. Foster is better, however, on setting Yeats in historical context, and this has me wanting to again read more about Irish history, especially the period in which Parnell played such a crucial role.

Yeats’s early obsession with the occult, with forming literary groups, with setting up networks of like-minded friends, in London, Sligo and Dublin, is fascinating. What we in the Internet age do with a mouse click, WB did in person. This was often the only way young writers could gain a foothold in the literary world of that day. In order to get publishers to agree to print their work, they would frequently have to beg friends to help them sign up enough readers to fund printing. Subscriptions. If they weren’t well known, they generally had to go that route.

Another interesting topic Foster covers well is the “fallen gentry” aspect of the Yeatses. The decline of the Protestant Ascendancy, which has an interesting ring to it. The rise and fall of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, primarily from the 17th to the 20th century, is enough of a topic for dozens of books on its own, but it adds layers to the bio. In the late 19th century, Ireland was changing rapidly, and old land holding families often could no longer count on making a living from their rentals, from what their land produced. The Yeatses were no exception and were often steeped in poverty. The patriarch, the artist John Butler Yeats, was supposed to be the family bread winner, but he was generally unsuccessful in doing so, which left much of the earning for his children. Willie Yeats, as a poet, was not much better at it than his father, though he seemed more determined to at least try to make ends meet.

*     *     *     *     *

I’ll continue the review in bits and pieces as I read, and will discuss Yeats’s poetry as well. And now for that old poem of mine:

Virtue and the Postmodern Forest

And they are all around me
And I stand quiet
Wait
Soak-in the cold and their eyes

The scene is too normal to believe
Me in the woods . . .
The theater guards the division
The forced separation of reality and fiction
Like a house described
In a book a song

Where are the people who act?
No . . . just animals today
Just sounds of wood crackling in my fire
And hawks in ecstasy

Smoke burns the eyes the trees
Are Greek choruses tonight
Every night
Branches are poets
Moss cushions the fall of the Hero

A flute would be nice
Violins
Lyres
Screams from the balconies above me
As someone faints

	 That girl is in the play
And that one too
Made androgynous by audience and script
By silent breaths of writer and reader
Like unmade holy minds before we burst
Upon this scene of black and white
Up and down
Here and there

	 Soon the Times will rave
And the Post will praise our successes here
The Theater of Life
Good Health
And Unbridled Noise
Will guarantee the merger of silence and waiting
Before the advent of communal storms

–by Douglas Pinson

Hi

I thought the readers of your website might be interested in our competition and was hoping you could post details on your site.

Bookhabit.com, in association with the New Zealand Poetry Society, are staging an international poetry competition that celebrates written and performance poetry.

US$2600 in prizes

Free Entry

Written, audio and video submissions received

All categories, ages and countries.

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Kind regards

Clare

 

The filmmaker in question, Hossein Martin Fazeli, is also a poet. One I hope to publish here soon.

If I had another life to live, I think I would be a filmmaker. The ability to make art that way, to combine prose, poetry, music, soundscapes, landscapes, paintings, photography, motion. It has it all. And I don’t think that “all” has been fully exploited. One could do a life of a poet, a musician, a novelist, a painter, a philosopher. One could utilize most of our senses and hint at the rest. He or she could create a world and go beyond any one form of art by itself.

Of course, it can not match the sustained connection between reader and writer provoked by the greatest works of literature, or focus our attention on one image like the greatest paintings and sculptures, but it could place and replace words on the screen to stir different emotions and links. It could and should provoke us to experience the multiplicity of art forms in a single sitting. Never to be the end all and be all. But one more catalyst. One more outreach program. One more initiation experience to beat the band.

The Shriek


On the edge of her lip, like a car
balanced on the brink of a precipice,
the shriek has halted, swaying.
Just one spasm, and all of her anger
would gush down noisily, sweeping
sighs and placid thoughts away.
We could try to rescue those inside
the shaky car before it plunges
to the bottom of the crag, but nothing
curable is in that mouthful of vibrations.
And the force of a thousand hurricanes
locked in a chest then suddenly released
would not suffice to wash such evil.
In the end what is unavoidable befalls,
and the tenacity of her facial muscles
is not worth the trouble. Ineffectual,
however long she strives, to hold her breath.
No human can contain a lifetime’s pain.


The Effort


Moon shines while billions
of corpses rot
beneath earth’s crust.

  —Shinkichi Takahashi

Man’s sight is dim.
Man’s look is squint.
Man’s eye is corrupt.

Man is the end.
Man is the end.
Not machines, not profit.

Man’s effort
cannot be vain.
Man is no means.

Man is the end.
Man is the end.
Not machines, not profit.

Man has to last
until the stars
decree the end.

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who has long adopted English as his writing language and his work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines from 12 countries including, in the USA, Antietam Review, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Concho River Review, The Iconoclast, Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Poesia, Poesy and Potomac Review. He is the author of three collections, most recently Straight Astray, the poetry editor of Private Photo Review, an international magazine of b/w photography and short writings, and a featured poet in the 2006 edition of Poet’s Market. Alessio’s website is here.

Copyright© 2008, by Alessio Zanelli. All Rights Reserved.

Grind your teeth on atonement pangs. Lone rocks crop the low sky. You reach up with a steady hand. The clouds elude you.

Walk the brown stream, dip in your hands and face, drink deep. Forget the water leads always down. Brown drops crumble in heat to ascend, as must you.

2.
You’ve got to stumble three times. You try to walk, and that staggers your first summers. Drink love and fall forever.

You enter the brown room, where an hour stretches to blackness before time, songs flash bright between your ears, there is no difference between the song and your voice, your mind.

3.
You bleed brown into your chest, your head.
Luck cleaves to the gray channels. Don’t cling
too tight, you might miss it. Keep one eye open,
or you’ll miss her. Two eyes, and she’ll run away.

4.
You dive through the murk to the stone, pry it loose with tired fingers. Every day you dive
again, lungs ache and muscles scream as you drag it a hand’s breadth farther.

When the stone is on the shore, glistening, you laugh. The gazelle ran by as you pushed stones underwater, in a flash of brown.

Her flanks lit up the evening sky.

Ibiza 08 (after a pic by doris)

Vertical gelatinous sun,
like the final image of Robert
Duvall in THX-1138, standing triumphant in the telephoto lens, the waters heal my sore feet and the salt air purges my hangover. The distant scent of fish and oil and car exhaust cannot compete with standing on the edge of an element and willing yourself into the center of the solar system,
even if only in your imagination.

The sails flap contented, Gina takes off her top and lies in the sun. I  fall asleep and sunburn. The pages
of her diary flip in the breeze. A gull watches us from the boom.

A cosmos is born in the sailboat’s wake, one far better than the one
I usually travel through in a sleeper ship at infinitessimal fractions of the speed of light, and wake up from
with bloodshot eyes and a creeping sense of defilement along my limbs and in
my soul.

beguining

raspberry twist of a girl
with all comets in her
jean’s pockets,

the atmosphere
I am losing because
we can’t breathe or
have breathed too heavily

and she dances
sings
plays guitar
intones the name
of God in
79 flavors

we are
rejoicing for the first
time since before the
war.

Tony Jones is a 36 year old poet who has been writing seriously for 21 years, and has been published in journals like Virginia Writing and Kronos. He lives in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and took a succession of dead-end jobs that were nonetheless very productive of creative inspiration, though generally in a negative way, before deciding to finish his Masters in Religion, which occupies him presently. He lives with a cat, Sibyl, and far too many books on history, philosophy, theology, science fiction and, well, you get the picture…

Copyright © Tony Jones, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

This night holds me so tightly in its palm,
as if to never love another, but outside

what remains is the inheritance
and an unfriendly notice.
I fumble through the memories, recalling
promises of life, never loving another.

Softly, I wait until the lush beginning
comes to me. I am pale yet ripe,
seasoned with night clouds,
wondering how the skin is perfected

before the portrait of a wrinkled woman,
from my kitchen to yours, is secretly hung.

My heart weighs the love and lust
as I sprawl within this page, inking
aloneness, swinging the papers
or a naked spoon inward.

–by Lekshmy Rajeev and Sheema Kalbasi

Lekshmy Rajeev is a poet, and literary journalist and translator in English. Her poems have been published in many highly regarded literary magazines & journals. She has translated The Narayaneeyam, a devotional Sanskrit work in the form of a poetical hymn. For over the period of two years she wrote a monthly column on living Indian poets titled ‘Pebbles’ for Deccan Herald newspaper’s Sunday Magazine. She is currently working on the meaning of ancient Indian spiritual texts.

Sheema Kalbasi is a human rights advocate, an award winning poet, and literary translator. Her work is distinguished by her passionate defense of the ethnic and religious minorities’ rights. Her poetry has been translated into eighteen languages to date.

Copyright©2008 by Sheema Kalbasi and Lekshmy Rajeev. All Rights Reserved.

Whirling Dervishes, Istanbul. Photo by Lohen11

Recent events have me thinking yet again about ecstasy, mind, spirit and the power of suggestion and belief. The laying on of hands by Pentecostals. The ecstatic motions of Sufis. The chanting OMs of Hindus and Buddhists. The trance-states of shamans, west, east, south and north.

The universal appearance of X proves that X is not uniquely the province of any one region, culture, or religion. By definition. As in, if there are instances of peanut butter all over the world, then no one religion can claim ownership of peanut butter or its source. No one religion can logically claim they hold the only key to the peanut butter cabinet, when members of dozens of religions have access.

To take this sticky metaphor a bit further. Each case of peanut butter appearance has a story regarding the origin of that peanut butter. Many will pull resources and agree to the same origin, but across the world there will be hundreds of those origins. Same thing. Peanut butter. Hundreds of origins for that same thing.

The chances that they are all right about their interpretations of origins is minuscule. But the chance that only one interpretation out of hundreds is right is less than zero. The sheer multiplicity of origin stories all but negates the possibility of one being right and all of the rest being wrong. The sheer multiplicity of authentically striving adepts from dozens of religions, each looking for peanut butter, negates the extremely narrow view that only one holds the key to the origin of the cabinet.

The origin of the cabinet and the origin of the peanut butter. Organized religions want you to go through them to get to their particular cabinet. They don’t want you to go to the store and find the peanut butter for yourself. They also don’t want you to notice that people all around the world have their cabinets too, and their access to that peanut butter, and their own names for the cabinet, the peanut butter, and the source of both. That would, of course, confuse people and perhaps push them toward removing the middle men.

*     *     *     *     *

A subject for a later day: What is happening when people feel the ecstasy, peace, serenity, or blast coming from a religious (or poetic, artistic, musical) experience? Is it the merger of the conscious and subconscious minds? Is it truly a meeting with a divine being or force? Is it the meeting of humans and just one divine source, with just one name and one story?

Is it all in our heads, or is there some outside force involved?

For me, the universality of the experience rules out the possibility that any one religion is right and all others are wrong. I see that as physically and logically impossible. My questions then are mostly reduced to two possibilities.

(Of course, my questions are virtually endless, but these two are essential)

1. Is this experience simply the result of the power of suggestion, belief, or faith in something beyond us that actually does not exist . . . which causes, in some cases, for some people, a powerful physiological alteration?

2. Is there a divine force that works on those willing to believe, practice, strive for at-one-ness, but that makes no distinction based upon region, culture, or religion? As in, a divine being or force that couldn’t possibly care less about what it is called or the stories humans have developed about it in pursuit of explanation and understanding?

Again, to be continued . . . .