Too busy to write, too busy to think. The last months have been dogged with the avalanche of daily chores - a few days a week teaching, daily trying to edit one thing or another; emails to write and answer, DVDs to package and post, festival entry forms to fill, along with the usual daily chores of cleaning up, cooking, sharing with Marcella, going to dentist, checking new cameras, and so on. A clutter of conflicting things unconducive to real thought or the time needed for it.

Amidst this I’ve twice been asked to participate in academic symposiums, some months back one on Digital Media and Art at Chung An University, which I printed here a while back; and just a few weeks ago, one on Narrative which was done this weekend at Yonsei. I didn’t attend the first session, done in un-translated Korean, and was present only in my section. As usual there was little information given before regarding what was going to be done, but on arrival, on being handed the program notes I saw I was listed first, and a word on the other two speakers - a Finnish man talking on video art from Finland, and a Frenchman doing something on animation - and I quickly thought perhaps it would be better if I was last as my piece (see below) was a bit serious. Thought it might be an unhappy dampener for the others. I proposed going last and this was agreed to, and after the scramble of the three of us doing tech-checks, we commenced.

The young Finnish man, Pontus Kyander, was a curator, critic, and said he’d worked programming for Swedish public television. He talked a bit - inarticulately, stumbling around a bit aimlessly, mouthing critic-speak about the young generation of Finnish video artists and then showed one work, Power, by Salla Tykka - a one-idea item which started with a quote, “I wanted to make a film about my mother but I could only think of my father” and was followed with a rather long sequence of shots of a young woman - the filmmaker I think - boxing with a man who might have been her father. 10 minutes or more. Competently shot, edited mundanely, nobody knocked out, and coming to an anticlimactic end as the protagonists walk off ring and off screen. It was basically boring, though our critic then lavished haltering words upon it, pressing to give it a weight it did not have. This was followed with further fumbling critic-speak, and finally another film, Lasso, same maker, similar in its conservative style, and again we were informed of the post-modern irony, the expropriation of movie clichés, etc., as our critic fumbled more with his rote academic theory terminology, and underlining for us this was real “art” he said it had been in the Venice Biennale, sure-fire proof. And then another film, a bit better if still locked in movie conventions long ago worn out and clearly under the sway of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whom I find similarly dubious. This all took a long time. Ended with some final stammers - it wasn’t his handle on English language but the man’s dim thoughts which made for the clumsy verbiage. The Frenchman, Jean Poulot, (who proved not so French - he’d live Portland some years, travels on a US passport, and knew one of my actors from HOMECOMING) who was sitting beside me leaned over and confided I could be thankful, he’d be a lot shorter. After a short break, he commenced, a born raconteur, nimbly telling about himself and what he does, and then with lights turned down, he went behind a box with an HDV camera mounted above it, and in a matter of minutes using his hands and sand, he animated live a little tale built around the thought of messages in a bottle cast into the sea. It was fluid, his technique fascinating and flawless, and done in all humbleness. A real treat - especially after the turgid Finn and his student-work as “art.” Another break and it was my turn.

Given the present social-political reality, and the general triviality which I find in my students here, (and in general), I tend to take these unrequested opportunities as a chance to make a harsh and needed corrective to the generalized head-in-sand consumerism, not to mention the lifeless PC discourse which usually afflicts these academic affairs. So I wrote to challenge what I assumed would be some likely topics or assumptions. Here’s the piece, written in haste the days before.

NARRATIVE: Seduction or Gang-Bang?

It is normal in a circumstance such as this - an academic symposium presuming a certain level of intellectual commonality - that it is assumed that everyone knows and understands certain terms. In fact it is one of the typical ways in which professionals of all kinds wall themselves off from others by using arcane jargon, which while proposing to make for more exacting and precise discourse usually does exactly the opposite, and obscures and hides simple things with a facade of complexity.

So I will start here by taking a look at one of the words we are using today: narrative. Excuse me if I use Indo-European languages as my source, but they are the ones I am familiar with. I would be very interested to know if in Korean a similar examination would arrive at a very different conclusion.

According to our dictionaries, a “narrative” is something constructed - it can be oral, written, in music, theater, or other forms - which describes a sequence of events, which may be fictional or true, and which contains a kind of internal logic which holds it all together. Normally we’d use the word “story.”

The origins of the word comes from a Latin verb, narrare, which means “to recount.” So we can see already that this is a process which is second-hand, that we are re-counting, or re-telling something. It’s not “the real thing,” but rather a kind of replica, a replacement or a substitute.

In Latin, this word is related to the adjective gnarus, which means “knowing” or “skilled.”

So putting 1 and 1 together, we can then say a “narrative” is a kind of skilled and knowing form of storytelling, of linking one thing to another, in a way which holds an audience’s attention and interest.

Finally, these Latin origins refer back far earlier to a Proto-Indo-European root, gnō-, which means “to know”.

So a real narrative is, by definition, the re-telling or re-counting of a sequence of events, in a skilled and knowing manner, which at the end leads to “knowing.”

So, we might say, that the function of a narrative is to lead us to knowing, it is in effect to teach us something by making a series of linkages, so that we might learn and come to know something.

Now I’d like now to place these thoughts in a personal perspective.

I’ve been making films now for 45 years. From the very outset I was very much concerned with the formal aspects of how to make a narrative - not in the sense of how to make one that works by the conventions that largely govern filmmaking or other narrative arts, but rather how to extend, re-arrange, or otherwise alter those conventions, with the thought that in doing so one might re-new the spectator’s interests, and be able to slip deeper into the spectator’s sub-conscious.

In this sense I was in step with similar thinking in all the creative arts in the 20th century, be it in literature in the form of Joyce or John Barth or Robbe Grillet, or cinema in the form of Godard or Marker or many experimentalists, or the plastic arts in painting and sculpture, as well as in the sciences where old paradigms were shattered and completely new forms of thinking revolutionized the world of physics, and in turn our lives.

I’d like now to show a few sequences from my early films, ones which in a way address these questions, and show a small bit of the concerns involved.

[I then screened some clips from early films, sequences which in one way or another interrogated the story-telling process in words and/or filmic terms. The films were: 13 FRAGMENTS (1967), SPEAKING DIRECTLY (1972), and ANGEL CITY (1976).]

Perhaps today the matters broached here seem quaint - in part because the very idea that things should mean something, or that truth matters, is in some quarters thought old-fashioned or passé, defeated by various so-called post-modernist theories. Or, more cynically, if we move away from the arid world of academia, which in fact has little impact in the larger world, the defeat is more obvious and blunt: commercialism, consumerism, rampant capitalism, have simply swept all else aside, and concerns about narrative forms seem silly when the proper concern of the times is only how to construct a narrative which will make as much money as possible, or how do we continue to milk box office out of Indiana Jones? Which, I note, earned $311 million dollars in global box office in its first week, so said the film trade papers the other day.

From either of these perspectives, pondering the process of a search for truth through narrative devices, or questioning the moral and ethical nature of what stories we tell, and how, and at what cost, must seem simple-minded and foolish. But, along with a few others, I seem to persist.

Which brings me to a leap to present day concerns, to the recent fashion for “interactive” narratives and art. In the last decades, particularly with the advent of computers, CD-Roms, and similar technologies, there has been a concerted wave of interest in the idea of interactivity in the arts. This impulse is usually buttressed with quasi-political assertions that the intention is to democratize or communalize the arts, to in some way let everyone be an artist.

The techniques usually involve some manner - using buttons or joysticks, or motion sensors - to allow the spectator to either change the course of a narrative, or the shape of some visual or aural thing. It is claimed that in doing this the spectator becomes an active participant in the art-making process, and becomes a story-teller rather than a mere listener, active rather than passive. There are myriad manners in which this is done - in theater, in the electronic arts, in some kinds of literature - all with the same fashionable patter about interactivity, participation, and so on. And more or less all are reliant on one or another technical gimmick to accomplish these ends.

An examination of the end results of most of these, or shall I say every instance I have seen, amounts to little more than video-games, or the fraudulent kinds of choices we find in a normal so-called democracy - that is the choice between two or three or perhaps more things, none of which we actually want, and all of which were carefully and fully orchestrated as our choices before we are allowed to enter the position to make an alleged choice.

You should have been able to guess by now that I think very little of these fashionable theories and practices in so-called interactive arts. I do find them, while sometimes technically of interest, for the most part to be vapid and empty little exercises, things which attract tech-heads, and people interested in machinery and electronics, or those interested in theory, and their counterparts in the audience-world, people who basically want to play video-games, which similarly provide an illusion of choice within the box of a prison.

For me, the irony of the theorists and practitioners of alleged “interactive” arts is double, first in that most often it is made by persons who seem to have little real artistic skill or intuition, (just as the early so-called video artists were by and large persons with no aptitude for the other arts), persons who are more adept at either technique or theory, and so take refuge in this new-fangled concept where they can appear to be competent. And secondly, and far more importantly, is that they evidently have missed understanding the most important and obvious thing: that good art, and all great art, is inherently interactive - to say all great art engages its spectator at the deepest of levels, as well as on the surface, and requires to be confronted again and again, and with each new engagement, new and deeper insights, understanding and knowledge can be gleaned, again and again. This is the genuine interactivity of the arts, and while it may seem elitist to say it, and it may seem undemocratic,” the simple truth is that real art is a difficult kind of work, even a very dangerous work, and one doesn’t arrive anywhere near it by playing with a joystick or flicking a few buttons, or choosing between fork A, B or C in a pre-arranged pattern. In consequence most people, even offered the opportunity, choose and would choose, even under the best of circumstances, not to be artists; many artists on the other hand do not and did not choose their course, but were compelled, as if by fate, and they can do no other, whatever the personal price they must pay.

In my view the idea that one can - whether with a re-structuring of narrative forms to include spectator options, or with the addition of some technological new gimmick - open up an art to include the spectator on an actively participatory level is essentially an abdication of the artist’s real responsibility - the responsibility plunge the essentials of life, to speak to those essentials, and to effectively convey that to a spectator. When one has done that, then it is the passages in the spectator’s mind and soul which open, and lead to a genuine activity, which is the function of art.

I now quote some diverse sources:

“Art has no other purpose than to brush aside… the conventional and accepted generalities, in short everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.”
(Henri Bergson, French philosopher of the early 1900’s)

“The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.” (Lucian Freud, contemporary painter)

“Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.” (Andrei Tarkovsky, filmmaker)

Each of these quotes suggests that art’s purpose is to press the spectator to see reality, and in turn to suffer some kind of discomfort and pain.

One might argue conversely that one deals with “reality” every day, all day, so what’s the big deal. And, some might ask, who needs “art” that rubs our nose in what is around is all the time?

And so, to return to the topic with which we began, the matter of narrative. Properly defined, as we suggested at the outset, a narrative is a story-telling, done with skill and craft, which leads to a knowing, to knowledge. Whether that story is valuable or not depends on two basic things - whether the story is told with the needed skill and intelligence, and whether the knowledge acquired is worth the time spent in the telling and receiving. There are many stories which are cleverly told, even brilliantly told, which might leave us empty, or even worse, negatively touched by the skill and talent used to a worthless purpose. The entertainment world is full of such works, where the disproportion between the effort and the content becomes absurd and sours the soul. [I recently had such an experience at the Jeonju festival where I finally had the chance to see the work of the much lauded and favorite of the festivals and critics, Bela Tarr. His work is long, with a marked aesthetic, and I am amazed that it is so respected when - similarly to Wim Wenders - what he has to say through his cinematic efforts is at best sophomoric, and more appropriately described as stupid.]

And then there are narratives, often of a disarming simplicity, which strip our souls bare, and leave us, in Tarkovsky’s words, traumatized, but in a manner which we seek out, and which elevates our spirits.

So to just what “reality” is it that Freud, and Bergson, and Tarkovsky point? A reality which we apparently would avoid, and which requires a special skill and artistry to reveal to us? A reality which we must be seduced through the magic of art to confront?

It is the reality which religion institutionally exists to deal with, but at which, in our time, it largely fails - perhaps in another time it succeeded: the reality is a simple one, one which each of us knows in the core of our being, but which we spend most of our time fleeing, avoiding, evading, ignoring, doing whatever we can to distract ourselves from considering it.

It is the reality that our lives are fleeting and brief, and that death awaits each of us, and with death - whatever your religion may or may not have you believe - “you,” as a conscious and sentient being, cease to exist, and your passage in life ends. It is that reality.

And this is the function of art - to remind you of this, not as a morbid exercise in self-flagellation, but rather as a necessary step to in turn fully embrace life and live it to its fullest. And narrative, properly done, is an art and its purpose is and should be to awaken in the listener a consciousness of the fullness of life, and conversely, of the finality of death. In its myriad of ways, harrowing and/or exhilarating, all good art does this, and in turn it fully engages the mind and spirit.

It is up to the spectator, though, to open one’s self in order to see and to hear, to think and to feel, and to actively participate in the fruits which all great art offers.

These days, against the clamor of an insatiable consumer society in which distraction is the constant and norm, this seems nearly impossible. In the noisy echo chamber of our world, with its cell phones, I-pods, PC parlors, the rush of work, the avalanche of trivia which is pop culture - a culture carefully cultivated and developed for socio-economic-political reasons - there is almost no chance for art to exist, to be made, or to be properly utilized (certainly not in most museums where it is reduced to yet another commodity to be swiftly consumed, a kind of cultural trophy hunt, as the circle of tourists who surround Mona Lisa having their pictures taken aptly shows).

In our world, the fundamental narrative thread of art is too easily lost in the cacophony which surrounds it.

Rather than having the space, the time, and the conducive atmosphere in which to be seduced by the serious narrative of art, and its contemplation of life, we are instead gang-banged by the constant and shrill distractions of a society rushing madly, and it seems mindlessly, to its auto-destruction. It is a world in which all perspective has been lost, and in which, for yet another idiot toy or brief superficial thrill, we risk our collective suicide. It is a world in which the genuine concerns of art is utterly alien, and in which the rich fundamental narrative which animates all good art has been ripped to shreds and replaced with the ersatz sex and death of a video-game.

As a small echo of what has been lost, and needs to be regained for us to survive, literally, and to regain our balance, here is a tiny hint:

Following the talk, Seo Hyun-suk, the Yonsei colleague who had organized the symposium opened it up for questions. Following the predictable student silence, after a long pause, Jean, the Frenchman sought to break the ice, and asked me a question about video, about its being inexpensive now, and letting almost anyone (in a wealthy part of the world) make something and express themselves. To which I concurred, noting I’d spent the better part of my life encouraging people to DIY, to make their own films or video, but than adding that there was a difference between “art” and other things one might make, and I cited the Finnish works, saying that for me the boxing one was at best student level work and scarcely merited being called “art” whatever the poobahs of the Venice Biennale might claim, and I referred to an essay by John Updike on his visit to the 1999 Biennale which I’d visited and caustically commented on in 6 Easy Pieces.

This then provoked an intervention from Pontus, who defended (weakly) the Finnish pieces, though he clearly took great offense at my dismissive views of it. This led to a fuller discussion in which I suggested most of contemporary art is a kind of fraud, having little to do with the real functions of art, and more to do with business, money, and so on. Pontus, more deeply antagonized, ended shooting back that the clips I’d shown were bad, he’d fallen asleep, and otherwise in his own view, he spoke insultingly, or so he said in an end-of-session apology. It hadn’t bothered me at all, and the students had finally become engaged and said a bit. We went off after for a nice dinner where we managed a nice long talk with Jean and a few others. Pontus kept himself away.

And then yesterday evening, a few days after, arrived an email, ostensibly to me, but sent also to Seo Hyun-suk, to Jean, and to Mira, one of the student helpers in organizing the symposium. Here it is:

Dear all,
I send this letter to you all, although it is adressed for Jon Jost. As I experienced yesterday’s debate as lacking in respect, and my unpolite final remark as a result of provocation, I also regret my apologizes for overstepping cordiality. Today I think I just said too little, and due to Jon’s age I was initially too polite.

As a debate only becomes meaningful, if there is some little openness for the arguments of the other participants, I find the discussion we had quite meaningless. If we only had managed to talk about what these artists want and work hard to achieve! But no, it was “bad”, “ridiculous”, “too long” - and this comes from one whose lecture and works put me to sleep several times, an art critic with 14 years of enduring also the dullest art works and presentations imaginable, and being supported by another, whose sand animation was for sure beautiful and skillful from a technical point of view, but actually also could be cut a bit shorter…

May I say that the debate was disrespectful, and I regret taking part in it? No shadow on Hyun-Suk though. The lack of minimal respect for me I can only understand as motivated by an arbitrary animosity, which I notice I evoke in some people. I talked about artists currently working, giving a unique opportunity to see their work in full, artists having very clear aesthetics that can be discussed and disliked. But how about some arguments to supplement such disregard as was presented?

So I attach the letter to Jon, to you all.

My best regards,

Pontus Kyander

And then the letter with the letter:

To Jon Jost,

Hope this finds you well.

I was – to say the least – surprised by your criticism of yesterday, and honestly also taken aback by its unpolished nature and hostile tone. I did resist for a while getting as personal and polemical, but gave in for the impulse of uttering an as unjust and simplified statement about your work. The time did not allow me to get any more specific, so I feel I owe you some more precise remarks.

First of all: I know too little about your oeuvre in general to give any such kind of criticism. I am sure you have better works in your production stored away somewhere, and the lack of interest I have to express in regards of those you showed might be due to the fragmented nature of their display. Although I also have to say, that the texts of the first two ones might have done for essays in some minor magazine for poetry and aesthetics of the sixties, and might serve a good purpose for historians interested in the positions of the time. I do not believe these texts are good for anything else today, though, than expressing a standpoint of their author – as a comparison, as this letter expressing my viewpoint now and hereafter, nothing else, and no other ambition. Their style and argument I found dull, and the way they were voiced in the films were not improving that impression. I admit I did slumber at occasions. As for their ”experimental” nature, and their technical appearance, I just note that they are pretty poor, image as well as sound. I see the same kind of dull experiments today, much longer though, in those ”video installations” you so strongly denounced, by young self indulged artists. Shaky camera, lack of focus, no check whatsoever on sound, step by step opening aperture while reading a statemnt in the wind – well what shall I say? Maybe give yourself your own advice, to cut it down to a half, a fourth, a tenth of the actual length? As I saw only half the work, I am inclined for the latter. The last work, as I understand something still in production, seemed to me as a very good
introduction to some educational program in art history for a night school adressing itself to elderly citizens. One of Bach’s incredible cello suites, with images of indisputable art works of some different epochs… well, well, what shall I say this time? From now on, I cannot listen to Bach cello suites without having their almost crazy dynamics banalized by this latest experience.

I also hope you are not tutoring any students with the kind of attitude you showed. I see it often in artists looking for someone to carry on their own strivings and ideals. Times change, the way artists express themselves change. Anyone who choses to stand by the side and whine about the present state of everything may do so, for whatever satisfaction that might give. Although exclamations about how everything is going bad might be a bit wasted on a generation, that has no other time to live in, and that might not have the same perspective on life. Another approach is to actually make a minimal effort to understand, to at least have a minimal openness to expressions differing from your own.

As for the work Power of Salla Tykkä, I find myself in the bizarre situation of explaining the most self-evident aspects of the work, to another artist not the least inclined to understand. Too long – well, it is a matter of timing of many things, as she chose to use three different tempi and soundtracks. As I actually have ten years of experience in the field, as a documentary feature maker on contemporary art for television, I believe there might be some 15 seconds to cut here and there, but that consideration still has to deal with timing. The actual 4’15, or 3’45? I cannot see this is a major point of critique. And I am ready to accept and like a work also with some small imperfections.

Expressing viewpoints of a young woman and artist today, it actually has several obvious good points: Her claim of wanting to make a work about her mother, but only being able to think about her father – this can of course lead to the simplified opinion by someone, that it is a work ”about” domestic or gender violence. It is, but it is also a number of other things. It is ”about” fighting back, it is optimistic, it has a slapstick humour, with the classical underdog perspective of Buster Keaton and others. It has some historical references that I find interesting: Revolution on the Barricades by Gericault, with a bit of humour added. Amazons and other female warriors or fighting/hunting goddesses in greco-roman art. With a sympathetic reading, much can be deduced from the work. With an attitude which discards it from the first moment, it can of course give nothing.

I am convinced that you denounce this work and others because it expresses – and this is further emphasized in the work Lasso – aestetics and ambitions running totally contrary to yours. All these artists (less so with Anu Pennanen) express a Romantic inclination (Romantic as in the period esthetic), have a general interest in ”Beauty” and strongly stress emotional and sometimes personal or even autobiographical content. Their work is ”literary” in a different way than yours. Their narrative builds on cinematic means and traditions. They do not ”experiment”, instead they use quite classical compostions and cinematic modes of narrative – including the choice of soundtrack. They work with film, it gives better colour depth and also some limitations, as the necessity to plan and script in advance. And they actually have check on focus and sound, which is a relief to me, having endured hours and hours of ”experiments” with sound registered by the camera mic and the camera set on autofocus. I suspect you find these works conservative in expression. Maybe they are, personally I don’t mind, since radicalism in general (political or aesthetic) is usually just a pose – and when not, often a disaster (as I have worked with some truly radical artists and see them as my close friends, like Gustav Metzger and Sture Johannesson, I also know the price they have paid for not compromizing and for aggravating the wrong people. They do not travel the world on residencies as we do. But despite their age they are still open and curious!).
But is the continuation of the same luke-warm experimentation as has been going on at least since the sixties really an alternative? Is that progressive? I find it just as conservative, and usually much more stereotypic.

This letter is as mentioned before motivated by my lack of real possibility to advance my standpoints yesterday – to a criticism I was totally unprepared for, as being invited for, as I thought, an event where different standpoints were welcomed, and where there was a curiosity about different approaches to narrative. As it proved, only one viewpoint, the loudest and most simplistic, took most of the airspace… With due respect for your age, it was like arguing with a child of the age of five, screaming in the street: ”I don’t like chocolate! I HATE chocolate! I want JELLY BEANS! I WANT JELLY BEANS!!!”
Best regards,
Pontus Kyander

I thought to write a response, but then thought it might be better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Eleven years ago, March 27, 1997, early in the morning, my daughter Clara was born in Lisbon, Portugal. I was there to see her emerge into this world, unlike the other Portuguese fathers who sat in the waiting room instead. It was a joyous experience, followed with three and a half years in Portugal, then Paris, and then Rome, during which I spent almost everyday, all day with Clara, raising her. Her mother, Teresa Villaverde was usually off making a film - two weeks after Clara was born she went off to prepare a film, one on a modest European industrial level, and for the next 18 months she was primarily busy preparing, shooting, and then editing that film, Os Mutantes. When she was gone I took care of Clara, as well as in those times where she was present. It was a complete joy, surely the happiest period of my life, raising Clara. There was no grandmother or babysitter: it was my full time job, taken willingly and happily. I can’t describe how much I learned in process. Clara was with me as a tiny infant, sitting on my lap, as I edited my first DV film, London Brief, in Lisbon in late spring of that year. And throughout the Parisian film, OUI NON, her voice punctuates the sound track, as she was with me almost all the time - while strolling through the city, while shooting with actors. In 3 and a half years I was absent at most 2 weeks, gone to festivals or other such things.

On November 2, 2000, after her mother returned to Rome from shooting Agua e Sal in Portugal - a film in which a surrogate look-alike mother, dressed and with haircut to pass as a dead-ringer for Teresa plays the role of a mother who kidnaps her own daughter as played by Clara - she kidnapped Clara, and went furtively to Lisbon, hiding from friends and family for several weeks. She then placed Clara in a school, while she went off to edit her new film, with Clara staying for after hours as her mother worked in usual film-world fashion. Teresa would not let Clara talk with me, and when I went to Lisboa with the supposed legal right to see and visit Clara daily, this was blocked, and the courts did nothing to enforce their ruling. Thus inverted those 3 and a half years of joy, not only for me, but for Clara, who naturally was severely damaged by the sudden absence of the person who had brought her up; and by the abuse inflicted upon her by her mother. The next years my life changed to the most sad and unhappy of my life, and my work ceased as I attempted to see that justice and law do as it was supposed to - to return Clara to her home. Under Italian law Teresa Villaverde had kidnapped, a felony offense. Under international law, under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, she had also committed a crime. And properly Clara was legally to have been returned to Italy, where whatever custody terms would be decided under Italian law. However the courts and government of Portugal are corrupt; Teresa Villaverde comes from a politically and culturally influential, though not rich, family, and the law was bent and broken to accommodate her family’s interests. I have not seen or heard of or from Clara since August 2002. Mail sent to Clara’s address, registered, has all been returned. I do not even know with any certainty where they live. It is clear that if Teresa Villaverde has any voice in the matter, Clara will neither see nor hear from or know anything of her father - the person who raised and loved her for three and a half years. And she does have a voice. In a Lisbon children’s court in summer of 2005, having demonstrated a long sequence of perjuries from Teresa and her family - false claims of residence, assertions of my poverty and incapacity to make a living, claims of violence - I heard it said that Clara, naturally not present, had been told her father did not love her, did not want to see her, and other such pleasantries. What warped “love” would think it would be in a child’s interests to be told a parent did not love her, I cannot fathom. But so, surely, has Clara been told. And my imagination is not so ripe as to conceive whatever else she has doubtless been told. That same court later issued a ruling that, never mind the illegal kidnapping, the Hague Convention, etc., Clara would legally be placed in Ms. Villaverde’s custody, and I’d have visiting rights - to be enforced in the same manner as the court had done so up to that time, to say not enforced at all. I have heard and been told nothing of Clara since that time.

Long ago, in 1965-67, I spent several years in prison for refusing to cooperate with the Selective Service system; later I lived for some time in what others might call dire poverty; in the early 1990’s I was betrayed by what I thought to be a close friend, Henry S. Rosenthal, who illegally claimed the copyright to 4 of my films, and being “independently wealthy” - to say lived off family money - he could sustain the court costs which I could not. And I lost all control, rights and incomes to Sure Fire, All the Vermeers in New York, The Bed You Sleep In, and FRAMEUP - films for which Mr Rosenthal is listed as”producer” when in truth I raised virtually all the money for them, and secured almost all their sales. To say in my life I’ve had my fair share of things to be unhappy about. But all of this pales to nothing confronted with the tragedy which Teresa Villaverde inflicted on our daughter Clara, a tragedy which Clara will carry her entire life.

I hope in the coming year to resume work on a film I’d begun before Clara was born, called Picolli Miracoli, a kind of essay about those wonderful three and a half years of raising her, and learning and loving so much. I have tried a few times to return to it, but the pain was too intense to proceed, and I did not wish to contaminate the lovely joy which was there with the stain of what happened in Nov. 2000 and since.

Clara will be eleven in a few more days. A letter and a DVD of Passages was sent to her, registered post, but I fully anticipate it will be returned, or accepted and destroyed. It was a letter written knowing she will never be allowed to see it, at least not now, by post. Perhaps in some future time she will find it, along with all the court papers and other things she will need to sort out the truths of her life.

A letter to my daughter Clara:
March 15 2008

Dearest Clara

It is 11 years since I sat in the hospital, and watched joyously as you emerged into this world. And now you have, with me, and with your mother, spun around the sun 10 times - just the beginning of your life.

I write to wish you happy birthday, and wish I could be with you, as I have wished I could be with you since Nov 2, 2000, when your mother took you from our home in Rome and fled with you to Lisbon, and the corrupted legal system of Portugal closed around you.

You are still too young now to understand or know what has been done to you. You are too surrounded with the falsehoods of your mother and her family to be able to know at all what was really done to you. Nor, sadly, can you begin to understand now what this story will mean to you later in your life. These will be things of which you must and will learn later.

I send this today, knowing that you will not see it - that your mother will refuse to accept it, she will return it unopened, or she will destroy it. This is sure and clear from what she has done in the last 7 and a half years.

And in doing so she will, again and still, refuse you the love which you deserve and need from your father, and which he gives to you freely, as he did in the first three and a half years of your life, when he raised you almost alone. He loved you dearly then, as he does now. And he awaits the time when you will be free to reach out, to find him. I will be here for you.

With deepest love, and sadness that you have been kept from it for now some 7 and a half years.

Happy birthday Clara, and may love grace your life.

Your father,

daddy

jon

Querida Clara

Passam onze anos desde que no hospital te vi vir a este mudno, com imensa alegria.
E agora, comigo, e com a tua mãe, deste a volta ao mundo onze vezes – quase o principio da tua vida.

Escrevo-te para te desejar feliz aniversário e que gostaria de estar contigo, como o desejo desde 2 Nov 2000, altura em que a tua mãe te levou de casa, em Roma, voando contigo para Lisboa, e quando o corrupto sistema legal português se fechou em teu redor.

Ainda és muito nova para te aperceberes ou saberes o que te foi feito. Estás rodeada das falsidades da tua mãe e da sua familia de maneira que te impedem de te aperceberes da situação real em que estás. Não será igualmente possivel começares a perceber toda a historia que te rodeia, a não ser mais tarde na tua vida. Tudo isto são coisas que saberás e aprenderás mais tarde.

Envio hoje esta carta, sabendo que decerto não a lerás – pois a tua mãe recusa-la-á, ou devolverá a carta sem a abrir, ou vai destruí-la. Isto é certo, devido ao comportamento que tem tido nos ultimos 7 anos e meio.

E fazendo isso, ela continua a recusar o amor que tu mereces e necessitas do teu pai, e que o faria com todo o carinho, como o fiz nos primeiros três anos e meios da tua vida, altura em que te criei praticamente sozinho. Amei-te e muito então, como agora. E espero o tempo em que sejas livre para te poder descobrir e recuperar. Estarei aqui e sempre para ti.

Com profundo amor, e também tristeza pela forma como tens sido afastada de mim nos ultimos 7 anos e meio.

Parabéns Clara, e que o amor abençoe a tua vida

O teu pai,

Daddy

Jon

[Note, April 22 2008: A week ago I received in the mail the registered packet - this letter and a DVD of Passages - sent for Clara's birthday. I had anticipated its return, though marked with a different cause - in the event it came back marked "unknown".  So now I know that I no longer even know where my daughter lives. I am doubtful that the Juvenile court which sanctioned all this will deign to inform me, or perhaps even they no longer know. Sadly this is typical of persons known as "parental alienators," a behavior pattern common to those who kidnap their own children, and a pattern which Teresa Villaverde has consistently followed throughout this unhappy story. The consequences for children subjected to such actions is, naturally, dismal.

Should anyone reading this - a friend of Teresa's or anyone else - know their current whereabouts, I would deeply appreciate knowing. As it is it seems the best and short of hiring a private detective to gumshoe the matter is to sprinkle the internet with Clara's story, and hope in a few years, with a curious mind wondering just who her father is, she'll find me. It would still be some small comfort to know where Clara is living.]

A month or so ago I was asked by the Dean of my Department at Yonsei (Graduate School of Communications and Arts) to give a lecture at another University here in Seoul, Chung-Ang, where an “international” symposium on Digital Media and Visuals was being given. I said OK, never mind not being fond of these academic meetings which usually consist of deadly dull talks in their peculiar language, followed by food and drink. I got an email from the organizer, which said April 14 was the date of the symposium, and I plotted my time accordingly. They asked if their title, “The new trend: convergence of digital media and art”, would be alright. I asked for a little change, which I suppose should have warned them of my view: “Digital Media and Art: A Convergence?” They replied it was fine, and I began to write my thoughts, check about projection capacities, and do some internet searching for appropriate imagery. Then last week my friend Hyun-suk, dropped me a casual note about the symposium, indicating he’d be there as a questioner, and saying it was on March 14, just a handful of days away. Double checking the original email it did say April, but a note to the organizer got an apology for the slip. And I had to slip into high gear and set aside other things to ready everything, which in fact I failed to do - just not enough time to gather and organize the visual stuff. Which as it turned out was irrelevant since the projection system wouldn’t have been able to handle it, nor were they able to show the work I wanted passively in the background during my talk. As I commented to Hyun-suk, “The function of technology is to malfunction, and almost all departments who specialize in communication simply can’t.”

The meeting itself was as anticipated: a nice lecture room, a cluster of academics, a nicely printed catalog, a gaggle of, students doubtless forced to attend, an introductory address by a university vice president, and then a series of droning talks, several via Power Point, citing statistics in the increasing use of bandwidth for video, etc. etc. etc. It was all done in Korean, properly so, so my role was to sit dutifully imagining what they might be saying. Hyun-suk was beside me so I inquired once in a while, the response usually being a mordant, “um, I don’t see what their point is….” Which is typical of academic speak which hides nothing behind an elaborate facade of stats, big words, theoretical newly minted lingo, and usually comes down on no side. Then a break, during which half the captive audience fled. Resumed, and a few more talks, with me left as clean-up batter. Needless to say, they weren’t really prepared for my little talk which was followed with some questions and comments from the other participants. One woman stammered about a few minutes and basically said she wasn’t competent to talk about my supposed subject (life and death); the moderator misinterpreted what I’d said and turned it on its head; Hyun-suk likewise seemed to miss my point that art was no longer the realm of self-named artists, but is instead the accidental by-product of science, as science is our religion. So we finished, and went off to a duck dinner, done Korean style. Here’s the talk:

“Digital Media and Art: A Convergence?”

We are long past the time when we might say “digital” is a buzzword - to say something new and exciting by virtue of being new. Things digital are no longer new - they are instead well worn, everyday, utterly familiar, whether one is aware of it or not. For decades now any flight you took was flown by a computer; a telephone call was shunted by a digital switcher; the intricate infrastructure of water, electricity, traffic flow - the vast apparatus of a city such as Seoul is functionally under digital control and has been for quite some time.

On a more mundane level here in Seoul - on the metro, walking down the street, or driving, one sees almost everyone busy talking and texting on their cell phones, following a GPS map, watching a film or playing a video game on some small digital device. In the offices secretaries and designers and planning officials can be seen buried in their digitally-based work, and even in the market of Kwang-Jang amidst the clutter of things sold there, the shop owner will instantly whip out a digital calculator to show you the price. Even though our lives are run by it, like the video-game addicts of Seoul’s PC parlors, we hardly notice it.

Digital information is the fluid of our times, like air, a seemingly invisible but necessary component of our lives, taken so much for granted that we hardly notice how deeply enmeshed it is within us and how deeply entangled we are within it. It is so ordinary, so everyday, that like other such things - water, air, food, energy - we scarcely give it a thought or a moment’s reflection until it malfunctions and the computer crashes or the power goes out, or we turn on the faucet and nothing happens. This is the price we pay for living in a highly complex infra-structured world - most people know and understand almost nothing of the essentials which make this life possible.

So briefly, let’s take a moment to look at what “digital” really means.

The origins of the word comes from the Latin for “fingers,” each finger being a digit. Our usage in mathematics derives from this - each digit in a number is “a finger.” Clearly this derives from counting on our fingers - each finger representing “1″ something.

In our current usage, which broadly covers all computer-based computational work, digital means a particular and very restricted manner of using numbers: in this context there are only two digits: ZERO and ONE. Or ON and OFF.

At first glance one might think this is a very limited system, and would naturally lead to a very limited capacity for any kind of communication, and hence be rather useless. And, lacking other elements this would be more or less the case - were it not for the advances in electronics, the development of transistors, silicon chips and what are now the standard components of computers, the language would be far too cumbersome to be of any but the most limited use. Abacuses were around for a very long time but seldom strayed out of simple accounting.

The virtue of this very simple system is that in its binary YES/NO, ZERO/ONE, ON/OFF structure: it is utterly rigid, and hence replicable. Every YES or NO when copied, will be exactly as the original. There is no, “well, maybe” or “approximately this.” YES is always YES and NO is always NO. It is a self-replicable language which - barring corruption - is always accurate. In itself this virtue might seem rather meaningless. However, when this binary logic is expanded with sophisticated logarithms, and when some tool is able to rapidly calculate a vast number of ZEROS and ONES, then this rigid language takes on an extraordinary plasticity and the same machine, using the same ZERO/ONE alphabet, but programmed with differing logarithms, can be used to make engineering calculations about physical stresses, to determine locations, it can interpret and reproduce sounds or invent new ones, replicate 1000 type-faces, make amazing graphics, in 3-D, in motion, or can calculate the probable (as accurately as the information it is given) behavior of a clump of refined uranium and hence what a theoretical hydrogen bomb would do.

Thus, from this drastic simplicity of but 2 numbers, with the proper tools - silicon transistors operating at near the speed of light, and the proper software - to say all those logarithms which harness this binary language, we can arrive at a virtual universe of possibilities. One might say that as in the theorized BIG BANG of our origins - which suggests that our entire universe erupted from an inequilibrium in an infinitesimally small packet of pure energy and exploded into what is our still expanding reality, to say that from virtually nothing has come our everything - that the confluence of both the intellectual mathematics and the physical hardware to manipulate a simple binary alphabet of YES and NO, resulted in a similar kind of exponential computational expansion, in effect opening up a virtual universe of new possibilities.

As a filmmaker of long experience, I can in a very direct and material manner describe what this shift from various analogue systems - which includes film, video prior to its digital format, and of course sound recording - to digital formats has meant on a simple down-to-earth level. I began making films - 16mm at first and then 35mm - in 1963 and carried on in film until 1996. I was somewhat famed for making films for the lowest of costs, but films which were artistically, but as well technically prized. I made 15 feature length films from 1972 to 1995, and was considered very prolific. But I knew that in that period on average I spent 2 months of a year working on film, and the rest finding the money to work.

In 1996, rather by accident a new DV camera, provided by SONY, landed in my hands. DV had just come on the market and I had read a small bit about this new video media, and had been intrigued. 30 seconds with this camera in my hands, I told myself “I am never going to work in film again.” And I haven’t.

I saw that its imagery was much richer than analog video, and even on the computer editing systems 12 years ago, it was more manipulable than analog video, and far more so than film. I was sold. Since 1996 I’ve made some 15 feature length works in DV, many shorts, and a handful of multi-screen long installation works. I am editing with my wife Marcella on 3 other features. These range from narrative works to utterly abstract ones. They are all rich visually, and many contain things which simply are not possible in film. I work constantly at my proper work and it costs almost nothing.

To summarize then, what the shift to digital did for me as an artist, was to open up aesthetic possibilities which were simply non-existent or else financially unreachable for me, at the same time it allowed me to stop talking about money to the kinds of business people who really have no interest in what I do. Digital Video both expanded my aesthetic palette by a vast range, and liberated me to concentrate on my work instead of on chasing money. A similar story could certainly be told of many others, in varying fields, where low-cost computers, and a wide variety of software opened up avenues which previously were too costly, or simply did not exist.

And now we arrive at the “hard part.” We’re here to talk about Digital Media and its convergence with Art. Well - whatever some academics and many young people think - art is the hard part. The mechanics and mental organizing of digital systems is the easy part.

So let me begin with a quote from Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian filmmaker who died at the age of 52 in 1986, having made what are certainly some of the best films ever made.

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” - Andrei Tarkovsky

So said Andrei Tarkovsky, and it is a definition with which I fully agree.

In these days the word “art” is debased, little more than a label used for marketing. Most so-called “art” is not really art, but is its opposite - trivial entertainment, distraction, amusement, a diversion, but carefully “branded” as “art” and thus given the wrapping of seriousness. Art is in our times a very big business - as we can see from the prices of given pieces of so-called art, or as shown in the eruption of endless museums, usually architectural show-off pieces by famed names (more branding), filled with largely the same items, whether in Tokyo, Seoul, New York or Berlin or Paris or Madrid or Abu Dabai. And likewise the same shops selling postcards and books, or fashion with art pictures on them, or in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, now grown gargantuan, one can buy chairs or almost anything, while visiting what is now more of a vast taste-making shopping mall than a museum - a place in which what real art resides there is diminished and overwhelmed by the shallow buzz of humanity going quickly by, in a scurry to “see everything”. From the looks of it, art these days is very popular, as a weekend walk in Insadong suggests. It’s very fashionable to be fashionably artsy.

Naturally in the past years much of the alleged art is electronic - lights, technical devices and robots, video installations. As with most things these days, behind the flashing lights and movements are computers. And all around us are things masquerading as art - and in some circles, academic and otherwise, these are examined and studied as if they were art.

So in this whirlwind I ask us to step back, very far back, and examine just what art is, and how it comes about.

From the evidence we have, the earliest known art - to say the cave paintings to be found across the globe, dated from 40,000 years ago on: images of animals, of humans, some highly sexualized. While we don’t and can’t really know what these meant to their makers, we can surmise that these images had meanings other than simple aesthetics, that they were meant to be more than just to be pretty or interesting. We can surmise that an animal drawn or painted was a votive image, intended to prompt the real thing, that is to bring food, the sustenance of life. Similarly fertility images of sexualized women and men were meant to bring forth more life. And then there is the material of death: of carefully prepared bodies sent to the imagined next world with things thought necessary - a bowl, a tool, a piece of symbolic jewelry.

For tens of thousands of years this was the function of art - to amplify life, and to lay the groundwork for the acceptance of death. We can see this across the globe, in consistent but wonderfully varying forms. From the very outset the purpose of these images was to confront the elemental basics of life: reproduction, sustenance, and death. Doubtless these early images served in some manner for the function of some kind of religion, and in the development of various societies, the structures of religion became deeply and directly entwined with the function of art. Across continents, for millennia, art was in the direct service of religion (which was often also the basis of societal political organization.) Art at its source and roots was always sacred - it was about the meaning of life and death.

When we survey, historically, the arts of all cultures, it is only late in the story of the development of culture that art shifts from its essentially religious function, towards directly servicing wealth and power: as in the portraits which emerged in the European renaissance, and which can be found of rulers here in Korea, in China, India and elsewhere. Where rulers were effectually deemed gods - as in Egypt, Rome and elsewhere - then portraiture served the double function of asserting both religious and earthly power, thus mixing the profane and sacred.

But, aside from its externalized content - the celebration of the sacred - what makes art potent is something far more subtle and difficult: real art is always attentive to the means of its own making. Which is to say that whatever its material basis - paint, stone, light, wood, time - art is always attentive to its own being, its own substance. What makes art is not only the serious subject which it engages, but also the respect and seriousness with which the artist approaches the material by which the art is made. Good art is inherently self-reflective, and attends with profound seriousness to its own materials, whatever they are. On one level one might call this “craft” but in fact it is something far deeper, even itself “religious” and sacred: that the artist finds the proper means to express the sacred through the material itself. A real painter who is an artist uses paint as itself, in some manner intrinsically expressive of this paint itself. A real sculptor or dancer or musician or architect deploys the material of their art in a manner which respects the essential material being worked. It is the union of a substantive content which in some manner addresses the most fundamental elements of life, with an innate sensibility for the materials of the art which arrives at the sublime, where art transcends and in a manner becomes expressive of the sacred. Art, itself, is not sacred, or “the sacred,” but it can in some manner help lead one to a sense of sacredness. And that is its function.

I quote now an artist whom I greatly admire and most of whose work I think fulfills his intentions, James Turrell:

People talk about spiritual in art, and I think that’s been the territory of artists all along. You know, if you go into the great cathedrals made by architects and through the light of artisans, you have created a sense of awe that often is greater than what people feel when they read, or any sort of rhetoric by the priesthood. This is something that can be very powerful in a visual sense. And so the artists have always been involved in this; this is not something new. … But I also want to say that the senses and gratification through the senses, while it can direct you toward the spiritual, is also something that will hold you from it fully. That’s the limit of art, and so I don’t think that art is terribly spiritual, but it’s something that can be along that way, be a gesture toward that.

So the question raised here at the outset - is there or can there be a convergence of digital media and Art? Or in my case I must ask, in this sense of “art” - as a serious address to the matter of life and death, of the “sacred” - is there such a convergence - has it happened, will it happen?

To me, the answer is obvious. Yes, it will happen, and perhaps it already has, though frankly if so, I haven’t yet seen much which I think can qualify, and I have seen much digital work which certainly cannot so qualify.

It will or has happened because there is nothing mystical about digital technique as a media. It is perhaps a far more flexible media, it is inherently directly replicable, and in economic terms it is now a very inexpensive media, and these things confer both virtues and flaws, but it is like any other media when new.

Like all new media when they arrive, there is the tendency for artists to use them to copy whatever is or was fashionable at the time when they emerged. For example a look at early photography finds photographic images staged to look like the various painting styles of the times - Pre-Raphaelite romantic imagery, and early impressionism. The genuinely artful early photography was made not by self-perceived artists, but by documentarians.

Also, new media usually at the outset is used more by technicians who develop the technique, rather than real artists who come later and transform this technique into an art. For example if you examine early computer generated digital “art” what you find is basically pin-up art - sexy girls with fantastic tits and ass which move seductively at the flick of a joy-stick. Laura Croft and all her companions. This is not art, of course, though you will find academics who study it and assert it is a kind of art. And then we find emulations of single point perspective, except that we can move through it 3-dimensionally. Such “art” harkens back to Masaccio’s Trinity of 1462, or Piero della Francesca’s Ideal City. For the most part computer art - even as seen in a famed, supposed-video artist, Bill Viola - remains mired in the Renaissance, unable to leave go of the past and place itself firmly in the present and in the actual substance of digital media and its capacities.

Perhaps there is an explanation for this. Artists today remain largely attached to the bohemian concept of art as the function of the alienated loner, and for the most part society encourages this. Art is in these days a business, a matter of marketing, of selling styles, replacing them with new ones as quickly as possible. The substance of art is now, as in almost other realms of life, simply money, of business. That art which is acknowledged is that which makes money and celebrates the making of money, and the rest is swept away. In order to hide this brutal reality we have a kind of kabuki theater in which firm roles are given for each player, be they on or off stage, be they as producer or spectator. The illusion is made that “art” and its corresponding culture is alive, while in fact art is dead but we are loath to admit it, so we carry on with a charade. Young artists pretend to be bohemians. It is dead because our culture has for all practical purposes completely lost touch with the essence of what art is about. We do not, as a culture, care to think about death, or life. We would rather bury ourselves in trivial games and cell phones and empty socializing, all the better to flee from the heavy questions which life poses for us. We buy health and life insurance to ward off such thoughts. This is reflected in the video games which thousands of people are playing right now in this city in which there are myriad virtual killings but no consideration at all of death; it is reflected in the television which most people watch; it is reflected in the frantic cycle of consumption which is leading us over a cliff, but which we prefer not to notice. In such a context art is for all practical purposes impossible, for art must arise from within a culture. A culture which is in flight from all that which animates genuine art, from a serious contemplation of life and its ending, can hardly be expected to actually produce art.

Today, even if people assert they are Christian or Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim, in the advanced industrial societies of this world, this is for most simply a genuflection to our past and not a reality. The reality is that the religion of our cultures is in fact science. It is science to which we turn to address life and death, but for the most part the manner in which we do so is evasive: we fill ourselves with vaccines and drugs to ward off death; we take invasive measure to replace worn parts; and we surround ourselves with the thundering noise of technologically “scientific” gadgets to distract ourselves from confronting, in the sacred sense, our deaths. In effect, as best we can, we flee from death.

Ironically however, the imagery which science produces, without any intention of being so, is surely the art of our time, and it is this imagery which inadvertently provokes us into contemplating death, even as we rush to avoid it. (This is perhaps why the imagery of science is so little seen outside specialist magazines and the laboratories in which it is used - precisely because its shadings are the stuff of art itself.) In the last decades much - even overwhelmingly most of this imagery, and is accompanying artifacts - has been digitally based.

So the answer to our query, is there a convergence in digital media and art, is a forceful YES, but we must look in the right place: the art of our time is science, precisely because science is the religion of our time, as actually practiced.

Ironically and appropriately that very science - a Prometheus’ fire of which ancient fable warns us - is the very tool and implement which in our evasive response before death, is rapidly bringing death to us collectively by our abuse of the world in which we live. Science and the technology it gives us turns us away from acknowledging and confronting the very information which that science now places before us.

I have no doubt that at the moment - seemingly almost upon us - when the priests of science can surely raise a final Eureka ! and announce that we finally understand everything of the mechanisms of our physical existence, from the micro to the macro - that this will be the moment when our kind has auto-destructed, destroyed by the very tools which we used to arrive at our amazing knowledge. We are vastly clever, but evidently we are not wise.

Ancient mythologies from all cultures admonish us of this, but as ever, we are heedless and do not learn. In our busy attempt to construct, by digital means, a grand virtual universe with which we imagine to supplant the real one, we have expanded Plato’s cave exponentially and lost track of where shadow and substance separate. We are lost in hubris, and the price, as ever, will be fatal. The digital art - that made by science - as real art will be, is powerfully beautiful, but the message it carries is the same as ever: we will die. Confronted with this, despite the trivial culture which surrounds us, it poses the question for us: how shall we live? In doing so, it carries out the proper function of art, even if by default.

And so ended the lecture, with an audience of young Koreans likely understanding very little of it since it hadn’t been translated, and though I excised from the above considerably, and spoke slowly, I doubt it had any function. They probably had their heads in their cell phones anyway.

The duck was so so, though the place was famed for its duck, so I was told. As it arrived I was informed the restaurant said it took three hours to cook, as if this was a prized matter. The meat slipped off the bone, the taste was pretty much gone, and in my book it had been drastically over-done. However, cynically, I picked up my $650 honorarium.

Coming down from the last few weeks of psychological ruffling - Wm. Shakespeare’s query, to be or not to be, is a good little prompt for some philosophical rummaging, and it certainly worked here - seems to have directed things to a more relaxed mode, and the work over there in the editing machines is slow. And rummaging about in other things seems to be the silent dictum. Cleaning up after a fashion, trying to find some order in the long trail of messes that have accumulated in this transient life. Riffling through old files here, I found this, which seems worth posting, somehow pertinent to the news of these days. This was written in autumn, 2004, as I headed back to Port Hadlock, Washington, where on return to the US after a 10 year absence, I’d holed up in a little cottage and plunged into non-stop work, I think as a way to deflect the pain of the loss of my daughter Clara (lost to a kidnapping, a corrupted legal system in Portugal; lost in the vulgar normalcy of our world). The trip was to do screening and make some needed coin, as well as to visit friends I hadn’t seen for some time.

Oct 15 2004:

Finished with screenings in LA (full house for OUI NON - sounds great until I note for you the house has 70 seats, a speck in the vastness of the place), I wandered southward, through Orange County, down to North Coast just above San Diego, to visit friends. I’d lived there a while back in 1977-78, and then visited often in the interim. The changes down there, even since 2002, my last visit, have been profound. The once desert realm just a mile or two inland is now an LA-style sprawl, as far as the eye can see or the soul can cope: condos and houses and cookie cutter shopping malls, chic boutiques, and cars and cars and more cars. The rural areas, once only a few miles from the ocean, now begin only at the edges of the mountains, inland 20 or 30 miles. The funky arroyo where I lived a while in 77 is now a swanky realm of $500,000 duplicate homes, just out of that Beverley Hills by the sea, Del Mar. No more funk to be seen, and where the Mexican laborers - the ones who care for the pools and yards, who do the household cleaning and cooking - find a toe-hold is unclear. A friend informed they live in the few yet-undeveloped ravines left. It is clear that here money has triumphed, though at the cost of what the buyers presumably were purchasing: a slice of So Cal sun and fun, now reduced to LA-South: the not-so-freeways jammed, the beatific beach life now caught in the hustle of managing to make that $80,000 a year which a UCSD acquaintance assured me was the requisite sum to live OK in the area. Naturally the chic streets of Del Mar and Encinitas, as well as the more inward shopping malls, are full of balming cures - yoga and pilate and all the customary fixer-uppers of California: tits droop? we got the answer. getting old? Botox or Viagra? Scripps Clinic, sitting on the bluffs overlooking the vast Pacific outside La Jolla (most expensive/classiest burg of the union it is said) has a kitschy billboard at the north end of Encinitas, a gigantic flower against white and the phrase, “A World of Healing: Scripps.” Scripps is a very high-end check out clinic, a last ditch if-you-have-the-money-we-(may)-have-the-cure end-game joint. You go there to die. Ah, but you get a most unhospital-like place and a handsome look at the endless horizon off to the west. Go west old man, very west. And in classic SoCal manner, if you go far enough West you will get East, and a little Buddha will greet you in deathland way off there in the big Pacific beyond.

Friends were in their particular rat-races. Marshall, star of my silver screen (Slow Moves, Bell Diamond, Bed You Sleep In) is trapped in cubicleville, working for a big IT corporation, whose place now sprawls in classy anonymity across the once-desert east of Carlsbad, which itself has burst from sleepy next-to-Marine-Jarhead-Oceanside, into burgeoning competition for Del Mar. The newly minted swathes of tarmac are lined with industrial and corporate parks, instant warehouses of labor that can’t be outsourced to cheaper places, though they are trying hard. Marshall treads the fiscal waters trying to stay afloat while writing English lingo manuals for esoteric computerese stuff, he’s the interface between zero-one geek and customer. His ex lives in one of the endless houses, this one with swimming pool, vast square footage and a mortgage designed to kill. However Dad had property in once worthless desert, now worth as many zeroes as you care to add. But there’s still a mortgage, which in my book translates from the french, “death-measure.” Pay til you drop, but another variant of the patriotic duty of all Americans, so our President said after 9/11, “shop til you drop.” So Cal is very patriotic, though I would shudder to tally up the personal and business debt. Not to mention ponder the matter of such elemental stuff as “water” which these days mostly is hauled from the far away and dwindled Colorado River. What these new millions will drink soon I wonder. I am told desalinization plants are on tap as the solution. And then, all of this sprawl firmly rooted in the All American premise of cars cars cars, and attendant freeways and tarmac connective ribbons, I wonder what happens when 30 years hence the oil is gone, and in the interim, oil costs (lots) more: present cost of lowest octane fillerup is a mere $2.40 or so at the moment. And due to climb (and climb and climb).

I spent a little time on the beach, shooting some nice stuff, and then fled inland to visit another friend, who has a spread at the foot of Mt. Palomar. Enroute into the so-called “inland Empire” I passed no less than 3 new giant Indian res casinos. Last time I went there, only 2 years ago, there was only one, now there’s four. These are really huge things, buildings erupting from what only a few years ago was a desert of scrub brush, cactus, and sparse ramshackle homes with junker mobiles adjacent. The latter remain, now abutted to sprawling multi-level parking lots and bloated hotels and the sacred casino, horn of plenty born of the apparent American belief that instant wealth is a constitutional right. The guys in Vegas, having exponentially bloated that desert mirage into a million soul city, have managed to insinuate themselves fully into the American landscape anywhere an alleged Native American has a plot of other-law land. California, as well as many other places, now blooms with casinos, where in the name of the social and economic improvement of the local inhabitants, a vast Mafia, in collusion with that other mafia, our wonderful federal and state governments, a wonderworld of fraud is installed, carefully calculated to extract a special tax from the TV besotted mostly lower-end citizenry who verily seem to believe that the horn of plenty lies in the statistical odds of loss. I am sure the casino population is a solid Bush world. I am informed that the investment for these elephantine gambling joints is normally recouped in a year, and from then on it is pure frosting. One wonders if the “profits” from these enormous machines is included in the GNP? I bet so. Barnum is happy in his heaven, rolling in coins like Scrooge McDuck. How very American it is.

My friends have a small horse ranch, at the base of Mt Palomar. Gretchen recently got 3rd best mare in the country, not sure what that means in that world, but given some of the horse country I have driven through in the last month, it must mean something pretty big. Their horse ranch is small and funky, but SoCal, with trees dripping with fruits which the boxful of exotic items I brought to Newport with me attesting to the fecundity of lots of sun and watering. As the billboards I saw enroute down through the San Joaquin valley attested, “Plants grow where water flows.” All of that valley and SoCal are ecologically actually a desert….

Under the press of lots of things to do I left sunny SoCal for the north, and instead of driving slowly as I had imagined to do, the accumulated things-to-do kept the pedal to the metal, my old ‘88 Subaru running fine, up through the backside of Orange County, the deserts east of LA, a vast sprawl of yet-to-be chic’ed terrain, though Wal-Mart is paving the way for sure, up past the landing place for the now hesitant Space Shuttle, Edwards Air Force Base, and then on the Pear Blossom Highway where I was tempted to stop and do a live variant of Hockney’s lovely piece (will await HDV), and then up into the Owens Valley from whence came a good chunk of LA’s water supply (see Nicholson in Chinatown for a bit of local lore), behind Mt Whitney, highest mountain of the contiguous states, where the valley has been drained from greenery to desert thanks to the masses to the south. The small towns began again to be small towns, untainted with the urban wealth after passing Mammoth Lakes, a ski resort. I had a $10.99 all-u-can-eat beef rib and salad dinner as the TV brawl began. I bedded down in an Indian run (India Indian, but she was from South Africa she said as I bantered about having been in India a year ago) old motel in Bishop, catching the last half of the 3rd so-called Presidential debate. Bush again deflated, this time in his 3rd reincarnation, this one an ever smiling and joking 50’s throwback, none other than Alfred E Neuman of Mad Magazine renown. Columnists assert this is his just-plain-folks persona, the guy you’d go to an NFL game or a bar with (except he don’t drink he says), a regular good old boy. Personally I find him phony as a 3 buck bill, and certainly no one with whom I would care to spend 2 seconds. He trotted out his threadworn phrases, desperate to shore up the lost credibility of his last two outings. Yep, George has been outed. No, he’s not gay. In outing #1 he was befuddled by the apparent wiring, his direct line to whomever (Rove? Cheney? God?) making for inexplicable pregnant pauses which begot verbal abortions. And the Quasimodo lump was seen, giving some game away. Round two he came out the loud tough-guy slugger, though maybe seeming more the out of control madman, and then he settled down into lumpen civility, if lacking any intelligence. The critics said he was “good” in his last half hour; I thought he was pathetic. Round 3 he came out as smiling Joe, your barroom chat-mate, Mr Regular, regurgitating stale old cliches just like the guy in a bar, looping a dead conversation for the umpteenth time. But smiling all the way, spittle on his lips, making one shiver at the thought that this schizoid creature has been sitting in the White House for 3+ years making mayhem, while still half the nation allegedly admires and respects him. If this is statistically correct, then we have a nation headed to perdition, and fast: Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but at least he had the character to commit suicide when the game was up; I sincerely doubt that our George has the modicum of grace to exit in such manner. Actually, given his performance in these three episodes of As The World Turns, I expect him as I thought possible a year ago, to simply go over the edge and flip out, resume drinking, or snorting, or whatever his last resort m.o. would be. When push comes to shove, George throws a tantrum and then runs. You can run, but you can’t hide, to quote one of his supposedly clever retorts. Whether Kerry held his fire or is simply not up to skewering replies himself, I cannot say. One suspects a fraudulent respect for the institution of the Presidency and our utterly corrupted government held things in check, since bottom-line, Kerry is part of this totally bankrupt system himself. America is in the deepest trough of corruption - moral, ethical, social, economic, political - that I have ever seen. We would have to go back to the 1890’s or so for an equivalent, and even so I think this likely trumps our past. These fake souls we have for politicians and judges and bureaucratic middle-men are pathetic, as shown in the wreckage of their policies and thoughts, sitting in their comfortable upper class realms speculating quite incorrectly on how other cultures and humans think and behave and how they should bow down to our supposed superiority in all matter, never mind the lip-service about multi-cultural values: bottom line, MacDonald’s is better for you than kebabs…. Yes, Mr Tenant, a real “slam dunk.” These people are akin to Hitler, biting off far more than they can chew, filled with themselves and their imaginary powers, hunkered down in think-tanks where thought is an alien form. American universities (which I visit too often) are full of the same, and breed the same detached-from-the-real-world “thinking.” Little wonder as America wanders in the wide wide world it bumps into things in the dark and wonders waaa the hell…? Ignorance is far from bliss.

Driving up the Owens Valley, the landscape a stunning one of autumn trees turned vivid yellow, alders tracing the moisture of creeks running down the vast arid mountainscapes, the late afternoon sun illuminating these bursts of primary colors, tempting me to stop to shoot, I turned on the radio instead, unusual for me. Flicking through the modest selection I got the expect C&W, now a canned corporate kind lacking, like rock, any originative qualities - over produced, slushy lyrics far removed from any real experience. Next was religious stuff, exactly the same, either the country twanged minister reciting chapter and verse from his holy text, fulminating about Caladeans, hell and damnation, or alleged music, lyrics of such tripe “god, cross, died for you and me” to the accompaniment of something that has to do with music as Kincaid has to do with painting, pure unadulterated kitsch posturing as uplifting “religion.” The combination of this Hallmark Card sincerity in the form of purported music, and the Jimmy Swaggart phony sermons stridently serving up alleged morality, coupled with the landscape to make a portrait of an America of appalling provinciality, a perfect mirror for that other world of mullahs, buried against the mountains of Afghanistan, where the same religious fervor and fear evokes a similar deadly response. Here in the USA such a program might sit on the same frequency with a followup program of C&W, the lyrics of which are mostly about picking up pussy at the local bar, and beating beaver for a quicky one-night stand. That these two can share the same station sometimes is a schizophrenia left untouched by the irony-lacking locals who somehow manage, like good little human beings, to couple their fears and their sexual organs in the same breath. Shifting programs, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh come into range, foaming and yelling their toxic brew of hates, feeding the already boiling social atmosphere with still more irrationality, begging for a Hitler strongman to step in to impose order. Slipping in on the on/off FM range, NPR comes with soothing voices, the horror of Bush’s L word floating across the dried up lakebeds of Nevada as I headed into Reno where another small city had mutated in the last 15 years, like a cancerous growth, sprawling out into the surrounding desert, a gush of suburban settlements all built upon still more casino cash, the American dream writ in spades across the harsh terrain of Nevada, all nicely air conditioned for summer, and heated for winter (it gets real cold in Reno then). The rush of SUVs matches the energy consumption needed to make this place hospitable to present day Americans, busy doing slots, awaiting that call from on high to suddenly anointed millions. Gods Bless America.

I zipped right through, somewhat shocked at what had happened in only 12 years - Reno blooming from “friendliest little city” into bloated semi-LA North rushing headlong into the Nevada night. I felt as if I were in the midst of some rapidly metastasizing cancer called US. Plywood and 2 x 4s, with thin veneers of “class,” quarter million buck and up homesteads built to last 20 years if lucky. Again, the American ethos of move in, wreck the place, move on, seemed to shout as the umpteenth Wal-Mart, Target, Albertsons, and shop-til-you-drop fillerup slid by.

North of Reno, on US 395, after about 50 miles this more or less disappeared, and the old (well, sort of old, depends on the measuring stick) American west resumed, thin in population, up into the Sierra Nevada, ponderosa stands with thick trunks lining the highway, though clear-cuts lay behind, somehow not as brutal and warlike as those in Oregon. The pace slowed down, and Susanville, seemed still unfazed by the bustle further south. No Starbucks in sight. Over the high plateu of the Sierras, large blanched meadows by which stood signs asserting “lake” underlined the 7 years drought, as did a fat plume of smoke to the south. Still though gorgeous, and being a national forest, very thinly populated. I should have stopped for the night but kept moving on, up into Oregon, pausing in Ashland, pretentious little town of “culture” (The Bard is their man, having an annual Shakespeare festival, college, etc.) it’s little downtown an oasis of “culture” imbedded in the redneck of Medford and Grants Pass, places hosting survivalists and such, and that very evening, none other than George Bush, come to the area to speechify in his peculiar manner. Off I-5 parking lots filled with cars and lots of police were to be seen. I am told the man pulled 12,000 in for the night, of whom today’s papers say 4 women were arrested for the evidently illegal matter of wearing T-shirts which said “Protect our Constitutional Rights.” The newspaper said they did nothing else to warrant removal from this rally. Welcome to police state America I guess, where asserting there is a constitution or rights which need protecting is an offensive concept to Our Great Leader and his minions. I fled on, northward in the dark, getting to the coast at Reedsport only to find highway 101 up the coast was blocked at the Seal Caves, nightwork on a tunnel closing it down 8 to 6am. I found a reasonably hidden place and parked and slept in the back of the car. It is getting hard to find places to camp anymore - all the state and national forest campgrounds run $10 or more, never mind the simplicity of your rig. In California along the coast any place that has room for a car or van is heavily posted NO OVERNIGHT PARKING, etc. Valhalla is gone.

As noted on the journey down, given the intensity of the present campaign the absence of bumpstickers and yard displays for Bush/Cheney or Kerry/Edwards is remarkable. Very few the entire route, though in rural areas the occasional and often outscale absurdist Bush/Cheney display, accompanied by gigantic flags, literally Christo does politics in RWandB. I take the giganticism to be a sign of vast insecurity posturing as macho B(u)S(h)[it]. Otherwise I think the lack of outward signs is a fear that to disclose one’s views will result in never talking to your neighbor again. Or of the government should Bush pull this one out. All the signs of imminent jackboots have been on ample display and Americans seem to be showing the same spine our German friends did some 60-70 years ago. I hope not.

Newport now, a gray fog hanging along the coast, and boxes of things for me to cope with in the next 2 days. Then northward on to Portland, Port Angeles, absentee voting and then on the London and Italy on Oct. 25, from where I will watch the election unfold. Should Bush win I think I will not return for 4 years, at least. And if America proves so terminally intent on strength and ignorance, perhaps I will excuse myself from its citizenship.

———————————————————————————————

That was back in 2004. We all know who won (or stole) the election, and know what that has meant. I did not then stay away from the US, but rather returned to live in Portland and then Lincoln, Nebraska, and to travel a fair bit with Marcella. Meantime the country has naturally changed, and what was once a hidden opinion of those crazed and marginalized sorts such as perhaps myself, has edged into the so-called mainstream. Calls for impeachment are broadly heard, even if the corrupted souls who occupy most the seats of our Congress remain deaf to them. And the purportedly apathetic youth, if we are to believe some of our dubious pundits, are actually stirring themselves to action, to put their shoulders to the much needed corrective that America begs for. Unfortunately for me, the closer the possibility of a genuine shift though our political system appears, the more I smell the whiff of gunpowder. I hope I am wrong. I do not envy whomever finds themself in the pilots seat for the coming years - the adjustments America, and the entire industrialized world must go through are drastic and the kind of thing that usually prompts ugly social-political consequences.

[Little note: WordPress doesn't seem to want to take instructions about type color, size, etc. - I know I am just learning, but when I look at the "code" it says it should be there, but then... And when I open up the site from the web the text is in a nearly unreadable red which so far I can't manage to change, though it does change if you click the header line. Go figger....]

Jan 28, 2008

Here’s a letter sent to friends this afternoon:

Jan 28.

Today went to the Severance Hospital to get the information on MRI. Marcella was anxious, and had been for a few days, her belly betraying her. Entering the hospital, a handsome well-designed place which manages to overcome the usual bad-vibes of most such places, I confess to a little flutter, a kind of summation of the past weeks’ ruminations: either it was going to be more probing, next with Endoscopic Ultra Sound, and more limbo, or it was going to be “well, dang, these high tech imaging things that let us see in your body saw something, but, well you know those hi-tech things, sometimes they…..” So we checked in, went to the appropriate door to wait, while 6 or 8 others preceded us in quick succession, all the while Marcella getting palpably more anxious. And finally our name, and in we went. Less than a glance I noted the doctor’s peculiar smile and he quickly said he had good news to report. The MRI showed a perfectly normal pancreas, with nothing wrong. He showed us the MRI images. Marcella had tears coming down her face which the doctor saw as she tried to hide it. I felt a little sense of relief, and being myself, as the doctor was scrolling the MRI image down, saying ” that’s pancreas, and its all OK…” and then as he scrolled down, pointing out the aorta beside it, I added, “however….” in a droll voice, a little gallows joke. The doctor, getting it, said promptly, “There isn’t any however…” And he smiled, and after a few more words, off we went.

So, thanks to the “miracle of modern medicine” I got a few years worth of philosophical ponderings condensed into a few weeks, a good workout for those thoughtful mental glands.

Then we went to the fertility lady, and are lined up for an in vitro attempt in March. Caught the bus home, and in front of Jongmyo’s Citizen’s Park we stopped by my favorite Korean donut lady and treated me to a donut. Arriving at the intersection just before our place the light was changing, and Marcella asked “shall we try to make it” and she began to run. I hesitated as it was late, and then donut in hand started to race and then tripped, hands first to the pavement just as the light changed. Got up promptly with scuffed and bleeding hands, ate the rest of my donut and scampered on across. Well, there’s lots of ways to go….

To all of you who sent me a little note of encouragement (and thankfully no one descended to the maudlin), thanks much, and I guess I better not yell “Wolf!” again for a good long while.

Anyway it was a good day. And now back to work.

This all began a short 14 days ago, thanks to a free full-tilt medical exam from the university. It’s seemed a lot longer than 2 weeks, doubtless courtesy of the heightened awareness of time slipping by as one pondered just what to do in the perhaps limited bit left. Lessons in philosophy, indeed. While I can’t say I was immune to certain negative thoughts in these weeks, by and large I was accepting of fate, whichever way it might go, and certainly I considered what options to take in case the word was that time was minimal, and I promptly in my mind set to calculating what condition might be at hand, and what might be done under those. If at all possible we hope - Marcella agrees in this - that at some stage while still functional and useful, to go to some less fortunate realm of this world where whatever we have learned and can pass along that would be genuinely useful, to teach (and to learn), and give whatever possible. My experience in India 5 years ago suggested this wasn’t just an idle thought, and seemed to demonstrate that indeed there is something useful to offer. So now, with this inadvertent reprieve, perhaps it is time to begin to take more concrete steps towards this. Among the thoughts which floated by these last weeks were those.

Curiously, but perhaps predictably, on hearing this “good news” there was a sense of deflation, of anti-climax. I certainly felt it in Marcella who had hidden her anxieties pretty well, though I saw them clearly, and they rushed to the surface, tangible and visible when the doctor said all was OK. Afterward in both of us there seemed a quizzical sense of confusion - we’d both psychological prepared ourselves, even if we had not quite realized it, for, if not the worst, at least for something, and suddenly, capriciously as this had arrived, everything was again normal. Well, maybe not really. A tart reminder that life is limited. And in this case a good reminder.

I had wondered a bit to myself just what might be of interest to post here, and the days went by with no answers. Most of my public musing about politics or society or art seem to fit better in a discussion, like that at www.cinemaelectronica.com, where whether it actually happens much or not, there is at least the semblance of a discussion, or give and take, which somehow makes it more interesting and engaging, at least for me. [Given usual net forum behavior - or for that matter most settings for public discourse - it is obvious this is a minority view: in nearly any setting those who speak and those who keep silent are clearly two differing kinds, with many more of the latter than the former.]

Anyway last week circumstances shifted, and dropped a topic in my lap maybe suitable for this setting where the functional given is that it is a monologue. I’ll still have to find a voice for this way of speaking, but for the moment here’s a letter sent out to a long list of friends and acquaintances, to let them know first:

Hi
I’ve been too busy of late to get around to finishing a shared letter with news and thoughts from here - it got started but now seems to have cobwebs. Anyway for closer friends a bit before I get around to finishing up the longer one. I hope you won’t mind me bunching this up for you - I’d prefer writing individually, but time is scarce, and for this I certainly wouldn’t want to write it all repeatedly in happy variants. Briefly, the other week, thanks to a thing Yonsei does - free exams for professors at the University hospital, reputed to be Korea’s best - I went for a thorough medical exam which by and large said all’s OK (cholesterol a little high, blood pressure a little high, otherwise all normal or better). With one little glitch, one not unexpected on my part as my mother had and died therefrom: an ecographic scan turned up a little something - a “nodule” in my pancreas. A consultation with doctor A went on to specialist B, who this morning confirmed what I’d pretty much already figured out from data so far, which is that the odds of this being cancerous are a bit high (20% higher than statistical norm thanks to genetic bequest from family, and given size etc., 50-60% chance it is not benign). Whatever it is, benign or mean (!), it is in early stages since it hasn’t caused any readings to alter of things that would tilt if it were metastasizing along. Tomorrow I go for a scan, and on Thursday get the info, and if I have my way, I’ll say let’s just do the biopsy and cut it out at the same time, a nice thing or not (since we kind know if it is nice now it might not be later). My guess is this is the way it’ll go except they’ll likely want to separate biopsy (endoscopic), and the other part later. The location of the whatever-it-is is not in the head of the pancreas, which we’re told makes for a much simpler and easy operation. I’d just as soon get it over and back on my feet in time for next term, starting in March. Doctor today said recovery is about a month. I’m otherwise in rather good shape, so I hope it’ll be shorter. So, if things are as they seem, and go this way, we’ll be slowed down here a month. If it is not benign I guess some chemotherapy would also ensue. Well, most my hair is gone anyway!

Anyway that’s the hot news from here. Marcella is taking it very well, and while our philosophy muscles have had a nice little workout, we’re feeling fine. In the last few years I have found myself wise-cracking, as is my habit, that at this age the next grand adventure is decrepitude and death, and lo and behold. So much for wise-cracks, now the reality. Aside from philosophy muscles, the rest are getting a nice daily workout too: we both swim vigorously for half an hour a day (nighttimes of late), do some exercises (me 80 pushups, 60 toe-touches, 60 squats), walk a lot. The cranium side is busy all day working at the computers, finishing up new film, PARABLE, shot in Lincoln area last spring - maybe it goes to Berlin fest (will hear latest tomorrow); OVER HERE premieres in Rotterdam festival in a few weeks. Was going to go if both were in fests, but not now, needless to say. Otherwise university and living in Seoul going well for both of us. Lots of other things to tell, but later.

Best to you. No maudlin sentiments please - not looking for them. Just wanted to pass along the word. I’ll update once we’ve found out more and perhaps gone through the whole process. The lay-back recuperate period should give me time to finish up that damned shared-letter update.

from us

jon and marcella

So this would seem an appropriate topic for solitary rumination that might be of interest. As Marcella and I think to make some kind of work of this, here is a tentative opening commentary written this afternoon:

It arrived more or less by accident. The whole thing. I’d gone to Seoul for a festival, and casually dropped word with my host that should there be interest, I’d be game for a job teaching. Seo Hyun-suk, now my friend, took it up and I found myself a year later in my first real paid job - at the age of 64, due for mandatory retirement a year later. Marcella and I moved to Seoul in August of 2007 where anointed me a Professor. I’d been kicked out of college in 1963. Later Hyun-suk told me about a free offer of the University hospital, for a full physical exam for faculty. It was something I’d never really had, and the last vague one had been done back 15 years ago. Never one to pass up a freebie, I signed up and went.

The place was like a medical assembly line, shunted through like a car body being put together, except here it was more the fashionable matter of deconstruction: take out 8 vials of blood, sent off to labs for analysis; pulse, breath, pulmonary, intestinal exams, flipped this way and that by a machine moving tracing fluids in your gut; an ecographic tool probing your innards. It was fast and efficient, and a few days later went back for the analysis. Cholesterol a touch high, blood pressure too. I knew about both those. A slip of the pen or something had me down for “extremely obese” in the gut. I’m 5′10 and weigh 150, and there’s no there there when it comes to my belly. What we get from an exam where no one actually touches you, you’re just one body on the line, zipping by.

One thing though did pop up to mess the clean bill of health, something I had anticipated. The ecography exam had seemed to hone in on my pancreas as the lady did the exam, marking it, and seeming to mark something else. My mother had died of cancer of the pancreas 30 years ago. Genetics. So towards the end of the consultation the doctor said there was a “nodule” in my pancreas, and this could or could not be a sign of the unsaid word, cancer. Funny how the doctors seem to assume you can’t deal with simple things, like cancer, life and death. It’s their business, but I guess they see too many cases of adults who never grew up. So I had to bring it up, as he referred me to the next specialist on the assembly line, and we booked for a CRT exam a few days later. The doctor said none of the cancer markers had shown, and all my other readings were normal, so maybe nothing bad, at least not yet. So it was back to the technicians who inserted a needle, injected a dose of iodine to help the machine read the innards, and then slipped me into a metal circle that shunted across my torso, spinning, zapping X-rays, taking a more precise reading of the pancreas and its errant guest.

More to come. Tomorrow we go hear about what the CRT says. I think I know.

January 20.

Here’s letter sent to friends, after my visit for information on the CRT:

Hi
Today went to Severance Hospital to find out the analysis of the CRT or whatever it was done the other day. Marcella came along, visibly nervous though I tried to cajole her with humor out of it, but to little avail. We arrived a touch late for our appointment at 9:30 am, and so had to wait a bit amongst the others who went into the office and emerged a few minutes later, conveyor belt swift. Our turn came, went in, sat down. The young doctor pulled up the electronic files, showing us as the scan dropped down through my body, “here’s the heart, the liver, and then honing in on the pancreas, this angle and that. He said the seeming nodule in the tail wasn’t there, the other machine had mistakenly read a something. Marcella audibly was relieved. Then he flicked on and pointed out some gray mass on the edge or side of the head of the pancreas, and said “there’s this” which made Marcella slump a touch. The other day he’d commented how much easier something in the tail rather than the head was to operate on. He then went on that the indications are that this was a “lesion” on the side of the pancreas, or was a “nodule,” but in either case there wasn’t any indication it was (silent word) cancerous, and that statistically there wasn’t any reason to think it was, others had this and it was no problem. However, he suggested we do an MRI in 2 or 3 months, up to us. Pressed a bit more on what was meant, he seemed to indicate (his English is OK but not great) that at this time it didn’t appear to be in any way bad, and we should just keep track of it. I tried to get more out, like the odds of it becoming cancerous and he seemed to waffle a touch, unwilling to give anything more specific. He didn’t say it could become cancerous, no more than keep a watch and come back in 2-3 months for an MRI. I then told him we were attempting to have a child, which begot a quick, “Well, in that case come in promptly for the MRI.” Marcella and I didn’t quite see the logic of this jump, though I doubt it was indicative that there was more of a problem than he was letting on. I think he was just erring on the side of caution, thinking in such a case better to know a bit more, which apparently the MRI does. So we’re now scheduled for an MRI this coming week, and the Monday after they’ll give us the analysis of it.

For the moment my reading is that it is probably not now cancerous or a problem, but that it could be in the future, and we’re lined up for an MRI every 3 months. In case it does turn into a problem we should be on top of it, and catch it early, upping the survival rate/length of time. Being though on the pancreas’ head, it’d be apparently a messier more complicated operation, but doable.

So for me a relief, though for Marcella it has underlined that I am not a spring chicken and my being around is not assured, hence a bit of anxiety for her. Understandable. And a little wake-up call for me to get my chaotic papers (bank stuff mostly, along with originals of work) all organized and legally assigned, so in case I do drop dead or get run over by the proverbial bus, or this takes an unhappy turn, its all done.

So, not really a false alarm or a clean bill of health, but a little red flag to pay attention to. Not much “to do” about it - dietary things don’t matter much apparently, and there’s no preventive medicine, and having long passed the stage of being nervous or stressed out, little to do there. So we’ll do as we did last night, and go swim 30-40 minutes, do our other exercises, mind our food, drink very sparingly, and be happy campers. And go have the MRI next week and find out the data the one after this, and if this happy-toes stuff gets flipped then, well who woulda thunk it?

News for now. I’ll keep you posted. Now back to work, and boy is there a lot of that (self-chosen, of course).

Have had time to let all this sink in, a kind of tentative and temporary reprieve from possible worse news. Perhaps only for a week, once we get the MRI and word on its indications. Meantime friends in New York, one of whom is a doctor specializing in such things, offer a bit of expert “second opinion” once we send the data (all nicely available to us on CD for the asking, wonderful scans slicing through my body, of which I’ll post some here once I have them and figure out the mechanics of pasting them in.) For the moment, whatever comes next, it is a good workout for the philosophy muscles - the kind of workout that confronts everyone, everyday, but which we tend to avoid until pressed by circumstances.

Jan 22

So Tuesday came, and I went for MRI, and here’s letter to family with report:

Hi all

This morning up very early for a 7 am appointment for MRI scan. Outside the window snow obscured the towers down Jongno, and went out, caught the bus and we got there fast thanks to the empty streets. Needlessly fast as no one was there until a bit past 7, and they’d asked me to show up at 6:30, which I did. Time to read some of the NYReview of Books. Finally someone arrived, took my card, had me sign an OK for iodine injection, gave me hospital robe, and I changed, went in to lie down on the MRI machine, a big circular funnel. He wrapped me up, set my body as required, and slid me into the hoop. Uncomfortable position of the shoulders, a bit painful. Technician advised not to be afraid of noise, and began the process, little whirrings and discreet mechanical clanks, then bursts of differing loud frequencies. One could feel a bit of warmth, like being in a radar wave oven. Courtesy of the pain in my shoulders I had a little wave of claustrophobic anxiety, nervousness at the constricted space. In the less than good English voice on headphones instructed to breath in, out, hold. Then a long sequences of breaths at the exhale of each came a burst of frequencies, I counted 80 of these. Then withdrawn, injected with iodine for contr