Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Daily Meditations
Daniel:
Jack: "Honey, you seen my blue parka?"
The Five Stages of the Soul: "A time of abundance is usually brief. Therefore a sage might well feel sad in view of the decline that must follow."
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace: "Though farm work is hard, there are certain times in each season when the work becomes beautiful and the farmer becomes an artist who transforms the landscape."
"Most talk about the self disappoints because it presents not the deep, autonomous and unknown inner world, but cipher figures that are easily recognizable as members of some psychological syndrome."
"An individual is a creature in whom difference has come alive."
"[T]he focus ws more on the experience as participation in something more ultimate than one's needs, projection, or ego."
Jack's inclusion of his wife Lureen indicates an active role on his part to include her in an important experience inhisl ife - the desire to share every experience is in particular a quality of the questing soul. If he is nothing else, he is that.
Perhaps that is also the reason he seems to complain so much throughout the film: he is sharing his experiences as best he knows and reaching out with hopeful consciousness, as he does time and time again. Complaint shares experience and pain.
Daniel:
This is a meditation upon the track known as "Brokeback Mountain #1" from the soundtrack. I have heard it enough times that I do not need to hear it as I perform this meditation.
It begins (joyfully) with an intricate and happy musical piece performed on one guitar - deep and resonating - much like a baritone voice. But it is quicly joined by a pump organ which also plays its own song - harmonizing with the first voice in its own tinny instrumentation. It is a plaintive voice an octave or two higher than the first one.
Into this beautiful and playful harmonization is introduced orchestral strings, which bridge the silences that grow wider and wider as the music continues, until finally the tenor voice dies off completely, leaving the guitar to harmonizeas best it can with the orchestral strings.
As for the musicality of this piece, it quickly and lively moves upward through the note scale, but not without some tune of pure essentiality: a voice which harmonizes joy and serenity, union and seperation, life and death. As the music continues and the two voices learn to mesh and play off of each other, where one falls back and its music is muted, the other pulls forward and fills the void.
When the violins are introduced, the musical piece quickly cresendoes then dies down in tone and emphasis slowly. The songs of the two voices slow down as well. When the baritone voice is left entirely alone with the strings, they both suddenly crescendo again before fading out completely.
The Five Stages of the Soul: "Something about returning to music after all those years aroused feelings of an old companionship and made life seem newer and richer. Existence is not over til the last breath, and we all have an obligation, a mandate even, to plumb its depths."
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:
"Music does not touch merely the mind and the senses, it engages that ancient and primal presence we call soul. The soul is never fully at home in the social world that we inhabit. It is too large for our contained, managed lives."
"Sound and gesture are contemporary, identical, and indistinguishable... Linked to its own past, the gesture fills up with music and becomes rounded, like the universe... The beauty of gesture renders time invisible." -Catherine David
"For their short while on earth, most people long to have the fullest life they can. No one wants to remain a prisoner in an unlived life."
"Where woundedness can be refined into beauty, a wonderful transfiguration takes place."
The music is not over until is is over and every instrument is silent. During the music are we not drawn into some experience transcendent to ourselves?
Do we not experience emotional pains: joy, loneliness, sorrow, mourning. In society, we are requested not to experience these - we are told to live a normal life and not to worry about being more than human.
Ultimately, the soul insists upon movement. It cannot remain stifled in lesser forms but must expand to fill the gap between God and Man. Inspiring works of art, including music, can expand consciousness and advise the soul to seek what it does not have.
If music is a gesture, when combined with vision it resourcefully dislodges the soul from its quiet slumber. It awakens the soul to the experience it most lacks, makes bold our weaknesses, and instills within one a desire to relinquish them.
In other words, certain pieces of music wound us to the core. They wound us so that we may see the necessity of transformation and experience fulfilment by that transformation.
gattaca:
This is rather like the I Ching of Brokeback Mountain. I really like it! I'll read it more thoroughly today. :)
gattaca:
Daniel -
Forgive me for my rather broad interpretation of this. I find the concept intriguing. I mentioned the I Ching of Brokeback Mountain just now and since I have an electronic copy of the I Ching I decided to get a reading. I don't have the DVD yet (it's been ordered) but I do have the soundtrack - Wings has been playing like a hymn (mentioned elsewhere) and the music plays in my head unbidden, but adds color to the day. And so, I threw the I Ching with the word 'Wings' (my intent here was 'ascent'). The result is quite interesting:
The present is embodied in Hexagram 26 - Ta Ch'u (The Taming Power of the Great): It will be advantageous to be firm and correct. If he does not seek to enjoy his revenues in his own family, without taking service at court, there will be good fortune. It will be advantageous for him to cross the great stream.
The things most apparent, those above and in front, are embodied by the upper trigram Ken (Mountain), which represents stillness and obstruction.
The things least apparent, those below and behind, are embodied by the lower trigram Chi'en (Heaven), which represents strength and creativity.
Daniel:
Thank you for sharing that... I have more meditations, I really do.
My leg has finally healed to the point where I can get to the computer more regularly now, and of course as soon as that happens my current workplace requires extreme temporal devotion, which is always taxing.
Good news. I have nearly completed the first draft of a book I am writing which pursues intensely the philosophical, spiritual, and psychological repercussions of this film. I have about two more chapters to write, then the conclusion, and then rewrite the introduction. Maybe three more chapters, conclusion, and introduction, depending on whether my concept of a dreamfilm (as discussed on the IMDB board) is one worthy of immense detail. The more I research the concept, the more I think that it is, and that Mr. Lee has introduced a new type of artform which other directors have attempted to do in the past but have not (as far as I am aware) been as successful as Mr. Lee's interpretation of Brokeback Mountain.
For instance, I can recall hearing something about Ridley Scott's attempts to create a film which had a dream-like quality and a disturbing effect on the human psyche through that film. As far as I know, while the film which resulted from that attempt obtained a cult following, its effect on the majority of those who saw it was mind numbing rather than expansive. But the point is, that the attempt was made. There are other films where this type of quality seems to be strived for, but which is sorely missed due to some internal flaw(s) of the films themselves, which of course can be attributed to human error. This is not to say that Brokeback Mountain is unflawed. It certainly is, but its flaws do not retract from the dream-intense state that so many people have described during and immediately following the film. In other films, these flaws are barely noticable yet somehow prevent the dreamfilm experience. Consider the following films as potentials for dreamfilms, though this list is by no means comprehensive.
Brazil
Legend
The Dark Crystal
Labyrinth
What Dreams May Come
Logan's Run
I am certain there are many more films in which the director saw some obscure vision which deeply impacted the subconscious which he or she attempted to draw out in the films he or she created. Whether or not this was successful depends I think on the depth of the experience of the individual audience members who saw it. That is all I have to say about the dreamfilm.
As far as the philosophical and psychological repercussions of the film, the chapter I am currently writing about revolves around the issues of death, and perhaps more importantly, Thanatos. The death urge, the death instinct, thanatos seems to be one of the least understood draws of psychology. The death instinct was originally hinted at in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle which I think is his best work as it ascribes some meaning to the existence of human life beyond its most basic drives. But it has only recently (within the last 20 years or so) been understood in an artistic sense. In my depths of research specifically into the topic of thanatos, I have uncovered very few nonfiction texts which discuss it in detail. Actually, I have uncovered none, which is both surprising and disappointing. There is a book of poetry/photography which is the closest I have found to understanding the duality/relationship between Eros and Thanatos, and it has provided some insight. If anyone has suggestions for a book or articles which describes thanatos (or the death instinct) in some way which points out a depth of almost indescribable meaning in the film, please let me know. If not, I may be on a voyage of discovery in an unexplored frontier.
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