Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Responding to Joseph Epstein’s What Happened To The Movies.
Scratching head. Was something important being written about? There must have been, but found myself agreeing, in general, only with the chap who said that movies have been the creativity nexus of the 20th century.
I have long thought so. Especially the music, in that the finest actual MUSIC during the century, work Brahms would approve, was written for movies by the likes of Gershwin, Mancini, Morricone, Goldsmith, Barry.
I measure success of art by its power to communicate an audience into a revelatory constellation of their power and meaning, individually and communally, via structures of thought, sound, light, color, words and music (melodies and rhythms, which are given in the melodies and cannot exist independently of them).
This might be termed an ontological measurement in contrast to a financial measurement or a measurement implied in some ideology.
What the movie enables in opening man to his essential self — not his existential self, with which he lives full-awaring momently — is what makes it great. Art is whatever it takes to do that. Art has no value in and of itself, it is merely a tool for occasioning (it itself can induce nothing) a reception of and participation in the power and meaning of being-itself.
Art for art’s sake is an absurd notion, merely tautological and therefore sterile. As an artistic program it is farcical.
For example, Michael Corleone’s delivery in GFI of It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business. is art because it brought and continues to bring millions of individuals into a revelatory situation. Much else in the GF series does also. Hanks’ line to PVT Ryan, Earn this. is another example. Goldsmith’s echo theme for Patton is another. And every note Mancini and Morricone wrote are this.
There is no harm in lowest common denominator art since the actual lowest common denominator is being-itself, which is also the middle and highest common denominator. In fact, it is the only common denominator.
When we say someone caters to the lowest common denominator — as is reprehensibly done — we mean they artificially cut off the spectra on both sides of a narrow band and then play that narrow band as if it is the whole. They have not been common enough. Common is the most worthy possible goal and intend. The truth is the whole and the whole is what audiences actually want, and rightly so.
I do not respect writers who are clever, who make their ego the center of their attention, show-offs. I respect writers who try to express the infinite, abundant, sweet, commanding majesty that is the common ground of all beings and all things.
My observation is that the decline of Hollywood started a few years back — was it during the Reagan years? — when screenwriters went on strike and were replaced by non-union individuals hired by producers, among whose number Reagan accounted himself just after he signed an agreement with producers as head of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Seems to me the strike occurred later than Reagan. Anyhow, from that time, movies have gone niche and the niche most favored is racial pandering, which is rarely an occasion for a revelatory experience, but is always an occasion for cleverness.
For what it is worth, my favorite movie is Love Among the Ruins, Hepburn and Olivier, at the end of their lives and playing characters likewise conditioned.
Second favorite is Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days, then Kaye’s Court Jester, then Blake Edwards, all, but especially Pink Panther series, then Bond, then Bullitt, then Patton, then Godfather, then Hunt for Red October, then Brosnon’s Thomas Crown Affair and Someone to Watch Over Me. Well, also Jeeves and Wooster.
As with music, few works from any time have staying power, and the ones which do have it do it by consistently providing revelatory experiences for succeeding times, regardless of the look and feel they concretize from the time they were made. Their time-specificity is unimportant, just as instrument specificity is unimportant for the works of Bach.
Art is revelatory beyond its stylistic particulars. The experiences of power and meaning it occasions occur because the symbols it uses, regardless of their conditioning by styles prevalent during their creation, point to the ground of ultimate power and meaning that is the essence of every individual, every group and of reality as a whole.
Of course, some symbols become ineffective as symbols pointing to being-itself. Greek and Roman polytheistic symbols once powerfully occasioned revelatory experience, and some non-revelatory ones also. Such is not the case today.
Powerful effort has been under way for over 100 years in the west to evacuate and deflower Christian symbols of their power to occasion revelatory experiences. For the last 50 years office holders of churches have been doing this themselves, eagerly ignoring or replacing Christian symbols with signs indicating where something is. Signs of course, while useful and important, have no revelatory power because they do not participate in that to which they point, as symbols do, and they are not intended to point to ultimate power or meaning.
We shall see if blogs, podcasts, webpages, etc. become the new nexus of creativity, replacing movies, which were the last one.
During the High Middle Ages through the early Renaissance, and rarely and locally since then, of course, the nexus of creativity was the churches. We shall not be seeing that happen again for many hundreds of years, although it will happen again.
So far, blogs, podcasts, etc. appear trying to bud and flower into a or the major nexus of creativity. I am not sure they can do that, however, without their creators sharing some physical space in relationship. I might be incorrect on that, however. Just not sure.
The thought that art can happen without family as a base — actual family, not pretense by the sex-addicted and addled — seems untenable, but time will tell whether that is reality or speculation.
And another thing …! (a favorite Clouseau line, from Shot in the Dark): art is a type of manual labor, close to day labor for most. Artists ipso facto rely on sponsors of one kind or another for room and board, unless they have a non-related manual labor income source. This is appropriate and traditional and I see no reason for it not continuing indefinitely.
Thus, there is no objection to artists working for as much money as they can obtain. The laborer is worth his wage, which he is entitled to participate in fixing. If the artist does not like their financial or other wage, they may terminate their work (strike or quite) and should expect to endure the consequences (jail for Bach and unemployment for screenwriters).
Neither money nor power per se corrupt anyone. Niebuhr’s famous dictum, Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is inaccurate in every sense meant, implied and exegetable. Ambition, now power, corrupts so. Niebuhr was ambitious.
(Niebuhr, a founding member of ADA, led many astray with that and other bits of nonsense that appear wise. He was a show-off. My father was his student at Union and I did honors work on his oeuvre as a senior at U Redlands, before matriculating at Union, where I met and did not enjoy him. He asked me to walk with him on a cold February day along Riverside Drive and promptly started a fight over the civil rights movement, a fight which he conducted stupidly, thinking he was being brilliant and profound.)
Some specific impulses in the heart corrupt a personality and nothing can corrupt anything absolutely because evil itself does not have ontological status. It is not and cannot be an absolute because it depends absolutely on good to act as its antagonist. God has no second. He has aseity.
Power is to be treasured, not ephemeral, non-ultimate power such as political power, economic power, intellectual power, etc., but essential power, ultimate power, the power of being-itself. Anything less than the power of being-itself is worthless beyond its finite scope, as Mr. Saddam found out.
Money never hurt art and never will. And the great artists have the impulses of their hearts sublimated so they are never really bothered by them nor allow them, consequently, in their work. This is why their work persists. Money does not affect these matters one way or another.
Additionally, the great ones always make their own way regardless of obstacles. Only counterfeits worry about being polluted by money, worry about my art being corrupted by filthy lucre. Great ones regard such hand-wringing as a sign of a non-artist, a pretender, a cheat and idler. Lucre is neither filthy nor clean. It is a tool, a resource to be used as one deems appropriate and the degree of appropriateness rises with the purity of one’s heart and descends with the contamination thereof.
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
