The Essence of Things

Something that happens with time is the re-investment of substantial discourse in something previously trivial and empty. The fast-paced multi-angled editing of an MTV music video finds a new richness in the context of contrasting Iranian cinema to its Western counterpart. The multi-dimensionality of stories through narrator stances is suddenly symbolized by this kind of rapid-editing.

Those remarks are dangerous because they are as empty as what they refer to. Their main utility is to work as filler in a process of avoiding the essential. Why is there avoidance of the essential? Because there is an inability to translate it. I believe the essential is always experienced, but most often badly translated.

I heard an expression once: les phrases creuses. It’s French for empty phrases (sentences). Most texts I come across, essays on films, are full of idées creuses. You can recognize one of those when you’ve experienced the essence of something and later reading about it you sense a great divide between the communicated thought, and the recalled experience.

List of Tom Waits Quotes

1. A great many songs are like riddles. You don’t necessarily understand them. Those are the ones you keep singing, in hopes of finding a new way in.

2. She has a remarkable imagination. And that’s the nation where I live. She’s bold, inventive and fearless. That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you. (On his wife Kathleen)

Deleuze and Thinking

Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift – Desert Islands, p. 262.