Fascinating. I assume the novel was written then? So perhaps I'm not clearly following those cuts, Chris, but compelled to read through.
And those words, that's a comic cut, indeed...
Doug
On 2012-07-10, at 11:54 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
> I still have stashed away a Cannon 514XL Super 8. Shooting with Kodak Tri-X super 8, 200 ASA negative film. One may say cinematic methodology; a snapshot sequence. Written in the days before was written The Day Lady Died; youthful blond curly locks is this child's soft hair. Our lady of the flowers. A violet hole.
>
>
> * * *
>
>
> Strike hard; cries the blow hard. The tie is still on the table. Tying it harder and harder around his neck is this trial of death. Is it to be a guillotine for our Lady Divine.
>
> Indictment. The clock has struck five and our Lady Divine is seated.
>
> Between an inner courtyard of apartments on which all the kitchen and bathroom windows look out. Through the gloom of the kitchen, star spangled opulent ivory headed old men watch with tranquil eyes for approaching murderers in slippers.
>
> Our Lady at the bottom of this well. The guards demand he stand.
>
> The judge requests he speak his defense.
>
> To be natural at that moment was to be theatrical. His maladroitness saves him from ridicule.
>
> He was truly great, he said;
> The old guy was washed up. He couldn't even get it ...
> The last word did not need to pass his soft little lips.
>
> The virility of the twelve old men of the jury
> and the judges, hands over ears, mouths open;
> words as big as an organ enters open mouths
>
> With mincing little farts under his robe
> the defending lawyer makes a plea bargain.
>
> Our Lady being told to behave with decorum.
> Lawyer speaking of being raised in the gutter,
> of hunger and thirst. (My God; what was he going
> to make of this innocent child.)
>
> Gentlemen, he is a child! He said.
>
> Our Lady, face screwed up said; Ah no, please not the reforms promised by your Christian youth. Rather to croak it right away.
>
> The cruelty of the word left the judges stripped of their splendor. Let's not rush matters. Sitting on his wooden bench squarely and solidly between his guards Our Lady felt triumph. Known as Our Lady of the Flowers. Though he was no longer intact for white robes, he held ground and the world was no longer in the room.
>
> Our Lady was given the death sentence. Forty days later, on a blue sky spring morning, in the prison yard.
>
> At dawn it was processed and ready to cut. Our Lady of the Flowers had his head cut off with a knife. And nothing happened. No need for the veil to be ripped off because some god gives up the ghost.
>
> I see myself, a child, laughs and smiles, breaks the drama constructed and when I think back destroys it, makes a false power, manifests an attitude which the character could not have had. Tearing to bits the harmony life forces, painfully. To see myself becoming another, and on the first drama grafts another, again.
>
>
> (Post Bergson, transversal cinematic cut; yet again the etymology is queer, diagonal cut, across black and white grains of super 8 film.)
>
Douglas Barbour
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