Rainy day in New York; rehearsal, tutoring; teaching a fiction workshop tonight. Feeling a sense of comedown from an exciting, at times glamorous, two weeks; now I’m back in civilian garb: galas, book parties over; excitement fading—hustling again, clinging on again… No wind in my sales. Becalmed.
8 1/2 last night at Film Forum—a new 35mm print; probably the 25th or 30th time I’ve seen the movie. When I was younger, I always felt that I was like Guido, the director-protagonist; now—now that I’m nearly his age in the film; a bit like him—weary at the center of a production that he doesn’t have the will to organize and master; a rogue, a scholar… a confused artist—all that I now understand in a much more pragmatic way; 8 1/2 is realism.
There is the core, and there is the surface; most of our time is spent on the surface, skating, skimming, but sometimes the core erupts and a new, emotional landmass forms with new fauna: undiscovered, terra nova.
Contradictions are a source of vital energy.
The new Pope: “we have great need to recover the sense of mystery... liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder.”
Some things must be found within—not without; without naturally follows the lead of within (but not the other way around).
the new america pope is an open admission of the symbolic marriage of church and state. america,in this 4th turning,is Technocratic Rome.