Liber Liberum Aperit (one book opens another)
[by Sean Kernan]
I’ve been riding a long slow curve from the activity of making photographs through the question of why I pursue it so hard, visiting the question of how we create, and winding up (for now) at the question of why we create in life-size our versions of how everything should be, using photos, movies, novels, art of all kinds, and also our life stories and beliefs.
So my reading list includes:
First, The Making of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, a diary of the rehearsal of the landmark Peter Brook production of Shakespeare’s play. The rehearsal process was a culmination of many inventions in the way theater discovered a play and what was in it, and people who saw the play say it changed their lives. It certainly changed the way theater was done. But the fascinating thing to me was that whole rehearsal was extremely uncomfortable for those involved. No one really had any sense of the scope of what they were doing or how it would influence things going forward. The experience was sometimes exhilarating and more often frightening at the time, and often seemed doomed…until the play opened and the amazed responses began to come in. I usually feel insecure in the middle of projects too, so this book reminds me that that is what I’m supposed to feel if things are going as they should.
Also, Laurie Robertson-Lorant‘s biography, Herman Melville, whose a vision so great and so far advanced, and his insistence on it so complete, that he gradually cut himself off from those around him. Of course, he didn’t know he was writing the Great American Monumental Novel, and that might not have been a compensation? Did he even have a choice?
And Son of the Morning Star, Evan Connell’s reading of the national psyche’s that led up to Custer’s demise and the exploitive mythmaking that followed. I read it as another kind of insistence, that of a young nation forming its identity by pursuing a belief in its own “manifest destiny” and remaining blind to the consequences on others and on itself. (This is something Melville was particular critical of, as he witnessed missionaries and diplomats taking it on themselves to “civilize” the cultures of the Pacific.)
The thread that I have followed through all of these is that there is often—or always—something behind what we’re aware of that is bigger than anything we have in mind, that leads to a much fuller outcome. It can be for good or ill, but it is there. Can a wider awareness harness it? That’s the next question, isn’t it? Anyone know any good books on the topic?
But I have all of Stieg Larsson series in front of me too. Maybe I’ll run a little sidetrack into that next, lest things get too serious. On the other hand, knowing new stuff is fun too.
