with special love and honor for Cindy Sheehan and the residents of Camp Casey
image: Anti-war protester and President of Gold Star Families for Peace, Cindy Sheehan (R) of Vacaville, California receives a hug from Deb Zagoreos of New Canaan, Connecticut, at her roadside protest near the ranch of U.S. President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas, August 17, 2005. Sheehan, whose military son Casey, 24, was killed in Iraq last year, started her roadside vigil August 6 in an attempt to force a meeting with President Bush to argue her case for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
(Jason Reed/Reuters)
Cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
image and poem below the fold
“Man’s search for meaning is a primary motivation in his life, and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and must be fulfilled by him alone.”
Viktor Frankl
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor
Audience
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1
People think, at the theatre, an audience is tricked into believing it’s looking at life.
The film image is so large, it goes straight into your head.
There’s no room to be aware of or interested in people around you.
Girls and cool devices draw audience, but unraveling the life of a real human brings the outsiders.
I wrote before production began, “I want to include all of myself, a heartbroken person who hasn’t worked for years, who’s simply not dead.”
Many fans feel robbed and ask, “What kind of show’s about one person’s unresolved soul?”
2
There’s sympathy for suffering, also artificiality.
Having limbs blown off is some person’s reality, not mine.
I didn’t want to use sympathy for others as a way through my problems.
There’s a gap between an audience and particulars, but you can be satisfied by particulars, on several levels: social commentary, sleazy fantasy.
Where my film runs into another’s real life conditions seem problematic, but they don’t link with me.
The linking is the flow of images, thwarting a fan’s transference.
If you have empathy to place yourself in my real situation of face-to-face intensity, then there would be no mirror, not as here.
3
My story is about the human race in conflict with itself and nature.
An empathic princess negotiates peace between nations and huge creatures in the wild.
I grapple with the theme, again and again.
Impatience and frustration build among fans.
“She achieves a personal voice almost autistic in lack of affect, making ambiguous her well-known power to communicate emotion, yet accusing a system that mistakes what she says.”
Sex, tech are portrayed with lightness, a lack of divisions that causes anxieties elsewhere.
When I find a gap, I don’t fix it, don’t intrude like a violent, stray dog, separating flow and context, to conform what I say to what you see.
Time before the show was fabulous, blank.
When I return, as to an object in space, my experience is sweeter, not because of memory.
The screen is a mirror where a butterfly tries so hard not to lose the sequence of the last moments.
I thought my work should reflect society, like mirrors in a cafe, double-space.
There’s limited time, but we feel through film media we’ve more.
4
When society deterritorialized our world with money, we managed our depressions via many deterritorializations.
Feeling became vague, with impersonal, spectacular equivalents in film.
My animator draws beautifully, but can’t read or write.
He has fears, which might become reality, but Godzilla is reality.
When I saw the real princess, I found her face inauspicious, ill-favored, but since I’d heard she was lovely, I said, “Maybe, she’s not photogenic today.”
Compared to my boredom, I wondered if her life were not like looking into a stream at a stone, while water rushed over me.
I told her to look at me, so her looking is what everything rushes around.
I don’t care about story so much as, what do you think of her? Do you like her?
She’s not representative, because of gaps in the emotion, only yummy parts, and dialogue that repeats.
She pencils a black line down the back of her leg.
A gesture turns transparent and proliferates into thousands of us doing the same.
Acknowledging the potential of a fan club, she jokingly describes it as “suspect”.
She means performance comes out through the noise.
5
At the bar, you see a man catch hold of a girl by the hair and kick her.
You could understand both points of view, but in reality, no.
You intervene, feeling shame for hoping someone else will.
It becomes an atmosphere, a situation, by which I mean, groups.
In school we’re taught the world is round, and with our own eyes we confirmed a small part of what we could imagine.
Because you’re sitting in a dark place, and I’m illuminated, and a lot of eyes are directed at me, I can be seen more clearly than if I mingled with you, as when we were in high school.
We were young girls wanting to describe love and to look at it from outer space.
– – –
This diary series is dedicated to all who suffer because of war
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
support the fallen
support the troops
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
read this soldier’s blog
witness every day
