3—
Short Films 1975 , Stan Brakhage

Being myself a very personal writer—which is to say, one who speaks always for himself despite the hopeful community I'd also insist upon in that fact—I'm dismayed, and often irritated, that the personal as a situation in experience of otherwise content comes now

under attack. I grew up in a time which used to propose a kind of contest between the objective and subjective. That should really date me for all of you. Anyhow, people used to say things like, "let's take an objective look at the facts" or, "you're getting too subjective." For the true scholars present, there's a piece I then wrote called "A Note on the Objective," Goad , Summer 1951, collected in A Quick Graph —and I really haven't changed a bit apparently in the twenty-seven years since. It isn't that I love myself in some overbearing way, or that I think I have some privileged and authoritative information of the world. But for me it is true that this complex piece of meat, me , is factually the author of that 'world' the also present 'I' has as experience. Did you know, for example, that the word world comes from a root in wiros (Germanic), which means "life or age of man . . ." I presume they left the article out, because there never was "man" without one or the other. Ok. So much for 'objectivity,' though a heavy humanism would bore me equally.

But as Allen Ginsberg has it in "Wales Visitation": "Particulars!" Or, Williams, "To tell what subsequently I saw and what heard . . ." I am amazed that people can think there is either information or record without the agency of the human—that is, for humans, no matter what the birds may be saying to one another otherwise.

So this last film is certainly personal , and I love it. I take a lot of trips, I get stuck in drear motels, I dream of home. There are two lovely instances of language in this film which are really right on , like they say. Be it also said that Brakhage is very aware of the powers of language, and thank god he is not here tonight to hear me lay it on his valuable creations. So—enough of that.

But —which is truly a great word, isn't it?—you know, like, it never is the last word no matter what happens, death included. But—don't we care what others feel in this life, how they literally have a life? This film is so wisely, gracefully, real to that demand. I could never so actualize my feelings in those places where these images were collected, never substantiate those moments of true consternation, yearning, witness, love as he does here.

"With your eyes alone / with your eyes / with your eyes . . . ," Ginsberg wrote in his never to be forgotten masterpiece "Kaddish." Hear it. We are all related, we are all here. See this world we live in.

Placitas, N.M.
June 19–20, 1978