Realm Buster: Stan Brakhage

Abstract

MICHAEL McCLURE: Stan is a realm buster, and I use "realm" as the word is used in Biology and in Zen. Stan uses his energy and it's almost like moving his shoulders powerfully to break the walls between realms. Some of these realms are the concept of painting, the idea of poetry, the meaning of music, what portrait is, what personal physiology is; other realms that Stan opens up are human and other biology, also the nervous system, ideation--how things are conceived; and then there's the separation between hearing and seeing, sound and silence, and music and sound, which are all explored and more or less brought into one shape in his work. When enough realms are opened, the walls between them torn down or ignored away, then consciousness and concrete experience become one sizeless event in the sizeless event of the Taoist uncarved block which is either the universe or the body, as you see it. Stan likes to say that he was frustrated in his early desire to be a poet and that his hundreds of hours of film are closer to music than to poetry. I can appreciate that, especially in terms of Messiaen or Vivaldi. I also hear his delight in Madrigals, as much as other music. But Stan derives some of the organicity of his huge body of work from the style and thoughts of some liberated poets of today. I'm thinking of the works of Robert Duncan, as they branch like rivers and streams, one from another, lighting the dark of the night or lighting the dark of the body and mind. There's also the sizeless willingness of Charles Olson's spirit in Stan's films--Olson's willingness to let things break, to let things fall down and go boom, and to trust that they will all land on all fours. Further, there's the sheer trusting experimentality of Gertrude Stein in Stan's work and there's Stan's love of the wry, aesthetic wit and intellective delicacy of Louis Zukofsky. I first met Stan in 1954, at which point he has described himself as being "the houseboy of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins," meaning by that that he helped them fix meals, do dishes, and slept in the flat below their place. I had just begun to know Robert Duncan and less Collins through Robert's first poetry workshop at San Francisco State, which included myself and Helen Adam, a balladeer of the strange and haunted, who was in her girlhood in Scotland called the Fairy Poet. On what was perhaps my first visit to Robert and Jess's San Francisco fiat in 1954, Stan came upstairs to visit. My impression was that Stan was inhabiting the floor below Robert and Jess, which was the housing, as I understood it, for the Centaur Press of Kermit Sheets and James Broughton. Stan is the same age as I am, within a few months, and also as I am, Kansas born. When I saw his huge head with dark, tousled hair and intense eyes that were simultaneously focused and staring, I recognized a kindred spirit. I saw Stan visiting Duncan's lectures at the workshop he was teaching on a number of occasions. Stan was absorbing the energetic principles of the concept of field from Olson via Duncan, and he was taking in the intensely biological shaping-ideas of Robert Duncan and the beautiful, unique concepts of collage of less Collins. Stan was a young man who was sui generis and coming up as a member of an artist foster family of sui generis individuals. Stan's myriad-mindedness is both on the surface and below the surface. Surface-wise, Stan is myriad minded in the art of film, and so busy freeing realms from walls between them, that it's impossible to keep up with him. On the less visible field he is tirelessly investigating not only the arts and history with a voracious love for them, but he's also digging through realms of science--particularly the biology of seeing and the neuro-chemical anatomy of the nervous system. Stan agrees with Thoreau that, "One must stand up to live before one sits down to write," or to edit film for that matter. And Stan stands up not only with his travels and his varied adventures and family mountain life and film, but also with the large scale of his passions, his happinesses, his pleasures, his modesties. …