smith on brakhage

Carter Smith

On Mothlight

When asked to account for why I find something beautiful, I usually find myself explaining how the object in question, for me, serves as an exemplary case of poesis, of making. But why should the act of making be considered beautiful?

In an essay on the first poem in English, Caedmon�s praise hymn, Allen Grossman writes that [t]he only logical compliance to a demand for a text that does not exist is to fail [. . .] to produce the required song; but, then, by intricate strategies of resistance and flight, to succeed in producing something else--the only response that is really wanted, the text that is not a text--the poetic text.[1] Here, Grossman is relating the story of Caedmon, an Anglo-Saxon peasant of the seventh century, who ran away from the fire shared by his companions because they were exchanging songs and he knew no song to sing. Later that night, though, Caedmon composed a song in a dream. A person had appeared to him in the dream, demanding of him, Caedmon, sing me something (5). Grossmans point about the poetic principle--a point that seems to me relevant in a discussion of the beautiful--is that poesis is the making of significance in the felt absence of significance.

Which is to say that I find Scarrys claims about beauty at once important and underdeveloped. If beauty insists on its replication, if it proposes an ideal in excess of any attempt to reproduce it, then perhaps we might find a reason for returning to beauty not as a model for justice, but as a signal of a more basic human engagement with the world: the attempt by intricate strategies of resistance and flight, to succeed in producing something else.

I chose Stan Brakhages Mothlight as the object for my position paper because I think that it demonstrates not beautys power to stabilize, as Burke surmised, but its reference to the makers agitated state. For if Burkes overarching concern in A Philosophical Enquiry is to account for an excess of the passions--a concern that obliges him to go through the sublime in order to arrive at a curative, centripetal concept of beauty--my tentative claim, then, is that even in works of art that do not contain the elements of the sublime that Burke and Kant delineated we can see an excess agitation (sing me something) associated with the very act of making. By turning to Mothlight, I want to ask: is it possible to speak of our conception of beauty as a perception of the attempt to make significance?

We can hear, in some of the commentary that accompanies the DVD presentation of Mothlight, parallels between Brakhages poetic impulse and Caedmons.

Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief. The grief is my business, in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me. I said these crazy moths are flying into the candlelight and burning themselves to death. And thats whats happening to me. I dont have enough money to make these films and its destroying . . . Im not feeding my children properly because of these damn films, you know, and Im burning up here. What can I do? Im feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way. But, the truth of the matter is . . . then I say what to do. Okay, Im going to comprehend this. Ive got to understand it. So I go out with a camera, and I start following moths around. Well, that was hopeless. Im not agile enough to follow a moth, even with a camera, and get anything of any real meaning. And suddenly I realized that over the light bulbs theres all these dead moth wings. And I hate, you know, hate that. Such a sadness. [. . .] And I tenderly picked them out and I started pasting them onto a strip of film to try to . . . In one way you could say its a kind of madness. To give them life again? To animate them again? [Laughing} To put them into sort of life through the motion picture machine? But really its, I think, deeper than that. Its really to honor . . . what is it? Its something better than that they shall not have died in vain. Its so silly, thats not what it is. Its to engage with this that otherwise is just an unacceptable unhappiness or misery, to engage with it in some way that makes of it something.[2]

[T]o engage with it in some way that makes of it something: this is the presence that I feel behind those things that I want to call beautiful. And I felt this to be true of Mothlight before I heard Brakhages commentary on it; the moth wings and plant stems applied directly to the film seemed to me--and seems to me now--a kind of answer to the demand sing me something (a demand underscored by Brakhages wish to comprehend and understand his situation). What makes this film particularly beautiful to me, though, is that Brakhages solution to the problem of what to sing--his answer--occurs through his insistence on the materiality of his means. The poetic text is produced not by following the moths with the camera, but by literalizing the litter of moth wings around him. In Brakhages attempt to reconcile himself to the world through making, I see an analog for the function of Kants judgment. For though taste does not produce a text, strictly speaking, might we see it as an analog for the attempt to make significance?