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The advantage of writing and editing is that at any time you can stop what you're doing and walk around the block, or have lunch, or take a phone call, or go dig in the garden and think. At any particular moment, the editor has the freedom to interact or not interact with the material. You can always step away and let the subconscious do some work.
When I write a script, I lie down—because that's the opposite of standing up. I stand up to edit, so I lie down to write. I take a little tape recorder and, without being aware of it, go into a light hypnotic trance. I pretend the film is finished and I'm simply describing what was happening. I start out chronologically but then skip around. Anything that occurs to me, I say into the recorder. Because I'm lying down, because my eyes are closed, because I'm not looking at anything, and the ideas are being captured only by this silent scribe—the tape recorder—there's nothing for me to criticize. It's just coming out.
That is my way of disarming the editorial side. Putting myself in a situation that is as opposite as possible to how I edit—both physically and mentally. To encourage those ideas to come out of the woods like little animals and drink at the pool safely, without feeling that the falcon is going to come down and tear them apart.
In any film scene there's a petitioner and a grantor, a weaker character and a stronger. Otherwise you don't have a scene. It may be obvious what the power relationship is, or it may be hidden from one or even both of the characters themselves. So at each moment in every scene there is a dynamic between two people that can be expressed in many ways.
In making a film you're trying to get the most interesting orchestration of all these elements, which, like music, need to be harmonic yet contradictory. If they're completely contradictory, then there's chaos. It's like when instruments are tuning up before a performance, you can't make anything coherent out of it. It's a fascinating, evocative sound, but only for about fifteen seconds. If, on the other hand, all the instruments play the same notes—if they're too harmonic, in other words—yes, there's coherence, but I'm bored after a few minutes. Just as bored as with the chaos of tuning up.
The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades.
<3
May 1936.
I will read you a poem, Clifton’s wife said, in her formal voice, which is how she always seems unless you are very close to her. We were all at the southern campsite, within the firelight.
I walked in a desert.
And I cried:
‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’
A voice said: ‘It is no desert.’
‘I cried: ‘Well, but -
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’
A voice said: ‘It is no desert.’
No one said anything.
She said, That was by Stephen Crane, he never came to the desert.
He came to the desert, Madox said.
July 1936.
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.
i feel like im missing some of the complexities with the stephan crane bit [is madox being literal or figurative? is she correct or misunderstanding something?] but i love the feeling of it just the same
‘Older than Hana. Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. She can be obsessed by the Englishman because he knows more. We’re in a huge field when we talk to that guy. We don’t even know if he’s English. He’s probably not. You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Hana.
‘Neither do I. Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed. Here.’
stunt: he feels this
John Bell, director of Desert Surveys in Egypt, asked these questions in 1927. By the 1930s the papers grew even more modest. ‘I should like to add a few remarks on some of the points raised in the interesting discussion on the “Prehistoric Geography of Kharga Oasis.”’ By the mid-1930s the lost oasis of Zerzura was found by Ladislaus de Almásy and his companions.
In 1939 the great decade of Libyan Desert expeditions came to an end, and this vast and silent pocket of the earth became one of the theatres of war.
ah!!! you really feel the loss here, the tragedy
We were a small clutch of a nation between the wars, mapping and re-exploring. We gathered at Dakhla and Kufra as if they were bars or cafés. An oasis society, Bagnold called it. We knew each other’s intimacies, each other’s skills and weaknesses. We forgave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. ‘The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.’ That was the real Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog.
ugh i love this
By 1932, Bagnold was finished and Madox and the rest of us were everywhere. Looking for the lost army of Cambyses. Looking for Zerzura. 1932 and 1933 and 1934. Not seeing each other for months. Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the Forty Days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I’ve met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African – all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations.
The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched … Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.
:'(