by
Yaa Gyasi
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We didn’t know to worry, so when the police knocked on our door at about nine o’clock to tell us that Nana had overdosed on heroin and died in the parking lot of a Starbucks, we were blindsided. We’d thought our routine would save us, save him.
I didn’t write anything in my journal that night or for many years thereafter.
I didn't liek this ... didnt feel smooth in terms of the rising action. the save us, save him felt cliched and like first-drafty. the tension is all wrong
Nana had been dead four years. It had been three and a half years since my summer in Ghana, a month of bad dreams. In that time, I had promised myself I wouldn’t ever burden her, that all she would ever get from me was goodness and peace, calm and respect, but still, I said, “Sometimes I talk to Nana when I can’t sleep.”
She sat down on the couch, and I watched her face intently, worried that I’d said too much, that I’d broken our little code, my private promise.
“Oh, I talk to Nana too,” she said. “All the time. All the time.”
I could feel the tears start to well up in my eyes. I asked, “Does he talk back?”
My mother closed her eyes and leaned back into the couch, letting the cushions absorb her. “Yes, I think so.”
i like this actually
It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.
do NOT like this
Transcendental style is not a vague label like “religious film” which can be attached to films which feature certain religious themes and evoke the appropriate emotions; it is not a catchbasin for all the sniffles, sobs, and goosebumps one has experienced at religious films. It is neither a personal vision nor an official catechism. It is not necessarily typified by Joan at the stake, Christ on the Mount, or St. Francis among the flowers; it is not necessarily suffering, preaching, or good will among men. It is only necessarily a style.
If a critic hopes to extract this style and its component parts from the individual artists who employ it, from the cultures which influence those artists, and from the emotions it must use and transform, he must have some fairly precise critical tools (and even then it’s like trying to separate sound from the waves it travels on). A term like “transcendental,” after all, is almost nonfunctional in art criticism, and “style” is little better. Causing more problems than it solves, “transcendental” has fallen under the jurisdiction of journalese, particularly among film critics. “Transcendental” is currently a catchall term for the imprecise critic: a film’s plot, setting, acting, theme, and direction are all spoken of as transcending each other or themselves, and “style” can refer to anything from a camera angle to a way of life.
“Transcendental style,” however, can be a useful term in film criticism, and when analyzing the films of certain film-makers, such as Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, it can be indispensable. The understandable reluctance of aestheticians and serious film critics to employ the concept of transcendence has caused these films to be underestimated and misinterpreted to varying degrees, and evaluated within critical patterns for which they were not intended. But before these terms can be of any use to a critic they must have meaning: he must know what is “transcendental” and what is “style.” And knowing this, he not only has a term which denotes a specific style, but also the critical method with which to analyze it.
i love his carefulness
Transcendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism. To the transcendental artist rationalism is only one of many approaches to life, not an imperative. “If everything is explained by understandable causal necessities,” abbot Amédée Ayfre wrote, “or by objective determinism, even if their precise nature remains unknown, then nothing is sacred.”10 The enemy of transcendence is immanence, whether it is external (realism, rationalism) or internal (psychologism, expressionism). To the transcendental artist these conventional interpretations of reality are emotional and rational constructs devised by man to dilute or explain away the transcendental.
Ozu’s later cycle of family-office films (thirteen films from 1949 to 1962) features the estrangement of parents and children. The incidents of estrangement are in themselves remarkably petty: marriage, relocation, bickerings, and at most running away from home. Behind these incidents are the divisive elements of modern Japan: the Second World War (the children are called the après-guerre generation) and Westernization (the compartmentalizing effect of office routine). The parent-child estrangement is not a failure to “communicate,” as in American juvenile delinquency films. Even in successful relationships Ozu’s characters do not communicate, as that word is used in sociological jargon, with commiseration and emotional interchange. The estrangement results from the loss of the traditional family unity which was never verbally communicated in the first place. In his later films Ozu set these opposing forces within a home-office superstructure containing a variety of interchangeable character-conflict infrastructures. One story (really nothing more than an anecdote) could sustain several films. Ozu was notorious for filming the same situation over and over again: the father-daughter conflict of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) became the mother-daughter conflict of Late Autumn and reverted to a father-daughter conflict in An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962).
Before one can analyze the transcendental style in Ozu’s films, one must make (or attempt to make) the crucial yet elusive distinction between transcendental art and the art of transcendental experience within Ozu’s work. Do Ozu’s films express the Transcendent, or do they express Ozu, Zen culture, and man’s experience of the Transcendent?
The first, immediate answer must be: “both, of course.” There is no static-free communication with the Holy, and any work which expresses the Transcendent must also express the personality and culture of its artist. Then comes the thorny problem of individual instances, of determining influences and effects. The distinction between transcendental art and the art of transcendental experience resolves into several incumbent questions: which influenced Ozu’s art more? His personality,* Zen culture, or the Transcendent? And which critical definition of style is best suited to uncover that influence? The personal, cultural, or Eliade-Wölfflin (transcendental style)?
The personal interpretation of Ozu’s films has been encouraged by two misleading circumstances: one, that we simply happen to know much more about Ozu than we do about earlier traditional artists, and two, that Ozu, unlike a Zen poet or painter, must use living human beings as his raw material. The characters on screen are experiencing life, and the critic, who naturally empathizes with their feelings, may conclude that their feelings are representative of the film-maker and let the matter go at that. But the characters who are emoting on screen may be no more or less representative of the film-maker than a nonhuman shot of a train or a building. The characters’ individual feelings (sorrow, joy, introspection) are of passing importance: it is the surrounding form which gives them lasting value. Each person, each emotion is part of a larger form which is not an experience at all, but an expression, or rather, not an expression of the individual or cultural experience of transcendence, but an expression of the Transcendent itself.
Like the traditional Zen artist, Ozu directs silences and voids. Silence and emptiness are active ingredients in Ozu’s films; characters respond to them as if they were audible sounds and tangible objects. Although such responses are usually quite subtle, a rather obvious use of active silence occurs in Early Summer: Setsuko Hara has just told her parents of her intention to marry, a decision which displeases them. After a polite argument the parents, despondent, go upstairs. In the next shot the father is staring into the camera while in the background the mother does some busywork and speaks to him. She makes a trivial remark, and he replies, “Ah.” She makes another remark, he again replies, “Ah.” The mother leaves the room and Hara walks noiselessly through the background. The father again says, “Ah.” The silence has become electric, much more meaningful than anything the mother could have said.
A potential disparity between man and nature underlies Ozu’s films. He suggests that the flow of man and nature may be separate rather than unified, which, within the context of his traditional structure, certainly does create a schizoid reaction. This disparity becomes obvious when Ozu juxtaposes similar codas after contrasting family scenes. A shot of a snow-capped mountain inserted after a discussion by several parents plainly suggests the unity to which they aspire, but the same shot inserted after a parent-child quarrel suggests that the traditional unity may have little meaning within the postwar family structure. The codas can be not only a positive statement on the unity of man and nature, but also a wry commentary on the lack of it.