In speaking of flowers, Kakuzo Okakura would say, some flowers glory in death. Japanese cherry blossoms do. Going-with-the-flow a fragrant avalanche hovers, dances above then sails away on to eternity.
At this time, I have come to find, in the ongoing story of life, to go with the flow of reality as it is being played out. Going-with-the-flow, we call true, says Henri Bergson, any affirmation which, in guiding us through moving reality, presents us with and announces what will be.
On and on, the ocean continues moving, at Ocean Beach, against the rocks, which support the Cliff House, in San Francisco. The landscape changes, each time, whether the weather is whatever. On and on, till the horizon, salt water clashes with the sky. This reciprocal confrontation is. On and on, a time-shift is.
It is to go away only to come back. Although out of consciousness the ocean is not but is. It continues. An experiential montage is a gathering of oneself. As a path laid out before us a guiding principle it is. Yet as an arrangement in itself each is to the other be.
For the Russian master of film, Sergi Eisenstein, montage is the primary guiding principle of film. For others montage is the arrangement of the objects in the scene itself. This would be a mise en scene, a stage setting, as of a play, the surround of that which is seen. The narrative tells a story. Although a montage can be reflected by a third person, an anonymous "they," as Martin Heidegger would say, tells the other side of the story, there is, the first person narrator who within the scene itself reflects.
To do a cutting, a mise en scene is to bring the "arrangement" into time and space. This is a reflection, with a temporal gap, of that which is reflected upon which is the reflexive. The reflexive is primordial. It is the primary guiding principle an immediate reflexive consciousness of self. This self-witnessing, as Dharmapala would say, is an assuring consciousness. The reciprocal is, the re-witnessing, of that which is original.1
The guiding principle comes from within the first person who, the composer; the cutting from the third person they. The they is not a who. The montage is colored and re-colored. This is, as Albert Einstein would say, a totality of existing facts which are conceived as mutually dependent.
What a cinematographical method shows, in movement, is the series of immobile views of the film. What is projected, on and on, over and above the immobile is the movement within. The projector begins within. The cinematographical method, for Bergson, is the only practical method since it consists in making the general character of knowledge form itself on action while the detail of each act is upon that knowledge. On and on, beginning, rise, high point, fall…ending, beginning, on and on…
The curtain parts and characters appear. With flexibility of mind following gestures and actions the audience experiences the life of the characters on stage. In the performing of the play it is not only the audience absorbed in the plot those within the play can be captivated in the action. Neither is thinking of the writer. Understanding is directed towards the plot and the interplay of characters. In this way they re-live the action intended. When one notices the acceptance of this given reality one's understanding moves from the expression and what is expressed to the play and the writer. This is hermeneutics in play.
We are being both before and behind ourself and at this time ourself. This is to bring space itself into one of our moments of time. For some American Indians paintings on the outside of the teepee reflect an experiential montage. What one is, what one would like to be, what one could be. Consciousness is one's capacity to know something and know that one knows it. It is also the capacity to transcend a situation to live one's possibilities. One is aspiring yet following an inspiration. With the passing of time I shall have reached, become, that self which is now temporally away. I go to that self, in that, I project it as a possibility into the future realizing the present power to be.
Notes
1) Cognition is understood within the intuition from which it originated and the intuition is understood by the cognition in which it finds expression.
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(2003)
