Before you die, see the film BLOOD WEDDING. 

En espagnol, “Bodas de Sangre”. 

It`s a flamenco ballet based on the play by Federico Garcia Lorca. 

Here’s a 10-min YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWvM2VlRD6k

And with that, my good deed is done for the day.  But who am I to leave well enough alone?

I want to describe to you (you don’t see it in the clip) the final scene.  The bride, her wedding dress smeared with the blood of her rival lovers (they’ve just killed each other), faces the camera in the final image.  Her expression—all horror and hopelessness—is what the filmmaker choses to leave us with as we fade to black>>>.

Tragic, yikes!—but it’s something else that has me spellbound.  Something more elemental.  Much less emotional.  Once identified, it`s obvious—the heroine has reached a full stop—with her eyes wide open.  She is profoundly present. 

Presence.  Such an everyday word, such an underrated state of mind. 

I’ll go out on a limb and say that presence—and the hankering after it—is synonymous with the spiritual search.  Or, if that’s too far-fetched, consider this:

That the obligation of Art is to provoke this altered state.  Forget about beauty and truth.  If art can bring us to a standstill, can centre us in the moment, however briefly, it has done its job.  While nothing much may appear to be happening during this break in continuity, we feel its power. 

Power to accomplish what?  Does it matter? 

Presence is a radical awareness, whose chief feature is equanimity.  What’s in a tab of acid?—equanimity!  The blood coursing through our veins, a distant dog barking, a memory—their boundaries melt away.  Of course, the drugless way to such objective bliss is a total commitment to life.  A going for broke.  Going so far past the point of no return that death looks good compared to the more horrendous disillusionment.  Flamenco with all its do-or-die passion seems to be about nothing else but breaking your heart. 

Blood Wedding would seem to have as its aim the taking away of every last scrap of the bride`s identity.

And this is where the artist leaves us—with an end so brutally absolute that its only possible function can be as the quiet seed of a new beginning.  A moment devoid of future and of past.  Devoid of any story at all.  A moment present to nothing but the space out of which new things come.

Olé!

I know this sounds crazy but…is Eckhart Tolle e-stalking me?

It seems that every time I compose a dispatch, I find that E.T. has been visiting my in-box. Most recently, I was making notes for a blog post on a talk I’m giving soon about ‘The Nascent Self’ with respect to fiction.

[nascent, adjective: coming into being, emerging]

Regular visitors to my blog will be familiar with my theories—that any story can be divided into two—before and after the protagonist has exhausted all her options. I would appear to be making a hobby out of putting that moment under a microscope to see ever more deeply into what exactly is happening during that personal crisis.

Fictional heroes are all about Desire. It’s desire that sets them off on the adventure, and it’s desire that gets them deep into trouble. But it’s clear that some kind of awakening occurs during their crisis, and a rearranging of priorities. I don’t know of a single literary critic who speaks of this phenomenon. Mr. Tolle, however, seems to have his finger on drama’s pulse:

“When you drop your expectations that a person, a situation, a place, or an object should fulfill you, it’s easier to be present in this moment because you’re no longer looking to the next one. Most people want to get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this moment.”

All the mystics offer the same key to freedom and true victory:

Want what you’re getting in this very moment.

With whatever spontaneous action arises out of presence,
an intelligence is then at work in the situation.

Whatever the situation, that intelligence is far greater
than the intelligence of the thinking mind.

Sounds like my theme of the last few months, doesn’t it?

At the major crisis of most films and novels, the protagonist gives up her thinking mind. I’ve often deferred to the mystics to explain the fallout of ‘presence’ that descends upon characters who find themselves in a dramatic cul de sac. The above quote – discovered in my in-box this morning – points to some kind of ‘higher intelligence’. It comes from the e-desk of Eckhart Tolle.

I’m inclined now to see a story as a unity in just two parts. They are separated by that all-important moment of presence. Call part one: Complications. Call part two: Resolution. They are really two separate stories. Of course, they’re linked by unities of time and space. But mainly by the hero’s deepest and truest yearnings.

No one operates from depth until they have to. No one functions from truth unless their delusions fail to support their goals. The thinking mind is a miraculous realm of sophisticated delusions. It takes a protagonist very far indeed. In real life, it takes many people as far as they’ll ever go. But fiction is different.

Fiction is the realm of the extraordinary. It’s a place where characters persevere. Subconsciously, we the reader are willing to suffer any amount of painful complications as long as it delivers us to that moment of presence that opens us to our higher selves.

We want to experience the ‘greater intelligence’ that sweeps any good story to its resolution.

If George Gurdjieff (see previous post) had been a screenwriter, he might have organized his plots around the story’s “centre of gravity”. Gurdjieff used that term with reference to his lectures. There’s no point in wasting time with details, he said, if the essence of his subject isn’t understood. Let’s – as writers and readers – consider this approach.

So, what is a story’s centre of gravity?

In Star Wars, it was the Dark Force, a centre of gravity that most certainly guided George Lucas through the development of his intergalactic tale. It’s almost always a ‘dark force’, that is to say, an aspect of the protagonist that he or she will avoid like the plague. It’s what heroes fear most. It defines their limits. So, naturally, that’s where the story is headed.

A story should take the protagonist to that very place where she has no experience in defending herself. It’s a place of emptiness, exhaustion, and dread. It’s only at this dead-end where the hero opens up to influences beyond her narrow, mind-made reality…and finds a way out.

As writers, we need to discover this crucial story element as soon as possible in the writing process. As readers, we get seduced into the story by our expectation that the protagonist will crash and burn into this personal void.

This week’s blog from Eckhart Tolle says it perfectly: “Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.”

Consider Loretta (Cher) in Moonstruck. I keep coming back to the Act Two crisis in this most perfect of films. Loretta has struggled throughout Acts One and Two to suppress her romantic nature because she’s soon to marry a dullard. But after the most romantic evening of her life (with her fiance’s brother), she has run out of defenses. She has come to a full stop. As the camera zooms slowly into her face, we see exactly what Gurdjieff and Tolle are talking about. We see the ‘thoughtless presence’ that exists at the ‘centre of gravity’.

Act Three finds the hero functioning in tune with her deeper nature for the first time. As in fiction, so in life – we have to come to a complete stop before resuming a life that’s in tune with the wider world.  

Until we know what it takes to bring our hero to that complete stop, all other story details are meaningless.