nathan’s Reviews > Life of M > Status Update

For a while it runs free, it runs and runs in search of something, but in the end there is nowhere else for it to go but back home.

It might be said that creative people were people whose childhoods hadn’t ended. There was no particular basis for thinking this, other than the fact that most children created things and most adults didn’t. In a way it was terrible, the idea that childhood might not end. Being a creator was like being a dog that keeps running away from its violent master.

M said she did not consider herself to be an artist. She saw herself as merely an element in the creations of others. She did not possess the tal power of choice that a creator has. She had acquired some of that power later, through fame. She was using it not to create but to try to make her life seem more normal.

The reduction of the element of time relative to that of space created a moral imbalance that was also a liberating convenience. Reading books did not make life easier in the same way. It took time to read a book. Watching a film temporarily broke the power of time.

Watching a film was a means of surrendering control over what could not in any case be controlled.

Being able to do what I wanted made me afraid that I had never done what I wanted.

Even in the best films things were made to seem more possible than they actually were, especially cruelty. The possibility of cruelty was nearly always present in films. It was as if, in films, people could do whatever they wanted and were simply choosing not to for now. It was as if there was no law.

A film is also always happening; its origins in time have been frozen through the process of recording. M could always be found in her films, living the same instants over and over.

It was hard not to feel ugly next to M. Part of it was the ugliness of experience. I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself. For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance. Personally I felt saturated with that violence. All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was.