June 6, 2005
The failure of Communism destroyed a sacred part in each of us.
They put up makeshift walls in Zhivago's house-- enough for fourteen families. Shot the Czar and his family.
Dreamers die a cruel death. Blanche was escorted away like the belle of the ball. Into the cobwebs of her mind, her Southern past. The asylum walls where the most hopeful of us go, those not protected by walls. Without support they collapse into themselves. She paid for her passion, her love of subtlety , beauty. Her illusions.
The best of us fail at everything.
We take care of those within our own walls. We own them. We build other walls for those who don't have their own, for the Blanches of any era, the old, the disabled.
Saw Lost Land with Malkovitch. Great script of ideas. About borders, history, passion. But it lacked a spark as drama, flat as paper. There is no difference between drama and physics.
We cannot depend on the kindness of strangers. Better the bare bulb that casts no shadow. Some can stand up to the glare. Some cannot.
Because artists dream, they are in danger of being escorted away. The dollar, the euro, the yen drive human desire. Poets are an incestuous family of iconoclasts. With patrons we owe something, without them we expend creative energies securing and maintaining a room of one's own.
