tmatteson

When I think of Zen’s relationship to writing, I think of paradoxes (like Zen koans) and unexpected connections. As a writer, I try to avoid the Western mentality of breaking things down into their constituent parts, and I try to instead think holistically, tracing all possible connections, however unlikely, absurd, or impossible. I know that I do not have total control of my thoughts, I simply follow them:

“I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. ”
-Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

I teach academic writing at a public university, and I ask myself this question every day. I have to believe writing can be taught for my livelihood, but I try to teach it indirectly. Many people believe that writing is simply grammar, but that’s like saying that filmmaking is only lighting. I try to teach my student that clear writing comes from clear thinking, and clear thinking comes from active reading. Especially given today’s information-saturation, I see it as my biggest responsibility to teach students how to evaluate sources, to tune it to what’s reliable and to critique what is unreliable.

I think we should see the French New Wave not as a historical phenomenon but a movement of the continuous contemporary, particularly since its greatest filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, is still making films. One of the things that fascinates me about the New Wave is its response to technological innovation. If you look at Godard’s films, for example, you can see the typewriter (literally in Histoires du Cinema, personified by journalists in Breathless, Tout Va Bien, Comment Ca Va, etc.) as a formative influence on Godard’s conceptual of cinematic temporarily as discontinuous. In this way, the typewriter is the father of the jump cut. A more recent example: Godard’s use of cell phone footage in Film Socialisme. Godard presciently considers the liberatory potential of cell phone video just a year or so before one such video (the Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation) would spark the Arab Spring.