Clint Mansell Project

Currently shooting and preparing for a film release that accompanies a performance by composer Clint Mansell. For the 35th edition of the Ghent International Film Festival (October 7th -18th), Clint and The Sonus Quartet will be performing atmospheric tunes from Darren Aronofsky films (Pi, Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain). Like Aronofsky in the film world, Mansell has garnered an immense cult following for his soundtrack work, known for its dark, hypnotic beauty. The concert will be held on October 16th in the theatre hall at the Vooruit.

Official project blog

Have you anything to say in your defense?

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I’m alive,
That I’m vicious; and they don’t know
The December that follows from that January.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

There is an empty place
In my metaphysical shape
That no one can reach:
A cloister of silence
That spoke with the fire of its voice muffled.

On the day I was born,
God was sick.

Brother, listen to me, listen…
Oh, all right. Don’t worry, I won’t leave
Without taking my Decembers along,
Without leaving my Januaries behind.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I’m alive, that I chew my food…and they don’t know
Why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
The narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
Winds untangled from the Sphinx
Who holds the desert for routine questioning.

Yes, they all know…Well, they don’t know
That the light gets skinny
And the darkness gets bloated…
And they don’t know that the mystery
Joins things together…
That he is the hunchback
Musical and sad who stands a little way off
And foretells
The dazzling progression from the limts to the Limits.

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
Gravely.

–Cesar Vallejo

Waking Up

Daylight leaks in, and sluggishly I surface from my dreams into the common dream and things assume again their proper places and their accustomed shapes. Into this present the Past intrudes, in all its dizzying range-the centuries-old habits of migration in birds and men, the armies in their legions all fallen to the sword, and Rome and Carthage.

The trappings of my day also come back: my voice, my face, my nervousness, my luck. If only Death, that other waking-up, would grant me a time free of all memory of my own name and all that I have been!

If only morning meant oblivion!

-Borges

Despair

A despairing man is in despair over something. So it seems for an instant, but only for an instant; that same instant the true despair manifests itself, or despair manifests itself in its true character. For in the fact that he despaired of something, he really despaired of himself, and now would be rid of himself. Thus when the ambitious man whose watchword was "Either Caesar or nothing" does not become Caesar, he is in despair thereat. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot endure to be himself. So properly he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar. This self which, had he become Caesar, would have been to him a sheer delight (though in another sense equally in despair), this self is now absolutely intolerable to him. In a profounder sense it is not the fact that he did not become Caesar which is intolerable to him, but the self which did not become Caesar is the thing that is intolerable; or, more correctly, what is intolerable to him is that he cannot get rid of himself. If he had become Caesar he would have been rid of himself in desperation, but now that he did not become Caesar he cannot in desperation get rid of himself. Essentially he is equally in despair in either case, for he does not possess himself, he is not himself. By becoming Caesar he would not after all have become himself but have got rid of himself, and by not becoming Caesar he falls into despair over the fact that he cannot get rid of himself. Hence it is a superficial view (which presumably has never seen a person in despair, not even one’s own self) when it is said of a man in despair, "He is consuming himself." For precisely this it is he despairs of, and to his torment it is precisely this he cannot do, since by despair fire has entered into something that cannot burn, or cannot burn up, that is, into the self.

-kierkegaard

Everything became shadow and ardent aquarium

I am reborn in reason. The world is good. I will bless life. I will love my brothers. There are no longer childhood promises. Nor the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength, and I praise God.

Boredom is no longer my love. Rage, perversion, madness, whose every impulse and disaster I know-- my burden is set down entire. Let us appraise with clear heads the extent of my innocence. I am no longer able to ask for the consolation of a beating. I don't imagine I'm off on a honeymoon with Jesus Christ as my father-in-law.

I am no prisoner of my own reason. I have said: God. I want freedom, within salvation: how shall I go about it? A taste for frivolity has left me. No further need for divine love or for devotion to duty. I do not regret the age of emotion and feeling. To each his own reason, contempt, Charity: I keep my place at the top of the angelic ladder of good sense.

As for settled happiness, domestic or not... no, I can't. I am too dissipated, too weak. Work makes life blossom, an old idea, not mine; my life doesn't weigh enough, it drifts off and floats far beyond action, that third pole of the world.

What an old maid I'm turning into, to lack the courage to love death!

If only God would grant me that celestial calm, etherial calm, and prayer-- like the saints of old. --The Saints! They were strong! Anchorites, artists of a kind we no longer need....

Does this farce have no end? My innocence is enough to make me cry. Life is the farce we all must play.

Stop it! This is your punishment.... Forward march!

Ah! my lungs burn, my temples roar! Night rolls in my eyes, beneath this sun! My heart... my arms and legs....

Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! the others go on ahead... tools, weapons... give me time!

Fire! Fire at me! Here! or I'll give myself up! --Cowards! --I'll kill myself! I'll throw myself beneath the horses' hooves!

Ah!...

--I'll get used to it.

That would be the French way, the path of honor!

But I am still alive! Suppose damnation is eternal! A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he? I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am. This is the catechism at work. I am the slave of my baptism. You, my parents, have ruined my life, and your own. Poor child! --Hell is powerless against pagans. --I am still alive! Later on, the delights of damnation will become more profound. A crime, quick, and let me fall to nothingness, condemned by human law.

Shut up, will you shut up! Everything here is shame and reproach-- Satan saying that the fire is worthless, that my anger is ridiculous and silly. --Ah, stop! ...those mistakes someone whispered-- magic spells, deceptive odors, childish music-- and to think that I possess the truth, that I can have a vision of justice: my judgement is sound and firm, I am prime for perfection.... Pride. --My scalp begins to tighten. Have mercy! Lord, I am afraid! Water, I thirst, I thirst! Ah, childhood, grass and rain, the puddle on the paving stones, Moonlight when the clock strikes twelve.... The devil is in the clock tower, right now! Mary! Holy Virgin!... --Horrible stupidity.

Look there, are those not honorable men, who wish me well? Come on... a pillow over my mouth, they cannot hear me, they are only ghosts. Anyway, no one ever thinks of anyone else. Don't let them come closer. I must surely stink of burning flesh....

My hallucinations are endless. This is what I've always gone through: the end of my faith in history, the neglect of my principles. I shall say no more about this; poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest one of all, a thousand times, and I will hoard it like the sea.

O God-- the clock of life stopped but a moment ago. I am no longer within the world. --Theology is accurate; hell is certainly down below-- and heaven is up on high. Ecstacy, nightmare, sleep, in a nest of flames.

How the mind wanders idly in the country... Satan, Ferdinand, blows with the wild seed. .. Jesus walks on purple thorns but doesn't bend them... Jesus used to walk on troubled waters. In the light of the lantern we saw him there, all white, with long brown hair, standing in the curve of an emerald wave....

I will tear the veils from every mystery-- mysteries of religion or of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, and nothingness. I am a master of phantasmagoria.

Listen!

Every talent is mine! --There is no one here, and there is someone: I wouldn't want to waste my treasure. --Shall I give you Afric chants, belly dancers? Shall I disappear, shall I begin an attempt to discover the Ring? Shall I? I will manufacture gold, and medicines.

Put your faith in me, then; faith comforts, it guides and heals. Come unto me all of you-- even the little children-- let me console you, let me pour out my heart for you-- my miraculous heart! --Poor men, poor laborers! I do not ask for prayers; give me only your trust, and I will be happy.

Think of me, now. All this doesn't make me miss the world much. I'm lucky not to suffer more. My life was nothing but sweet stupidities, unfortunately.

Bah! I'll make all the ugly faces I can! We are out of the world, that's sure. Not a single sound. My sense of touch is gone. Ah, my chateau, my Saxony, my willow woods! Evenings and mornings, nights and days.... How tired I am!

I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride-- and a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!

I am weary, I die. This is the grave and I'm turning into worms, horror of horrors! Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!

Ah! To return to life! To stare at our deformities. And this poison, this eternally accursed embrace! My weakness, and the world's cruelty! My God, have pity, hide me, I can't control myself at all! I am hidden, and I am not.

And as the Damned soul rises, so does the fire.

-Rimbaud

The Black Riders

There are blows in life so violent – I can’t answer!
Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them,
The deep waters of everything lived through
Were backed up in the soul…I can’t answer!

Not many; but they exist…they open dark ravines
In the most ferocious face and in the most bull-like back.
Perhaps they are the horses of that heather Attila,
Or the black riders sent to us by Death.

They are the slips backward made by the Christs of the soul,
Away from some holy faith that is sneered at by Events.
These blows that are bloody are the crackling sounds
From some bread that burns at the oven door.

And man…poor man!...poor man! He swings his eyes, as
When a man behind us calls us by clapping his hands;
Swings his crazy eyes, and everything alive
Is backed up, like a pool of guilt, in that glance.

There are some blows in life so violent…I can’t answer!

–Cesar Vallejo

To Heav'n, where his eye sees a radiant throne,
Piously, the Poet, serene, raises his arms,
And the dazzling brightness of his illumined mind
Hides from his sight the raging mob:

"Praise be to You, O God, who send us suffering
As a divine remedy for our impurities
And as the best and the purest essence
To prepare the strong for holy ecstasies!

I know that you reserve a place for the Poet
Within the blessed ranks of the holy Legions,
And that you invite him to the eternal feast
Of the Thrones, the Virtues, and the Dominations.

I know that suffering is the sole nobility
Which earth and hell shall never mar,
And that to weave my mystic crown,
You must tax every age and every universe.

But the lost jewels of ancient Palmyra,
The unfound metals, the pearls of the sea,
Set by Your own hand, would not be adequate
For that diadem of dazzling splendor,

For that crown will be made of nothing but pure light
Drawn from the holy source of primal rays,
Whereof our mortal eyes, in their fullest brightness,
Are no more than tarnished, mournful mirrors."

—Baudelaire

Hell is the place of those who have denied; they find there what they planted and what dug, a lake of spaces, and a wood of nothing, and wander there and drift, and never cease wailing for substance.

-Yeats

What shall I do, singer and first-born,
in a world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
with all this immensity
in a measured world?

-Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva

Being Without Existence

Thus we have man outside the world, and outside himself. We cannot classify him among the living, so superficial is his contact with life; his contact with death is no less so. Not having been able to find his exact place between the one and the other, he has cheated from the first: an intruder, a pseudo-animal, a false mortal, an impostor. Consciousness, that non-participation in what one is, that faculty of not coinciding with anything, was not provided for in the economy of creation. Man knows it but he has neither the courage to assume it to the end and to die of it, nor to repudiate it in order to save himself. Alien to his nature, alone amid himself, detached from both the here at hand and the beyond, he espouses no reality utterly: how could he, when he is only half real. A being without existence.

(photographs by R. Frank and G. Winograd)

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.

-Mishima

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

-T.S. Eliot

(Photo by Roy DeCarava)

In The Land of Oden

There Stands a Mountain,
A Thousand Miles in the Air.

Once every Million Years,
A Little Bird comes Winging,
To Sharpen its Beak on that Mountain.

And when that Mountain,
Is just a Valley,
This to Eternity shall be...

One Single Day.

Two Larks

I heard two larks singing,
They sang so bright and clear
And flew on joyful wings
Across the sky so wonderfully.
One approached the sun
Blinded, it withdrew in awe
While often recalling with delight
Memories of this past bliss.
Yet, it does not dare to raise
Its wings towards those rays,
Afraid, that its striving
Might turn to pain, in the end.
The other [lark], courageously venturing
Swings itself up, close to the sun
Yet it fearfully closes its eyes
Along this never-taken path.
Yet, it can not resist
It feels an invincible desire
To see the heavenly rays
Hardly aware of itself, anymore.
It gazes into the bright sun
Gazes at it without complaint
In heavenly bliss and joy,
Until, finally, its eyes break.

-Nietzsche