Clay Pigeons
I tried watching the new episode of Doctor Who. The season finale. I couldn’t finish it. I’d like to tell you it’s because the episode is all about the show’s mythology and that I just can’t be bothered with mythology anymore, which is true, but it’s also not why I turned the episode off. I had something of a breakdown this weekend. I won’t bore/titillate you with the details, but I’ve been having a very difficult time personally, and certain things finally came to a head for me. I thought an episode of TV would distract me, but it didn’t. I’ve never found it easy to put movies or TV on as a balm, not when I’m upset, nor when I’m sick. An escape sounds nice in theory, but the attempt only ever highlights for me how bad I’m feeling. And so, no Doctor Who.
The role of escapism in art is famously fraught, and I don’t have any opinions on it that would shake you, but I am beginning to find my own relationship to that escapism alarming. For quite a long time now, I’ve been attending every rep cinema screening I can possibly attend in Toronto, which usually means one per day, often more. It’s a habit I developed that may have become an addiction of sorts, fuelled by a genuine love of cinema and a desire to see it presented in a theatre, where it belongs. It also allowed me to engage with the films more fully, given my other addiction, to my phone, often prevents me from properly enjoying them at home. So I convinced myself that it was all fine and healthy. Many of the screenings I attended have been far from escapist. Rather, they’re often serious works of art dealing with the problems of the world and the human condition. But I get a little high, go to a movie theatre, sit in the dark as a bunch of images and sounds fill the space, and the whole experience becomes an escape, a detachment from the world.
Recently, though, even that feeling of escape has begun to elude me. Thoughts intrude, my mind drifts, the pressures of my life refusing me a moment’s peace. A recent screening of Contempt, a movie I’d previously seen years ago when I was too young and stupid to understand it, unlocked things about myself that were probably good to be confronted with, but also not why I went to see it. I wasn’t looking for that kind of confrontation, because what I’ve been after is a pleasant numbness, to convince me everything is going to be fine. I don’t know that everything will be fine. I hope it will. Things usually work out. But passivity is hardly something to which anyone should aspire.
I’d like to have a more deliberate relationship with art. One that refuses the escapism I’ve sought until now. Not in form, but in practice. I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario the other day to check out their new exhibit on Modernism. It’s more of a sampling than a properly educational work of curation, with a requisite Warhol and a Rothko, you know, to make sure they covered all bases. There are rooms dedicated to other artists. I found myself incredibly moved by Rita Letendre and Jack Bush’s paintings, which in similar ways put trust in clear brush strokes and the dimensionality of colour. Letendre, who died in 2021 at 93 from blood cancer, an affliction I share, talked about the impulses behind her work in a 2017 interview.
“My painting is honest in that it is good and bad at the same time. My thoughts, my attitudes are automatist, which means that I have no set formula. My paintings are completely emotional, full of hair-trigger intensity. Through them, I challenge space and time. I paint freedom, escape from the here and now, from the mundane…The world isn’t only what we see or what we experience.”
Escapism, again. Yet, of a different kind. Staring into one of Letendre’s paintings is akin to falling. The colours and lines and stabs of the brush have such visceral depth as to break through the window guarding reality from the imaginative space. To escape into such work is to be confronted by the boundedness of the world around us, of life. Her art demands we probe those limits and the areas beyond them, that maybe in doing so we find something of ourselves. I’d like to find myself.
A few years back, I came across the work of songwriter Blaze Foley, a troubled man who went in and out of alcoholism, dogged by depression. Unbelievable songs, simple and sorrowful.
I'm tired of runnin' 'round
Lookin' for answers to questions that I already know
I could build me a castle of memories
Just to have somewhere to go
Count the days and the nights that it takes
To get back in the saddle again
Feed the pigeons some clay, turn the night into day
And start talkin' again when I know what to say
- “Clay Pigeons”, by Blaze Foley
I find comfort in Foley’s music, not because it offers an escape, but because it reminds me I’m not at all alone. Unfortunately for the world, Foley was killed before he was able to find solid ground in this life. So it goes. There’s a scene in Ethan Hawke’s film about Foley, appropriately titled Blaze, in which the artist admits to the love of his life that he cannot be with her anymore. “It’s real love,” he tells her. “But there’s other stuff going on out there. There’s things that are pullin’ at me and they’re pulling hard. Things that aren’t love. I don’t know why, but I have to let them take me.” As pure an illustration of depression as I’ve ever seen, and one that sounds scary on its face, but within the scope of the film is merely part of a continuing struggle. It’s work, that's all. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with struggle, I’ve come to realize. Feed the pigeons some clay, turn the night into day.