The Things Inside

Bloutcher rhymes with voucher and is a factor of:
BLogjOUrnalskeTCHbooknewslettER

In this bloutcher

• Announcements
• The Things Inside
  

Announcements:

• Holidays are approaching. Consider a gift of Becoming a Life Change Artist by Fred Mandell and Kathleen Jordan. Order here. Also consider a gift of newly released Unlocking Your Creative Mantra by Fred Mandell and Donna Krone. Unlocking will ignite new levels of creative energy in your life. Order here. Even better, consider giving both as a gift!
• I have been out on the speaking circuit lately and have received many requests for copies of the power point slides I have used. I automatically make the slides available to attendees. I thought it might make sense for those who have not been able to attend any these talks to make a general offer to send a pdf of one of these presentations. If you would like to receive a complimentary pdf of a presentation entitled: What the Great Masters of Art Can Teach Us About Navigating the Second Half of Life with Vitality, Creativity and Meaning please just send me an email by clicking here and I will be happy to shoot you the pdf.
  

The Things Inside

The remarkable Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa who passed away a few years ago made an utterly stunning film called "Dreams." It is composed of several vignettes inspired by Kurosawa's own dreams. One of them, entitled "Crows," begins with a Kurosawa alter-ego, a young man, in a museum staring at a series of famous Van Gogh paintings when he is literally drawn into one of the paintings--The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing. The French washerwomen, now unfrozen, begin shouting at him to watch out for Monsieur Van Gogh. "He was in an asylum!" they giggle. Wherein the young man takes off in search of the great artist. Only now Kurosawa takes the viewer into a virtual Van Gogh world, as his alter ego trudges through Arles, wheat fields, down dirt roads, resplendant in thick impasto brush strokes--ochres, blues, greens, vermillion. The scenes vibrate with brilliant color.

When the man finally finds Van Gogh, the master is hard at work and asks the young man "Why aren't you working?" He then goes on to say, "All of nature has its own beauty. I lose myself in it. I devour nature completely and whole. It is so difficult to hold it inside." And then he packs up his easel and marches over the hill out of sight until a sky full of crows explodes over the fields

and the young man is back in the museum looking from the outside in again, staring longingly at the painting as though he had lost a world. As though this real world were a mere pale reflection of the actual painting.

This is one of the visually most stunning scenes I have ever seen in a movie. Chopin's haunting prelude #15 in D flat adds to the surreal experience of being IN the painting. Click here to listen.

So what's going on here? Is Kurosawa as mad as Van Gogh? Has he lost his ability to distinguish reality from fantasy? Or is it as simple as one master paying homage to another?

I think there's a lot going on here. But one thing in particular strikes me. It is, as Van Gogh says, "so difficult to hold it inside." Van Gogh gave us the gift of expressing in color what was inside him. He literally created a new visual language. We all recognize it today. He could not resist it. It was inside and it had to come out. From my perspective it seems Kurosawa is telling us we cannot keep our nature tamped down forever. We cannot hold it back. Our personal nature has the force of real nature. What Van Gogh expressed through painting, Kurosawa expressed through film and we can express through the way we live our lives. We each have the opportunity to find the language, voice, courage with which to express our true nature. That is how we create not only ourselves but the world around us.

So a question bubbles to the surface: Imagine, for a moment, you are at a museum or a concert or reading a novel or listening to a poem and you could both imaginatively and in reality step into and live in a particular painting or be the music or be a character in a novel or take wing like the words in a poem. Which painting, music, novel, poem would you choose? What does that tell you about your true "nature," about the things inside you, and how you are or are not fully expressing it in the world?