I’ve made three pilgrimages in my life: the 40-some-year home of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and the mountain ranch and crypt – would you call it? – of D.H. Lawrence, outside Taos. I keep returning to the Lawrence environs again and again; and this last time attempted photography in that narrow little building where his ashes were (or were not) deposited (contradictory stories about that). There is a child-like sculpture of “The Phoenix” at the far end of the room, a perfectly lovely emblem to deflate any pomposity people have added to Lawrence’s “I rise in flames…” The building is open, contains only a straw chair (remindful of the one Van Gogh painted) and a broom, which I always use with delight to sweep the dust and leaves from his simple abode. I have tried to make a film as true to the spirit of Lawrence as is this gentle chapel in homage to him. I have attempted to leave each image within the film free to be itself and only obliquely in the service of Lawrence’s memory. I have wanted to make it a film within which that child-Phoenix can reasonably nest. Bruce Elder sends me this quote from D.H. Lawrence, which may help to explain why “Visions in Meditation: #4” is subtitled in his name: “…there must be mutation swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, no fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouncement or close” (“Poetry of the Present,” Introduction to the American Edition of New Poems, 1918). (Stan Brakhage)

Plato’s cave would seem to be the idee fixe of this film. The vortex would, then, be the phenomenological world – overwhelming, and thus “uninhabitable.” The structures of thoughtful meditation are naturally, therefore, equivocal so that, for example, even a tornado-in-the-making will be both “dust devil” and “finger of God” at one with the clock-work sun and the strands of ice/fire, horizon, rock, clouds, so on. The film is, I believe, a vision of mentality as most people must (to the irritation of Plato) have it, safely encaved and metaphorical, for the nervous system to survive. All the same, I hope, with this work, to have brought a little “rush light” into the darkness. The film is set to the three movements of Rick Corrigan’s “Memory Suite.” Its multiple superimpositions are superbly timed by Louise Fujiki, of Western Cine, as usual. (SB)

This meditation takes its visual imperatives from the occasion of Mesa Verde, which I came to see finally as a Time rather than any such solidity as Place. “There is a terror here,” were the first words which came to mind on seeing these ruins; and for two days after, during all my photography, I was haunted by some unknown occurrence which reverberated still in these rocks and rock-structures and environs. I can no longer believe that the Indians abandoned this solid habitation because of drought, lack-of-water, somesuch. (These explanations do not, anyway, account for the fact that all memory of The Place, i.e., where it is, was eradicated from tribal memory, leaving only legend of a Time when such a place existed.) Midst the rhythms, then, of editing, I was compelled to introduce images which corroborate what the rocks said, and what the film strips seemed to say: The abandonment of Mesa Verde was an eventuality (rather than an event), was for All Time thus, and had been intrinsic from the first such human building. (SB)

This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation,” in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism “indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully.” It is a film “as in a dream,” this first film in a proposed series of such being composed of images shot in the New England states and Eastern Canada. It begins with an antique photograph of a baby and ends with a child loose on the landscape, interweaving images of Niagara Falls with a variety of New England and Eastern Canadian scenes, antique photographs, windows, old farms and cityscapes, as it moves from deep winter, through glare ice, to thaw. (SB)

“Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves in the universe.” – D.H. Lawrence This little film, like a fire in the mind, seeks that “tree” along a line of metaphorical synapse.