Word: vision
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every immigrant leads a double life. Every immigrant has a double identity and a double vision, being suspended between an old and a new home, an old and a new self...
...they were absent or violated in their native lands. It was no accident in the '60s and '70s, when alienation was in flower, that it often seemed to be "native" Americans who felt alienated, while aliens or the children of aliens upheld the native values. The immigrant's double vision results in a special, somewhat skewed perspective on America that can mislead but that can also find revelation in the things that to native Americans are obvious. Psychiatrist Robert Coles speaks of those "who straddle worlds and make of that very experience a new world...
That pursuit continues for the immigrant in America, and it never stops. But it comes to rest at a certain moment. The moment is hard to pin down, but it occurs perhaps when the immigrant's double life and double vision converge toward a single state of mind. When the old life, the old home fade into a certain unreality: places one merely visits, in fact or in the mind, practicing the tourism of memory. It occurs when the immigrant learns his ultimate lesson: above all countries, America, if loved, returns love...
Fortunately, Forman had studied his new subject, America and its movies, like a scholar lover. "I knew America by way of the films I'd seen growing up," he recalls. "I had a kind of mythical vision of the country, a movie vision, larger than life. But then, so many things about America are larger than life that it was a more accurate vision about things than you might think." Forman's early years in New York City gave him glimpses of New World generosity ("The manager at the Chelsea Hotel was very relaxed about the rent") and mendacity...
...even his biggest canvases behind glass: it makes the separation literal, though sometimes too literal. The glass becomes an element, even a kind of collage.) As Art Historian Dawn Ades acutely notes in her catalog essay to the Tate show, there is a lot in common between Bacon's vision of human affairs and the neurasthenic, broken allusiveness of early Eliot -- a cinematic, quick-cutting mixture of "nostalgia for classical mythology, the abruptness of modern manners, the threat of the unseen and the eruption of casual violence." Some lines from Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" are quite Baconian...