Posted 11:36 PM by sport

"Now I'm homesick for my silence..."

Here you will find a poem by Hart Crane entitled "Chaplinesque." The poem goes like so:

We will make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!


And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

There is a linked page for comments. Here's one (of two):

from this poem it is evident that charlie chaplin and hart crane were butt buddies!!! ~Wang

Don't you love the internet? What makes a chowderhead seek out an obscure poem online, just to offer this? Mercy, mercy me.

When I was very young, two tv shows -- "Silents Please" and "Fractured Flickers" -- instilled in me a love for silent films. Chaplin especially won my heart. When they finally let him back into the country and gave him his special Oscar ( © ® TM) in 1972, I wept. Not only a great filmmaker, this guy made The Great Dictator -- which Hitler is known to have seen at least twice -- thereby humiliating that asshole grandly, which is Mel Brooks' avowed career goal. Chaplin played two roles, the Hitler character and a heroic barber who turns out to be a Jew. Not only did Chaplin have the balls to spit at the dictator well before our entry into the war, but he called attention to the vicious Anti-Jewish hatred at the root of it all. This raises the work from mere political parody to humanist Art of the highest degree.

Dunno if any of you ever saw a 3-part series from Thames in England, rebroadcast on A&E, entitled "The Unknown Chaplin." I just got it on dvd, and it's mandatory viewing for anyone interested in Chaplin, filmmaking or the workings of genius. The man didn't use scripts! He began with a set and his stock players, began improvising gags AS THE CAMERAS ROLLED and built his films from there, painstakingly reworking gags and plotlines, shuffling cast members and often rebuilding sets to suit his developing ideas. Much of the unused footage (I'm guessing it was a ratio of 100 outtakes to 1 keeper per scene...) was preserved in spite of Chaplin's wish to have it all destroyed. These shows present it all with excellent commentary, read by James Mason, to keep track of where we are in the formation of each project.

It is better than examining the notebooks of a great writer or the sketches of a master; it's more like watching Beethoven sit at the piano trying out ideas. ("Dun-Dun-dadeeDAaaa... nope... Dun Dun dee Dun DA-Deeeee... nah... Dun-Dun-Dun Daaaah! Could be... hmmm..." But it's even better, because you can see it all before you! It's more like watching Ludwig work out ideas with the FULL ORCHESTRA! Only the various bootlegs of SMILE approach the excitement of this stuff. Words don't do it justice. I see that it's available on eBay for peanuts. Get a copy, I implore you.

Especially interesting to see are the entire sequences Chaplin perfected, then discarded. The discipline required is mind-boggling to someone like me, delighted with whatever feeble ideas I can squeeze out of my imagination: "Say! that doesn't suck too much! I'll keep it!" Cassavetes had that, too. On the Criterion set there's a deleted 15-minute opening sequence from "Faces" that any director would be justly proud of crafting. Not John; he was after bigger game. And Chaplin... He just lived in Geniusland. Here's the closest, clearest glimpse of that place most of us will ever get.