Reflections on the Avant-Garde Experience: A Meditation on Phil Solomon's the Secret Garden (2003)

I Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. - Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet (translated by Stephen Mitchell) II The Secret Garden has long been one of my favorite films; complex and generative, it casts it seeds into the minds of its viewers, where they freely grow into flowers and trees subtly changed by their new environment. But writing about it risks violating Rilke's truth: I don't want to tame the garden or fix it in place. Let us, instead, think more openly about resonance, playing with the tracers left dancing in the mind when the film ends-a gift of return, a happy acknowledgement of joy. III In renaissance fashion, gardens perfect the world. Behind the safety of their walls, they nourish and open the soul to a communion with nature that becomes communion with art. Solomon's film creates this generative environment-images of trees ablaze with perilous light, so flooded with creative power that it becomes a challenge: see with me or lose yourself in the realm of the mundane. The Secret Garden demands that kind of truth, that trust in the quality of one's own artist's eye. It never compromises. We never enter Solomon's garden completely, and in this way it remains always secret, never ours to own. Instead, we see mere glimpses, and we're left wondering and grasping for meaning. We can see through the gateway into the garden, but are gently bidden not to fully enter. What a wonderful metaphor for the art-making process! Bidden to look but not to own, to see and enjoy but not to fully understand. It denies even the semblance of comprehension. And in this way the avant-garde speaks honestly about the tenuous possibility of understanding, asking us instead to plant parallel gardens, which is what this essay is meant to be, a parallel set of ideas in a different medium, words in a chance encounter and a transformative tarrying. Each viewing of a film like The Secret Garden asks for this kind of very powerful, creative act of sharing. Though one can, of course, simply look at the film and allow it to penetrate the mind, one can't really walk in a garden in passivity and hope to find rest. Gardens are driven by life and death forces that belie their quietude and stillness, so that they seem to imply the peace of perfect balance between motion and stillness, life in death, the essence of film. I never stop wondering at the little miracle of cinematic motion that springs into being in the mind in a room essentially filled with darkness. Film is a metaphor for life itself, a fragile grasping for meaning before the flickering ends. The world runs in time, flashes always into the future so fast that we have to race to keep up, so our perceptions fail. They operate slightly in the past, so that what we see is always older than what is. Photography attempts to deny this whirlwind, to capture moments of light and shadow, moments of fleeting pastness now still in the general outward motion of time. It has the fragility of the always passing, a constant sense of the retrospective that invades the whole process of the making of photographic and also cinematic art. In the art of looking we seek to preserve, we separate ourselves from the moment of being, and so become, automatically, those who seek a false stillness in the motion of life through our art. This imparts an intensity to the gaze that desperately reduces the motion of the world, holding certain things while forced to let others drift away into oblivion, creating a slice of reality, and a fragile sense of wholeness as well, much like the renaissance garden that seeks to encapsulate and refine the world. …