This March, in like a tiger. My sister called me a tiger in a recent blog comment, and this morning at work while at eye level with a teapot rapidly filling with boiling hot water, flying droplets striking my face like tiny daggers, I was named a tiger again. The Raising of Tigris Lazaros. This evening an event of stochastic symmetry transpired. After hours of work on the digital painting of Roly Poly and my foot, I rented the 1958 film, “The Horse’s Mouth,” from the Criterion Collection, the story of the vulgar artist Gully Jimson, who tricks millionaires into leaving him alone for six weeks in their apartment, where he paints a mural of a fierce tiger and many multi-colored feet.
Sir Alec Guinness adapted the screenplay from Joyce Cary’s book and stars in the film. Its his personal project. The story of the Horse’s Mouth is about how art affects the world around the artist, and works upon the people in his life. As human beings, we are all seduced by creation and destruction. “I’ll show you how to understand a painting,” says Gulley Jimson. “Don’t look at it. Feel it with your eyes. Feel the shapes in the flat, like patterns. Then feel it in the round. Feel all the flaws and sharp edges, the lights and the shades, the cools and the warms. Now feel the chair, the bathtub, the woman. Not any old tub or woman. But the tub of tubs and the woman of women.”
Gully Jimson to his young follower, Nosey: “You really want to be useful, Nosey? Then, get me a tiger.” Now talking to the painting: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame they fearful symmetry? Not mine! Did he smile, his work to see, did he who make the lamb, make thee? Apparently! We should have got something live, from the zoo!”
Nosey: “I like it Mr. Jimson.”
Gully: “You like meringues, cream puffs, and candy floss. I’m sorry. I should have learned by now its easy to offend the faith of the little ones.”
Nosey: “You didn’t offend me, Mr. Jimson. Perhaps I’m not the little one you imagine. I’ve got eyes in my head and I like your tiger.”
Gully: “The trouble with you is you’re an enthusiast, like my dad. He’d stop painting a picture of a girl on a swing and go right on to the shine of a rose thorn, and the pollen in a lily, and then lacquer it. Me, I like starting, but I don’t like going on. For me, the tiger is dead. And the rest is a blank.”
Nosey: “What do you see in the blank, Mr. Jimson?”
Gully: “A kind of colored music in the mind. A glass green Lazarus, stiff as an ice man. My mother bore me in the southern wild and I am black… how does it go on? Where’s your education?”
Nosey: “When I from black and he from white cloud free.”
Gully: “Freedom, that’s it! Freedom from paint brushes. From fear of yourself. Freedom to do or not to do. Freedom to come and go, as your please. Black, white, yellow… black.”
If this film is ever remade (and I don’t think it needs to be, but these days every film gets remade) I nominate Tom Waits for the lead role.
3rdarm. Your taste in films and all things is dense, immense, ever-expanding. 3rdarm, 3rdarm, burning bright. Like a tiger in the night!