Light and simplicity of Jonas Mekas

In invisible catalogue of language there is always a sentence, which speaks our innermost sense. One singular gathering of words which is our closest approximation, day by day we try to uncover. Neither biography summarized, nor personal ethos illustrated, but experience of life miniaturized in language. Let us imagine, for a while, the registration book for the infinite number of beings, where every incorporeal substance would be marked by one concrete sentence with the memory about the one engraved in it. 23rd January 2019 Jonas Mekas passed away and what would have been his place in language as the sentence in this hypothetical book if not the passage from Psalms: “The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.”

Light and simplicity were Mekas’ two principal hypostasis indeed. There was something angelic in this man and therefore theological references are not coincidental. His natural pallet of light, mainly composed with crystalline blue and softly flowing yellow plainly generates atmospheric honesty of image, the sense of immemorial kinship with it. “You go outside, look at the sun, then you return home and you can’t work, you are impregnated with light - -” His images, even in the most ordinary sequences, are following the pure intuition of light, which in between frames becomes the sovereign point of direction for camera eye.

But how to tame the light, that is how to trace its splendid mystery till the mechanism of technical device? While being devoid of all types of external instances, in the abstraction of pure thought, one with easiness feels the reality of living light, the question is how to transpose this, the most intimate of all feelings through camera lenses?

Mekas’ response to this question, which in fact is one of the basic conundrums of practical aesthetics, seems to be programmatic - “I do not make films. I just film. I am obsessed with filming. I am really a filmer...”

With Mekas’ cinematic experimentation, film becomes the visualized ornament for phenomenological nakedness of eyes - “Why do I have to make films when I can just film!” To film for Mekas means to emancipate the image from various types of specifications, desire to fixate “images with no purpose”, “just images”, where no outer intermediation is able to corrupt the ecstatic intuition of light, no script with its conventional demands for storytelling, no project with its preordered structures of materialization. Only the blink of spontaneity felt in light can give understanding to the simple.

“... I looked at the apple, I thought of my friend, Leo, Valery, Rilke...”

Mekas’ unique simplicity grows up from life’s never-ending streams of spontaneity. Vertiginous camera becomes the organic part of the body, which aims neither to document reality nor to objectify it. The camera just records the life - “The ecstasy of filming, just filming life around me, what I see, to what I react, to what my fingers, my eyes react”. The man of the minute (as he once called himself) fantastically dissolves in the river of time, in the blossoming nothingness, where the spontaneous intuition of living light gives voice to the simple.

“Keep looking for things, in places, where there is nothing.”

In harmony with old wisdom he studies the monad and understands the archangel. What matters are eyes that see, mind that perceives, experience that senses, the question of formalization is always secondary. The grace of nothing, understood in accordance with Mekas’ philosophy only perfects the trajectory for the act of leaping into oneself, it never deprives us of anything but only rewards with genuine simplicity, with this dream of art in every epoch, when fully recorded life erases the past, when the fragment below with the sense of good sentimentality for an instant prevails in the order of universe:

“As I was watching you that moment, I thought there can’t be anything more beautiful or more important on this earth, between heaven and earth, as you were there one with them, one with heaven and earth, giving life, giving life to Oona. I admired you that moment and I knew that you were completely somewhere else, somewhere else where I could never be, something I could never totally understand. The beauty of the moment, that moment, was beyond any words.” (As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty; Voice-over from chapter VI).

The quotes used in the text are voice-over and written fragments from films by Jonas Mekas.