Envoi
∙ 327 ∙ envoi ira Jaffe ■ Gus Blaisdell told me about this book in August 2003, a month before he died. We were having coffee in a Nob Hill restaurant near the University of New Mexico, where he had been teaching courses in film criticism and theory for nearly a quarter century. Approaching his sixty-eighth birthday (he was to die just four days shy of it), he seemed at once buoyed and saddened by the prospect of publishing a collection of his writings. While the book might yield, he said, fifteen minutes of celebrity as posited by Andy Warhol, the fleeting fame would arrive too late to suit Gus. His remark surprised me, for while Gus appreciated having famous friends, he usually seemed uninterested in wider notoriety for himself. Original thinking and writing, not their outcome in fame or ignominy, were his priority. Moreover, his engagement in the arts, literature, philosophy, history, mathematics, and other disciplines—all of which he invoked in his teaching, writing, and conversation—generally kept him vibrant and upbeat. Plus, he was a brilliant, tireless talker, with a withering wit and unabashed dramatic gifts, who deftly veered into diverse dialects, languages, physical gestures, and impersonations to comically advance his points. One evening I observed him unleash a comic torrent that left the hostess of a small dinner party in honor of a world-famous philosopher peeing her pants and wailing with laughter. A peerless performer as well as a gamboling polymath, he was clearly a star in my view. Why, then, his dispirited reaction to the proposed publication? Perhaps he was concerned that revisiting his writings so as to prepare this book would prove painful. Rather than reveling in the act of writing much as he let himself go when performing live for an audience, he was beset by standards he derived from towering figures (such as Emerson, Thoreau, 328 ∙ envoi Freud, and Plato, no less) whose books he kept by his side. Although he turned out much fine work, criticism he mounted against his writing could keep him from completing essays and other projects even after years of toil. His works in progress might wilt under his glare—even vanish; he’d misfile or otherwise “lose” them. After his death, friends and family had difficulty locating some of them, discovering only fragments stashed in boxes of yellowing folders or in extensive notes logged into his computer’s hard drive. That the authors and artists he revered might disarm as well as inspire him, might stifle and displace his voice and keep him from writing, was of unremitting interest to him. He addresses this concern within the first sentences of “Still Moving,” a 1992 essay he composed at the behest of his old friend, photographer Lewis Baltz. Gus acknowledges at the outset both Baltz and Stanley Cavell, the philosopher Gus took to heart more than he did any other living thinker and writer: “Baltz and Cavell are coeval in my experience.Whenever one of them asks me to write or think the other comes immediately to mind. Four may be intimately involved when two go to bed. Only three are necessary to confuse happily what issues as writing. Can the question of what is mine not arise? Can originality not be stifled if the eyes of one and the voice of the other possess the hand of the third?” Gus opens his next paragraph by recalling that he concluded “Skeptical Landscapes,” his essay about Baltz’s photographs in the book Park City (1980), not with his own words but with Cavell’s in The World Viewed (1971) regarding the ending of Antonioni’s Eclipse (1962): “ . . . instinct is estranged . . . birds droop at noon . . . strange gods are readied.” Then Gus concludes this paragraph in “Still Moving” by observing that he allowed Cavell’s “three clauses” about Antonioni’s film to “eclipse anything more that I might have to say, letting his words still mine—the silence of the pen lifting from the page.” Gus further explains his falling back on Cavell in “Skeptical Landscapes” as follows: “I wanted Cavell’s good words for Baltz’s good work and I could find no better words in myself. I still cannot find better ones. . . .” These observations in “Still Moving” perhaps point to key aspects of Gus’s life—and, in a way, of his death. The title bears on the main subject Gus taught for twenty-five years, since nondigital cinema consists of a succession of still photographs, each of which...
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