Quotes I loved
I watched this tonight on Netflix and several ideas from the final performance stood out to me.
There's so many different reasons why people come to sit in front of me. Some of them, they're angry, some are curious, some of them just want to know what happened.
Some of them, they're really open, and you feel incredible pain. So many people have so much pain.
When they're sitting in front of me it's not about me anymore. Because very soon I'm just a mirror of their own self.
1:11:16
This is about the idea of projection which comes up several other times in the film. I've been reading "Iron John," by Robert Bly, a book about men where he describes the initiation process which includes a "descent" into a time where grief is expelled. He says men of the modern era - and it appears, women too - have incredible grief, and it seems for many people when they stared into Marina's compassionate face, their own sadness, pain, and/or grief, stared back at them. She was like a good therapist or a well practiced Buddhist, just accepting.
It was so strange today. I had this enormous pain and at the same time when announcement arrived I was thinking it was mistake. I was expecting another three hours. I was thinking it was short. I don't know.
There is pain but the pain is like a kind of keeping secret. The moment you really go through the door of pain you enter to another state of mind. This feeling of beauty and unconditional love and this feeling of there is no kind of borders between your body and environment. And you start having this incredible feeling of lightness and harmony with yourself. It's something become, like a holy. I can't explain. And that other state of mind is exactly what public start feeling; that something is different.
1:17
This sounds like a mystical experience, which is an otherworldly feeling of unending connection with self and the world, and the total acceptance and love for it all which that entails, because if there are "no kind of borders" between you, the other, or the world, how could you not love all of it, as opposed to just yourself? She even said she felt "lightness" which is what "enlightenment" refers to. It's amazing to me that she shared this with so many people. Her pain was really a gift both to herself and us. I am jealous that I didn't get to experience it.
It's so interesting that I could not do without table in the first two months. I need to have structure. I need to have the table and the table have to get there 'til I really go to the point that I actually don't need the table. And once this table is removed it's... so... much more direct.
1:21:24
At a conference I went to on culture recently, a native American woman and her husband spoke about “Native Communication.” They said that in these cultures it is important not to have anything in between you and the audience. There shouldn’t be a difference in physical height or levels, so no speakers on stages above an audience, and ideally everyone should be in a circle. That Marina finally felt this herself, that there shouldn’t be an object between her and her “audience,” really, her equal (because removing this blockade says I trust you well enough to not take advantage of my increased vulnerability, which obviously the audience trusted her enough to not feel threatened by her or else they wouldn’t have come at all).
Marina's connection with the audience comes out of this extraordinary lack that she feels, or she felt as a child. She desires to be loved, she desires to be needed.
Marina does have the experience that she needs the audience like air to breath. That's the gasoline she's running. She lives for her art, she lives for her audience.
When I met her I thought oh God she's in love with me and it took me a while to understand that she is in love with the world. So it's not personal. Don't take it personal. I'm in love with the world. I'm not in love only with you. I realized she is repeating this misunderstanding with every single person in the atrium.
I don't know if the public idolize me. It's their own thing how they project, but it's not my aim. It's like, if you come to a certain point of your career you're idolized, and you have the money, and you're famous, but this is not the aim of the art, it's just a side effect. It's like a B-product. <smiles> I love B-product.
1:27:40
Earlier in the film she talked about how her mother never kissed her and how strongly that affected her. More and more I am attracted to sharing myself, through writing, poetry, through even conversation, and I think it comes out of deep feeling of disconnection that I experienced from childhood through adolescence and into my late twenties. This idea about Marina resonates with me for that reason.
"She is in love with the world." That’s another manifestation mystical awareness. If I am aware of the sameness of everything then I have reverence for it all, but if I am speaking, interacting, and sharing my social and emotional experience with one person, then that total love is focused on what is prime in my view, namely, you.
Another application of projection is the idea that the audience projects their idolatry of themselves onto her. The public wants to idolize themself, but they don’t think they are worthy, so they project it onto someone else.
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