What Doesn'T Happen And Uncertainty Poem by gershon hepner

What Doesn'T Happen And Uncertainty



Life’s as much about
what doesn’t happen as what does,
just as what we doubt
provides, more than belief, the buzz
that keeps us on our toes.
Disbelief’s the way to reach
a goal God won’t oppose,
though not one that the preachers teach,
because what hasn’t yet
occurred to us may have occurred
to Him, far less upset
by doubt than by what is absurd.
It wastes time to observe
fresh pain by watching while it dries,
but doubt helps to preserve
uncertainty, which never lies.


Inspired by Dave Kehr’s obituary of Eric Rohmer, NYT, January 12,2010 (“Eric Rohmer, a Leading Filmmaker of the French New Wave, Dies at 89) :
Eric Rohmer, the French critic and filmmaker who was one of the founding figures of the French New Wave and the director of more than 50 films, including the Oscar-nominated “My Night at Maud’s, ” died on Monday in Paris. He was 89. His producer, Margaret Menegoz, confirmed his death, which took place at a Paris hospital, but provided no other details. Aesthetically, Mr. Rohmer was perhaps the most conservative member of the New Wave, the internationally influential movement led by a group of aggressive young critics, among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who parlayed their writings for publications like Arts and Les Cahiers du Cinéma into careers as filmmakers beginning in the late 1950s. A former novelist and teacher of French and German literature, Mr. Rohmer emphasized the spoken and written word in his films at a time when tastes — thanks in no small part to his own pioneering writing on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks — had begun to shift from literary adaptations to genre films grounded in strong visual styles. In a statement Monday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said of Mr. Rohmer, “Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the ‘Rohmer’ style, which will outlive him.” Mr. Rohmer’s most famous film in America remains “My Night at Maud’s, ” a 1969 black-and-white feature set in the grim industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. It tells the story of a shy young engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who passes a snowbound evening in the home of his best friend’s lover, an attractive, free-thinking divorcée (Françoise Fabian) . The conversation, filmed by Mr. Rohmer in a series of unobtrusively composed long takes, covers philosophy, religion and morality, and while the flow of words takes on a distinctly seductive subtext at times, the encounter ends without a physical consummation. But the pair form a bond that movingly re-emerges five years later, when they meet again in a brief postscript that closes the film. “My Night at Maud’s” was the third title in his “Six Moral Tales, ” a series of films that Mr. Rohmer began in 1963, though for economic reasons it was the fourth to be filmed. In each of the six films, a man who is married or committed to a woman finds himself tempted to stray but is ultimately able to resist. His films are as much about what does not happen between his characters as what does, a tendency that enchanted critics as often as it drove audience members to distraction. “I saw a Rohmer movie once, ” observes Gene Hackman’s character in Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” (1975) . “It was kind of like watching paint dry.”


1/12/10

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success