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One of my favorite authors is Ursula K. LeGuin. She wrote the following. “I talk about gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”

One of my favorite filmmakers, Werner Herzog, wrote “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can only be reached through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

One of Pete’s students, Jim Aleski, a film major who also ran EIV News at one point — one of those crazy Emersonians who actually “got” this school and tried to do everything, and succeeded (from my POV) — had this to say,

“Pete was an incredible storyteller. He’d tie up a hallway or sidewalk just because he’d be talking about something and people would just gather around// He was often 100% full of shit. Some people couldn’t stand him for that, but // He was a filmmaker and teacher of future filmmakers — quite literally a professional storyteller.”

Pete was a storyteller. But now that he has passed he can’t spin his own stories anymore, that falls to us. That’s going to involve a little bit of leeway in what we consider truth. None of us is Pete, we can’t speak FOR him and possibly we can’t even truly apprehend him. I was pretty close to him and am wary of pretending of I have a true grasp of the gestalt man. I witnessed pieces. So did all of you. Truly knowing any one person is a task for God, and I am an atheist.

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"I love you more than word can wield the matter"

I video-taped a performance of King Lear that Emerson put on when I was attending. We shot it a couple of times in dress rehearsals. Multi-cam to tape. 2 cameras on sticks and 1 lockdown WS center-center.  And then I edited it together in my spare time for several weeks. One my favorite lines and dialogues is by faithless daughter Goneril when goaded by her father to publicly praise him, without forewarning, under threat of getting a shittier division of his property vs. her two sisters.

Taken from a Yale University Press version that belonged to my grandfather in-law:

"I love you more than word can wield the matter:

Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;

Beyond what can be valu'd, rich or rare:

No less than life with grace, health, beauty, honor;

As much as child e'er lov'd or father found;

Beyond all manner of so much I love you."

I don't know much about actual analysis of Billy S, but I love it because Goneril (by way of Billy) is doing what all artists do: lie in order to try to reveal a deeper truth. I mean, Goneril is straight up lying. And her sister, Cordelia, the good one, balks at the opportunity to also be full of shit. But underneath Goneril's hyperbole *is* a deeper truth.

Words won't wield the matter. And even if our love for others can't surmount space, time and the greatest gravity well of all: our own self-concern with numero uno, ourselves -- well sometimes the place where love exists does actually transcend the container (us) we seem to hold it in.

And also, messy life makes love too dynamic, complicated by all sorts of other emotions and experiences (both fraught and ecstatic and things in between) to be bound or even honored properly by mere words. And yet we can construct daisy chains of words to float emotional kites that capture some essence of a thing without belaboring over whether justice (the thing itself, the gestalt, the ineffable) is served.

A true map of love would be simply a copy of the thing itself. It would have to be 1:1 in order to be "true." That would be an unwieldy map. And yet we can fold up a map of a forest path we intend to walk and not be disillusioned that the map is somehow inadequate to the task of describing the mountain, the mountain it reduces to an abstraction of lines and shapes. It serves a limited purpose. And even a casual walk in a beautiful forest is not appreciating the forest itself, it's just skimming it for a while from a very limited vantage.

Words do not wield the matter, Beyond what can be valued, beyond all manner of so much I love you.

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Random thought: Peter's time at Emerson was a 3rd Act. Do the math. He was about 49 when he started teaching part time and coaching. He was essentially done with parenting his own "kids" as full dependents and would no longer be an independent film-maker himself. Sure, he had taught Film in the early 70s at BU, but being a professor at Emerson was a thorough reconception of his life and career trajectory.

If Pete had an impact on your life by way of his time at Emerson, consider that teaching was a recalibration. Partially the dissolution of his marriage caused this. He could no longer rely on my mother to be the principal bread-winner, which was the anchor which allowed him to be an independent maker with all the attendant peaks and troughs that came with that: financial and creative.

No rock-wife = the necessity to manufacture a steady income.

Corporate video was a transitional bandage, one I think he did not much relish.

Pete liked to self-analyze. He would chart his past, present, and future and question it. He considered his life (through one set of analytic filters) to have been a series of summits and troughs and he sometimes actively wondered if he was "done" with the summits or if he could discover a new incarnation.

Most (but not all of you) to the degree you feel some connection to Pete, had that experience because he was willing to try to recreate himself. (I'm not dismissing his time at BU, I just don't have much access to it. I perceive it as a kind of journeymen phase to his film-making.) But if we are to argue it, it is with his work at Emerson, after film, that he acquired some sort of Mastery which synthesized various disciplines from apprentice levels to lay the base(s) for being a mentor: education, film, philosophy, psychology, army, coaching and his myriad, endless, omnivorous dabbling in other stuff.

We all contain this possibility.

Life can sometimes feel constrictive, like our potential for doing and being have become constrained by certain inescapable limits or necessities. And none of those things can simply be shrugged off with a few inspirational sentences that fail to grapple with Your Actual Particulars. But. Consider the case of Pete, who made his most meaningful contributions to the world after he was 50. He had to find that path, I remember him struggling to find it. It wasn't inevitable.