Keaton

 

Buster is equally capable of expressing complacent contentment. A realm of continual improvisation. Unexpected leaps. A realm of continual education. Fantastic structures and machines have the stark authenticity of the handmade. Rigour and purposefulness. Buster is equally capable of expressing inhibited longing. Imaginative agility. He turns every action into the most elegant possible ideogram. Whether by means of intricately conceived machinery or the barest of gestures. No matter how impossible the attempt. Shades of awe and amazement reliably awaken. Buster is equally capable of expressing controlled panic. This comedy of catastrophe. He undergoes catastrophes and dodges extreme risks by a hair with a grace positively angelic. As if he had done nothing at all. His trajectory and vicissitudes. That risk of harm – of annihilation – continues to play out. Buster is equally capable of expressing dawning awareness. The clear-eyed genius of a very serious child. Inventing new and undreamt of uses for common objects. He worked things out in his head. Buster sits up, jumps on the chair he is sitting in and onto the table, from which he vaults over his adversary’s head and flies through a narrow open transom over the locked door. Heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado. Not with bravado but with a demeanour that could pass for self-effacement. He is actually in great peril. Missing death by inches. Buster is equally capable of expressing unspoken sorrow. Incarnated a superior but detached intelligence. All that information alleviates somewhat the sense of pain attached to loss of independence. He plays all the parts and all the members of the audience. Neither frozen nor funereal. Nor blank nor immobile nor masklike. The most quintessentially silent. At times almost otherworldly beauty. Buster is equally capable of expressing resigned acceptance. He learnt how not to get hurt, or how not to make too much of it if he did. When it’s done, it’s done. Buster is equally capable of expressing the supremely focused attention of the scientist on the brink of a discovery. Geometric abstraction. Not only plausible but inevitable. He dives forward into a small valise held open by his assistant and is instantly and inexplicably swallowed up. 

Note to readers: Found poem using words from a review ‘Keep Your Eye on the Kid’ by Geoffrey O’Brien of two new books about Buster Keaton, published in The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2022, pages 49-51.