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When she left, sure the sun was shining, sure the boxman in his truck had forgotten to brake at that dangerous intersection, sure the clouds had cleared two months ago over my mother’s house which made her think there was an explosion and the astronauts’ urine tank had cracked.

Yes, I’d heard rumors, rumors that she would return; that she couldn’t stay away; I’d heard rumors on the molecules the wind brings in from the sea, where, if you listen closely, you can make out the whispers of sailors as they lean to their fellows and say, “I have a child who’s nine years old. ????????????.”

The dogs always bark at inopportune times. Remember when we hid, that first kiss under the porch and Bengi crawled under and started his yapping, drawing the neighbors and the police? The day we fell in love.

She departed. She said, “That first day I left so long ago, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. When we were in Anchorage filming cracks in the earth, steam, and how the birds were drawn there, I remembered that other camera, the one behind the view finder or the eye nipple. Your eye,” she said, “I remembered how you stirred the soup, how you said, ‘The moon’s never as full of light as you’d think’ and so I was impressed by your mysteries.'”

“Look,” I said, “tomorrow’s a new day. And what I said, I didn’t mean. But I’ll need reminding.”

She said, “I was hoping it would work out.”

“But it’s morning,” I said. “Two days isn’t enough.”

“I have to be in Argentina in two days,” she said. “The cracks have appeared there too and the birds are coming. It’s just not what I thought it would be. With you.”

“Then you think too much,” I said.

And she laughed.

And I made coffee. I took it into the sun, got comfortable, and wondered if I were a character and this were drama, what would I write, how would I place things, and where would I start? Would I make her larger than what she is or was; would the clouds be red or black; would I have her go to Argentina; would I call, buy a ticket, and be on a plane tomorrow?

The road ahead does indeed look like more than a bowl of morning cereal or something dead and furry you saw the other day on the shoulder or a red kite jerking against a cool blue sky.

It isn’t the curves, the crazy angles of the cable wires, those few drops that run up the wind shield to disappear into the sky. It isn’t yesterday’s argument that ended in the dark or crawled under the purring refrigerator to sleep, the dull thrum of tire rubber, the little click clicks of pebbles leaping at the undercarriage, the anonymous eyes that see you.

You’d heard someone ask for ice cream; you’d heard someone ask about what moves through the forest at night, what doesn’t. And how do oranges taste under water? You close your eyes; you try to imagine how the road might look outside your eyelids; you try to convince yourself that you know how to drive a straight line; you try to imagine what it must feel like to fly into the cool weather clouds you remember, the ones with their shredding edges that drifted over the mountains like whales.

You imagine the boy behind you, sleeping maybe, thirsty, dreaming of those worlds he draws onto paper. You don’t know what will appear when you open your eyes; you don;t know how the world will change. So you keep them shut, locked tight. And hope you remember the way back.

This is what you wish for: that years later you might tell him. “That day we turned back. Do you remember it? I drove you home in the dark.” You might ask: “What did you see when you opened your eyes?”

The cinematic form is a wonder. With this form an artist can make several events or activities appear to be happening at the same time.

Let’s examine this notion.

Simultaneity is a perceived fact of every day life. We can prove this by considering single events in space and time, such as the action of stopping at a red light. Some significant aspects of this phenomenon are worthy of note. Stopping at a red light assumes a red light. It also assumes the existence of an actor who will be doing the stopping. It doesn’t necessarily involve the existence of other people in their cars. In any event, we have the event of stopping an automobile at a red light. Let’s add a few time factors. The light has gone from green, to yellow, to red, perhaps, which is a graphic image. As it turns red, the driver applies pressure to the brake and stops, presumably before the light goes green. Let’s also assume that the driver approached an intersection several hundred yards away and hits the hundred yard mark just as the light goes red. The law of simultaneity would assert that the light turned red at the same time that the car hit the one hundred yard mark. This, therefore, is a simultaneous occurrence. But it’s not a very dramatic example.

Let’s write one (of course, by let’s I mean Steve Ersinghaus as writer and Steve Ersinghaus as mind, which may or may not be simultaneous phenomena). A more dramatic situation would call for a graduation ceremony where any number of people are moving through time simultaneously and in concert, each moving according to their own inclinations, and each restricted by or adhering to the rules of the ceremony. These rules involve a certain kind of dress, performance, spatial positioning, symbols, gesture, roles, sequences, and narrative in the form of the completion or “journey” home of rites of passage.

Within the space of the ceremony, which is a space of exclusion, simultaneity would imply a state of chaos, which would appear to be a paradox. A closer look at the ceremony bears out the chaos of the simultaneous and its potential horror: in one case, a man contemplates the art of flowers and their similarity to a crushed and wrinkled paper napkin, which is a metaphor for a world outside the boundary of the ceremony thus in a space of exclusion. In another case, a man is observing a fascinating collection of binary code flickering in the palm of his hand. In another case, a woman is addressing an audience, thanking them for their attention, hard work, and dedication. Case four may be described as the ambient audience, which is a part of the setting, the background for these three strange cases.

These three cases (two captured optically, the other captured aurally) may be simultaneous. (Case four is a river, a container.) They may have no relation other than the fact that they’re happening at the same moment but cannot be experienced through the human senses as such, as one may crush and observe a napkin, turn to and identify a seated neighbor, and hear voices but not all three at once. In film they are simultaneous and juxtaposed, edited into meaning; dare I say more real than reality.

The digital field, the metaphor of the flower, the utterance of thank you: what do they signal? That some unknown end is coming (war, marriage, beaches silvered with the bodies of countless dead fish, a faulty circuit, a cellphone argument, disastrous inattention, a paused automobile, a red light.

“I really liked the movie,” the man said.

“I liked that it was about trees,” the woman said.

“But it wasn’t about trees,” he said. “It was about the end of the world.”

“It was about trees,” she said.

“It wasn’t about trees. That’s like saying the day is about sun when everyone knows that days are more complicated than just the sun.”

“In that film trees were falling everywhere. You just didn’t see them fall,” she said.

“It’s maddening that you say that. You always say that,” he said.

“You always say that every movie is about the end of the world. Which means that you’re either confused or viewing the same film over and over or think you’re seeing the same film over and over. For the life of me, I don’t know what might be worse. That’s maddening.”

“You always say that the movie is about trees. No matter the movie. Where are we by the way?”

“Untrue,” she said. “Last week we saw a movie about frogs. I never said that movie was about trees.”

“And yet the movie was filled with trees,” he said. “If I said that something was about this or that, then this or that would have to be related in some fashion to the score or the story or the setting. I could say that the wind moves the trees or that the trees are pissed off and that’s why they’re shaking. But it would make no sense.”

“Just because the wind is moving the trees doesn’t mean that the trees are not also angry,” she said. “If the trees somehow know that their fellows are being killed off by butternut blight, then I would assume they have a right to be angry.”

“That makes no sense,” he said. “The wind isn’t even blowing.”

“Because it would be nonsense,” she said. “But the movie we saw was about trees. They were falling throughout. You just didn’t see them. It was too fast, too subtle. You had to pay attention. Like reading Saint Augustine or Le Petit Prince in Japanese. There’s a certain art to the identification and meaning of trees, a sort of dendrological scansion, a picking through the confusion of color, scene, and dialogue. I assure you that if you watched that same film at double the speed you’d conclude with me.”

“Look at her. See how she looks at us. Or him. What’s he saying, by the way? In any event, if I said that that cloud looked like a switchblade and when you looked up to see what I see and the switchblade had turned into a cow, then how could you agree with me. It’s the same with how you read a film.”

“A film isn’t a cloud. That’s your first mistake. You just aren’t the subtle kind. It’s true. There’s nothing subtle about you. It’s unfortunate but true. The art of dendrological scansion eludes you.”

The woman with the red hat checked her phone. A text message read: “I got your message.”

She walked into the shadows. She reached high for color. She drew a branch down, plucked an orange then another orange and then another orange and put them into her purse, one by one.

I got your message.

The street lights passed to the beat of the road’s surface, which was disfigured, rough but rhythmic. She played the voice mail without taking her eyes from the road: “. . . I was kinda surprised . . . ” The green signs were drawn small, very small, to large, very large, just as they slipped out of view of the wind shield. Before rain came.

I was kinda surprised.

She reached into the shadows with her shears and snipped at a stem slightly above a large thorn. When she did so, when it fell, evening broke through the new gap and printed a flower on the gravel nearby.

“Whatever you want, I guess that’ll be alright with me,” he said. “I’ll talk to you.”

I’ll talk to you.
I’ll talk to you.
I’ll talk to you.

The phone slipped from the front of the seat to the gap, coming to rest beside the oranges wobbling there to the road’s rhythm. The heated daylight passed across the dials, gleamed on the metal shifter, turned wood into chrome. She turned the brim down on her red hat for protection. She followed the curve of the road into the morning sun.

“I got your message,” she said.

When I watch a green dot and am asked to listen for 45 seconds, I have 45 seconds of silence.

In that silence I imagine traveling forward or away.

And in that silence come a deck of characters: Wally, Geronimo, someone named Jean, who had just leapt out of a plane.

I also think of Karsai and his jirgas, Netanyahu and what he might know or not know, as Augustus might not have known the whereabouts of Ovid on any particular day and may not have cared.

I think of Hayward and what he must be thinking. Dreaming of silly tar balls, fish eyes glowing like tarnish in the brown, a poetic thought, maybe, a sunset, a single person standing against it watching the sun go down on the last beach of our time.

I think about my hands and how small they are and useless and how deep the sea is in places and how little I really know.

My wife, whose car I hear in the drive way, how this is a lonely sound.

And then the 45th second comes and the world crashes back, like a cat appearing suddenly and slipping across the hardwood and smacking against the door, only to right himself. Saunter off.

The line “this point in space” in John Timmon’s short film titled Perspective #2 reminds me of another by Robert Frost.

It goes: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (1).

I don’t know why, but let’s trace the logic anyway.

This is the first line of Frost’s famous poem, Mending Wall. What’s interesting about this line is the “placement” or “arrangement” of the second and third words, which forms an inversion of syntactical expectation. Grammatically, the line wants to read (and therefore become prose): “There is something that doesn’t love a wall.” But Frost “the poet” places “Something” before the pronoun and the to be verb, breaking what we call natural word order, introducing with this play on syntax the theme of ________. But also disorder–as we don’t know from the first line what “Something” means. In reading poetry we can make a poem mean something by considering not just how a poet uses language, the dictive element in a poem, but the arrangement of those elements. Hence, we can conclude that “placement,” the thinking or action that goes into an object’s positioning, carries with it the potential for meaning.

We could trace this thinking to a logical conclusion and claim that poetry is an earthquake.

But that’s not difficult to understand. What is somewhat more interesting is that points in space are strange creatures. A point in mathematics, for example, while indicated with a dot or a series of numbers, is not a dot at all but a “place” in time. We know that time is intimately related to “space.” A line, likewise, is neither a line nor the outer most surface of the tip of a pencil. A line, like a point, is a metaphor.

We could follow this logic all the way to another claim and claim that nouns are always other nouns hidden.

Timmon’s camera follows a certain track of lines (which is another noun hidden). Each of these lines or vectors stops at a point and then follows another line to another point or moment, completing its movement at a place called 35 seconds. This stop of time is defined by trees, a rail, a coffee cup, or by a composition of colors distant and nearby: green, gray, and deep blue. But we would never tell an acquaintance when he asks “Where were you when the world stopped moving?” that we were “Watching green, watching gray, watching deep blue” as these phenomena are “out of expectation.”

He might inquire further: “What was green, what was gray, what was deep blue?”

And we would play with him, following a certain logic. We would say “earthquake” and walk away.

He might think to himself, as he watches the line of my travel into the phenomenon of perspective: “That speaker, though standing not two feet from me moments ago, was miles away. He was both near and far; he’s like a coffee cup, whose surface is infinite. He is both eye and Yes.”

P.S.
In my knowledge, the first use of perspective as a literary device is spoken by Edgar to Gloucester in King Lear. Edgar is trying to convince Gloucester that they are at edge of a cliff in this case. Edgar says:

Come on, sir; here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles.

A complex image, indeed. But I wonder if there are other or earlier examples of perspective used to indicate distance relationships in literary works? Tweet using #100Days2010 if you have examples.

Let’s imagine a scene. This scene could easily be re-imagined as a poem, a painting, a photograph, it could be puzzle piece in a larger framework, such as an epic, a novel, or a long film.

The weather is unsettled. At random intervals the wind grabs at the trees and lets them go, leaving heavy tree branches to hang and the flowers in the window beds waiting for the sun to appear through the clouds and blind them.

There is a significant and abstract relationship in this scene: inside and outside: one from two abstractions. This relationship could easily develop into a theme. This theme could describe sanity, madness, loneliness, an impulse to violence, for if inside and outside are manifest (as in the relationship between civil behavior and wildness, the natural world and the world of cities), then some border, some intervening or partitioning force has to be drawn.

We need devices. Two people in this instance or four. A woman is on the inside, physically placed in an apartment, a house, a castle, a hut. Why is she “inside?” This might be obvious. She comes home from work and closes the door. She’s weary from shopping, travel, court, performing surgery; she’s been visiting an elderly woman who’s life weighs like fragile eggs in her small white hands. When the woman opens her hands, the young woman closes hers around them, and says, “Walk with me” or “Tell me what you did yesterday” or “Why won’t you sit?”

Once home, she closes the door. It’s been a long day and the weather is unsettled and yet more days are coming, days she cannot count. She takes a shower, dries, wraps herself in a comfortable robe and makes hot chocolate. But even though the day is unsettled, it’s hot, humid maybe, so she changes her mind about the chocolate and pours a cold glass of white wine, and when she sits on the couch with the wine and the robe, she remembers a time when she heard the door bell ring of the house where she grew up. The memory is abrupt and its clarity is like an image in a mirror. She remembers her mother saying, “Could you see who that is?” as her mother was on that side of the house furthest from the front door yet near enough to call out instructions and still be heard.

The doorbell was insistent. This is what she remembers. The finger depressed the button to a strange beat, short rings one after the other. The finger pressed the button, let go, depressed again, then let off. This action increased in rapidity. Some jeopardy on the outside was approaching, some terrible monster, and so whomever rang the door bell did so with insistent repetition, saying, You will open, you will let me in; it’s important. This is what the woman remembers. As she approached (6 years old, 8 years old?) the door, she felt that insistence. The loudness of the buzzer, the numerous times the button had been depressed and was still being depressed–this made her aware of the thickness of the door, the ominousness of the silhouette in the sidelight made by the person who wanted this door opened and opened quickly. She remembered putting her hand to the door nob and turning, turning slowly. She opened the door to a man whose identity is still a mystery. This is what she remembers. She remembers her mother approaching quickly, drying her hands with a dishtowel, saying, “Oh, it’s you. I forgot you were coming.”

The wine is good and crisp. The weather outside is unsettled. The evening sun struggles grayly at the windows. It strikes her as odd that she’d never inquired about the man who’d come to call that day, had never asked about the transaction that had followed, must’ve followed after her mother told her to go to the kitchen. She remembers solid shapes, height and great width, a face that has no name and that neither smiled nor said hello, and as far as she can remember this memory is fresh, new to her, a new element of plot, but real. The memory has come, a memory that has neither aftermath nor preposition. It is merely a ringing, unutterable fear, and an opening.

She turns to the front door and assays the evening pressed at the illuminated sidelight. She feels a brief impulse to go there and look outside. Then she notices the blinking red light on her message machine.