The filmmaker saw an amazing thing. On a busy road, she saw a chipmunk jump from the edge of a yard, race across the street, and leap into a crop of lilies that had yet to open their blossoms. Normally, this road, at this time of morning, evoked the loudness of commuting. At the moment, however, the air was quiet, which she found perfect.
Seconds later, another chipmunk followed the first chipmunk. It behaved exactly as the first chipmunk had behaved. It jumped from the yard, raced across the street (in the small-legged arcs of the movement of chipmunks), and leapt into the exact lilies and in the exact place of the first chipmunk. A few counts later, yet another chipmunk burst from the yard, bounded across the street, and hopped into the lilies behind the first and second chipmunk.
Three chipmunks, one after the first, the next after the second, all performing exactly the same movement, following the same line across the surface of the world, each entering the lilies in exactly the same place. In the distance, she saw a line of approaching cars. The lilies, however, remained as still as lilies stand in those brief, rare moments of the passage of chipmunks.
This rare observation, of course, brought to her imagination the notion of pens. Yes pens. In her studio, she had many pens and each pen was the same. They were simple pens, pens from a box. Inside each pen was a small spring. Each pen had the same spring but it was a different spring, made by machines. On the line of assembly, one pen follows a fellow pen in much the same way as the chipmunks had followed each other across the road. But, she knew, there was a significant difference. One image was a random image, rare, perhaps even impossible, while the second, the image of pens, was non random. The filmmaker considered a worker at the factory where the pens were constructed. This factory worker, a person who wore rubber gloves with small amounts of ink on the fingers, rarely questioned whether one pen would come out a machine minus a spring. The factory worker, drinking coffee in the break room, would perhaps never count all the pens that had, by some strange fluke or anomaly, been placed into their boxes missing their springs.
This thought, of course, brought to the filmmaker all the events happening in the world that she might never observe. Every moment on the planet, events, simultaneous events, strange and beautiful things were happening that defined the very essence of the random, the non random, phenomenon that illustrated the abstract notions of shape, color, emotion, and narrative. Puzzling evocations of theme, progression, circularity, and probability.
Just a few days ago, her friend, the writer, had made a casual observation about coffee. She’d said, “Coffee is cruel. It’s bound to happen that if I put too much sugar into my first cup of coffee, I’m sure to put too little into the second.”
Sure enough, just before observing the chipmunks, the filmmaker had spooned too much sugar into her coffee but she hadn’t remembered the conversation she’d had with the writer until she’d seen the animals, imagined the pens, and it was at this moment that she put it all together: the chipmunks, the pens, the writer’s observations on coffee, her own mischance with sugar, and the over-compensations to come. The conclusion suddenly hit her, that problem she’d been fighting herself about all morning prior to going out for the paper and encountering the amazing repetition of the chipmunks.
She rushed into the house and called the writer. She said, “I have the ending. After everything that’s happened, after the whole struggle, her hand can never reach that phone. That’s what happens, she reaches and reaches and reaches with those small delicate fingers of hers and her hand never touches the goddamned phone.”
