098: The Dress

August 27, 2010 – 8:43 am

Henry followed the impression of the elbow, for he had judged the image, the impression, the dream of movement as an elbow. The elbow belonged to a woman. Work had been difficult, long, and somewhat disorienting, filled with numerous seconds, some of which he remembered, others lost, lost in the sound of typing, overindulgent chatting, and arguments in offices whose occupants had neglected to close the door.

Many cups of coffee, seconds filled with letters and words and the syntax of new programming languages (sometimes the computer screen would flicker, sometimes he’d get a call) he had little time to learn (At work, he thought, everyday I have to learn my life all over again. It’s crazy).

Seconds: we can name them: here they are: home, close the car door, fetch the keys, open the front door, close the front door, and then it happened

something quick, something fast, an elbow disappearing around the corner into the living room.

But the living room was empty when he followed that impression, that image, that instance of time into the room. He’d expected

empty rooms once silent and absent of any human presence would erupt with life

or with the owner of the elbow but as he entered the living room, he saw nothing, no owner of the elbow, no human being, just an empty room. And then he heard a strange swishing. It sounded like a dress, a dress touching against the wall of the stairwell.

He moved to the stairs, slowly. He edged one of his eye balls passed the corner and looked up the stairs and saw her standing there, wearing the dress, the dress his lover had left behind (she’d departed in a storm, an argument, a sort of storm, maybe a brief drizzle, something about her interests including his face and hands no longer), his neighbor’s daughter.

One Monday morning he’d got in his car ready for work and she’d been in the backseat, asleep (there’s no need to address what she wore, how she looked, as these really don’t matter, and why should they, as his neighbor’s daughter was aslumber in the back seat). Then he smelled peaches (yes, peaches are better than any image of attire). Another day–yes, this happened many times–he’d come home and there would be a dinner and his neighbor’s daughter would approach him and hand him a fork. Outside the market, she’d walk behind him and to the car with a bag of groceries and she’d say, “Bread and grapes. You forgot them. You can’t leave the market without bread and grapes,” which he found strangely logical.

He talked to the neighbor. “Well, she lost her job. I’m retired. My energy’s gone and I can’t follow her constantly. Her accounts fled with the recession, you know. Don’t you think that would make you a little crazy?” Henry found this strangely logical.

On another routine complaint: “She’s looking, sure. Isn’t everyone? Count yourself one of the lucky ones, Henry. No harm done.”

Sometimes the dinners were good. Sometimes she would turn to the oven and say, “I forgot to turn it on. There’s something big, wet, and raw in there. Sorry.”

She laughed when he said, “But are you sure it’s dead?”

He watched her in the dress at the top of the stairs, a red dress, prom frumpy (which would suggest old fashioned), the fabric crisp and sharp. She began to turn slowly, moving her body in motions that brought to Henry memories of the dance and the punch bowl and the floating glitterball high above and the broken heart. A slow tune, a little slower than what a turtle must be thinking. Electric strums and rum tums on stretched skin, bleeding music, so slow you want to paint your ears red and eat the pages of Ulysses with warm milk.

He said up the stairs to her: “I don’t have a dance to take you to, my dear.”

She turned slowly to that invisible tune. She had a smile on her face soft as a fresh paint brush. She said down the stairs to him: “That’s okay. I’d rather be with the elephants. Yes,” she said, “I’d rather be with the elephants.”

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097: The Broken Second

August 26, 2010 – 8:41 am

There is a device in fiction that writers call the broken second. Of course, this device is not limited to fiction that uses writing as its media of conveyance. The broken second device can also be used in other media that convey fictions, such as motion film or water color painting, where fictions are as numerous as ants.

The broken second as defined by writers is a method of taking space time and expressing a part of a thing so that a thing–an object, an emotion, or some other human metric–is created in multiple parts of a second. Writers can measure a broken second object as a millisecond, for example, so that a human being inside a fiction becomes an elbow. The elbow may appear but for the broken second device to work, the elbow must happen fast (in a millisecond, for example) and then it must disappear. The rule of the broken second, however, is that the reader must be able to do three things: recognize the elbow and determine the owner of the elbow as a complete entity (it must be made plain that it’s a monkey’s elbow or the elbow of a newt or, indeed, the arm joint of a woman) and to assure that this incremental phenomenon is part of a larger sum of knowledge called the second, which, while referencing a complete section of time (an element of closure), cannot be a thing to itself but is really several items placed one after another, as in:

1. An elbow appears
2. It disappears

Hense, the audience is gripped by the effect of the broken second or several parts of a second broken into slivers of occurrence that amount to 1 and 2 above. The effect being questions.

1. An elbow appears
2. It disappears
3. Questions follow

It doesn’t matter what the questions are just that the writer or the filmmaker make them possible. In order to master the broken second device the fiction writer must go inside a second and live there as if it were a space unto itself. Swim in it, say. But the fiction writer must not dwell on it more than a second, even though the writer must enter that small space and poke around, pry into, and rummage around it for a lengthy span. But not for more than a second, otherwise the creator will die. And not know it. More than millions of writers have died by breaking the broken second rule. They forget, they get lost, they wander the halls, they watch meaningless scenes or read meaningless books, here meaningless meaning that the subject matter cracks no hulls, empties nothing into the watery matter of the known or the plain or the obvious, thus leaving them dead or lifeless or dull with nothing to add. Which is a kind of death.

Yes, the writer must live there but not for longer than a second. But it must be remembered that the second or parts of the second (the phenomenology of the broken second), which can last forever but no longer than that, must reverberate so that the second and seconds after the second and still more seconds recall the initial etching, the part that started it all, the first note, the starter drip, as in Henry, who, after closing the door, saw motion out of the corner of his tired eye (he’d just come home from work after all, or a long walk, or from climbing something high), something quick, something fast, an elbow disappearing around the corner into the living room. And everything in the house is so quiet and every expectation that he had prior to closing the door has been shattered. Did you see it, the broken second? Did you see it? Can you still see it? What will Henry do; what will he think; will he make for the phone and call the police; will he follow the afterimage and than see another, a heel, the heel of a women, the heel of a woman disappearing behind the bottom frame of the door to his bedroom?

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096: The Stalker

August 25, 2010 – 9:01 am

He saw them on the balcony, laughing, tickling each others’ ribs, looking at each other in the way she used to look at him. It was self-explanatory. The look of them up on the balcony: he knew exactly what it meant.

But then he wondered why everything else was so ambiguous. He watched them on this alien balcony and thought to himself: why was this so obvious when the poem, the photograph, the film, the novel, the story, and the law and the government were so beyond his understanding?

And the war. Nobody understood the war. Everyone had forgotten how it had started and nobody knew when it would end. And the street signs: nobody understood them either. But this, this was clarity. This he could understand. Up on the balcony, that laughter, that ecstatic touching, and those fresh smiles and beaming looks, that liminal happiness, those sounds and images of abject betrayal.

She’d said, “Tokyo.”

He’d said, “Tokyo?”

“Yes, Tokyo. A month in Tokyo for work,” she’d said.

“A month in Tokyo for work?” he’d said. “But you just got back from Chicago.”

“Yes,” she’d said, “and I’m off again.”

He watched them. He watched her on the balcony. She touched him with her little hands and laughed. He touched her and laughed, too. Yes, he knew exactly what it all meant: this knowing, this unique understanding, this peculiar and rare vividness pushed all his doubts away and he felt suddenly happy for it, perhaps even thankful. For in this ambiguous world, this strange, frightening place that had never made sense to him, he had always felt a little lost, disoriented, apart from its arguments and expectations, its crude arrangements of space.

Now it all made sense. Her lies, her disagreements, her evasiveness after mysterious phone calls, the way she avoided his hands and his eyes. Yes, it all made sense now.

He heard something, some rustling in nearby bushes, a subtle sound of a camera shutter. Above, he heard them laughing, playing and joking, like children. But there in the bushes he saw the shape of a women. She was peering up at the balcony. She had a camera. But she also had tears or what must have been tears; she watched them on the balcony, and he knew exactly who she was, this women, this woman with a camera hiding in the bushes. She in the bushes, he carefully peering from behind a corner. Both of them looking up and watching those motions, sounds, and images of betrayal. He watched the woman. She had yet to notice him. Regardless, he new exactly who she was. He knew exactly why she’d come here.

His gladness soared. This happiness, this clarity, cut all the old weights from him, the old burdens and sadnesses. He wanted to go to her but he didn’t know how. Yes, he would find a way. He would go to her. He would find a way. He would tell her all about it.

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095: The Event

August 24, 2010 – 9:05 am

When the moon was full, the three women remembered the same event, even though none of the women could remember the event actually happening to them. Then, as the days passed and the countenance of the night sky changed, the memory would fade and the women would pass, like the moon, into a period of forgetting. In this period of forgetting, their lives could be described as normal, everyday, the sort of thing you wouldn’t find on camera or any other sort of dramatic work. But then the moon would return to its size as a matter of angle and exposure to the sun in its orbit, and the memory of the event would return and each of the three women would feel it, like a great moon in their throat or the color of the moon in their throat; they would feel the suddenness of the memory; they would feel its thickness, its color, how it branched off and split from its main bulk and threaded coils of itself into the forest or into the desert. They would feel how the memory of the event in question sometimes walked silently. Other times the memory entered wearing iron boots or blaring bells and a trumpet in a room with wood or marble floors. For each of the women, the memory could be blue, the kind of blue of October moons, or brownish orange, the orange of dried apricots, or purple, the purple of hunting, the purple that comes to you when you think of a cold night and remember that the lights of the house are just about to come into view. Moments of levity would sometimes come with the memory of the event, moments of great pain and sorrow. Other times they would laugh or they would cry out in the dark at the event’s return as a shared memory. Each woman, of course, had an impression of Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Churchill and sometimes the memory of the event would take on the characteristics of the shape of Caesar’s nose, Napoleon’s hands, or Churchill’s ankle and they would consider this surprising or fantastic, an impression they would want to remember and keep fresh in their minds, but it was impossible because soon the memory of the event would disappear, like a lamb or a small dog into the great body of a python or an anaconda, and it would seep into those places where forgetfulness is palpable and genuine and distant. But, whatever the shape, whatever the image, it was the same for each woman, exactly the same. It come with the fullness of the moon and then it passed on with time, for each woman identical, for each simultaneous and always amazing.

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094: Leslie and the Philosopher

August 23, 2010 – 5:04 pm

One afternoon, Leslie told the philosopher about her little brother, Billy, and it was on this day that she learned that it was possible to be profoundly incorrect and so incorrect about the basic knowledge of the world that others will radically change their opinion of you on the spot and because of this incident change the course of human events as they impact you directly.

“This is the Billy who almost lost his life on the bridge, the same Billy you say refuses to use the words ‘I understand’ in the affirmative voice,” the philosopher said.

“Let me tell you this without interruption,” Leslie said, excited. “Just listen. Billy refuses to believe that the car is moving. I swear it. He believes it’s the world that’s moving and not the car. Isn’t it hilarious. And crazy. And warped.”

The philosopher appeared stunned by such an admission on the part of Leslie. She took the look on his face to mean that he was surprised that her brother could be so dislocated from reality, that the philosopher would soon smile and take her side and sympathize with her as was typically the case. He considered her one his best colleagues in the Department. He figured she would go places, move high, and someday run the whole affair.

Leslie continued: “The worst thing about it is that he’s almost thirty years old. He had an argument the other day with my father about locomotion and that he thinks my father and I have been tricked into thinking that it’s the car that actually takes us to the store or to work or church. He won’t give it up. He refuses to budge. My father brought out all the logic he had: he said, How did you get home the other day? How? Explain it. And Billy said, I got in my car and the world moved and that’s how I got home. Simple. My father said, Try an experiment. Stand there in front of me and project yourself to the store and when you get there call me. My brother said, It doesn’t work that way. You have to be in a car or a train or a plane and that’s when the world moves you to the place you want to go to. My father said, You refuse to listen to reason and he stormed out of the house.”

The philosopher shook his head. He took his hands out of his pockets (there’s no need to write that the philosopher had his hands in his pockets in the first place, as he must have had his hands in his pockets in order to take them out). The philosopher stuffed his long white hands back into his pockets. He said, “Are you okay, Leslie? Would you like a glass of water?”

“Why would I want a glass of water?” she asked. “I’m asking what you make of my brother’s crazy ideas.”

The philosopher put his hand on her shoulder. They’d known each other for a long time and so such a gesture on the part of the philosopher seemed the first step toward toward a typical meeting of the minds.

The philosopher asked: “Do you believe the world is round?”

“What?”

“Do you believe that all people can learn and that everyone should be provided the opportunity to have quality of life?” the philosopher asked.

“Of course,” Leslie said.

“Leslie, then you’re not telling me that you think your brother’s wrong are you? You don’t really believe that the car is the thing that moves?”

Leslie stepped back. “Of course I think he’s wrong. What’s the matter with you? What are you saying? The world moving? It’s absurd.”

The philosopher said, “I’ve met people who live their lives with a certain peculiar notion. You have, too, or at least I once thought you did. Their basic misunderstanding of the mechanics of the world might go unnoticed for years as their understandings never come up in academic, professional, or casual conversation. Why, because their friends and colleagues would never think that they believed a thing contrary to their own world view or against a whole body of evidence taken as essentially given. I’m merely being honest, Leslie. If you, as you claim, actually believe that the car moves and that’s its not the world that’s moving, then I must question your ability to make sound leadership and pedagogical decisions as they impact this Institution, this Department, and the people who’ve made it what it is. I really must question my own decisions about you, also. I’m sorry.”

The philosopher took a few steps away from Leslie. The look of profound shock and disgust on his face stifled Leslie’s immediate impulse to pursue the argument. He turned, opened the door, and then departed the office. Leslie watched the door as it slowly closed. Heat rose into her neck. She felt short of breath and the approach and arrival of wretched fear and regret. She’d lived all of her life believing that the car moved and not the world and that her brother bordered on the insane; she’d never even harbored the suspicion that others thought differently, knew differently, as why would the subject ever come up: why would the issue of the car or the world moving ever have arisen as the answer must or should have appeared obvious?

She couldn’t guess what the philosopher might do, to whom he might be disclosing her supposed error and ignorance, and so she stood watching the door, suffering a paralysis of the world come to a crawl. Behind her fear she had a list of questions: was the philosopher joking? Was she just being foolish? Was her brother correct after all and she and her father so incorrect as to be judged insane? It must be a joke, she told herself. It must be a joke.

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093: Presence

August 22, 2010 – 2:40 pm

After ninety three days of making a film a day, the filmmaker began to study a new phenomenon, a phenomenon he dubbed his growing madness. The evidence for his madness (although he would not define it as insanity) took two forms.

The first involved a simple fact: the filmmaker carried his digital video camera or often several cameras with him at all times. He carried a camera to parties, to the houses of friends, and when he forgot a camera, which was rare, he would hold his phone at the ready, waiting for the proper moment to use it.

The second phenomena was more fluid and abstract and illustrated his growing madness more authoritatively. He found that his sense interpretations/impressions and cognitive load (the weight of his day to day thinking, you might call it) about the world had begun to occur in the viewfinder of his camera or on the screen of his phone without the presence of physical subject matter. For example, empty rooms once silent and absent of any human presence would erupt with life when he opened the viewfinder. The chairs would be occupied by people or people would cross in and out of the room, turn things on or off, stumble, or appear ready to strike. These people would be animated, involved in intense discussion or uttering monologues either elliptically suggestive or directly expressing critical notions.

But when he moved his eyes off the viewfinder, he would see only an empty room. He would hear the clock ticking. In the distance, he would hear the quieted activity of neighbors or the hum of the city. Then he would look back into the viewfinder and the animated images would return. In the finder he witnessed murders, car chases, bank robberies, arguments between lovers, scenes of conflict, disquieting shadows.

The filmmaker sat on a park bench. Of course, he had his camera with him. He felt the sun on his forehead. He heard birds in the trees. He couldn’t help but reflect on his growing madness. The world still impacted him. Yes, everything was as it always had been, he told himself. He still laughed with his friends, and his colleagues reproached him for nothing. He made his films and published them. He ate and slept and moved through the day, but while the world still impacted him (just the other day he had a brief argument with a salesperson on the phone and nearly fell down the stairs carrying a tripod) he found that what he observed and recorded as a filmmaker on his camera, placing and recording objects, directing his actors, were the only things that had significance for him, especially the elements of life that he saw when he aimed the camera at, say, an empty chair and focused his attention on the viewfinder and there Esmarelda would appear and she would be engaged in important and dramatic address but when he looked away he would see an empty chair, no one there at all, no Esmarelda, no person, no words or suggestive dialogue, just an empty chair, and the thought of this now as he listened to the birds and felt the breeze touch his face made him smile for it was a madness he was prepared to live with for the remainder of his days.

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092: Reasons for Moving

August 21, 2010 – 10:32 am

It’s a cliche to say that language is interesting, although some people might not agree and thus believe whatever they see or read. By language I mean a formal system of communication and by formal I mean that there are rules to the thing and by rules I mean several handshakes in a backroom somewhere (by the way this is why languages always smell a little of smoke). I don’t here mean individual words, which, taken out of context, might simply be a collection of unimpressive symbols. We have two works to consider in this fiction or experiment: John Timmons’s short film Reasons for Moving and Mark Strand’s poem Keeping Things Whole.

But we also have a list of words and images that might act as a test of a system of communication, its formalities, its rules, and its subtle hint of pipe smoke. We simply list some of the words of this poem and ask three acting troops to consider the senseless words and memorize an ordered narrative from them and, after thirty minutes of study and rehearsal, act them on a stage before an audience. The important restriction is that these actors may not be told the whole from which the parts are drawn as this would be too suggestive. Here’s a possible list:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

The audience would be called upon to judge how closely each play dramatized the human lifeworld and its spirit from the approved list.

Another problem we might throw at these brave and intrepid adventurers would be to draw next from the film and order the actors and their grieving director to select from its elements, such as these:

The Elements

and to approximate as closely as possible the spirit of human experience in all its enigmas, questions, and veracities. Again, the significant restriction is exactly as it was for the first task: that the troops must not be made aware of the whole from which the parts are drawn.

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091: Sexuality

August 20, 2010 – 10:24 am

“But with you, it’s great sex.”
the woman on the bus said long ago

It was on the bus where he got into trouble. He told a stranger what he was best at was sex. He felt he could tell her this as she had been studying him. She’d watched him enter (he sensed this). She’d watched him scan for a place to sit. She’d watched him settle by a window. He’d watched her watching him. She smelled of water and she’d reminded him of the reflections of the sun on a stream he remembered. She reminded him of the sounds of water moving, and these things–the smell of water, the sun, and liquid-like movement–brought to his tongue intonations of the personal.

“But not of lust,” he said. “No, not lust, which is a hunger for it, and potentially dangerous. No,” he told the woman, whose matted gray hair tumbled from under a hat onto her small lap, “no, I’m not trying to brag or make a scene. But it’s a fact any way. I’m best at sex. I never really took to things like math and science. No, from an early age I was drawn to bodies, sometimes several, and they loved me for it. Though I don’t mean to brag.”

The woman watched him. It’s important to know the color of her eyes. They were black and so the whites of them seemed whiter, which he took as interest, and so he continued: “It’s not easy to talk about. I agree with that. You can’t get a degree in it and I hear about the rules and the possible health hazards and how it competes with standard relationships. But I’m not a standard guy. I don’t care much about religion, which is definitely against it. But it would be a little strange for you to be sitting on a bus with someone who said their best skill was stealing or killing or lying. I’m being honest and I tell you I hate people who steal and lie.”

More passengers entered the bus but their forms were unmentionable and there were seats at the front. The woman watched the man at the window seat. She slipped her hand into a small purse that had seen younger, less frayed days.

He said, “Yeah, sex and ecstasy, that feeling when the body just reaches out into the sky and goes and goes and the surface of the body scatters out in all directions. Like when things suddenly make sense and the answers crash at you at a hundred miles an hour and you just want to stay there. I don’t think it’s happiness. I don’t even think it has much to do with a cause or understanding. Where does understanding get you? And people, it seems to me, always get lost in their causes and forget what got them going in the first place. They go: what was I doing? and then they go off looking for another purpose. But I may be wrong. I may be putting words in your mouth,” he told the woman, who from the shape of her shoulders and the mode of the wrinkle patterns on her face seemed on the edge of agreement.

“Yeah, sex, ecstasy, and keeping the feeling or the sensations going for as long as possible. That’s what I’m good at,” the man said. “But maybe not good enough. Maybe none of us are all that good at what we do, so good that we invent the next marvel, the next thing that will keep peoples’ attention or make them love us. Problem is I don’t know how to get better at it, to improve, to actually capture the moment of pleasure and make it last longer. It’s not like a stick of gum or a really good novel, though I’m not much of a reader, it’s not like the universe which I hear just keeps expanding and no one really knows where it’s going.”

He could feel the bus ride coming to an end. He felt a closeness now to the woman beside him, this stranger with the gray hair, who couldn’t take her eyes off of him and whose silence he took as evidence of sympathy, interest, or some mysterious willingness to agree by remaining silent.

“Yes,” he said. “Making it last, lastingness, if that’s even a word. Endlessness. That’s what I really want to be good at. Making things last. But I’m not very good at it. Maybe not even sex, but everything good. Maybe,” he said. “You know, good things. But I think this is my stop. I have to go now. But I don’t want to.”

The woman remained motionless. She might not have been alive, except that her black eyes followed him as he passed before her and up the aisle and out into the heat of the day.

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090: Poetry, Prose, Music

August 19, 2010 – 9:33 am

The crowd of us (we were all wearing robes, different colored robes) all came to different conclusions about the poetry, the prose, and the music. Our task was simple and we were to draw from the archives.

Imagine a stone. One of the ancients saw opportunity to engage the history of the earth from the stone, to determine its physical parts, and from these parts infer the age of the earth and its entire geography; another saw markets, exchanges, and needed to know only from the first of them the stone’s composition; and yet others of them, those ancients whose societies with which we were currently charged, saw weight, pattern, color, and considered the meaning of these things.

But we could only imagine the stone from this strange parable (it was recited to us and thus we had to memorize it). I asked the teacher what we had of the stone, what evidence other than its description, the equations, the estimations of its value and the lists of credentials of those ancients who had moved the stone from place to place, and the poetry and the notes on the staff that had generated an image of the stone in unknown audiences. The teacher said these were all we had as knowledge of the stone and from each of these pieces we were to reconstruct it as a physical object and from this reconstruction reinvent it and thus know it.

One of my companions said that we could travel into the desert and bring a stone back and merely present it to the teacher. But this would be a guess, I said, a lie, and would tell us nothing. One of our friends drew a stone on paper. He said given the data presented that the stone had to have been composed partly of gold, other parts silver, yet other parts composed of human flesh and yet other parts manufactured of grief as so much evidence pointed to these elements and so the stone he drew was round, the surface rough, and out of his imagined lapidary he formed spines and grasping the spines were human hands, each supposedly using the spines as handles.

He said: This is a swift rendering of the stones from the prose, poetry, and music. The ancients pulled it apart, using these handles. One of them took what he needed to prove ideas contrary to beliefs at the time; yet another broke the stone into pieces to determine their value and sell them for riches; and yet others felt the stone for its texture and the way the stone made different sounds when tapped with a rod and explored the effects on the human mind, and so this is how I imagine the stone, what do you think?

Our companion shook his head and insisted we embark into the desert. We will find a stone and bring it the teacher and be done with it, he said.

My friends turned to me and said that I should decide. I said, we could do both. We have some stones out in the desert I’m sure with which we could trick the teacher or we have this drawing of the stone, which is a more concrete rendering of the evidence, which comes in the form of description, value, and effects, and this also is a point of departure to our studies. Recall, however, the video we found of that mysterious place called Tupper Lake. The teacher is fixated on the stone, which does not appear in the video and is, I believe, a mere invention of the teacher. What I found interesting was the hand we saw, the hand that went from note to note, article to article, surface to surface. But whose hand was it? That’s the dangerous question, and so I propose this: that we forget the stone, forget the poem, forget the music, forget the imprecise calculations of the geographer. I propose that we reconstruct the creator, the owner of that hand, and my first question to him or her will be how from that one stone, that one little article, did you make so many things, so many things unlike the original such that the original was lost or forgotten, leaving behind only words, sounds, and the deaths of millions.

My friends saw the wisdom in this and we got to work.

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089: What I see is Death

August 18, 2010 – 10:55 am

Moments after the filmmaker departed, Cruz stored Maricela’s 35 millimeter slides in a plastic container. There weren’t many of them. Most had come from the basement of Maricela’s father’s house, sent by her mother as her mother had no use for them.

They’d projected the slides up on the wall and each slide revealed one instance of a river and the bridge that spanned it, more precisely the railing of the bridge and a view of the river, such that each image captured an incremented moment in the crossing the bridge. If compiled into a flipbook, a viewer would be able to cross the bridge as an act of animation.

Even though it was obvious, the filmmaker kept asking Maricela but not Cruz what she saw in each image.

Maricela said, “I see death.”

After Cruz had put away the slides he found Maricela in the living room. She was reading through travel brochures: Spain, Mexico, Australia, the United States.

“I find it troubling that you saw death in the slides, death as a consideration of each image in juxtaposition,” Cruz said.

“It should come as no surprise,” Maricela said. “I’m in love with death. I don’t fear it. Death for me is a fascination.”

Cruz sat across from her. He said, “I remember as much from your father’s funeral when you snapped at anyone who cried or showed any evidence or unhappiness. Of course, we’re born, we live, and we die. We have millennia of proof of that narrative. But, Death. I don’t see how you could love it, my love, how you could not fear it. It’s an exasperating notion, Maricela. In those images, I saw a river, a bridge–these things mean passage, travel, movement toward a goal. To see death, is to make a joke of time.”

“On the contrary,” Maricela said. “First of all we need to understand that Death is an abstraction, even in medical terms, where death becomes the absence of quantity. The philosopher might claim that Death is a binary of Life. But this is incorrect, as Death for us is really an imprecise notion, an abstraction, an idea that is beyond the grasp of the living, as we can grasp the bridge and water that flows beneath it. If we range across time and societies, we find that the human fear of death has nothing to do with the moment after the heart ceases to beat but is really concerned with one, the method dying; two, the regrets one may have during life; three, fear for the those left behind; four, suffering and its meaning; five, fear of the truth; six, a disquieting and I would claim foolish jealousy of the dead, as we hate that even the dead would have knowledge of something denied us.”

“I follow your logic,” Cruz said, “but do you really dare apply such generalities? I have to admit I suffer all of those options you list.”

“It’s nothing to me, really,” Maricela said. She lay the pamphlets down. “Really, I don’t dismiss life and love as I long for the knowledge death. You see here our plans laid out on the table. Soon we might be in Barcelona. We might be in el Norte visiting Henry. Nevertheless, the great answer that is the moment after my heart ceases is simply too fascinating to dismiss. Think of it, Cruz, all our schemes of death, and how trivial they must be in the face of the size of the universe and the amazing things we’ve seen there through the lenses of telescopes and imagine the triviality of the human concept of a god or gods that might make such a universe where these wonders exist yet to think that such a being could harbor such a dull emotion as spite or jealousy or possess a threatening finger. Yes, my father passed last year, and we’ve just seen his slides, slides that he kept because he prized them and we wonder why these images of a bridge and the water and their juxtaposed motion were so important, so valuable to him. But, indeed, they are his motion, they are what he saw, but we don’t know what they meant to him, only what they mean to us. Yes, we have the universe in all its wonder and potential significance and yet we dismiss each other with such spontaneity, with such gross love of destruction, and we raise our apparatus in the face of the nebula and busy ourselves with establishing ownership of a thing none of us can even touch.”

She paused and said, “But, Cruz, consider, when we die maybe then we might touch it. Maybe then, just after the moment our hearts cease pumping, maybe then, with some practice mind you, we might be able to understand what we’ve seen by gaining that enormous distance death may supply us, depending of course on the realities of death. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Do you see?”

“I see,” Cruz said. “It’s an amazing thing to consider. Life indeed may be a fantastic trick. But what about now; what should we do now?”

Maricela picked up one of the travel pamphlets. “Australia,” she said. “Australia is it.”

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088: It’s Interesting said the Comatose Patient

August 17, 2010 – 10:00 am

“It’s interesting,” Ruiz said.

His Mexico City loft looked over a small park and a line of buildings at the far edge. One structure might have been an apartment house. It’s doors were painted a different color which in my frame of mind meant that there could never be a million or more doors in that one structure alone to carry all known hues. Ruiz remarked on it.

“It’s new,” he said. “The people who live there all come from different countries. The paint on each door is a color significant to those places, to their religions, manner of governance, and household gods.”

I watched people move in the park below. They seemed to have purpose, destination, and subject. Two men appeared to be arguing over something they’d just read on a phone. Several women and several men were seated in a circle, exchanging views on whatever topic. It might have the war in the north, maybe the war in the south, the tremendous building in the west, and the rumored troubles in the east from whose direction smoke would come on the hot days, or so Ruiz told me. Or subjects other than these. Whatever the case, sometimes they would smile or laugh or frown or smoke cigarettes or draw from bottles of water and then put the bottles down and then stub out their cigarettes and then go back to their exchanges, laughter, and other expressions.

Ruiz said, “Actually, it’s interesting.”

A man appeared. He followed a paved trail through the trees. The paved surface was was painted with shoe prints that were obviously the traced ambulations of a man. The man who’d come into view held the string of a strange helium balloon with a feathered decoration dangling and wafting beneath it. A monkey walked behind the balloon. It appeared to be a small member of the species, perhaps a capuchin. The animal would often stand and bat at the feathers of the balloon. The man, the balloon, and the monkey disappeared under the branches of a tree.

“Yes,” I said, turning back to Ruiz. “It’s interesting.”

“But I don’t know what it means,” Ruiz said. “Why you’re here. We know you’re on a bed, that you’re in a coma, and that I’m sitting by the sea side.”

“Yet I’m here,” I said. “We’re here and I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe this is how a person waits.”

Ruiz and I looked out over the park. An escaped balloon rose out of the trees. This one was a balloon without decoration, reblackd in hue, and it kept rising into the sky until it became a bird racing south. Tell me when you see it.

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087: The Art of Deception

August 16, 2010 – 1:35 pm

John Timmons’s short film perspective #4 addresses or may address certain human themes. We could make a list: new media aesthetics, technology and history, the nature of truth, the nature of reality, and/or the art of deception, issues that fill the news these days as it’s election season and the season for world governments wondering how to spell the word e-n-c-r-y-p-t-i-o-n.

The speaker, who is not John Timmons, claims with irony that aesthetic quality of digital video should be made to look like film, an analogue technology, as there are technological problems that render digital video outside an aesthetic norm or a technological and aesthetic custom. Most viewers of film are accustomed to the look and feel of film (indeed, most people probably don’t consider how accustomed they are to it), therefore footage captured in another format should be manipulated so that it takes on the qualities of that other format. The same issue was confronted by early photographers and by present day remodelers of books into ebooks, so that when a reader confronts Huckleberry Finn on the digital reader, the motion of page turning is to be simulated, as instructed in the Ten Commandments. This will bring aide and comfort to the reader, who, if confronted with common words on another technology, in what may or may not look like prose, might fling up their hands and say, “If I can’t turn a page, then I might just have to give up reading and turn to hiking the back country, instead.”

Which calls to mind the question of the early poet for whom Plato readied cement shoes or pink slips because poets were prone to taking perceived reality and turning it into something that was perceived as untruthful, inactual, or an outright lie. This recalls the nature or truth and reality, two ideas that presuppose the existence of untruth and disreality. If, for example, I told a friend that my father was seven feet tall, I would be altering reality and “the truth” as my father is not seven feet tall in actuality. The friend’s potential image of my father, that is, his mental picture of my father, would be permanently shaped, even if I backed off the description and said, “I was just kidding. He’s really only three and a half feet in height.” It would be fine, however, for me to tell my friend that I believe in a being who is a deity and can rise into the clouds and disappear there on his way to heaven.

A theory goes that we walk in a perpetual smoke of invention. Reconsider my above paragraph and that not so subtle reference to truth and reality and consider human inventions, one of the most powerful of which is the common life narrative parents tell their children on pretty good evidence. You’re born, you go to school, you must work or perpetually seek work out till your fingers break, and then you die, hopefully with your mind in tact. Sometimes I laugh when I sit back and think about this “truth.” Why must the inevitability of a working life for Americans be “the reality?” Why must this “reality” be the way things are? Why must employment be the headline in all the papers, analogue or digital? It is the modern framework of human biological survival, encapsulated as “the truth” in the common narrative. In another reality, this “truth” might be different. In some other reality, the common narrative might be: you’re born, you become a poet or a juggler, and then you die, and we make due by eating the hair of ground sloths. Of course, modern work has its analogues in all societies where the stuff of everyday survival might be farming, bargaining, or the backyard vegetable garden.

But we love the lie. Everyday we leave spaces behind echoing or reverberating with the inventions of ourselves. My friend asks, “How are you?” and I lie. She lies back. We understand this. We devise best practices for artful deception and we call these “good manners.”

Modern politics is the perfect playground for tests of truth and reality or their arbiter “irony.” People grow angry at what’s called the “negative campaign ad,” which as a communication genre is as honest as it gets in its evidence of “irony.” Remember, we love the lie, and so lying should be loved and it should come through some aesthetic worthy of our devotion. The real problem with “negative campaign ads” for people is that they aren’t artful enough. As lies, they’re too obvious. We want “good manners” in our negative ads. We want a better knife, a knife whose trail through the skin is harder to detect. We want the beautiful lie, the smiling deceit of the artful dictator, the wonderful, nuanced hands of experienced magicians, not the blundering and obnoxious dunderings of our modern political ad producers. Our modern politicians, furthermore, commit the sin of being unable to actually articulate their lies in a manner commensurate with the sophisticated technologies they have at their disposal. Some of these pols think that the blatant lie is “good enough.”

When the critic or honest person claims that “negative campaign ads” are corrupting the system what he or she really means to say, but is ignorant of a better means of saying it, is: “I wish this Republican or Democrat or so-called Independent running for office was just a little better at lying to me; I wish they could take their nickel and turn it into a silver dollar; I wish they could take that snap shot of the dog and turn it into the beauty that is film.”

Of course, I learned all of this from “the fiction writer.”

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086: The Juggler

August 15, 2010 – 11:21 am

I remember The Juggler from many years ago. The mystery had to do with why he’d been ejected from the party he’d been hired to entertain, how it was that he’d suffered a broken arm, and various painful looking marks on his cheeks.

He was a multitalented juggler, who could play the guitar while sustaining the orbits of several balls before the audience of stunned children. He was also a teacher. He played the guitar, juggled several balls, and told the children to always pay close attention to the relationship between sight and sound and then, suddenly, a blue ball would appear in the mix of balls, its sourse unknown.

When I first met The Juggler he demonstrated a rehearsed spontaneity. He shook my hand and nodded and smiled and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Through the touch of his hand, the judicious nod, the buttery, elongated smiled, and the way he produced a gold coin for me after completing the hand shake, I could tell that he studied each of these moves with an exasperating perspicacity, so much so that his greetings, as he moved from each of the attending adults and then onto the children with a different trick for each, appeared spontaneous and individualized. This juggler was a wonder.

I didn’t tell him that I disliked jugglers, magicians, or any other sort of hired party attraction, including artists, musicians, and face painters. But this was not my party; these were not my children. So I remained quiet.

In any event, the party kicked off with The Juggler taking his place in the yard surrounded by children. He began with two red balls then added two green balls. He began with conventional juggles. He added a fifth ball, which was yellow and contained blinking lights. He kept adding balls until he was juggling more than ten in a nice tight oval. He’d close his eyes. He’d open his eyes; then he’d perform a spin, a hop, an amazing back flip. Not a single ball fell to the floor.

The reaction by the adults was puzzling. The attending men stood back and observed The Juggler with obvious disdain. They might have been jealous as none of them possessed any of the abilities demonstrated by The Juggler. They pretended, however, that his amazing skills were trivial compared to their own expertise. I could see this in the tension of their shoulders, the tight fists, the way they turned their eyes to the ground or to each other or to the sky. They were not jugglers; they were business men; teachers; good parents; stock brokers. They pretended to laugh in awe at The Juggler’s synthesis of balance, coordination, and musicianship, as he had now produced from nothing I could see a small acoustic guitar and had begun to play something from Bach (JS) as he reduced the amount of balls in the air to five then increased their number to ten.

“It’s a trick,” said one of the parents.

“It’s all bull,” another man agreed as if he knew the equation he could just as easily take The Juggler’s place and play that tune, manipulate the balls, and rub the top of his head in a circle simultaneously.

Things changed when The Juggler completed the tune, caught all the balls, then held one of them up so that the children could watch it as he moved it in a circle.

He said, “You see a ball. It’s a blue ball. Look at it.” Then he let go of the ball and it fell but before it hit the ground it disappeared. “You see my hands.” We did see his hands. He held them palm out to all of us as evidence of his honesty. Then, slowly, he went to a knee and lowered his thumb and pointing finger into the grass as if to pull something out of the ground and this is expertly what he did. When the tips of his fingers appeared above the surface of the grass, they held the top most branches of a small tree. He pulled that small tree out of the ground as if one hundred years of growth was happening in the few moments it took for him to slowly raise three feet of vegetable form with the tips of his fingers.

The adults stood stunned. The children sat wide-eyed as if they’d just seen a favorite book character appear before them. The mothers all came out of the house (as they’d been inside ignoring The Juggler) to stand behind the children wordlessly. Even I had to admit that this trick had merit.

“We are built,” The Juggler said, “to experience the world as a product of each of our senses. We see what our eyes can see and hear what our ears can hear. We know that a ball will fall if dropped. We also know that trees can’t be pulled out of the ground by the fingers. Each of you,” he said, “is built in exactly the same way. All of your eyes despite whatever subtle degrees of difference of color and size and defect work exactly the same way. Your surprise at my last trick has to do with what you believe is the unexpected, the chaotic, some break or abnormality in the normal workings of the everyday. It, of course, is an illusion.”

As he mouthed the word illusion, he waved a hand over the tree and the tree suddenly shook. The limbs and leaves fell away to reveal little Jimmy Williams standing there with a slice of cake in one hand and a fork in the other, which produced an explosion of clapping from the children. One of the parents said, “I hadn’t even noticed little Jimmy was missing.”

The show proceeded. Cake was brought, with a slice gone, of course. The Juggler juggled, played his songs. One moment he wore yellow hair, then brown, then blue. Tall one instance, short the next, the men standing off conspiring now to get ride of him, to find some flaw, some moment when they might swoop in and beat him into the street as he had now become evidence of their own incapacities, their ignorance, and throwing unutterable weaknesses back in their faces. And I joined them because despite the wonders he showed the children, I found each trick, each gesture, and the inventiveness and uniqueness of whatever prop he happened to be manipulating at the time, like the twig that became a truck or the juggled knives that fell and stabbed the grass and immediately sprouted flowers, as lies, abominations, abnormalities, arrogant simulations.

“That dude’s toast,” a friend of mine said.

“He’s going to pay,” another said.

“I’m just waiting for that clown to go to the bathroom,” said Jimmy Williams’s father. “When he does, I’m going to pull him limb from limb.”

I wondered if The Juggler was aware of the aggression building against him, did he suspect the plots in hatch, the hard revenge held in momentary reserve, one man scraping the nail of his thumb over the tines of a plastic fork as he watched The Juggler with bared teeth. I never found out exactly, as I was called away to attend a patient at the hospital soon after intermittent puffs of smoke came from The Juggler’s ears as he sang a song about a mouse and a cat to the tremendous laughter of the children and the red hatred of the parents.

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085: The Conversation

August 14, 2010 – 10:16 am

When the filmmaker sent me the film for examination, it took me a few moments of orientation to the subjects of the work and to the surroundings in which I was meant to find, at the filmmaker’s request, what had been lost.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said over the phone. “I was filming it and then it just disappeared.”

“Just disappeared?” I asked him. I really wanted to ask him where he’d been all these years and how had he been able to grasp the subjects in such an intimate moment, wherein, in their closeness, he’d captured their ability to communicate without speaking but rather through writing and yet was still able to record the phenomenon of human speech.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s gone. It vanished. I was editing the film, playing it back, and suddenly, it was gone.”

By “it” I assumed he meant the speaking subjects.

He said, “Of course the speaking subjects. Notice their mouths. What I’ve sent you is a mere few seconds of two hours of conversation, with much of the context of that conversation somehow gone out of sync or simply lost.”

“I remember such a conversation between us,” I told the filmmaker.

“How do you mean?” he said.

“Several years ago,” I said. “We were at the cafe downtown, you and I, and perhaps another friend, Ezmarelda, Lucy, someone I can’t remember at the moment, and we were talking about that amazing wall of elephants you filmed, how they rushed passed the white and red canopies and throwing up clouds of dust with their movement.”

“Yes,” the filmmaker said. “And it turned out to be a heard of goats. Greatly disappointing.”

“Elephants or goats,” I went on. “More important was that as you told the story or as we discussed the shoot, the filming, and the subject, I observed you seated, reading a newspaper, and with your feet up. You were reading the newspaper, relaxing, perhaps with a glass of white wine, yet all the while I heard you telling me about how out of the clouds of dust and the amazing rumbles of those passing beasts, you saw trunks, flapping ears, undignified rumps, eyeballs flexed in alarm. After the herd had passed, however, reports came back saying that all the goats had disappeared and no elephants had ever been seen in the region. But through the conversation, all I remember seeing was a relaxing man with a glass of wine, reading the newspaper or tapping on the keys of his computer.”

At that moment, my wife entered the room, having overheard my words on the phone, and said, “It was a train, not elephants.”

Amazed, I relayed this information to the filmmaker, because it made perfect sense. He said, “Yes, I remember now. It was a train and the windstorm had been tremendous, the dust rivaling the passage of elephants or a massive passage of goats. What we’d thought was the trampling of the sands by elephants was the grinding of steel wheels. Rather than the trumpeting of elephants, I’d caught with my microphone the calling of the train’s whistle, which is perhaps why in your memory you remember my relaxed image in relation to mistaken story about the elephants or the goats or the train. It’s all making sense now,” he said. I could hear the elation rise into his voice as understanding came. He sad, “I’ve been mistaken about the film I sent you. The subject did not disappear, I’ve merely misinterpreted the whole and its parts.”

“How do you mean?” I asked. “It seems plain to me: two people speaking to each other on their technologies.”

“Incorrect,” he said. “Don’t you see. In that film I sent you, the one that pricked this conversation, there are elephants, goats, and a train–all three. I remember now: that conversation is a combining of several conversations, every word–yes, I remember now–is a word from a multitude of conversations, either repeated or unique, captured over time and made plain as a running narrative over a scene wherein two people are reflecting about the clouds, interesting birds, love, children, flight, and perhaps travel and then what to do there–hours before the passage of the train or hours before the mad scramble of the animals. But they are not the subject at all. Don’t you see?”

“I believe I understand,” I said. “But I’ll need to review the footage several times, as I believe that those two people who are silent on the screen but loquacious in their several pasts have appeared in other films and those guitars and other fixtures of the space are also a montage of past occurrences of image and are indeed the manufacture of a sencored montage. And so, I must not view for the phenomenon of speech alone but I must study the subtle occurrence of gesture, movement, stillness, and arrangement of artifacts as they are evidence of . . . ”

The filmmaker interrupted me. But, strangely enough, my wife also interrupted me. They said at the same time, one from the phone, the other from the kitchen: “Elephants, goats, trains, and, a few seconds into the future, explosions of laughter.”

“This has been one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had,” I said but the filmmaker had already hung up and my wife had withdrawn elsewhere into the house.

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084: Tell Me (a prose poem)

August 13, 2010 – 2:18 pm

Tell me about love, signs, laughter, the child who walked through the room and out, possessions, like that list you have in the closet, the list that keeps growing and may be a burden or a master stroke of collecting, that child who grew gray at the corner of the door then disappeared, signs like those fires we saw over the mountains last night, the ones that organized themselves into lines, arrows, creasings in the black spaces between the visible stars, beadings, pearlings that might portend dry days to come, laughter like the kind we heard in the adjoining apartment where we also heard weeping and the clatter of billiard balls, the child who began at a crawl, objected to stumbles, then closed her hand around a squirrel tail, which is like love, love of grasping, holding, and releasing, before turning out of sight and we were left with what we could remember possessing together,  you and I, lists, boxes, echoes, the feel of our hands growing warmer the nearer they approach. We who love laughter and reasoning out the signs.

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