tracking the small stick as the stream carries it away
Wednesday 16 May 2007 | I like a cookie
These cool spring days are so peaceful and empty, I feel almost guilty—even knowing that I’ll hit the ground running on July 30 and won’t really be able to look up until next May, a full year from now.
Late this morning I came home from a sleepover at the Brujo’s, washed dishes, dusted, vacuumed, cleaned the toilet, beat out the bathmat, emptied the litter pan and trash, watered my germinating seeds in front and back garden, weeded a bit, moved a few rocks, swept the front porch, watered houseplants, brushed the cat, worked on my dad’s website for a couple of hours, made licuado de fresa, beaded the Professoressa’s rosary, read through the State School’s creative writing info packet, mailed a sympathy card, put away the laundry, clipped my nails, took a nap with Pyewacket. Did not answer the twenty waiting emails; did not work on screenplays or the new poems beginning to roil and rustle underground. Which reminds me that I meant to write a bit about Doe, kind of remarkable for me in that it’s the first literary writing (not poetry, but definitely lyric) that I’ve completed since Everything Went to Hell, which tells me the truth about recovery—that it doesn’t happen quickly. That maybe empty, peaceful days are integral to it.
I began Doe at Maman’s over one late summer, around the same time as long whispered middle-of-the-night phone conversations with the Librarian. Abandoned it, like much else, when I returned to Tesuque in November 2004 and moved in together, however inadvertently, with the Young Monk. Then starting the Film Critic’s job at the Alt Weekly, the first realio-trulio stomach flu since I was 13, a tempestuous final Rohatsu, an unspeakably awful New Year’s, and moving to Cerro Gordo in February followed closely by my little waltz up the mountaintop, all interlaced with the Monk’s losing his shit at me on an increasingly regular basis. Post-parasuicidality, I started DBT in March 2005; the Monk and I stuck it out until that October. Then (are you asleep yet?) came the longest grimmest break-up winter of my life (2 am at Walgreens, abruptly deciding to bleach my hair and dye my clothes black, and buying bleach and dye to do same; turning up scandalously drunk at the Librarians’ house, similar hour, having had all of two beers; spending all night at the Alt Weekly on Hatester), during which nothing was written but long hysterical journal entries which were like a cross between the Master Letters and the Oprah subtitle Mandarin and I used to think was sooo funny, “My Buddhist Dom Took All My Money.” Ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ha! Et cetera.
So that I finally started writing new chapterettes last fall, let them lie dormant over the winter, and revised and typeset them this spring? Wonder of wonders, faithless readers; miracle of miracles.
Currently haunted by a persistent disbelief: Dad burned some new folk CDs for me, and it would seem that Emmylou Harris has written and sung a disconcerting number of I’ve-been-left-on-my-lonesome songs. This is disconcerting because why in God’s red-dirt earth would anyone dump Emmylou Harris?! Or does she only date crazy idiots? Because Ms. Harris has cheekbones like your imaginary Cherokee-princess great-grandmother, shock-white hair that’s the envy of the nursing home and a quavery alto voice to wring your widdle heart into tiny pieces. And she’s famous. She’s Emmylou Harris for chrissake. Helloooo; whatareyouthinking.com? I’d love to know who all these bozos are, just so I can travel whatever distance necessary to stand before them marvelling. And I really hope it’s all romantic affectation, and she’s long since met her Brujo.
Speaking of whom, and speaking of Doe: after serving as first reader, the B. offered the observation that its episodes are relativistically coterminous. So while they don’t happen in an order, nor is information divulged linearly, after finishing all of them you nonetheless somehow have a mental rough chronology of the lives of these characters, almost magically so. This pleased me to hear, because I had been thinking deeply about narrative versus story (an argument once frequently enjoyed by the Librarian and myself)—about Wendy’s seduction of Peter Pan—about the stilled vignettes of Chris Marker’s La Jetée versus Martin Arnold’s staggered, repeating loops of film, each black-and-white experimental films, each equally engrossing and each conveying story but in such completely different ways—and about this passage, in particular, from Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind:
The basic stories we know best are small stories of events in space. The wind blows clouds through the sky, a child throws a rock, a mother pours milk into a glass, a whale swims through the water. These stories constitute our world and they are completely absorbing—we cannot resist watching the volley of the tennis ball. Our adult experience actually revolves around pouring the drink into a cup, carrying it, watching the bird soar, watching the plane descend, tracking the small stick as the stream carries it away. […] This small spatial story takes place billions of times a day, all over the world, with numbing repetition. No one who pours the liquid thinks it is an interesting story; what is the point?
Small spatial stories. A woman pulls weeds, drops seeds into the earth, tamps it back down over them. A deer dips her head into the river to drink, looks up, runs away. Wind blows across grass and it ripples. Lights come on in the windows of a house. A man walks from the barn, blows out the lantern, enters. Now what do we know about these people, about their time or place?
For amusement’s sake, here are my short pieces on Martin Arnold, written not long after watching the aforementioned double-feature (courtesy of the Librarian). I highly recommend this exercise, viewing Arnold’s shorts juxtaposed with Marker’s La Jetée: the two together will give you the oddest, most vertiginous sense of linearity, not unlike the phenomenon of reading Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow in an afternoon and then, for the rest of the day, being unable to shake the visceral feeling that time is flowing in the wrong direction, i.e., forward rather than backward. What you should know about Martin Arnold, if you haven’t seen any of his work, is that he typically takes a brief passage and loops it around itself mysteriously so that you watch the same few seconds of film over and over, jagged and staggery. 
What you should know about Chris Marker is that those frozen vignettes which look like film of the actors holding very, very still are actually Pentax photographs, with one exception; which will probably only seem meaningful to you if you already get, say, why DePalma filmed the last scene of Carrie in reverse (ever-so-much scarier).
Pièce touchée (1989)
Takes ordinary motion and minisculizes it until made visible are the gendered dramas of entreaty and resistance, withdrawal and magnetism, not only between the embracing woman and the man, but also within the self; he seems pulled to her by a terrible ineluctable magnetism, drawn against his will, and she’s forever rising to follow him; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but with a sound throughout like a washing machine or eternally flushing toilet bowl, a quiet industrial susurration that hollows out and vitiates it with ambiguity.
Arnold knows when you need a drop more of story and he lets the film stop stuttering and run on just a bit further and with infinitesimally more fluidity.
Like cities seen from an airplane, humans reduced to our constituent components of limbic, reptilian, cortical desire.
•
Passage à l’acte (1993)
Nothing quite like the machine-gun fire to which Arnold subjects To Kill a Mockingbird, sacred cow of Americana, with Gregory Peck epitomizing the good father with whom all good girls can safely fall in love. Arnold refracts it into a compressed vision of the gentrified middle-class family at war.
Scout’s gesture of eating becomes obscene; their nice lady neighbor looks on and smiles politely while Atticus and his family engage in a strange percussive tribal routine, Atticus saying sternly “Jem” and Scout whining “I’m trying,” both quacking or creaking like crickets or loons, and throughout it all we never quite see Scout’s face.
What we do seem to see is a coordination between events which is normally not present or not experienced; the opening of a door inspires the turning of a head; they are connected as by a string, like Butoh, the actors forced into contortions they seem unwilling to inhabit, yet choiceless. Or they sit trembling, vibrating with barely contained distress. Calpurnia’s arm moving aimlessly at the stove. Scout drawn down into a squatting or hunkering position, coiling before springing upward to kiss Atticus like some skinny clinging baby vampire bat.
How in the world did Arnold locate within that film this one-line exchange between Scout and Jem which becomes an intensely politicized sexual debate? There’s a female solidarity between the younger woman and the older, as if drinking tea becomes the act of training Scout (recalcitrant, reluctant to learn). She rebelliously bangs her fork; now it is the adults who are fixed and glimmering, and the children struggling to flee against their terrible static pull, their lodestone glamour, their statuesque fixity, punctuated with the screen door’s repeated slam: successful escape.
•
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998)
The scene between Mickey Rooney and his mother has been so eerily eroticized in its slowing-down, primarily due to an almost invisible lifting of the actress’s left eyebrow and the opening of her lips as she curves her neck back into Rooney’s kiss, then the sliding and grasping and trembling of his hands. The way in which he turns away from her becomes tragic and renunciatory, in its lethargy; she licks her lips. Then Arnold jump-cuts to Rooney’s having his cheek struck, and the man shouting “Shut up!”—so raw and surprisingly violent by contrast. “Alright, Dad,” he says resignedly, his voice and eyes full of tears.
Judy Garland turns up as a creepy woodwind vocalizing all over the word “alone”—”There must be someone waiting / who feels the way I do”—her leaning forward and breathing visually pair with the mother’s sexual avidity. Garland conjures Rooney through the door in a top hat and he dances for her, all mating bird and plumage; their kiss is somehow similar to the one he exchanged with his mother, and despite intercuts to the mother, we can’t tell whether she’s anguished or overjoyed about their union. In the meantime they pant together like lizards or hissing cockroaches, tropical, inhumanly exotic, the rhythms ineluctably those of fucking.
“Where are you going?” the mother asks and he replies, “You know where I’m going”—we cut back to Garland crooning in what are beginning to sound like overtones. Rooney is torn between the lures of the two women, lures like fish dangle underwater, glowing—Garland all feminine and bright-eyed and juvenalized, and then suddenly belting out this startlingly deep, worldly “ALONE / with a heart meant for you.” Someone shouts “Here I come!” and with all her magic she summons him.
And Arnold in his own words:
The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.
If pièce touchée expresses sexuality and passage à l’acte aggression, then perhaps Andy Hardy finds melancholia.
And finally, for a rather…different sort of cinematic experience, please hasten to these highly abbreviated, rated-R-for-language distillations of Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, courtesy of bluishorange.com: the short version and the chicken version. You will not be sorry, je vous promets.
And, I am apparently allergic to Pyewacket, who makes my palate itch. Either that or maybe she’s just covered with invisible lilac or apple-tree pollen.
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