Dustin Hoffman looks out through the glass at his Berkley so narrow. Everything that he seeks is contained in that gaze – Elaine, his future, his life as he wants it, framed in that view. As a film, THE GRADUATE is filled with a dozen shots such as this, perfect compositions that place us right there in its action. Each small moment is crafted as if life itself had some style, or a groove, or even simply a point, well-lit and soft-scored by a soundtrack that Simon and Garfunkel saw fit to give voice. At various points while watching this flick, I wanted to somehow physically find myself right there in those rooms, staring at each small window, drifting in that blue pool. Actually go there, I mean. Hunt down those filming locations, the spots where they shot. An odd obsession of mine, unfilled. (My fantasies tend to involve artforms brought to life – my life.)
Is there a medical term for this type of delusion? I have wandered inside the old stone of Japan’s ancient Buddha, and ascended the steps of Cambodia’s temples at Angkor, but I admit that the thrill was soft and quite dull when compared to the joy that I felt while entering the wide mouth of Camp White Pine’s paved parking lot, the filming location of Bill Murray’s MEATBALLS. Not far from a cottage in northern Ontario, where we leaped off the end of short docks and into our lives. A fifteen minute drive, the parents acquiescing to the kids’ whiny pleas. Around the resort, just cottages and tall trees, but there, to the right, the tennis courts where all those crazy hijinks ensued! And this path is the same one that Tripper and Rudy ran down as they trained for the young boy’s final race! Oh, the joy. To have stepped into that world, where film became life. If your own life as a child revolved around screens of wide silver, then ‘life’ as a notion needed celluloid in some form to feel tactile and real. For a few minutes, I felt that Bill Murray, camp counsellor, might somehow still be there, a raucous spirit at play, waiting for us to acknowledge his gags. I was convinced: The sweet joy of that film could be bottled and stored in my mind’s dusty basement, a firefly now trapped in a tight mental jar, if only I stayed long enough in that place, rewinding and playing all those scenes that had been filmed right there under my feet. But the filming had happened a long time ago, thirteen or fourteen years in the past, and I wasn’t the one driving. We had to go. Leaving Camp White Pine was its own small form of death. A quiet, easy exit into a kind of real world. Nothing from the past of the film was there any longer, no cast and no crew, no music or montage, and seeing the camp as it was struck a knife in my spine: I realized: This is all real; it’s the movie that’s fake.
Yet the true cinephile is a persistent strange dork, and understands that the ‘real’ world of our lives, and the ‘fake’ world of each film, must intersect at some point, a collision of collusion. Movies are, after all, made from the stuff of real life – buildings composed of hard concrete, vehicles formed of raw steel. There are remnants. Things left behind. By going to these places, standing where the actors once stood, one can link oneself to each film, insert one’s own soul into cinema. It’s almost a religious quest.
And I know I’m not alone. Scouring the net, one can find an ambitious young Canuck who has spent a day in L.A. visiting various locales from the first BACK TO THE FUTURE. Ah, now there’s a man after my own private heart! If I had my coin, I’d run up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, practicing my Rocky Balboa quick jog. I’m convinced that I would find some teenage version of myself still preserved in those places, visible only to me, not hidden, but hiding.
Of course, I need not go that far. Right now, I’m in the Philippines, and weren’t PLATOON and APOCALYPSE NOW filmed right here in this green? And isn’t a jungle a suitable metaphor for the quest one must take to link life and the cinema? Perhaps someday soon I’ll slip on my backpack, slap some mosquito repellent on the base of my neck, and then wander away through these forests so thick still foreign, searching for my own form of Kurtz, that misunderstood madman whose own logic felt sound. I think he might even be waiting for me.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Saturday, March 05, 2011
EGLINTON STATION FOREVER, RIGHT HERE IN MY HAND
A few weeks ago, I picked up copy of Walker Percy’s 1966 novel The Last Gentleman at a used bookshop here in Baguio, and just now, crashed out on the bed, idly reading, lazily turning the page, I came across a subway transfer receipt for Eglinton Station on the Yonge Subway line in Toronto, a line I used almost every weekend for four years while attending York University, a station I wandered through on probably more winter nights than I’d like to remember. (Is there a more lonely, windy, grimy example of life than a Toronto subway station in frost?) How many Canadians are here in this northern Philippines city? A handful, if that. The thousands of other Filipinos or expats who could have picked up this book would have overlooked this same ticket, crumpled it up straight away. Yet for me it’s a crude talisman, a link between worlds. Taking me out to another.
In secret, we think: All space and its sun revolves around us. Alone. As adults, as semi, sort of grown-ups, we tell ourselves that we are mature, reasonable, empathetic humans; we know that there are others, too, who orgasm and excrete at irregular intervals, but most of us believe that we alone are the world. How can we know what the other is thinking? We sneeze, fart, fondle, sigh. I cannot know how these acts feel for you. So we move through this life, estimating. Tangible touches, those approximate links. If I stroke your hair, tweak your nipple, smell your breath, I forget, for a time, my own beating heart. Yet humans are messy. Just give me some kind of memento to hold in my palm. A subway transfer will do.
I should keep them – all of those boarding passes and bus tickets that I find in old books. I should hoard them – these connections between strangers and countries that litter my tomes. That I throw away with indifference. Where is that person who casually stuck this faded white transfer between this book’s brittle pages? Is she taking a bath, or is he yelling at his hyper twin boys who won’t go on up to bed? Are they happy, miserable, content or confused? Did this book at one point give them what they needed so much? I would like a box of these random placeholders from paperback books. They might fill certain spaces.
Or, and this is reaching, but I’ll stretch nonetheless -- perhaps this paper transfer was mine, long ago, in my youth. It’s possible. I don’t remember reading The Last Gentleman at any point before now, but my university days began seventeen long years ago; I read a lot of books in those years, most now forgotten. Perhaps I clutched this book between frigid fingers on a February night in my just-started twenties. It might have kept me company as I rode out from North York to catch a show right downtown. If I’m not mistaken, Eglinton Station, was, for a time, the last subway stop that led to my school; at this final junction, I would have gone up the escalators, danced on two feet to fight away that fierce cold, and then hopped on a bus, fifteen minutes from there to my school and my dorm up the stairs. Casually, I’d have slipped this paper transfer between the book’s middlepages. After reading it, I might have given it away, to a used bookstore or friend. Forgotten about it. (After all, one has a lot to think about at age twenty-one.) Fifteen years later, and half a world in between, it comes back to me hardly touched, almost pristine. I hold it up to my nose. I smell it. I snort it like coke. It smells bland and indifferent. It could be anything. Belong to anyone. I want to weep. Someone before me, if not me, has used this thin strip to mark their place in some world. I hold it and rub it and wait for a genie. None comes, so I am left with its presence, its light weight in my palm.
In secret, we think: All space and its sun revolves around us. Alone. As adults, as semi, sort of grown-ups, we tell ourselves that we are mature, reasonable, empathetic humans; we know that there are others, too, who orgasm and excrete at irregular intervals, but most of us believe that we alone are the world. How can we know what the other is thinking? We sneeze, fart, fondle, sigh. I cannot know how these acts feel for you. So we move through this life, estimating. Tangible touches, those approximate links. If I stroke your hair, tweak your nipple, smell your breath, I forget, for a time, my own beating heart. Yet humans are messy. Just give me some kind of memento to hold in my palm. A subway transfer will do.
I should keep them – all of those boarding passes and bus tickets that I find in old books. I should hoard them – these connections between strangers and countries that litter my tomes. That I throw away with indifference. Where is that person who casually stuck this faded white transfer between this book’s brittle pages? Is she taking a bath, or is he yelling at his hyper twin boys who won’t go on up to bed? Are they happy, miserable, content or confused? Did this book at one point give them what they needed so much? I would like a box of these random placeholders from paperback books. They might fill certain spaces.
Or, and this is reaching, but I’ll stretch nonetheless -- perhaps this paper transfer was mine, long ago, in my youth. It’s possible. I don’t remember reading The Last Gentleman at any point before now, but my university days began seventeen long years ago; I read a lot of books in those years, most now forgotten. Perhaps I clutched this book between frigid fingers on a February night in my just-started twenties. It might have kept me company as I rode out from North York to catch a show right downtown. If I’m not mistaken, Eglinton Station, was, for a time, the last subway stop that led to my school; at this final junction, I would have gone up the escalators, danced on two feet to fight away that fierce cold, and then hopped on a bus, fifteen minutes from there to my school and my dorm up the stairs. Casually, I’d have slipped this paper transfer between the book’s middlepages. After reading it, I might have given it away, to a used bookstore or friend. Forgotten about it. (After all, one has a lot to think about at age twenty-one.) Fifteen years later, and half a world in between, it comes back to me hardly touched, almost pristine. I hold it up to my nose. I smell it. I snort it like coke. It smells bland and indifferent. It could be anything. Belong to anyone. I want to weep. Someone before me, if not me, has used this thin strip to mark their place in some world. I hold it and rub it and wait for a genie. None comes, so I am left with its presence, its light weight in my palm.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
FOR WHAT I MIGHT HEAR
The month is now March, heralding the end of the ice, but the calendar insists on a warmth that is rare. Not for here; not for the Philippines. Where I come from, the Canadian winter is slowly deciding to call it a season, but this island I’m on never got with that program. Here in the north, it’s cool in the morning, cool in the night, with the random odd shower to liven the mood, but how cool can it be if t-shirts and shorts are the norm that I need? All the day long; all the year round. Something right out of a TV commercial, where ocean waves and ice tea conspire for my coin. A life where the sun’s yellow rays might be shrouded by clouds or gray skies, but exposed skin won’t freeze up after only two minutes. No silver clouds in small clusters breathed out from one’s lips. A steady stream of snot snorted up and then back, up and then back? Not here. Back home over Christmas I noticed my teeth chatter for what seemed like minutes on end, and this common facet of winter seemed rare, almost nostalgic in nature. Years since I’d felt my mouth go off in that manner. Chalk it up to the shock of the wind and the ice that gave form to my bend, greeting me with good cheer, a blunt form of face-smack. Welcome home, you’ve been missed!
Nature and nurture, indeed. Let the sociologists debate those two rigid poles of self-growth from which our minds might then sprout; a childhood in Canada offers other, more flexible angles of proof. Why don’t the academics consider the sound of a skate on the ice as it stops with a slice? You repeat that, over years, a dozen winters, let’s say, and you have an approach to the world that is clear and quite neat: The balance required to start and then halt on a frozen slick surface says more than enough about a life’s subtle needs. Or consider: the snow’s sudden melt. Spring as a bully, demanding some time. A thick sweater discarded, a thin coat your new sheath. Toques with small pom-poms replaced by a cap. Gloves stashed away in the drawer, your fingers now able to flex in the air. That first hint of warmth, when long pants are an excess. If you want to know how the human mind and its heart might react to life’s sway, a southern Ontario season could be a good start.
Now, I’m not even sure what season it is, which, believe me, is an odd place to be. Right here in my ‘fall’, the rain returned each day around three, for an hour’s shower and cleanse. Every few weeks, a typhoon might stop by for three days or four, cutting power, wreaking wrath. The skies would be dull and ash-dark for a good month or more. No winter to speak of, and now here in March summer starts in a month. I can’t figure it out. My body resists. Add to this confusion seven years in Japan (with bi-annual returns as I write), and two more in Cambodia, each nation chock full of dry and wet seasons and regional quirks that come complete with their own cliques of strong winds and deep deluges in circadian rhythm, and what do you have left? A Canadian, one who wonders, whether or not he can weather all this weather for much longer at all, this annual mishmash of seasons, this timepiece that ticks past each unbearable snowstorm and godawful rainfall, and yet each change of tide, I admit, does tend to wash in oddly shaped conks on the beach, ones that I still, more often than not, even after all of this time, dust off and inspect and hold close to my ear for what I might hear.
Nature and nurture, indeed. Let the sociologists debate those two rigid poles of self-growth from which our minds might then sprout; a childhood in Canada offers other, more flexible angles of proof. Why don’t the academics consider the sound of a skate on the ice as it stops with a slice? You repeat that, over years, a dozen winters, let’s say, and you have an approach to the world that is clear and quite neat: The balance required to start and then halt on a frozen slick surface says more than enough about a life’s subtle needs. Or consider: the snow’s sudden melt. Spring as a bully, demanding some time. A thick sweater discarded, a thin coat your new sheath. Toques with small pom-poms replaced by a cap. Gloves stashed away in the drawer, your fingers now able to flex in the air. That first hint of warmth, when long pants are an excess. If you want to know how the human mind and its heart might react to life’s sway, a southern Ontario season could be a good start.
Now, I’m not even sure what season it is, which, believe me, is an odd place to be. Right here in my ‘fall’, the rain returned each day around three, for an hour’s shower and cleanse. Every few weeks, a typhoon might stop by for three days or four, cutting power, wreaking wrath. The skies would be dull and ash-dark for a good month or more. No winter to speak of, and now here in March summer starts in a month. I can’t figure it out. My body resists. Add to this confusion seven years in Japan (with bi-annual returns as I write), and two more in Cambodia, each nation chock full of dry and wet seasons and regional quirks that come complete with their own cliques of strong winds and deep deluges in circadian rhythm, and what do you have left? A Canadian, one who wonders, whether or not he can weather all this weather for much longer at all, this annual mishmash of seasons, this timepiece that ticks past each unbearable snowstorm and godawful rainfall, and yet each change of tide, I admit, does tend to wash in oddly shaped conks on the beach, ones that I still, more often than not, even after all of this time, dust off and inspect and hold close to my ear for what I might hear.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
A CARTOGRAPHER'S SPRAWL
The world as it is often seems too large to know. The endless depths of each ocean; a languid sprawl of rainforests; those arrogant mountain peaks, straining to scrape the sky’s blue-streaked wide bottom – each of these spans is a trap, a dead end’s final wall. Even the length of my room hides untold floorboard wood puzzles. If I can’t even guess how one brick of this house somehow mingles with mortar, what hope can I have to decipher the globe as it is?
Nevertheless, I scheme. I invent alternatives. I concoct scenarios, imaginary escapades whose fruition is doubtful, and so I blame the world as it is for their unlikely rate of success. Put it this way: I envision a day, not long from right now, when I will begin my strange quest to make all Earth my own. If life as it’s lived consists only of footsteps, left turns and backroads, quick strides and slow shuffles, then, given time and its minions, I might trod upon all the streets and byways that lead from this room to out there.
It’s simple, as most complex plans truly are. I leave my front door, knapsack on back, water bottle in hand. One foot lifts itself up, and the other soon follows suit. Repeat. Again. Repeat. Again. You’re with me, I know. It’s nothing alien to our human instincts. All travel consists of one motion, xeroxed. That being true, what remains consists solely of intent and time, in equal good measure. We have a limited number of hours to use; the routes that we choose thus must follow such limits. If we lived all of this life on red Mars or Uranus, or on one of those planets where each day wastes hour upon hour before night finds its groove, our travels would surely consist of less forms of small grief. Here, with the ground that we have, and the daylight that we lack, we must select where we go, to limit our fallout.
Even so, my mad endeavor’s true roots have a core of discernment. How can one decide that this place over here is truly worthy of us? There’s a vanity at play in each interlude of pure wander. We expect the location to give us ourselves in some way, a reflection of hope, some excitement or thrill. Something, at least. It does not exist for itself, but as our natural mirror or twin. “It was a fabulous place!” means it got our rocks off. The earth, by itself, exists for that sly tingle – signaling: some sex might be near. We visit those waterfalls or small towns so that our palate or crotch might find a form of sweet touch.
Yet: What if we sought not fulfillment but presence? Nothing exotic; nothing startling. Just, the planet. Every road and dirt path somehow leads to each other, and I believe, without proof, that one could tread upon all of these paths that exist, if patience became our pure goal. All the paths, ultimately. It would take most of my life, but if I started quite soon, I might just pull it off. Rip the rails right from the ground and have the tracks be my feet.
You see: I want to see every street that exists in each country, the works. I would not linger; I might not even pause for one second’s small span. Only glimpse as I cruised. Time only wields certain weapons, and one must not waste their blunt force. Would I use Google Maps? Not at all. Turn it off. Shut her down. I’d instead ask the locals to tell me where each unpaved road ends and transforms into blacktop. Take a snapshot of each sign, the street names my new buds. Start here in east Asia, and walk my way counter- clockwise.
In fifty years time, I’ll slowly step into the court that holds my true childhood home, not seen since nineteen, and now my last resting place. In my backpack, a hundred notebooks or more will be filled with street names, the world cataloged and contained. Everything will have been seen by myself, underscored and processed. In a way, at that end, the world will at last have become all my own. Of course, I won’t recollect the underfoot of every swamp or quicksand that I dodged in my travels, but when I knock on my old door, I hope to hear that the footsteps approaching from inside have a familiar soft echo.
Nevertheless, I scheme. I invent alternatives. I concoct scenarios, imaginary escapades whose fruition is doubtful, and so I blame the world as it is for their unlikely rate of success. Put it this way: I envision a day, not long from right now, when I will begin my strange quest to make all Earth my own. If life as it’s lived consists only of footsteps, left turns and backroads, quick strides and slow shuffles, then, given time and its minions, I might trod upon all the streets and byways that lead from this room to out there.
It’s simple, as most complex plans truly are. I leave my front door, knapsack on back, water bottle in hand. One foot lifts itself up, and the other soon follows suit. Repeat. Again. Repeat. Again. You’re with me, I know. It’s nothing alien to our human instincts. All travel consists of one motion, xeroxed. That being true, what remains consists solely of intent and time, in equal good measure. We have a limited number of hours to use; the routes that we choose thus must follow such limits. If we lived all of this life on red Mars or Uranus, or on one of those planets where each day wastes hour upon hour before night finds its groove, our travels would surely consist of less forms of small grief. Here, with the ground that we have, and the daylight that we lack, we must select where we go, to limit our fallout.
Even so, my mad endeavor’s true roots have a core of discernment. How can one decide that this place over here is truly worthy of us? There’s a vanity at play in each interlude of pure wander. We expect the location to give us ourselves in some way, a reflection of hope, some excitement or thrill. Something, at least. It does not exist for itself, but as our natural mirror or twin. “It was a fabulous place!” means it got our rocks off. The earth, by itself, exists for that sly tingle – signaling: some sex might be near. We visit those waterfalls or small towns so that our palate or crotch might find a form of sweet touch.
Yet: What if we sought not fulfillment but presence? Nothing exotic; nothing startling. Just, the planet. Every road and dirt path somehow leads to each other, and I believe, without proof, that one could tread upon all of these paths that exist, if patience became our pure goal. All the paths, ultimately. It would take most of my life, but if I started quite soon, I might just pull it off. Rip the rails right from the ground and have the tracks be my feet.
You see: I want to see every street that exists in each country, the works. I would not linger; I might not even pause for one second’s small span. Only glimpse as I cruised. Time only wields certain weapons, and one must not waste their blunt force. Would I use Google Maps? Not at all. Turn it off. Shut her down. I’d instead ask the locals to tell me where each unpaved road ends and transforms into blacktop. Take a snapshot of each sign, the street names my new buds. Start here in east Asia, and walk my way counter- clockwise.
In fifty years time, I’ll slowly step into the court that holds my true childhood home, not seen since nineteen, and now my last resting place. In my backpack, a hundred notebooks or more will be filled with street names, the world cataloged and contained. Everything will have been seen by myself, underscored and processed. In a way, at that end, the world will at last have become all my own. Of course, I won’t recollect the underfoot of every swamp or quicksand that I dodged in my travels, but when I knock on my old door, I hope to hear that the footsteps approaching from inside have a familiar soft echo.
Monday, February 28, 2011
SHOW AND TELL
Sometimes random moments from life will return with full force. Just now. Me, in the car, age five, lounging in the backseat, flipping through a full-colour, hardcover book featuring Bert and Ernie, along with who knows how many other of their Sesame Street, plush-doll pals.. Somewhere in Niagara, near my home in St.Kitts. Beamsville? Grimsby? Driving through springtime, sunlight slicing its path through the rear window’s small square. One that I often lean against and lean into at night as I watch the moon chase our small car halfway home. The next day a Monday, me in Grade 1, at the front of the class, using this book as my show-and-tell prop. Proud that it’s a hardcover, and not soft to the touch.
Why now, this memory, as I reached for the fan to fight February’s thick heat? (Welcome to the Philippines.) I wasn’t thinking of books, of childhood; I wasn’t thinking of anything.
Alongside this stray recollection, another one soon arises: me with a Mcdonald’s Happy Meal toy, a blue plastic spaceship, a UFO shaped like a spiral, on each window a sticker, the shriek-happy faces of Ronald Mcdonald and friends. I particularly liked that peelable touch, the stickers; all of his buddies together, riding off into space. Something about them all being safe in one spot, awaiting adventure. Again, in the backseat of my car, that invasive hamburger smell perfuming the air, and me with my spaceship, imagining lift-offs.
That, too, became a show-and-tell moment – that Mcdonald’s space-shuttle, unique and short-lived. It wouldn’t be available forever. I had to flaunt its short life-span for all of my friends. Where it is now, I can’t say. That’s all in the ‘ago’.
Oh, please give me these touchstones, again, and again. Such warmth and great feeling. Such majestic emotion, a child’s one true trump card against adulthood’s grim slog. I recently finished Nobel Prize winning German author Gunter Grass’s new memoir, Peeling The Onion, in which he recounts the events of his life with a perplexed tone of candor. He can remember so much, and yet recall so damn little. Some events, crystal; others, only quartz. Opaque. He in his seventies, looking back sixty years; me, in my thirties, the early eighties my young time. The past is not only a foreign country, as a great author once said; it’s also a black hole, one that receives much raw data, but emits precious few signals. Yet still stuff leaks out, and I learn to slip through that hole, all at once, an accident.
If only show-and-tell still existed as life took away our small joys. Me, you, in a room. A small-town Ontario Legion hall all decked out. Soft drinks and hot coffee in Styrofoam cups. Folding tables lining both sides of the room. Metal chairs in neat rows. We all could take turns, the old folks starting first. Talking about the best things in our lives from the week that just passed. Flashing the odd souvenir we picked up from Sunday drives through small towns, or the latest new gadget, nabbed for half-price right downtown. Polite applause as we left the small stage.
I imagine a small kind of miracle as I take to the stage. As I begin to speak, as I open my bag, as I pretend what’s inside is a prop worthy of awe, down from the ceiling will float a blue plastic toy, all those Mcdonald’s friends in their spaceship, not lost at all but just waiting. For me and this moment. Three decades on, it will return to my hands. I will stare at those stickers, those portholes that feature Mayor McCheese in his suit and purple Grimace peeking out. An urge to hurl this ship like a Frisbee will come and then pass. Instead, I’ll clutch it tight, hug it, even fondle its ridges. Wondering if its descent is a fluke, or if it could not have come back until the memory had come first. If it will not return unless I give voice to its thrill. And if this is all true, I will tell everyone there of the joys of my past, staying still on that stage, until the book from that backseat spring drive will somehow pop up.
Why now, this memory, as I reached for the fan to fight February’s thick heat? (Welcome to the Philippines.) I wasn’t thinking of books, of childhood; I wasn’t thinking of anything.
Alongside this stray recollection, another one soon arises: me with a Mcdonald’s Happy Meal toy, a blue plastic spaceship, a UFO shaped like a spiral, on each window a sticker, the shriek-happy faces of Ronald Mcdonald and friends. I particularly liked that peelable touch, the stickers; all of his buddies together, riding off into space. Something about them all being safe in one spot, awaiting adventure. Again, in the backseat of my car, that invasive hamburger smell perfuming the air, and me with my spaceship, imagining lift-offs.
That, too, became a show-and-tell moment – that Mcdonald’s space-shuttle, unique and short-lived. It wouldn’t be available forever. I had to flaunt its short life-span for all of my friends. Where it is now, I can’t say. That’s all in the ‘ago’.
Oh, please give me these touchstones, again, and again. Such warmth and great feeling. Such majestic emotion, a child’s one true trump card against adulthood’s grim slog. I recently finished Nobel Prize winning German author Gunter Grass’s new memoir, Peeling The Onion, in which he recounts the events of his life with a perplexed tone of candor. He can remember so much, and yet recall so damn little. Some events, crystal; others, only quartz. Opaque. He in his seventies, looking back sixty years; me, in my thirties, the early eighties my young time. The past is not only a foreign country, as a great author once said; it’s also a black hole, one that receives much raw data, but emits precious few signals. Yet still stuff leaks out, and I learn to slip through that hole, all at once, an accident.
If only show-and-tell still existed as life took away our small joys. Me, you, in a room. A small-town Ontario Legion hall all decked out. Soft drinks and hot coffee in Styrofoam cups. Folding tables lining both sides of the room. Metal chairs in neat rows. We all could take turns, the old folks starting first. Talking about the best things in our lives from the week that just passed. Flashing the odd souvenir we picked up from Sunday drives through small towns, or the latest new gadget, nabbed for half-price right downtown. Polite applause as we left the small stage.
I imagine a small kind of miracle as I take to the stage. As I begin to speak, as I open my bag, as I pretend what’s inside is a prop worthy of awe, down from the ceiling will float a blue plastic toy, all those Mcdonald’s friends in their spaceship, not lost at all but just waiting. For me and this moment. Three decades on, it will return to my hands. I will stare at those stickers, those portholes that feature Mayor McCheese in his suit and purple Grimace peeking out. An urge to hurl this ship like a Frisbee will come and then pass. Instead, I’ll clutch it tight, hug it, even fondle its ridges. Wondering if its descent is a fluke, or if it could not have come back until the memory had come first. If it will not return unless I give voice to its thrill. And if this is all true, I will tell everyone there of the joys of my past, staying still on that stage, until the book from that backseat spring drive will somehow pop up.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
CLIPPINGS
I used a nail-clipper for the first time in a good five, six years on my toes the other night. Watching TV, pretending to condescend to the auditions on AMERICAN IDOL, but secretly sort of enjoying the program, rooting them on to false dreams of redemption. I realized that the keychain that I twirled had a tool on its end. I flicked open the clipper, took a gander at my feet, whistled a little bit. Not the prettiest of sights, those feet, not the kind of transformative view that cause sentimental people to compose memorable poems or eulogies that might last. (But a blog post, well, what the hell.)
I’d almost forgotten how to use a nail clipper, that’s how long it’d been. Which is not to say that my toenails were swirling and conspiring against each other in a grotesque foot embrace; I didn’t look like one of those Indian holy men in the Guiness Book Of Records, those emaciated souls who always seem to hold the title of ‘World’s Longest Fingernails’ or ‘No Sleep For Ten Years’. The nails were probably shorter than average, if a little ragged. You see, I belong to that subspecies of humans who pick the nails on their hands and the ones on their feet. (I’ve been known to chew my fingernails, but not my toenails; I have standards. Not many, and they’re usually quite low, but I do have them.) If you’re grossed out, that’s your right; just remember: what you, yourself, tend to do with your body’s strange parts, when you think you’re alone, and that nobody is watching, could very well cause your close friends to freak out. (You know who you are.)
Oddly involving, clipping is. For a moment or two I felt like a young Ralph Macchio, snipping and shaping his bonsai tree to perfection. (I then realized that I am currently eleven years older than Macchio was when he filmed the first Karate Kid film, and that I’m nineteen years older than the actual character’s age. Me, almost two decades older than Daniel LaRusso? That’s a little absurd. I remember quite clearly watching that film at a theatre in Niagara Falls at age seven, the same weekend I moved from the only house that I’d known; wasn’t that just a few weekends ago, or a month, at the most? Looks like 1984 must be a bit farther back in my life than I’d like to believe) There’s an odd kind of Zen that descends when minute tasks are engaged. The tiny clicks that I heard almost felt sort of soothing. Something was getting done. Needless parts of myself were disregarded, abandoned.
Someday, someone might just figure out how to invent a similar gadget, one that is used exclusively for our soul’s excess layers. Stuff is accumulating there. I can feel it. Except here’s no Mr.Miyagi to help me wax on or wax off, to teach me the crane kick, the right kata to use. Think of it: we never see our nails growing; they edge onward, at night. During work. While we eat. Creeping, creeping. Stealthy, almost. Stuff attaches itself to our hearts the same way. Over time. Slights, grievances. Frustrations, anxieties. All of our hurts, swelling. Bruising, even. Only we can’t spot them grow; they linger, then fester, always unseen. There must be a physical means to erode all that pain.
Not a pill for the pain; not some stupor we willingly enter,then hide deep within. I’m thinking of a wand of some sort, one warm to the touch and quite soothing to stare at. Almost like a benign light sabre. When dark thoughts start to build, the kind that spread fast, one wave of that stick will release a form of good cheer. Such joy will dispel and disperse all that black useless gunk that rides rampant around our mind’s endless linked circuits. A holographic display will present ebony raindrops that fall from our heads to the ground in grand showers. All of our fears, dissolved. Like toenails, they’ll grow back, slowly, with force. Then out comes the wand, and we’ll clip them once more.
Until technology deems my warped wish viable, I guess I’ll have to stay vigilant, to keep tabs on my thoughts. Look for barnacles and growths that might someday become foul. Make my soul my own bonsai, and my will its plant-cutter. (Or, at the very least, think of my spirit as my big toe’s growing nail, and my humor, weak though it is, as its makeshift nail-clipper. That, too, might work.)
I’d almost forgotten how to use a nail clipper, that’s how long it’d been. Which is not to say that my toenails were swirling and conspiring against each other in a grotesque foot embrace; I didn’t look like one of those Indian holy men in the Guiness Book Of Records, those emaciated souls who always seem to hold the title of ‘World’s Longest Fingernails’ or ‘No Sleep For Ten Years’. The nails were probably shorter than average, if a little ragged. You see, I belong to that subspecies of humans who pick the nails on their hands and the ones on their feet. (I’ve been known to chew my fingernails, but not my toenails; I have standards. Not many, and they’re usually quite low, but I do have them.) If you’re grossed out, that’s your right; just remember: what you, yourself, tend to do with your body’s strange parts, when you think you’re alone, and that nobody is watching, could very well cause your close friends to freak out. (You know who you are.)
Oddly involving, clipping is. For a moment or two I felt like a young Ralph Macchio, snipping and shaping his bonsai tree to perfection. (I then realized that I am currently eleven years older than Macchio was when he filmed the first Karate Kid film, and that I’m nineteen years older than the actual character’s age. Me, almost two decades older than Daniel LaRusso? That’s a little absurd. I remember quite clearly watching that film at a theatre in Niagara Falls at age seven, the same weekend I moved from the only house that I’d known; wasn’t that just a few weekends ago, or a month, at the most? Looks like 1984 must be a bit farther back in my life than I’d like to believe) There’s an odd kind of Zen that descends when minute tasks are engaged. The tiny clicks that I heard almost felt sort of soothing. Something was getting done. Needless parts of myself were disregarded, abandoned.
Someday, someone might just figure out how to invent a similar gadget, one that is used exclusively for our soul’s excess layers. Stuff is accumulating there. I can feel it. Except here’s no Mr.Miyagi to help me wax on or wax off, to teach me the crane kick, the right kata to use. Think of it: we never see our nails growing; they edge onward, at night. During work. While we eat. Creeping, creeping. Stealthy, almost. Stuff attaches itself to our hearts the same way. Over time. Slights, grievances. Frustrations, anxieties. All of our hurts, swelling. Bruising, even. Only we can’t spot them grow; they linger, then fester, always unseen. There must be a physical means to erode all that pain.
Not a pill for the pain; not some stupor we willingly enter,then hide deep within. I’m thinking of a wand of some sort, one warm to the touch and quite soothing to stare at. Almost like a benign light sabre. When dark thoughts start to build, the kind that spread fast, one wave of that stick will release a form of good cheer. Such joy will dispel and disperse all that black useless gunk that rides rampant around our mind’s endless linked circuits. A holographic display will present ebony raindrops that fall from our heads to the ground in grand showers. All of our fears, dissolved. Like toenails, they’ll grow back, slowly, with force. Then out comes the wand, and we’ll clip them once more.
Until technology deems my warped wish viable, I guess I’ll have to stay vigilant, to keep tabs on my thoughts. Look for barnacles and growths that might someday become foul. Make my soul my own bonsai, and my will its plant-cutter. (Or, at the very least, think of my spirit as my big toe’s growing nail, and my humor, weak though it is, as its makeshift nail-clipper. That, too, might work.)
Sunday, February 20, 2011
BURDENS TO BEAR AFTER DREAMS THAT DO FADE
I awoke with a cry from a strange and disturbing dream last night, convinced that I would remember it come morning, as its unusual hybrid of horror and hilarity unsettled something deep within me, but when sunlight emerged, the dream subsided, and I wondered if this was what would I feel like in those moments before death, the details of life forgotten completely, odd, intangible emotions the only remainder to guide me wherever it is that we go when we go.
Something to do with Germany. Something to do with children, two of them, a boy and a girl. Blonde-haired, the both of them. As a child, I had a recurring nightmare involving a golden, curly-haired boy, and a black, mammoth, sponge-like creature that swallowed me whole, again and again, nightly, and perhaps this dream from last night was a sequel of sorts. A reckoning.
And that's it, essentially. No details, no plot, no narrative thread of any kind whatsoever -- all of it, gone. All that I'm left with is vague and quite primal. Fear, basically. That kind of low, lingering dread that builds in your stomach and rises like vomit. I've yet to watch a film, or read a book, or listen to a song, or argue with a friend, and be left with the kind of terror and panic that a bad dream can build.
They start somewhere else, beyond our own skulls. These dreams. If an afterlife exists, if we've all been here before, and might come back once again, I'm slightly convinced that our dreams do emerge from that place, or one of its offshoots. They do not peek their way past waking life's mortared bricks. Emotions in dreams are stronger than those lost in life. There's something wondrous and frantic about such a blunt supposition. This might imply that we live our strongest felt selves while asleep on our pillows. Think of it! If we're lucky, seven or eight hours a night, with drool leaking from lips, our farts and soft moans unheard and ignored, and this is the state that arouses our most intense forms of touch. Not physical, but the force that one feels when a lightning storm starts its crackle. Sex, spite, tender, torment, ecstasy, despair, a motley arrangement of humanity's pulse. Can we get that from life? Intermittently, I suppose. But we need sleep and our dreams to relish these vices. And I think they may drift into our nights from those voids that await us all after death.
Even the bad dreams I often want to keep close. Don't go, I think. Stay, I plead. Give me all your details, and I'll cherish them so. Of course, this is not the means by which nightmares are enshrined within our soft psyches. They must exit forever, so that their power endures. All of our books and our movies are nothing but grasping attempts to recover those visions that move us in slumber. Imagine a dream that would last for long months and then years: Would its power be dimmed, or else would it rise and then build like an endless orgasm? Unbearable, or exquisite precisely because of its lack of release?
We let them go, though. I suspect we must. Imagine remembering each of your dreams for all time, from birth unto death! Surely a waste, no? I often consider our nighttime reveries as nothing more than stray junk, the mind's masturbation, their meanings all moot. Other times, usually at night, often when I can't sleep, I reverse my own theory, and declare that these dreams are gifts from those gods that we can't see or perceive when daylight burns bright. Or perhaps they are a small present I give to myself. My sleeping self is a self quite apart from the "Scott" that roams through waking life. He tempts me to loiter in dreams, embrace their strange moods, and upon waking I wonder: Which existence, which weight, has more burdens to bear?
Something to do with Germany. Something to do with children, two of them, a boy and a girl. Blonde-haired, the both of them. As a child, I had a recurring nightmare involving a golden, curly-haired boy, and a black, mammoth, sponge-like creature that swallowed me whole, again and again, nightly, and perhaps this dream from last night was a sequel of sorts. A reckoning.
And that's it, essentially. No details, no plot, no narrative thread of any kind whatsoever -- all of it, gone. All that I'm left with is vague and quite primal. Fear, basically. That kind of low, lingering dread that builds in your stomach and rises like vomit. I've yet to watch a film, or read a book, or listen to a song, or argue with a friend, and be left with the kind of terror and panic that a bad dream can build.
They start somewhere else, beyond our own skulls. These dreams. If an afterlife exists, if we've all been here before, and might come back once again, I'm slightly convinced that our dreams do emerge from that place, or one of its offshoots. They do not peek their way past waking life's mortared bricks. Emotions in dreams are stronger than those lost in life. There's something wondrous and frantic about such a blunt supposition. This might imply that we live our strongest felt selves while asleep on our pillows. Think of it! If we're lucky, seven or eight hours a night, with drool leaking from lips, our farts and soft moans unheard and ignored, and this is the state that arouses our most intense forms of touch. Not physical, but the force that one feels when a lightning storm starts its crackle. Sex, spite, tender, torment, ecstasy, despair, a motley arrangement of humanity's pulse. Can we get that from life? Intermittently, I suppose. But we need sleep and our dreams to relish these vices. And I think they may drift into our nights from those voids that await us all after death.
Even the bad dreams I often want to keep close. Don't go, I think. Stay, I plead. Give me all your details, and I'll cherish them so. Of course, this is not the means by which nightmares are enshrined within our soft psyches. They must exit forever, so that their power endures. All of our books and our movies are nothing but grasping attempts to recover those visions that move us in slumber. Imagine a dream that would last for long months and then years: Would its power be dimmed, or else would it rise and then build like an endless orgasm? Unbearable, or exquisite precisely because of its lack of release?
We let them go, though. I suspect we must. Imagine remembering each of your dreams for all time, from birth unto death! Surely a waste, no? I often consider our nighttime reveries as nothing more than stray junk, the mind's masturbation, their meanings all moot. Other times, usually at night, often when I can't sleep, I reverse my own theory, and declare that these dreams are gifts from those gods that we can't see or perceive when daylight burns bright. Or perhaps they are a small present I give to myself. My sleeping self is a self quite apart from the "Scott" that roams through waking life. He tempts me to loiter in dreams, embrace their strange moods, and upon waking I wonder: Which existence, which weight, has more burdens to bear?
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