Late into the night

Rachel Getting Married is theatre. There are a lot of superficial ways in which this makes sense - the limited set, the focus on character and dialog, and the subject of a dysfunctional family with a secret that slowly emerges through the night, reminiscent of plays as various as Long Day's Journey Into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but the identity with stage rather than film goes deeper, I think, than that. It has to do with the way stage and film communicate fiction to us. There are certain things that you can and can't do in either, and this shapes the stories and how they are told. We hear all the time about directors or novelists who have a story to tell and who tell it, truthfully and directly, in the medium of their choice, but I think we don't as often stop to consider how different the story would be if the novelist were a playright, or the playwright a director. I am talking not only about changes in dialog and narrative voice and so on, but also fundamental matters of tone and character, and even plot.

I have often heard that stage actors must learn to be subtler in their facial gestures when they transition to film, and that film actors must learn to go big. This is self-evident. I wonder, though, if the necessities of acting in either medium have influenced the way their stories are written. A playwright simply can't depend on every member of an audience catching a sideways glance in the eyes, a slight downturn in the mouth, to advance a crucial point; the strokes must be drawn large. Subtlety and layer must be conveyed not physically, but with words, since half the audience is always behind the speaker and you can't always depend on the actor to deliver exactly what you want. Here is a pretty general rule: films are driven by faces, plays by words. The result is two totally different types of fiction.

I have to admit that there are some pretty great faces in Rachel Getting Married, but it is nevertheless written like a play. I have been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes me sure of this, and I think it has to do with us. We are a character in Rachel. We walk through the house and listen to the speeches. We dance in the night and leave in the morning. This is not normally how film works, which is to render us invisible and non-existent. The filmic eye is kind of like the eye of God; we never question that it can show us whatever the director wants us to see, including a character's dreams. It can go everywhere, and disturbs no one.

Plays, on the other hand, are a spectator sport. The whole idea of a soliloquy (which would be totally inimical to film) is of a character speaking solely for the benefit of the audience, even if he or she is not aware of it. But even this is not always the case: Iago frighteningly addresses the audience in Othello, and Salieri conjures us out of thin air, because he needs an audience for his recollections, in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus. Note that when Amadeus was made into a movie, a new character was added: the priest, who replaces the audience as the recipient of Salieri's thoughts. It would have been inconceivable for Salieri in the movie to address the audience in the movie theatre, or to speak to no one. That is not how the language of film works.

But back to Rachel: no one addresses the screen in this movie, but we are nevertheless there. I am not sure exactly how I know this. There is something confessional in the way the camera is held, a dangerous sort of veering in and out, too close to their faces and then back again. There is also a lack of what we might call a directorial voice. What sets theatre apart from any other narrative art is that you are free to look where you choose. Movies always tell us where to look, and even though we may notice important details in the background, it is always in spite of a focus somewhere else. There is always a guiding lens that we can either work with or against. Novels are perhaps the most controlling of media - we can't look in the background (or hardly) even if we wanted. But plays, even if they have ways to direct our attention, essentially have no control over our focus. We can watch the speaker or the listener, or the actor standing closest to us. Of course we can't change what happens, or who speaks, and so this may seem like a small freedom, but it is actually a tremendous one. All observation is achieved through perspective; we don't ask "why is this green?" but rather "why did Shelley or Ibsen or Scorsese make this green?". Perspective is what connects a work of art to the artist. To give the audience control of their own perspective is, therefore, to fundamentally change the way art is received.

My sense in watching Rachel is always of a stage larger than what we are shown. Take the crowd scenes, when the extended family is gathered around some table and the camera follows those who speak. I am always aware that I can see only a small part, in the same way that I choose who or what to look at on stage. I know I am missing things with every choice. The camera in Rachel also has an uncanny ability to track exactly who you most want to see, so that the motion of the camera around the table, from person to person, feels like a wandering gaze.

Here is a test. Step 1: Watch Rachel Getting Married. Step 2: After you watch the rehearsal dinner with all the toasts, notice how you felt through every stage of the process. You probably felt very uncomfortable at some point, and probably noticed that most people around the table were as uncomfortable as you were. We can be scared, nauseated, shocked by movies, but it is not often that we are made to feel uncomfortable in this way, as if we were there and this was our sister or sister-in-law. This is the discomfort of someone who is there and who wishes he were somewhere else.

Basterds

I saw Inglourious Basterds, hesitated, wrote a review, saw it again. Hesitated. This is really and truly a controversial film, but not (only) because it is about Nazis and Jews. It’s controversial because it makes us question things that reveal our inner critic, shows us what kind of watchers we are, what we value in art, what we think an artist’s responsibilities are – or are not.

So many essays and responses have already surfaced online for this film that I find it difficult to add to the mess. I always hate reading about something if I am in the process of thinking about it myself, and the more I read the more my own thought feels recycled and unnecessary. Thus: I’ve tried to abstain as much as possible from reading what others have written about IG. And I will only bring up two points that I feel would be irresponsible, for me, to ignore.

One review that I have read is Daniel Mendelsohn’s brief but welcome rebuttal to critics who assert that IG is more about film than it is about Nazis, and is therefore not historically or morally problematic. Yes, it is a film about film, and like Tarantino’s other movies the main player is his wild and audacious artistic vision. But as Mendelsohn says, it is nevertheless a movie populated with accurate depictions of real people – at no point does Tarantino suggest that the Germans in the theatre might not be real Germans during the war – and that is why Inglourious Basterds is not the same film as Kill Bill, for instance, and why its violence cannot be thought of in the same way.

Mendelsohn points out that the burning of the theatre is an inversion of the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps, in which Jews were locked into a confined space and killed en masse. Now it is Jews who do the killing, and who do so thoroughly: by Shosanna’s fire, by the Basterds’ machine guns, and by explosives. If this is really and truly a revenge flick, which Tarantino has claimed it is, the absurdly excessive firepower levied against the Nazis would indicate a correspondingly excessive amount of hate, on our part, for those who perpetrated crimes more than sixty years ago.

I am not saying that the Nazis should be forgiven because of how much time has passed. As a culture, we don’t have to let them off the hook for anything, but that doesn’t mean that we have to delight in watching them suffer – which is, after all, the entire point of a revenge flick. We identify (for example) with Shosanna, because she is innocent and is wounded, and thus share her desire for retribution. Certainly the film thinks we should. From the beginning, IG has much in common with Kill Bill, a less problematic (because fictitious) revenge flick. Just as Beatrix Kiddo had her hit list, so too do we see prominent Nazis identified on screen. We don’t even meet some of them, such as Göring and Bormann; they are named solely as targets to be knocked off. Indeed, when we are introduced to the chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, we see a brief clip in which he spouts some horribly racist garbage about American blacks (more on this later); then, FREEZE FRAME! and Goebbels’s name emblazoned across the screen. We are clearly meant to know only enough about him to hate him; the scene’s only purpose is to mark him as one of the revenge movie’s villains, as a target to be later taken down.

This is all according to plan for a revenge flick until we come to the movie premiere, which is the film’s big climax. If we accept that this is a revenge narrative (and Tarantino has given us no reason to believe that we shouldn’t), then, as an audience that has both literally and psychologically bought into the film, we ought to subsequently cheer at the deaths of the hundreds of men and women in that theatre. That is, after all, how narratives in this genre end. This is actually quite sly, because at no point do we want Shoshanna’s plan to fail, or the Basterds’ pathetic Italian cover to be blown. Yet we (I hope) did not actively yearn for the deaths of the 350 or so Nazis in the hall, in the same way that we hoped for Shoshanna to succeed and the Americans to survive. But one must of course follow from the other.

When the fire begins to eat up the screen, and the Basterds open fire on the Nazis down below, the movie changes abruptly. The problem is that IG begins as a revenge narrative, but because these are real humans and not fictitious constructions, Tarantino takes us someplace morally we’d rather not go. We find ourselves, in fact, in the exact same situation as the Nazis in that theatre: we are watching a film that asks us to cheer at human massacre. If we do cheer, then we are no better than the Nazis at the premiere of “Nation’s Pride.” If we don’t, then we break the implicit contract with Tarantino, who sold us a revenge flick. I imagine that he might say: “This is how you wanted it to end, isn’t it? Didn’t you want them to die? I am giving you exactly what you paid for.”

I mentioned earlier that Mendelsohn recognized an inversion in the burning of Nazis by Jews. Here is another inversion, because Tarantino now turns our theatre, the theatre in which we sit, inside-out. As the Parisian theatre burns down, all that is left is the Cineplex or whatever that we are in, and the Nazi audience watching a revenge flick in which hundreds die becomes us, watching a revenge flick in which hundreds die – and the challenge to our own morality seems clear. It’s easy to judge the Nazis for celebrating what looks like a terrible film that delights in the deaths of other human beings, but how far off are we from they? We all knew, going in, that this was a revenge movie in which a band of Jews hunt the Nazis. We knew we would see Nazis die, and fantastically, because this is a Tarantino movie. I think Tarantino might have also worked in a dig against himself, in the scene in which Hitler praises Goebbels for making his best film yet; I can’t help but wonder if Tarantino was making an ironic gesture toward the critical success of his own violent films.

This might all sound like a stretch, but consider that Shosanna delivers her final monologue not in French, nor German, but English, a language foreign to both herself (she, after all, did not speak it at the beginning of the movie) and the German audience. Why, then, would Marcel remind her to deliver the words in English? Inglourious Basterds is, above all else, above even the subject of World War II, a movie about language. Tarantino is an American, and an English speaker. I believe the same thing happens in the movie’s first scene, when LaPadite and Landa switch to English from French; this is ostensibly so that the Jews cannot understand, but it is really so that we, Tarantino’s English audience, can understand. He wanted the directness of language, not subtitles, in that crucial exchange. Perhaps Shosanna speaks in English because her audience has changed. The Germans, after all, are either dead or can’t hear her in their scramble for the door; she is speaking to the only audience left in the theatre, and that is us.

***

If Tarantino is a master of anything, it is timing. He knows his audience cold. Roger Ebert likes to quote from Hitchcock, “A good movie should play the audience like a piano,” and I think that this is exactly what Tarantino does. His real art happens not on screen, in spite of all its visual and referential splendour, but rather in the hall where we sit. The second time I saw IG, it was in a 150-seat theatre in Germany, filled with Germans, and it was astonishing listening to them and then watching their faces as they walked out. It is both impressive and sort of frightening what he can do with us. I think to myself: it cannot, cannot, cannot be an accident that, at the end of the movie, it is directly at us that Brad Pitt gazes when he says, “I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

Here I am

Here I am, I am not drunk but I’ve been drinking again, and as always I feel compelled to put pen to paper and write. The motivation for this seems perfectly clear – I don’t know if this is an objective standard or if this is just an aesthetic prejudice of the age, but I feel that alcohol impedes the stops and starts of the thinking mind, the mind that paradoxically kills the pure, direct thought. I feel, when I’ve been drinking, not that my thinking is better but rather less muddled, like an overgrown forest after a flash fire. It's not more alive, in fact it is by definition less alive than the thorny, natural mess it once was, but at least you can see light between the trunks, count the trees. A cleared forest can be apprehended in the mind in a way that a fully grown forest with its million species of insects and millions of newly unfurling leaves never can be, shifting and brambled as it is like a brain.

The search as always is for the thought that strikes to the core of somebody, yourself maybe but better someone else. It would be expected here to complain that a cruelty of the universal order is responsible for our cleverest thoughts to appear weak or confusing to others, and those with which we are not satisfied to be perceived as (at best) a fragment of genius. Are we so blind to ourselves? What is responsible for us being our own worst readers? It would make sense, in a world in which we are spared pain, that someday we should gain a hard-won objectivity, an ability to see our words as others see them. But this can never happen. A mother can never be objective about her child – she can be unreasonably proud, or unfairly cruel, but the perspective can never be the same as that of the neighbour across the street. I think that we can either write for ourselves or write for others, and only one party can ever be satisfied with the result. For a writer this is no choice at all, since he must either sacrifice himself or his audience, and is thus doomed to some kind of defeat. It’s a winless enterprise, really, and in spite of the terrible options we have we do it anyway because the alternative is still far, far worse. We are bodies spinning in space, held tenuously together by a faint gravity, and shouting soundlessly at each other because the alternative is to be silent, to not speak and only spin absurdly in our shared proximity.

…

My fingers are numb. I see people standing around me, talking, staring at a screen that flickers, renews itself with numbers that speak delay and anticipation. They are beautiful and glow inside their own private spheres. I think: orbit. They shuffle obliquely around a central grain, the wide vibrato of electrons in a space so vast it may as well be empty.

LF

His arms glowed like alabaster. From a height, he watched the faint limns of orange light come off his hot skin, the sleep of alcohol nestling deep into the rivulets of his brain.

He felt, a little foolishly, like a child, as he maneuvered his bear's hands to grip the iridescent glass, once golden, now filmy with sud. It took a particular effort to track his eyes across the room, now lighting on the candle, the bright hot centre of it, now the slanted dark faces of strangers, now the waitress's receding ass. His point of focus like the pointer on an oversensitive mouse, he thought, careening across the screen of his vision, no no pull back pull back. There.

The candle's flame burned deep through his retinas, as if burning past vision into some other sense. Touch, perhaps - though he could not say what he was touching with. He reached for it, swatting helplessly with ham-sized palms, flickering the light. No, not touch - but the centre of the light, not the light itself but the dark hole within it, it communicated itself to him in a way that superseded vision, bypassed it entirely. There was no distance to travel, no conversion of sensory data into clarifying flashes of neurons. It was more like truth, a thing simply known, a thing that exists without reason or whyfore and resistant, above all, to worry. The opposite of truth is worry, he thought, as he sat in the certain worry-free glow of the dark heart of the candle.

He briefly considered ordering another drink, and then forgot the idea almost immediately. There is something reassuring about the space between the fourth drink and the fifth, a perfect equilibrium of the mind and the body. It was like being returned to childhood, really, to a time before peripheral vision and the ugliness that such a vision affords. He remembered arriving at the pub, which looked more or less like the two that preceded it, being escorted up narrow stairs by the sleek waitress who crinkled her eyes when she smiled, just one eye, so that he saw it as a covert wink, an invitation. He fantasized about her thoroughly between the first drink and the third, imagining her warm skin in the rubber of his hands, her bitter tartness in a wedge of lime.

The sounds in the pub were now less sharp, yet clearer. He finished his beer, but it did not do what he had hoped for. Instead, leaning forward, he stared deep into the flame in front of him, closer, until it filled his vision and burnished everything in the same orange glow that rose from his skin.

Reading in the dark

I am pretty keen on moments of connection between people, I think this is pretty clear. Not only do they not happen a whole lot, but when they do, they usually don't last for long - and the only record that the moment ever happened is just the two of you, walking away and remembering. These moments as far as I know don't leave any indelible trace anywhere; they don't accumulate, don't build toward anything. And if we didn't have memory, it could be as if these moments hadn't happened at all.

Which is why I am always so startled when I come across a physical trace of such a connection, often between people who have never met and never talked, whose only connection is through me - as if I am the connection, and without me they might never have found each other, touched each other across the vast space. I will read something someone has written, and something about the thought or the way that it is captured or the way the writer tried to capture it but failed, something about the attempt strikes me in such a precise way as to pull me back instantly to another moment when I read something by somebody else, a piece of writing that made the same attempt.

It really makes no sense, how sometimes it takes so much effort to commit something to our memory, and other times memory works as if independent of our intentions. I just spent an hour studying words for the GRE, words I probably have mostly forgotten already, and yet I read a poem last night that made me immediately think of this other poem I read last summer maybe one time? The only reason I can give is that both writers were going for the same thing, something that burrows deeper than words; they were going for a feeling, and our capacity for remembering feeling is exquisite. Truth, as Anne Michaels says, must have an emotional dimension - we must feel it in the body. Appropriate, then, that the poem I was reading last night in bed was hers, and the line in question the following:

Rain makes its own night, long mornings with the lamps left on.

Which immediately and without warning drew the following line out of my memory, from a poem by Hart Crane:

Yet how much room for memory there is
in the loose girdle of soft rain.

Anne Michaels and Hart Crane could not be more different - one a young, rash, bohemian New Yorker from a world long disappeared, the other a twentyfirst century Earth mother, a bear-like woman with the voice and face of a girl. But I feel in these two lines that they are thinking the same thing, maybe not exactly the same thing but at least pretty close, and that the thought then comes out of their pen, is processed in a different way, results in a different line.

But the thought is the same. The thought has to do with the externalization of memory, the projecting of an inner state outward that happens to manifest in both cases as rain. In both poems, it is dark out - the Crane example is actually the second line of the poem, the first beginning "There are no stars tonight" - and darkness seems to accentuate the physical senses, makes us more aware of our bodies and what surrounds them; in essence, both authors dim the lights for us so that we experience memory as properties of feeling. For Michaels, it is through shadow, and through a childhood memory we all have of lamps lit during a dark rain; Crane, instead, manages it through sound. Michaels is usually the far more sensate poet; her poems are like a heat lamp before your face, a film of cold, hot, sticky, cool all along the outside and inside of your skin. But Crane, here, in the lovely visual of the loosened girdle, hides tiny flecks of rain-sound, gurgle in girdle and the ssshh of loose/soft. In the last line of the poem, when he returns to rain, there is the unmistakable pitter-patter of the line: "And the rain continues on the roof / With such a sound of gently pitying laughter."

While I am looking at Anne Michaels and Hart Crane, I might point out another uncanny connection, between the last lines of Michaels's first published poem and Crane's last. Here is Michaels in the last line of "Lake of Two Rivers":

The forest flies apart, trees are shaken loose
by my tears,

by love that doesn't fall to earth
but bursts up from the ground, fully formed.

And now Crane in, yes, "The Broken Tower":

--- lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

What does this mean? I'm at a loss. Both have nature dissolving, the forest flung apart, the sky rending, and then an incredible inversion - love, which we associate instinctively with falling, here instead rising from the earth. Did Michaels read Crane? Does it matter? Here is a kind of connection - though not a connection by any definition we would ordinarily use - between two who tried for the same thing and left traces of their trials behind.

Questions

There is the life before your death, which belongs to you, and then there is the life after your death, which belongs to others. If you have made yourself heard, then they will gather in the empty moments just after your passing, when your life-before-death is no more and your life-after-death has not yet begun, to fill the space with memory and fabrication. They will construct you out of half-remembered wisps and unconditional generosities that may barely resemble you, but which are justified by a survivor's guilt and fear - and you will have no say over any of it. It is, after all, no longer your life to live. All the more reason to guard it jealously while it is yours.

By rough estimate, 100 billion beings have graced this earth to date. It occurs to you that being alive is not a default state, as it seems to be when surrounded daily by the living, but an exceptional one. Differently: it is an absurdity that we are alive at all. The rich (I think) don't spend all their time agonizing over what it would mean to be poor, so why do all the living agonize above all over death? It's strange, no, that we obsess over something that doesn't fuss those who have it, and will presumably no longer fuss us when we have it too. There has never been such universal insecurity amongst the members of an elite class.

I would not presume to suggest how you should spend your life-before-death, but if I were to say one thing, it would be to wonder about the use of asking what life is while you are still a member of the living, and not yet a member of the once-living. What is life?, says someone who inhales, breathes out the words, fibres them with a heart's beating blood. I hope it is clear that the question is not a true question, if by definition a question must have an answer. Call it instead a bleat of loneliness, which issues from one so vastly wealthy he knows not what to do with his riches, and is ashamed that this is his greatest dilemma. We, in truth, are crushed by our fortune; we are unable to comprehend, much less survive, the world's ceaseless treasures.

While we stand waiting

Tonight, I was convinced of the separateness of art, thinking about art, and life, and their mutual irrelevance. Maybe I shouldn't say "convinced," though, since there is an air of fatality about the word. (The Germans have it right with "überzeugt," which carries a dimension of excess and over-doing, and reminds me of a happy German accident. I received an e-mail a few days ago from a Québecois whose signature bore the following quote: "Il n'y a qu'un seul endroit où le mot "succès" vient avant le mot "travail"; c'est dans le dictionnaire." The same is true in English, where success comes before work, but not for the Germans, for whom Arbeit - even in the dictionary - comes before all.) In fact, as convinced as I am tonight of this one fact, I am also convinced of another: that one day I will know the opposite to be true, I will come to be certain about the harmony of all those parts that now appear to me as unrelated children. But that's another day. We need to court extremes to make sense of things, and for tonight, this one feels right.

How did this come about? I saw a show today that resisted my efforts to think at it. Yes, at it - because I now see (or am now convinced of something I've suspected for a while) that thinking about art is inimical to art; when we think about art, we are actually thinking about thinking, and art is left alone. To pretend that we can figure anything out about how art works on us is dangerous and potentially blinding (maybe because art introduces things that resist sense into our organized worlds). I saw Anne Michaels at a panel the other day, and scribbled something she said hastily onto the back of my programme, which was roughly: To know something you have to feel it in the body. All knowledge, to be absorbed, must have an emotional dimension. This, aside from being transcendently wise, is also liberating; it allows us to feel things and not have to give an explanation. So back to today: I felt strong emotional reactions to things that made seemingly little sense, and when I came instinctively to that bubble of experience with sharp tools of thought, I found that I could not bring myself to do it. I am sure that thought would have been richly rewarded today, if my tools were up to the task; but instead, for better or for worse, I chose to ride the subway in a suspended state, the bubble left intact.

Understand, I felt such a strong compulsion to make sense of what I saw. That is a hazard of my trade, and for a few moments I wondered if the best professions might not be those that exercise the body and not the mind, like house-building or field-plowing. I wanted to push Experience through my alchemist's apparatus and come out with Insight; but I realized that, no matter what insight I arrived at, I could not preserve or alter the emotional reaction I felt - only, at best, create a new, separate experience. At that moment art and criticism felt very far from each other, and art and life even more distant.

What else to say? Maybe only that this distance can be liberating in a strange and wonderful way - a way that I had not entertained before tonight. I've been having doubts recently about the value of certain things - art, thinking about art - and wondering how all these parts, these unrelated children, can coexist in a meaningful way. I have no answer today; as I said, that particular truth is yet to come. Today I found truth in separateness, because the paradox of art that comes close is that it makes you feel utterly alone.

Normally I retreat after live events into myself, shield myself with my thoughts from the chatter that sprouts from eager, art-addled mouths. To tell the truth, I use art to block life. But tonight art erased itself, and thought went with it, so that only life was left humming in the people and the floors of the subway. I was alone. And I thought of the Stanley Cavell quote that sits at the top of this blog, and inverted it in my mind: Art separates people. But it also brings them together.

Endings

As always, getting out of things is a trickier business than getting in.

There are rituals for getting into a work of art, but a lot of these happen outside the work. For every art 'event', there is the lead-up - getting dressed-up, entering the theatre, shuffling in the seats, waiting expectantly. The lights dim. The preparations can seem at times to be as elaborate as those for a shuttle launch, and I think this is right, because a certain transportation is meant to take place. When I read a book, itself having no built-in rituals, I sometimes create my own: I inspect the cover, turn it around in my hands, glance at each of the mostly blank pages that precede Page 1, the dedication, the publisher; then I read the first line very slowly.

But, having gotten in, it is the work's responsibility to get us out. This is a tremendous burden, and the consequences of its failure are too horrible to speak aloud. I get this feeling of dread all the time when I sit in student recitals, and a note slips - the kid looks worried - and I know he is thinking the same thing as me and everyone else in the audience, which is shit, shit, what would happen if I just stopped? What would happen? Would it be something worse than death? No - but I had to think about that for a second.

As I wrote in the introduction earlier, an ending is a place where a movie becomes movie, a novel becomes novel, where the art becomes about itself and shows us its artifice. Or, if you think of the content or story as artificial - its truth. Either way, having got us in, the work has to carefully extricate us from the world it has created, absorbed us into. There is no better example of this than the ubiquitous zoom-out from a city at the end of the movie. We literally leave the world the characters inhabit, and where their faces once filled the screen, they now disappear, tiny, tinier, until we can't possibly care about them any more as real people and can step gingerly out of our seats and into our lives.

There are two ways to read this. We feel genuinely, emotionally connected to art; the art world becomes our world. To return us, art has to show us its bag of tricks and say "Ha!" - we were duped. We forget that we are watching a movie, but now, at the end, we must remember it is only a movie; artifice, then, is a severing tool. The other way to read it - and this is both nobler and more desperate - is that art creates fragile worlds, ones that are easily burst. Art cannot stand up to the pitiless force of reality; it has tremendous power, but only in its own domain. Against actual lives, actual problems, its basic contradiction of reality and unreality would cause it to implode, not because it is less, but because its subject is completely different. Artifice, in this reading, is a buffer or a bridge; it protects art from the contaminating presence of reality by allowing us to leave the work behind, safely, and whole.

My favourite example of an ending is the one used in American Beauty, which is nearly preposterous in its artificiality but necessary to counterbalance the harrowing emotional impact of the movie's climax. Here we have the classic zoom-out from an American suburb, overlaid with the equally classic voice-over of the protagonist (the return to narrator being a borrowed marker of artifice from literature) - except Kevin Spacey was killed not five minutes before, and so is now apparently narrating after his death. But it works. As the camera zooms out, you slowly become aware of the edges of the TV (or movie screen), the room you are in, the people with you, the time of day, the light in the window. Half an hour before, you could have been in that suburb. But you already have your own suburb, and at the end of the day there can only be one.

Another example: musicologists Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker think they have smelled something shifty in Mozart; they say that the ending of Act II to The Marriage of Figaro reveals a discontinuity between music and action. Here, things are as confusing in the plot as they are likely to become - everyone is running around on stage, no one knows what the hell is going on. And yet the music is coming to a crash-bang dominant-tonic close - the epitome of musical certainty. A&P say, maybe music and action don't always have to correspond to one another. But I think that correspondence is still happening in the Act II finale, though it is not a correspondence of plot and music. It is a correspondence of music and the audience's relation with a work of art. We see that things are getting hairy on stage, but there is also an intermission coming, and we need to be ready. If the music ended on a note that reflected the stage, what would happen? It would end unexpectedly, we would be confused, and we would certainly not be ready to re-enter the work in the third Act. There is in fact a specific moment, as there is near the end of nearly every finale, when you know the work will be over within a minute or two. I can point to it exactly in Figaro: I always get caught up in the excitement of the Act II finale, and then there is a moment when the music suddenly jumps into a faster tempo, and I think Ah yes, it's almost time for the bathroom.

Are these codes learned, from watching lots of movies with zoom-outs and lots of operas that end with a crash-bang dominant-tonic? Probably, but that doesn't make them less real, and we need them besides. Think of these as tropes or devices used by artists to control a reader's position in relation to the work: close, middle, far? At the endings of things, I think most artists would say that they don't want the reader too close, where things are too specific and too much like life, or too far, where the work is held at arm's length and loses its relevance.

Instead: from a point of immersion, where the reader is in the world of the work, you pull back, up, and as you rise out of the work the universality of art stretches its relevance across the skin of the earth, encompassing everything. Everyone who has experienced this will know what I mean, and will not need me to describe it; it is an emergence, a moment that feels like rebirth or renewal. For a few delirious seconds after the work is finished, you are suspended halfway between the your world and the world of art, and touch both. Sometimes, I feel like art exists only for these moments.

Introduction to Endings

Does music tell a story? This is a valid question for many, and those who reject it generally do so because of a belief that music goes beyond storytelling, that it is beyond mere signification. But what if we could grant that music does not tell a specific story, that music does not mean or equal one thing? We would then be wondering, by asking the question "does music tell a story?", whether music is like a story, whether the two operate in the same way. For instance, I can tell you about something that happened to me today, and then you might go and listen to a CD of the Eroica. These are both temporal events; they rely on time for their existence. But are they the same kind of experience? And do they have the same relationship to time, or different relationships?

A clue is already given in the way we formulate our sentences. We might say that music tells a story, but we rarely say that music is a story. It is true that we do often say, "This song is about" or "This opera is about," but it is understood that we are actually referring to the story imbedded in the opera, and not the opera itself. The opera tells a story of such-and-such, but it is not the story of such-and-such. This is quite different from what I might say to a friend, namely, "This is the story of such-and-such" before launching into it. Storytelling is only one thing; but there is a distance in art, which means a distance between the part that is story (if it exists) and something else. It is this something else that I am interested in.

If music is unlike a story, and music is a temporal art, then we might guess that all temporal arts are unlike stories, and we can examine this thought further. This would include, of course, theatre, and even novels. To make this claim, we would have to say that Charlotte's Web is not the story of an unlikely friendship between a spider and a pig; but we can say that the novel Charlotte's Web tells that story. This may strike some as a ridiculous distinction to make, or even no distinction at all. How does the story of Charlotte's Web differ from Charlotte's Web?

I choose this particular book because it is a transparent, clear case of story-telling, which means that it is an important test for my argument, but not necessarily the easiest to tackle. Let's begin with a more straightforward case, which is by contrast a piece of opaque, metaphorical, deliberately artificial writing:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This is the last paragraph of James Joyce's short story The Dead. Now imagine I was telling you this story - as in, "Hey dude, want to hear a story?" - and told you a story that ended with the above. What would you think? You would probably notice my mode of presentation - my rhetoric - as a separate feature from the plot. Yes, you can follow the story, but whereas you might not be aware of any particular mode or rhetoric in the hundreds of exchanges you have daily with people you meet, here the way it is said becomes a striking and even distracting element that exists alongside the what that is being said.

What if you simply read the passage above as part of the short story The Dead? You would still notice the prose, probably, though it would not seem so out of place, since writing never sounds like conversation to begin with. But not all writing can dare to be as heavy-handed in its metaphor, its alliteration, its repetition as the passage above; here Joyce pulls it off (I think miraculously) because the passage comes not only at the end of a short story, but also at the end of the whole Dubliners set. The above paragraph is simultaneously the close of a story and of a whole progression of stories, which latter gain in complexity and depth as they approach their end. The so-called "purple prose" of the above is still obvious, but given its placement and what it is meant to do, I would argue that the style is also necessary.

Most importantly, the last paragraph of The Dead gives us an instance where the art of the literary work is discernible against the story, or content, of the literary work.

(SIDEBAR: I know we're trained to believe that art and technique, or style and substance, or art and story, are inseparable. It is a belief I've stood by and defended vehemently, often. I still stand by it, but I have started to suspect that there are points of separation, especially at the ends of things, and this is where I want to pick at.)

And if an overabundance of style over content is actually necessary, as I have claimed, then we can make a statement to the reverse: that without this overabundance, without this glaringly obvious dive into the machinations of rhetoric, the ending to The Dead and Dubliners would not feel like an ending at all.

Maybe I have taken too long to get here, but here I am: Even when art looks like storytelling, the two are not about the same thing. When I tell a story, there is not as strict an order in which my words must go, and few impositions on my style or delivery (aside from being clear, of course). Art can resemble story, as in novels, but always in their endings - and this applies to all temporal arts - there is a certain rhetorical acceleration, a point at which the style of art draws attention to itself, and indeed breaks the reader's concentration on the story of art. In storytelling, this concentration is maintained to the very last word; in art, the shift of focus from story to art - in the sense of its relation to artifice - is a necessary event. Without it, the work of art, be it opera, play, novel, risks losing its status as art; it risks becoming only story.

You and me, part 2

I want to speak to you, you, but I am afraid that everything I say is a lie. I feel the fraudulence rising from my sentences even as I write them, gaining in stench as I pile on words, each more false than the last. Here is the problem: I want to speak to you. You, I assume, also want to speak to me. But if lies are the only coin we have, then should we barter in lies rather than not barter at all?

What I am looking for most of all is a feeling. Meaning, after all, is a shared feeling. We cram words together clumsily and hope for meaning to pass, in the way that some cram their bodies together clumsily and hope for love to appear. We know, we should know, that love doesn't come from the mechanics of sex, but why should meaning come any more from the mechanics of language? The two are not the same, I know. But we often have one, and assume the other; we speak, and assume meaning; and never consider the possibility that our speech stops at speech, our words reach no further than themselves.

I would like to say that true meaning is as rare as true love. We go days or weeks or months without encountering a single living word, but instead walk through graveyards of words. They glint dully, the words you exchange with your barista or your wife or read in the paper or a novel - or a blog. Ask yourself: is there meaning behind these words, or are they simply transactions, and nothing more? We often say that if you could describe a piece of music in words, then you wouldn't need the music. But the same unspeakable, wondrous, felt quality is possible for words too, and when meaning happens the words themselves disappear, even as they mean.

If you seek to mean, then, know that you are in for a terrible time. But it can be done; as in the last lines from "Song of Myself":

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Or these, from Hart Crane:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

I once asked myself, upon reading difficult poetry, what it meant; I see now this is the wrong question, or not the most useful one. For even as I asked it, I felt a stirring as I read the words that I did not understand; perhaps words have to resist conventional meaning in order to carry something else. You might ask me to explain what these words by Whitman or Crane mean, or mean to me; but if I could, then why would we need these words by Whitman and Crane? I will not use words to explain meaning. Meaning and words are not the same; and when meaning is at its strongest, words can be its deadliest enemy.

As I say, we may all be in for a terrible time. But I think - I think - we must try. I admit that I'm impatient: I want clarity, focus, I want to find words only to forget them. I want to be pithy all the time, I want to be a human Pith-machine. But the road ahead is long; and what would be the value of meaning if it were easy?

What a mess

My parents and I watch movies very differently. I suppose it's a generational marker, one that just so happens, in our case, to be a cultural marker as well. To lay it flat: they grew up in a world with not much fiction, I grew up in a world suffused in it. The consequence of this - one consequence - is that I have developed a stout resistance to fiction, much as my parents inherited a resilience to the ginger and coriander that so easily defeat me. I can hold a movie at arm's length, observe it in the light; for them a movie is a loved one in distress, and is unquestionable.

Let me give an example. I was deeply moved, in a positive way, by There Will Be Blood. My dad hated it. Why? It ends with a guy killing another guy, senselessly. How can you love something that ends in murder? I think it's a good question, and one that I don't really have an answer to, only an evasion of sorts: that for me, the "murder" that ends the movie is not really murder, not murder in a real sense, and therefore I can hold it at arm's length and look at it in the light, whereas my dad saw murder, and reacted accordingly.

… and here I must confess that I had written more, I had written several different paragraphs, but rejected each one. This I think because I am trying to make sense of this line between fiction and reality, of what truth is (as in, is fiction truth?) and how we sense it, and nothing I wrote satisfied me because what I really have is a question, and not an answer. The question arose a few nights ago, though it has been in my mind for much longer before that, and perhaps the best I can do is try to capture the question here, and leave it unanswered.

So then - I was driving home on the 401 in mid-evening, and followed the highway as it rose gently above the city. Tall buildings in the distance appeared to float unmoored on an invisible floor, and for several minutes, the angle of the road aligned perfectly with the side of a faraway building. I was reminded of my crude childhood attempts to bring a third dimension to a flat page, which basically consisted of a square with short diagonal lines emerging from three points, and voilà! - depth. Against the strange yellow of the city's air at dusk, and at this precise angle, the building ahead looked exactly like those drawings.

In fact, the entire vista before me reminded me of something I had seen hundreds of times before as a teenager, watching Star Trek reruns after school: the painted backdrop, that staple of low-budget low-tech sci-fi. A camera would zoom slowly into a picture of a strange alien landscape, and sometimes you might even see real people standing in front of a picture of a weird desert, oddly-formed mountains, a backdrop whose purpose was to simulate reality by simulating depth. Of course you could tell they were painted, but sometimes you had to look carefully for the chink in the illusion - a certain dullness of colour, usually, or a frozen waterfall - and as I drove on this day I found myself staring at the scene before me, trying to find its chink, except this time the thing that made it real, the thing that set it apart from the fictions of my youth.

…

Why do we write?

You and me, part 1

Isn't it a strange feat that I can say something, and you can know exactly what I mean? At least that's what we believe - in fact our lives are based around this notion, not only in the company of others but also in the company of books. It seems instantaneous, the process of a thought formulating in your brain, which then transforms into slight muscular spasms that in turn become sound waves, scratches of ink, and then somehow the same thought reformulates itself in my brain, and I can say "Yes, I know just what you mean!" without having ever seen the shape of your original thought.

Sometimes, I find even the most banal daily exchanges miraculous; but if that is so, then how is it that I can read this passage from Emerson

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of our time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises ...

and feel like I know exactly what he means? Of course, I don't, not really - I can't say that the entire sphere of my understanding of the passage maps on exactly with the sphere of his own understanding, though for me to feel such a strong sensation after reading this (which feels roughly like my gut is saying "Yes! Yes! Yes!" after each sentence), our spheres must overlap more than less, a Venn diagram that is closer to being a circle than a figure eight.

But what exactly is responsible for this thought getting from RWE's brain into my head? If you drop some of the fancy metaphors in the passage, words like "centrifugal" and "repositories," you're left with just a small handful of words that most of us use on an almost daily basis. That is, totally unremarkable, even boring words, drawn from the tiny vocabulary actually in use by most people - I've seen this figure cited at around 3 000 words. And each of these words isn't even a meaning, but rather a sign for a meaning, a plastic arrow pointing, more or less precisely, to the thing it wants to say, so that a paragraph or a sentence might look something like this:


Yet with a few of these words, Emerson is clear; with a few of these words, I get a feeling, a sensation that I think he wants me to get.

Of course the somewhat abstract problem of language and signs is really, fundamentally, a human problem - the problem of how two people can understand each other. When I become disheartened with language, when I feel like everything I write or say is a nervy tangle of obstacles that just gets in the way of understanding, real understanding - what I'm really beginning to doubt is the notion that we can ever understand another person, that we can be open and not closed, that aloneness is not an inescapable state. We demand so much from language; it is the link that allows two identical thoughts to vibrate in two separate minds at the same time - and on the tenuous strength of that bond alone is built everything in our world.

Two things ought to be clear from the preceding, namely (1) We should choose our words carefully, and (2) Even if we do, communication is not guaranteed. I think poetry understands the problem of language better than any other medium. It is all about the careful choosing of words, and because of this, it embodies the struggle and anxiety of communication far better than the fluency of prose ever could. Prose can make it look easy, but poetry makes it look hard, and by this fact alone poetry is truer.

Lost fragments

It seems entirely impossible that now, as I slowly yet unfailingly lose my memory, my power to recollect, to navigate the labyrinths of people, places, times, the smells and sounds of years that roil beneath me like the sea and buoy me up to my present moment--that this curious ability should be stronger now than it has ever been, and strengthening still. Once, striding along the faded lawns of my alma mater, or otherwise enjoying my customary Asbach in an indistinct corner of a campus pub, I might have explained it thus: that as the sphere of human memory diminishes, as once agile neurons turn sluggish and obstinate with age, the sheer number of memories--if one can separate memories--is reduced from the infinite to the merely vast. And, as aging performs its irreversible work, the inchoate shapes and impressions of the past begin, slowly, to appear in their singularity, in the way that constellations gradually surface in the deepening night sky.

This thought may have brought me comfort, sitting enclosed (most likely) in a cloud of my own cigarette smoke, and guessing rhapsodically at truths I could not have hoped to know, though of course I did not need that comfort then. Now, when the one true record of my life seems at risk of erasure, the scientist in me might be reassured by the insistent, universal logic of the process, a charteable perfection: as the breadth of my remembered life decreases, so increases the force and vividness of those memories that remain, the two lines of hairlike thinness crossing somewhere on that infinite plane, extending infinitely. The rational comfort is there, reason's way out; but I find that I am more content to simply wander the well-worn paths I have wandered countless times before, to trace my way back through familiar roads that have led me faithfully to this point.

This is my most beautiful memory. It may be my first, though time has long ceased to be linear--an unsurprising consequence when little lies ahead, and the mind turns back. I am sitting in the garden. Under me is the grass, above the sky. My mother hands me an egg--perhaps it is Easter--and I carry it to where the tulips stand in straight rows, their flowers closed so early in the spring. And here is where memory, that devilish trickster, that laughing ghost, refutes all reason, meaning, sense, for the image of those green stalks arching upward to cupped, yellow hands has endured through all the joy and waste of my life. Of all that I have seen, I know that this will be the last to go: a blue egg, and a perfect yellow bulb.

The Enigma

If works of art have manifestos, they are revealed in their first moments and their last. An artist with a fine ear can suggest the breadth and the wholeness of the work to come in the first line, the first shot, and return us to that wholeness in its final moments. The Wrestler begins with an orgiastic array of newspaper headlines, rave flyers, and then a sequence twenty years later in which we follow the heaving, weathered wrestler through narrow halls into a high school gym. What intrigues me here is not what we see, but what we don't see - his face. Then, a fan appears, tells him he was his first match, and the camera tilts to reveal the hint of a profile - ah, I think, the fan melts him a little, here we get to see the man - but the moment passes, and the camera focuses again on his back, following as he walks out, walks on.

The movie falls into the perennial category of the biopic, a genre that all but promises to show us the hero's highest and lowest moments, his worst humiliations and his most private epiphanies. We see all of these, but still the camera returns to his back again and again, reminding us, maybe, that we are no closer to the man than the spectators who line his ring. We see him, in a long unbroken shot, walk from the staff bathroom of a grocery store through a depressing series of rooms and staircases to arrive at an open doorway: the portal to his new life behind the deli counter. This scene, powerful in itself, gains in significance when placed in the context of another, famous scene: the long unbroken shot in Scorcese's Goodfellas that follows Henry and Karen past the long line outside a nightclub through a back door, down a long staircase and right to the edge of the stage, the best seat in the house. Henry is a new initiate into the mafia, and here the camera shows us the ease with which things fall out of his way, the peripherality of the world when Henry and his girl are at its centre. In The Wrester, the walk becomes a long, anonymous descent into shame.

We see, maybe, things that his fans don't see - this moment, his many rejections at the hands of the few he cares to love, or thinks he loves - but does this mean that we know him? Almost all movies are based on the premise that we will understand and feel that we know these characters enough to care about what happens to them; this is both an explicit goal of writers (make your characters real) and a draw for audiences. But if we think of these characters as real people, as we are meant to, then isn't there something arrogant at the heart of the whole enterprise, that we can enter a theatre for two hours and say that we know the full measure of another person? We see what we are meant to see, but this does not mean that we know, and above all we have not gained the right to say we deserve to know.

Why should the wrestler tell us more than we need, or more than he wishes to divulge? The ending of The Wrestler cuts us off at a point where we may most want to know more, and this, understood along with the movie's opening scenes, becomes the source of its incredible poignancy and emotional power. For however involving a movie may be that shows us a character's naked interior, far more involving is a movie whose central character holds something back, out of dignity and pride. For the first time, the act of leaving the theatre felt, to me, somehow genuine - we do not know this man, we have only encountered him, and now we all exit our seats and return to our own, private lives, knowing little more than we did when we entered.

A fine balance

Some words are more interesting than others. I was reminded of this forcibly when I saw the trailer to the new movie Disgrace, based on a J. M. Coetzee novel. Single-word titles are always a tricky situation, because a writer’s craft is essentially one of arrangement – the true but annoying phrase “the music is between the notes” can equally be said of words. When you have a title with just one word, there is nothing you can do to add to its poetry, and so the task becomes one of selection rather than arrangement. Can your single word carry a book? Not all of them can.

Disgrace is a word I always thought I knew, until I saw the trailer. Putting a single word into a title is like putting it under a microscope, or hitting it with a floodlight – it becomes disassociated from other words, and bares itself for inspection. For instance, until now, I never thought of “disgrace” as a word with a prefix; it was just a single unit, like “honour,” which my thesaurus tells me is its antonym. But now I look at its two parts, “dis” and “grace,” and the word changes completely. It now becomes a word that means through negation, like “unnerve” or “misplace” – it has no definition, but rather un-definition.

The word itself continues to propel us down this path. Understood this way, “disgrace” is a negation of “grace,” which I find surprising. Have you ever thought of disgrace as the opposite of “grace”? What is grace? I want to steer clear of etymology and dictionary definitions as much as possible. It may be that they will help clarify, but I’m interested in my personal experience with these words and the strangeness of their meaning. Honour may be personal, but disgrace as its opposite strikes me as a social construct – disgraced by your family, your community. Grace is a much more interesting word than honour, I think, because it’s harder to pin down. To me it suggests elegance, simplicity, and what I can only describe as a profound awareness of mortality. To dis- a word whose definition is so fragile and ephemeral is almost a violent act, a collapse of all its subtlety of meaning into a monochrome negative.

But the negative, too, is interesting, because dis- is only one of many such prefixes. What if the word was not disgrace, but ungrace? Un is flat, neutral, mathematical – hinge/unhinge, wind/unwind, do/undo. It passes no judgment, adds no further meaning; it’s like a switch. Mis-, as in place/misplace, apprehend/misapprehend, always has a sense of mistake to it, of something not gone right. De- implies a reversal, a kind of rewind through time – deconstruct, desensitize – and is a less personal prefix than mis-. Which brings us to dis-. Dismantle, displace, disembark. There is something wilful about the prefix, a sense of human agency that doesn’t come through with the others. A useful comparison is misplace and displace – one is an accident, the other is a deliberate act, and I can’t help but think of the word disturb, which lies at the heart of all these dis- words.

What does it mean, then, to disgrace? The more I think about the word, the more unsettled I feel. I’m not exactly sure what grace is, but I know it’s a quality that I should aspire to. There is a rightness, a fineness and a beauty to it, that is smeared by that most deliberate and therefore cruel of prefixes; witness the sounds of the syllables, the “dih” and the “gray” both washed out by sibilance. The word is a terrible smear, terrible because it is personal and wilful, and gives us the intact word “grace” in the second syllable but shatters its sense with the first.

I am constantly amused and annoyed by single-word titles of romantic fiction novels, like Heartbeat or Lightning or Bittersweet or what have you (these all generated by an Amazon search for “Danielle Steel”). They pale under the spotlight, reveal their clumsiness and lack of depth. You delve into them, and hit a wall. A word like disgrace, by comparison, invites deeper and deeper listening. A title is always a risk, but a good writer, one that is sensitive to the musicality of words, can sort through the thousands of words that are dumb and find the one, the right one, that speaks.

Rehearsal

Daniel Barenboim may be more music than man. I wonder what it would be like to grow up in an environment suffused with music, in a culture that takes music as its spine. He performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in concert I think at the age of 17. Yes, he must have had the technique and the musical genius, but you need more than that to take on the full Beethoven cycle. Music has to be your constant companion. For a musician, music might be the most important thing in life. For Barenboim, I suspect that life is simply an interesting offshoot of music, which is the foundation.

I know enough about music to suspect that it has endless depth, that it can be as deep as you are deep. The more you bring to it, the more it will reward you. This is what is at stake if you forsake a career that is depthful, be it music or teaching or writing or some other art. The depthful careers are those that are bottomless, that appear to have no end, because they become a kind of surrogate for life, for the process of life and of living. The self-questioning that a depthful career demands of you, the way you are forced to struggle with your hang-ups and weaknesses and apply your creativity and discipline toward change, this is all essentially a rehearsal of what happens outside, a process that is as long as our lives are long. Life is too large to hold in our palm; and so we hold some other, and that in turn reveals to us life's hidden mechanism.

Of all the surrogates for life, music may be the most apt, not least because it happens in time as we happen in time. Barenboim says that the act of performance is akin to the span of a human life. In the beginning there is nothing. The first note is not just a first note - it is a willful act on your part to bring sound into a soundless world. This, in itself, is miraculous. During your performance, there is an obligation to your audience to keep going. A break would mean disaster, though we don't quite know why - we just feel it innately to be so. All along, we pass measures, musical events that come to us in time and then become memory, until we come to the end and, lingeringly, or triumphantly, we let go of the last chord and collectively acknowledge a silence, a return to the nothingness with which we began.

To be sure, this is superficial resemblance, but all of my thinking and doing in music has confirmed for me the deep parallels between performance and life, which is really the greatest performance of all. Because of this, working on a surrogate such as music becomes a way to work on yourself. Here are some of only the most obvious lessons that a performance can teach. When you begin, begin with a statement; don't wuss out. Sing every line, through every moment. Strive for clarity. Don't be afraid to experiment in the moment; pursue every idea to its fullest expression. Be elegant, rather than harsh. When you return at the end, your music changes; remember all that has come before, and end fittingly. The moment after music, if done well, is loneliness and ecstasy.

This is all well and good, but to be honest I have always had a serious problem with music as an analogy for life. In music, you can prepare for months, or years, before a single performance of a piece. You are given all the time you need to ensure your fullest readiness, and in performance it is possible to be mature and confident from the first note to the last. Life, by comparison, offers you no prep time. It's like walking onstage to play a sonata, except you were just born so of course you don't know how to play the piano! You're expected to learn as you play. This has always struck me as a profound unfairness. Hey, I didn't even realize I was alive until after being on the planet for something like five years. Thus the final tragedy (but also apotheosis) of Charlie Kaufman's Synechdoche, New York - the moment when we finally figure it all out, when we finally learn how to live life and how we want to do things, may be the moment right before we die.

And yet the rightness of music as metaphor continued to stick with me, forced me to grapple with it, until I thought of the idea of life as a series of present moments. A moment is a difficult thing to take hold of, because it is so fleeting - but what about a day? Our lives are also a series of present days, of todays rather than yesterdays or tomorrows. Let me begin again with superficial resemblances. We awake from sleep, and come into consciousness. Can you ever remember in what position you woke up in the morning, which wall you were facing? Studies show that in the first thirty minutes after waking your brain capacity is at a point lower than if you are drunk. If we consider a 16 hour day, and an 80 year life span, then half an hour equals the first 2.5 years of life. But soon enough you achieve clarity and your full brain capacity. We plan our lives around days - or, more precisely, around sleep, which is impenetrable. We make plans for the day, and then evaluate how well we have kept to our plans. A day is a span of time that comes out of nothingness and then disappears into nothingness, as our consciousness comes out of nothing and then disappears into nothing. The final hours of a day never go exactly as we plan. You may feel yourself to be tired, and decide to sleep early. Or, through tenacious will, you may decide to hold on a few hours more, and devote yourself to some task until early in the morning, fighting increasingly cloudy thought and blurriness of motion until the task is done.

So, a day may look like life, but what does it mean? Have you ever watched an older person behave a certain way, and wonder if you would behave the same if you were in their position, or decide differently? When you encounter a fifty-year-old in a low wage job who has always dreamed of starting a bakery, do you wonder if you would have the balls to act where another might remain safely stationary? Perhaps another question might help: how do you act when your evening is shot to hell, it's 1 am and you still have much to do? Do you find it in you to break your momentum and start as if anew, or do you resign your tasks to another day?

Possibly this is simplistic, and even facetious, but I don't think so. I asked earlier why we have no rehearsal in life, but if the living of a day tells you what your life looks like, and your life is rewritten every day, then we can understand the individual day as both a rehearsal and the complete performance. It is rehearsal in the sense that you can learn and change from day to day, challenge yourself and experiment with how you do and approach things. At the same time, whatever your life is in the moment is what your Life is - it is only the present moment that matters. What does it matter what happened a moment before, or what might come in the next, if right now, right now, you are the fullest expression of how you wish to live, which is synonymous with what you wish to be?

Here is a way of articulating what I mean that may be unfamiliar, and which even surprises me at times. Life is generous; it is a testing ground. Every day presents a new opportunity to evaluate yourself, to see how you will fare in the larger manifestation. If you wonder how you will behave in your last days on this earth, look to how you spend the waning hours of your day. They will be painfully honest. But, if you are concerned with what you see, remember that every day rewrites not only what comes later but what comes before. Which is why finding your answers in the last moment of life may seem like the greatest injustice and, at the same time, the only possible way. All of your days are a rehearsal for that last day, where your accumulation of experience and wisdom seeps back through your life and rewrites it all.

A fucking shithole of a city

Worst font on the worst promotional poster ever

I wrote before about a movie drawn from the shambles of a human face. Here is a movie where the tone is set immediately by the city, and the city, in a sense, determines all that follows. In Bruges seems to be marketed as a comedy-action, with Colin Farrell, but it is really neither action nor comedy, unless the comedy you're thinking of is Dante's Divine Comedy.

There is, indeed, something epic about In Bruges - epic not in our common meaning of grand or memorable (see: "That was epic, dude!"), for it is above all a most intimate observation of a few private lives, of men who are invisible to the crowds around them. Rather it is epic in the traditional sense of showing us a complete world, down to the smallest detail. Bruges is "the most perfectly preserved medieval city in Europe," and as one character says, too bad it's in Belgium but then again if it was somewhere good it would be overrun with tourists. I have no idea if the real Bruges is anything like the one in the film, but if it is, then it may be one of the most singularly miraculous places on Earth: a shockingly beautiful and poetic town that manages to stay off the radar, roamed mostly by its own residents across cobbled streets or otherwise the ubiquitous canals that seem to run under the old buildings, suspending them on water.

No wonder no one knows anything about the city, since in the film it is shot as if from an ancient time. In one of their first sightseeing forays, a character remarks to another that this particular church used to be a hospital in the 1100s. Strange to think of a hospital, a place singly focused on keeping people alive, now empty after almost 1000 years of disuse, all those mortal concerns long gone. And so it is with the rest of the film. The movie is about hitmen, but deeply ethical hitmen, and it is fitting for their line of work that absolutely no action is without its appropriate consequence in the movie. No person drawn into the world of the hitmen is incidental; people are drawn into Bruges, or drawn back into Bruges, but none leave, and all their decisions and actions wind back and back in concentric circles. In this sense fate becomes a guarantee; if you kill a man, or hit a Canadian, or insult a dwarf, or flirt with a girl on a movie set, their lives will become intertwined with yours and every consequence you expect to happen will, must happen. Somehow this sense of inevitability and enclosure is palpable in the way the houses line up in Bruges, their flat, triangular faces forming an impenetrable wall. Bruges is a Petri dish for all human karma.

The characters know this, or learn this, and become ever carefuller with their words and gestures. In one of the many remarkable sequences of the movie, a hitman is about to launch himself off of a high tower - but before he does, he sprinkles coins to the ground below, to alert the strangers passing beneath to clear a space for his death. It is a delicate act that betrays such a powerful sense of responsibility, such an overwhelming awareness that things go on, they always go on, that even something as personal (and, in this case, selfless) as suicide can nevertheless begin a progression of hurt and sadness that may have no end. Even though he is about to die, he knows that it is so easy to rend the fabric of other lives, that the world is a small, closed space, where nothing ever goes unanswered. And so he does his best to make the smallest possible splash.

I am trying to describe as much of the film's beauty as possible without "giving away stuff," which I find a terrible line to walk because the two really having nothing to do with one another. I mentioned that every life that becomes involved in the story becomes central - there is no reprieve or escape. Through the movie, the hitmen collect images, friends, enemies, lovers, architecture, impressions, art. In the last scene, as a character is carted off to a hospital in Bruges (yes), all of these people come back, in a sequence that, like the city itself, appears out of a dream. They are ordinary people: a Hollywood actor, a hotelkeep, a drug dealer, a small-time hustler, but in this sequence, surrounded by the lit-up buildings of night-time Bruges, they become archetypal, medieval, fantastical: a dwarf, a one-eyed villian, a beautiful girl, a pregnant Mary. (I had decided to call her "Mary" because of her beauty, her innocence and goodness, her pregnancy, and only this moment realized that her name actually is Marie in the film. Nothing is accidental.)

In voice-over, the wounded hitman says he would rather go to hell than stay in Bruges, and then decides that hell is maybe exactly Bruges. He says this as we see a shot of his totally hot girlfriend, sobbing as she tries to reach him, and we wonder at his comment. Surely he has seen worse in his life, surely Bruges is not so bad. Surely this girl has given him more happiness than he has had in a long time. But Bruges represents a closed world, and a fatal symptom of such a place is that one can never hope to leave. Every thought, every gesture you make resonates with all the air in the world and changes it, so that it is different from before, and you must eventually breathe again that changed air. This is responsibility, and inevitability, and therefore burden. Hell doesn't have to be filled with burning coals or devils with whips to be hell; hell is hell simply because it is a place from which you know you will never escape.

In the here and now

Sometimes the most obvious observations are the most startling. Have you noticed, for instance, that our daily lives are entirely ruled by our idea of past and future? We are always thinking about what we will do, what we will become, either this afternoon, or tomorrow, or sometime down the vague road before us. And what we do do is mostly determined by the past: by the habits we have built up. By the identities that we associate with ourselves, or simply by the sheer weight and bulk of all our past years, which easily steamroll over the millisecond that we call the present moment.

Laziness is often equated with apathy, indifference, irresponsibility - but I would like to suggest a different source, which is being caught squarely between the terrorizing forces of past and future. In all our moments of apathy, of stasis, when we lie in bed for half an hour after waking, or when we stay one more year in a job, a place, we know deep down is not quite right for us - what is happening but that we are fixed in the hold of two essentially fictitious times? The momentum of our past stasis carries us over and continues its hold on us because we are overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what might come next.

But if a moment only becomes "past" when we look back on it, is there ever such a thing as a "past moment," or a "past time"? Or were they actually just "present" moments, in the same way our future is just a different "present"? Maybe our lives don't resemble a tiny point moving through a sea of "was" and "will be", like so:

pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp!ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

where "p" are past moments, and "f" are future moments, and that "!" is the only point that we really know and control. Maybe, instead, our lives are a series of presents, like so:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But even the phrase "series of presents" is misleading, because it suggests a chronology, that some presents come before or after others - which is really impossible, because aren't all presents "now"? Doesn't every one of them happen at the exact same time (that is, "now"), and therefore it is paradoxical to say that there are future and past "presents"? Aren't all present moments simultaneous, or - perhaps even more radically - could we then say that there is only one Present moment, one now that encapsulates the whole of your life?

We normally think of ourselves as moving from point A to point Z, say on a racetrack. We begin, and there is an ever diminishing amount of track before us, and an ever increasing amount behind. As we run, we may think that we can still change our course before us, while we accept that the path we have already run is fixed in the past. Here is another way to think of it. Life is a river. And you are not on a little boat making your way down the river - you are the river. A river flows in time; it flows from the mouth of its source, down winding through the land, and ends when it empties itself into the sea. But even as it flows in time, a river exists simultaneously at the mouth and the sea: even if you are standing at the birthplace of the river, somewhere, somewhere at the same time the river is dying. Though the river moves from A to Z, every point along its long and cursive path exists simultaneously, that is, they are all presents.

Does it require too great a feat of imagination to believe that all the points of our lives, too, are simultaneous? It is not a concept that comes easily, and not one that is easy to fix constantly in our minds, because our experience speaks so much against it - we see our lives chronologically, one infinitesimal slice at a time. But we are not like the figure on the racetrack, who is only in touch with the immediate ground below. We seep into our pasts and futures, and they into us. The future changes with every tiny motion that we make - you could say that every decision, every small gesture, even the decision to remain still, pushes the refresh button on the browser of your life. If I stab myself in the arm now, my whole life up to the very end changes, and if I don't, then it will look completely different. But at the same time, we also control our past - just as our past can dominate us, so too can an act of courage and impulse in the present moment reject all that has come before, and in that way change its meaning and its import. How a story ends changes the whole story, not just the ending.

What am I trying to say with all of this? Maybe, as a species, we are always in transition. We plan for the future; we feel compelled by the past. We can't bring ourselves to make dinner at the end of a long day, not only because we are tired, but because we feel ourselves to be tired - we remember the day, and think to all the things that are yet to be done, and feel justified in saying, "Let me be." It's as if everyone walks around with blindfolds on, or rather with two faces, one pointed to the past, one to the future, and no one really sees that they are here now, now, a person on the planet who exists in this moment and who has complete control over this moment. This is not "Live every moment as if it's your last," even though it sounds a lot like it, but rather something like, "Live every moment because it is your last, first, and every other in between." Remember: the river exists at all points at once. If you are lazy in this one moment, you are lazy in all your moments, past and future. But you can always rewrite the whole thing in the next. Every moment is a decision on how you will live the entirety of your life, past and future.

Let me return to the beginning of this essay, and offer an alternative. You know those stories you hear about mothers who are able to lift cars off of their trapped children? Or how you can write more in the last half hour before a paper is due than you had in the last three weeks? In moments of great pressure, we are forced to wrench our eyes out in front of us and really see where we are. But this happens all too rarely. Think of that focus, that power that comes when we really live in the moment we are in, when we are driving toward a deadline or reacting out of impulse to save a life. But the past and the future have such a hold on us, and we are trained to let them in.

I'm not saying that being under great pressure is the only way to get there, but rather that those moments of achievement - we all have them - moments when we surprised ourselves, transcended our normal routine and did something remarkable, can teach us that any moment can be opened to the same freedom. If you are sitting at your computer, look up and realize that you are alive, that you exist here and now, that you can do whatever you want in the next moment because there is nothing holding you down, past or future. It's a remarkable feeling, and a scary one, as if you have now just taken your blindfold off, and can see where you are in the world. I cannot describe it better than this: it feels like entering the world.

Old as all time

How do you compose a film out of a single human face? In I've Loved You So Long, my guess is that the face came first, then the movie. Kristen Scott Thomas's face looks like it was carved out of stone with a blunt knife, then weathered for a time longer than that of natural human existence. It is so striking that it interrupts every scene in the first half without doing anything, and seems to provide frictive counterpoint to the lives around her - they are drawn into the deep recesses of her cheeks, the strong bone of her brow, her secret past. The camera knows this and stays close, allowing her gargoyle-like features to fill our vision, so that it is hard for us to see much else. A moment of wonder: in a montage of family scenes that show the beginning of a process of healing, her face is no longer central, but is simply one of many in the backdrop of a circling crowd. The memory of pain never disappears - but it can be overcome, and momentarily forgotten, by an outpouring of joy.

The face is not a symbol in the movie, or a part of it - it is the movie. It begins in the high, narrow arch of the nose, and splays outward in either direction across vast cheeks, pushing the pallid, sunken skin to its farthest point at the edges of the eyes. Looking at Thomas makes you realize that there must be something in our faces that holds the eyes, nose, mouth in close proximity, in more or less fixed distance from each other, because she lacks it. Her features spill out, barely contained by the edges of her face. Contrast this with her sister, aquiline, narrow, small. They look so much like sisters, not because they are the same, but because they together complete a universe.

You can see every day lived in the collective vision of a face, and though you may try to dissemble, your face will reveal what you yourself do not know to the most piercing gaze. When the face is this striking, you can only wonder at the life that passed before it, what it exacted and what it left in its ruin.

Playing Favourites

I have always hated the question "What's your favourite _____??" I find it reductive and meaningless. Reductive, because it reduces what might be complex and multi-faceted thoughts about a work of art to a single priority; meaningless because it tells you nothing. If I tell you that Hedda Gabler is my favourite play, what does that tell you about me? About Hedda Gabler?

I usually answer the question, though, mostly because I love to sing the praises of things that I value. For instance, under "Favourite Music" on my Facebook I have the late Beethoven string quartets and sonatas, just because I think it would be a deep tragedy if anyone were to die without really encountering these works. Here, my answer is more of a precaution than anything - it's a warning to others, more than a statement for myself. But one thing that I do enjoy without too much anxiety is making lists of movies. In comparison to music or novels, movies are simpler - but not without their problems.

Asked to make a list of my favourite movies, I might offer something like this:

12 Angry Men
Amadeus
Fargo
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Pan's Labyrinth

These are movies that aspire to greatness and achieve it. They share other similar traits; for instance, they all present unique and clearly drawn ideologies that are masterfully realized, a vision of the world that is penetrating and devastating. And most of all, they fill me with that indescribable feeling that comes in the presence of greatness. It is a completeness, a wholeness, a sense of being in touch with a current of human thought normally inaccessible to us, hidden above the clouds.

But asked the same question, the next list would be equally valid:

The Devil Wears Prada
Legally Blonde
Little Miss Sunshine
You've Got Mail

These are movies I can re-watch endlessly and never get sick of - and isn't that in some sense the best way to understand "favourite"? A standby you can pick up at any time? Movies such as Fargo and No Country For Old Men I can only watch maybe once every six months, at most. Fargo I find especially difficult to watch; something about it leaves me deeply unsettled, even though I love it and prize it.

I considered all of this when I was filling out my Facebook info (yes, this is important to me). Neither of the above lists satisfied me; the first seemed too impersonal, too arbitrary (I could probably think of many more great movies I have seen that have affected me in the same way), while the second seemed to convey nothing of my aesthetic, what I find important in art.

The list I finally decided upon was, sadly, unusable, because it contained only two items:

Into the Wild
Shopgirl

But this list is the only one of the three that satisfies my criteria. 1) It is based on a coherent value system, and includes all movies within that system. 2) The list is a personal one; it says something about me.

Into the Wild and Shopgirl are two movies that have shaken me to my core. They are not necessarily "perfect" movies in the way that the greats above are - Shopgirl in particular has its flaws. But they are probably the two movies that are most important to me, because I identify with them on an emotional level that far exceeds anything I have experienced with any other movie. Even though I am in many ways unlike them, I am also fundamentally exactly like Alexander Supertramp in Wild or Mirabelle and Ray in Shopgirl. They absorb me completely, and when their characters suffer the final blow, I too become lost.

The list that appears on my Facebook looks like this, though it will probably change:

12 Angry Men
Adaptation
Amadeus
Into the Wild
Magnolia
Shopgirl

Which is really an amalgam of several different lists. But it's the best I can approximate. Ideally, as the years pass I will be able to find more films that shatter me as completely as Wild and Shopgirl have, and then I will have a real list, one that can stand on its own. Say, five items or more? I don't think that's too much to ask.