"Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow..."
I had a dream about you last night.
There's snow everywhere now. I always forget how magic it is here in winter, because the cold keeps everything so crisp, and there are always patches of unmarked ground to be discovered, and the mix of streetlight and moonlight turns the ground to purples and oranges at night. Unbelievably beautiful. Last night, I just walked around for half an hour before work, indulging in the simple act of looking. The people in the light look beautiful, too, creatures of snowlight.
One of my professors declared that "We in the West" have a strange fetish about looking. No one questioned him about it, and, shamefully, I've lost heart about asking questions in that class, in this case, because I didn't want to, didn't need to hear the explanations. I need to look. I like to drink in images, and, later, wrap them up in words, to give them back out again, little paintings, little recreated songbirds.
But it's a confining thing, a containing thing. Sometimes I hesitate to describe people because it requires such a violent act of imprisonment. I hate introducing people, or characters, because some part of them must always be facing away, be it their back, front, top, bottom, inside, or out. Some part of them must always remain unknown, indefinable. The effort of trying to detail and catalogue the contents of a person always becomes a repulsive vivisection, an anatomy lesson. And, inevitably, the subject can never be kept alive that way, their organs and hairs and skin and teeth stretched far across a butcher-papered table (perhaps there...perhaps that was a bit too much. I'll leave it, anyway.)
Some small pieces of life belong to the viewer, or to myself, or to the subject of viewing... The humanity of a person is something you attach after you catch the detail of a name, a hand, a memory, the way you put faces onto automobiles and houses.
It's something I like about storytelling, that there must be such trust in the audience, and the skill of the storyteller to select only certain details to illuminate, but not entirely shape, their characters. Enough of a sketch that there is a face, or a heart, something the viewer can light up, and complete, see something human within. See part of themselves within.
I had a dream about you, and I only knew it was you because it was your voice over the phone, and how much it pained me to force myself to be silent on the other end. I wondered this morning, if you knew who I was by my silence.
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