the moon and antarctica
Yesterday I watched a film called Mister Lonely in a near-empty cinema. I was pretty excited to see it, but I didn't like it very much though it had some lovely moments.
In one scene a nun falls out of a helicopter as she was frantically trying to drop food over parched villages. She fell slowly and her habit billowed outward, blue against refracted blue, the unreliably soft nimbus. She put her hands together in serene prayer, and a few people in the audience laughed, including myself. What could save you, hundreds of feet up in the air, without a parachute, with only your brittle bones, your absurd limbs, your hands pressed together? Watching a small human body struggle through the thankless canopy of sky was beautiful and very absurd. I tried to think of what it would feel like. She whispered to God. She free-fell with a splat onto a field of tall, dried grass. And then she got up in a stagger, she staggered, and then she staggered out of the frame.
Sometime invisibly along I had begun to surrender my propensity for faith, for miracles. It's not some irredeemable hopelessness I'm subsumed by, more like a bleeding-out, the way watercolour spreads across a page, lingering into a gradual, graceful blur. Or the way you put out dry ice and the vapour escapes, and it looks noncommitally mystical, at the same time entirely unremarkable. I guess this is what they mean by Losing Steam.
Yesterday we went to Foyle's, which is this beautiful large bookstore and I fell in love, because I am shallow, with all the intoxicating covers, the arresting images and the delicious blurbs, a digestible world in 400 pages. I got 3 novels, one of them a short story compilation, and right now I feel satisfied. On my better days (this is one of them...and I realise I never write, on better days), I realise it's all about making do, and then when I fall into a rut I forget this perspective, vice versa...I suppose emotion is entirely solipsistic, and the only way to feel from two minds is if you were two-headed, like that mutant in that episode of the X Files. To lure him out Mulder and Scully place a peanut butter sandwich on a tree-stump. He appears, then scurries off at the sound of an authorative "Freeze! FBI!"...because nobody fires a shot so quickly.
When the agents get to the tree stump there is the sandwich, with two bites at a perpendicular corner. And I suppose, a mutant inbred with two mouths panting and running away, scared and dissatisfied. If life were as simple as a monster movie, we'd all either be the lone survivor [lucky you], the slut, the beefcake, the cynic (first to go), the nerd, or the funny guy. One day i want to watch a movie about the daily lives of all these monsters, these one-armed homicidal maniacs, these ghosts, these inbred mutants, a narrative about one of them just chilling out, just enjoying their down-time. Putting aside chainsaws and cleavers and scary apparatus, just settling down to a book or in front of the tv with a peanut butter sandwich, having some thoughts. All thoughts, no knives.
In one scene a nun falls out of a helicopter as she was frantically trying to drop food over parched villages. She fell slowly and her habit billowed outward, blue against refracted blue, the unreliably soft nimbus. She put her hands together in serene prayer, and a few people in the audience laughed, including myself. What could save you, hundreds of feet up in the air, without a parachute, with only your brittle bones, your absurd limbs, your hands pressed together? Watching a small human body struggle through the thankless canopy of sky was beautiful and very absurd. I tried to think of what it would feel like. She whispered to God. She free-fell with a splat onto a field of tall, dried grass. And then she got up in a stagger, she staggered, and then she staggered out of the frame.
Sometime invisibly along I had begun to surrender my propensity for faith, for miracles. It's not some irredeemable hopelessness I'm subsumed by, more like a bleeding-out, the way watercolour spreads across a page, lingering into a gradual, graceful blur. Or the way you put out dry ice and the vapour escapes, and it looks noncommitally mystical, at the same time entirely unremarkable. I guess this is what they mean by Losing Steam.
Yesterday we went to Foyle's, which is this beautiful large bookstore and I fell in love, because I am shallow, with all the intoxicating covers, the arresting images and the delicious blurbs, a digestible world in 400 pages. I got 3 novels, one of them a short story compilation, and right now I feel satisfied. On my better days (this is one of them...and I realise I never write, on better days), I realise it's all about making do, and then when I fall into a rut I forget this perspective, vice versa...I suppose emotion is entirely solipsistic, and the only way to feel from two minds is if you were two-headed, like that mutant in that episode of the X Files. To lure him out Mulder and Scully place a peanut butter sandwich on a tree-stump. He appears, then scurries off at the sound of an authorative "Freeze! FBI!"...because nobody fires a shot so quickly.
When the agents get to the tree stump there is the sandwich, with two bites at a perpendicular corner. And I suppose, a mutant inbred with two mouths panting and running away, scared and dissatisfied. If life were as simple as a monster movie, we'd all either be the lone survivor [lucky you], the slut, the beefcake, the cynic (first to go), the nerd, or the funny guy. One day i want to watch a movie about the daily lives of all these monsters, these one-armed homicidal maniacs, these ghosts, these inbred mutants, a narrative about one of them just chilling out, just enjoying their down-time. Putting aside chainsaws and cleavers and scary apparatus, just settling down to a book or in front of the tv with a peanut butter sandwich, having some thoughts. All thoughts, no knives.