12.25.2006
11.05.2006
10.22.2006
Eyes of a Blue Dog - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she'd been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that's all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: 'That. We'll never forget that.' She left the orbit, sighing: 'Eyes of a blue dog. I've written it everywhere.'
I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: 'I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets.' And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: 'You don't feel the cold.' And I said to her: 'Sometimes.' And she said to me: 'You must feel it now.' And then I understood why I couldn't have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. 'Now I feel it,' I said. 'And it's strange because the night is quiet. Maybe the sheet fell off.' She didn't answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and return--before the hand had time to start the second turn--until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her-- sitting behind me--but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. 'I see you,' I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower he eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: 'I see you.' And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. 'That's impossible,' she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: 'Because your face is turned toward the wall.' Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. 'I think I'm going to catch cold,' she said. 'This must be a city of ice.' She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. 'Do something about it,' she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: 'I'm going to turn back to the wall.' She said: 'No. In any case, you'll see me the way you did when your back was turned.' And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. 'I've always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you'd been beaten.' And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: 'Sometimes I think I'm made of metal.' She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: 'Sometimes in other dreams, I've thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that's why you're cold.' And she said: 'Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it's as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It's like- -what do you call it--laminated metal.' She drew closer to the lamp. 'I would have liked to hear you,' I said. And she said: 'If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing. I've always wanted you to do it sometime.' I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:
'I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. 'He must be near,' she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: 'I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: 'As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.' And she said to him: 'I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.' And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: Madam, you have dirtied the tiles.' He gave her a damp cloth, saying: 'Clean it up.' And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: 'Eyes of a blue dog,' until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.
Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. 'Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you,' I said. 'Now I don't think I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've always said the same thing and when I wake up I've always forgotten what the words I can find you with are.' And she said: 'You invented them yourself on the first day.' And I said to her: 'I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning.' And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: 'If you could at least remember now what city I've been writing it in.'
Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. 'I'd like to touch you now,' I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. 'You'd never told me that,' she said. 'I tell you now and it's the truth,' I said. >From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I'd forgotten I was smoking. She said: 'I don't know why I can't remember where I wrote it.' And I said to her: 'For the same reason that tomorrow I won't be able to remember the words.' And she said sadly: 'No. It's just that sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too.' I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. 'In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: 'Eyes of a blue dog,' I said. 'If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you.' She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. 'Eyes of a blue dog,' she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. The she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: 'This is something else now. I'm warming up.' And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read: 'I'm warming,' and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read '. . . up,' before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. 'That's better,' I said. 'Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp.'
We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.
Now, next to the lamp, she was looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: 'Who are you?' And she said to me: 'I don't remember.' I said to her: 'But I think we've seen each other before.' And she said, indifferently: 'I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room.' And I told her: 'That's it. I'm beginning to remember now.' And she said: 'How strange. It's certain that we've met in other dreams.'
She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow, soft, malleable copper. 'I'd like to touch you,' I said again. And she said: 'You'll ruin everything.' I said: 'It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow in order to meet again.' And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn't move. 'You'll ruin everything,' she said again before I could touch her. 'Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd wake up frightened in who knows what part of the world.' But I insisted: 'It doesn't matter.' And she said: 'If we turned over the pillow, we'd meet again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten.' I began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: 'When I wake up at midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe of the pillow burning my knee, and repeating until dawn: 'Eyes of a blue dog.''
Then I remained with my face toward the wall. 'It's already dawning,' I said without looking at her. 'When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back.' I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. 'Don't open that door,' she said. 'The hallway is full of difficult dreams.' And I asked her: 'How do you know?' And she told me: 'Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.' I had the door half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I told her: 'I don't think there's any hallway outside here. I'm getting the smell of country.' And she, a little distant, told me: 'I know that better than you. What's happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming about the country.' She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: 'It's that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave the city.' I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: 'In any case, I have to leave here in order to wake up.'
Outside the wind fluttered for an instant, then remained quiet, and the breathing of someone sleeping who had just turned over in bed could be heard. The wind from the fields had ceased. There were no more smells. 'Tomorrow I'll recognize you from that,' I said. 'I'll recognize you when on the street I see a woman writing 'Eyes of a blue dog' on the walls.' And she, with a sad smile--which was already a smile of surrender to the impossible, the unreachable--said: 'Yet you won't remember anything during the day.' And she put her hands back over the lamp, her features darkened by a bitter cloud. 'You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up.'
I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: 'I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets.' And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: 'You don't feel the cold.' And I said to her: 'Sometimes.' And she said to me: 'You must feel it now.' And then I understood why I couldn't have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. 'Now I feel it,' I said. 'And it's strange because the night is quiet. Maybe the sheet fell off.' She didn't answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and return--before the hand had time to start the second turn--until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her-- sitting behind me--but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. 'I see you,' I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower he eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: 'I see you.' And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. 'That's impossible,' she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: 'Because your face is turned toward the wall.' Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. 'I think I'm going to catch cold,' she said. 'This must be a city of ice.' She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. 'Do something about it,' she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: 'I'm going to turn back to the wall.' She said: 'No. In any case, you'll see me the way you did when your back was turned.' And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. 'I've always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you'd been beaten.' And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: 'Sometimes I think I'm made of metal.' She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: 'Sometimes in other dreams, I've thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that's why you're cold.' And she said: 'Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it's as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It's like- -what do you call it--laminated metal.' She drew closer to the lamp. 'I would have liked to hear you,' I said. And she said: 'If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing. I've always wanted you to do it sometime.' I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:
'I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. 'He must be near,' she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: 'I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: 'As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.' And she said to him: 'I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.' And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: Madam, you have dirtied the tiles.' He gave her a damp cloth, saying: 'Clean it up.' And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: 'Eyes of a blue dog,' until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.
Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. 'Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you,' I said. 'Now I don't think I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've always said the same thing and when I wake up I've always forgotten what the words I can find you with are.' And she said: 'You invented them yourself on the first day.' And I said to her: 'I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning.' And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: 'If you could at least remember now what city I've been writing it in.'
Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. 'I'd like to touch you now,' I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. 'You'd never told me that,' she said. 'I tell you now and it's the truth,' I said. >From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I'd forgotten I was smoking. She said: 'I don't know why I can't remember where I wrote it.' And I said to her: 'For the same reason that tomorrow I won't be able to remember the words.' And she said sadly: 'No. It's just that sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too.' I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. 'In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: 'Eyes of a blue dog,' I said. 'If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you.' She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. 'Eyes of a blue dog,' she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed. The she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: 'This is something else now. I'm warming up.' And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read: 'I'm warming,' and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read '. . . up,' before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. 'That's better,' I said. 'Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp.'
We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.
Now, next to the lamp, she was looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: 'Who are you?' And she said to me: 'I don't remember.' I said to her: 'But I think we've seen each other before.' And she said, indifferently: 'I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room.' And I told her: 'That's it. I'm beginning to remember now.' And she said: 'How strange. It's certain that we've met in other dreams.'
She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow, soft, malleable copper. 'I'd like to touch you,' I said again. And she said: 'You'll ruin everything.' I said: 'It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow in order to meet again.' And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn't move. 'You'll ruin everything,' she said again before I could touch her. 'Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd wake up frightened in who knows what part of the world.' But I insisted: 'It doesn't matter.' And she said: 'If we turned over the pillow, we'd meet again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten.' I began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: 'When I wake up at midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe of the pillow burning my knee, and repeating until dawn: 'Eyes of a blue dog.''
Then I remained with my face toward the wall. 'It's already dawning,' I said without looking at her. 'When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back.' I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. 'Don't open that door,' she said. 'The hallway is full of difficult dreams.' And I asked her: 'How do you know?' And she told me: 'Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.' I had the door half opened. I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I told her: 'I don't think there's any hallway outside here. I'm getting the smell of country.' And she, a little distant, told me: 'I know that better than you. What's happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming about the country.' She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: 'It's that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave the city.' I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: 'In any case, I have to leave here in order to wake up.'
Outside the wind fluttered for an instant, then remained quiet, and the breathing of someone sleeping who had just turned over in bed could be heard. The wind from the fields had ceased. There were no more smells. 'Tomorrow I'll recognize you from that,' I said. 'I'll recognize you when on the street I see a woman writing 'Eyes of a blue dog' on the walls.' And she, with a sad smile--which was already a smile of surrender to the impossible, the unreachable--said: 'Yet you won't remember anything during the day.' And she put her hands back over the lamp, her features darkened by a bitter cloud. 'You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up.'
10.06.2006
9.30.2006
Documenting Truth
It has been nearly 40 years since Frederick Wiseman, a one-time law professor turned filmmaker, exhibited his first documentary film, Titicut Follies in 1967. The film was banned (outside of educational uses) by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, from 1967-1992, who ruled that since it was filmed at Bridgewater State Hospital it violated the patients’ rights to privacy. Now available from Wiseman’s distributor, Zipporah Films, on VHS or 16mm film, Titicut Follies is considered the quintessential example of direct cinema documentary filmmaking. It has been said that Wiseman is the penultimate examiner of American culture through the filming of its institutions, (Law and Order, 1969; High School, 1968; Juvenile Court, 1973; Missile, 1987; Domestic Violence, 2002, just to name a few of the 36 films) but the question remains; is Frederick Wiseman telling the truth?
Dictionary.com finds five entries for the word truth:
truth (tr th)
n. pl. truths (tr thz, tr ths)
1. Conformity to fact or actuality.
2. A statement proven to be or accepted as true.
3. Sincerity; integrity.
4. Fidelity to an original or standard.
5.
a. Reality; actuality.
b. That which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence.
Throughout the history of documentary filmmaking, the question of the “truth” in documentary filmmaking comes up over and over again. Did Robert Flaherty tell “the truth” about his subject in Nanook of the North (1922)? What was “the truth” that Leni Riefenstahl was telling in Triumph of the Will (1934)? Whose “truth” was Barbara Kopple documenting in American Dream (1991) or Connie Field in The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980)? Can we believe that we are viewing the objective truth about a subject when we are viewing a documentary film and if we, as viewers, do expect “the truth” from documentary, why? Do we imagine that the makers of such films have no opinions regarding their subjects, no agendas? If that were the case what would be the point of making the films in the first place? Still, we tend, in general, to separate fictional feature filmmaking from documentary as if one holds more veracity than the other. American audiences expect that the documentarian has an obligation to “the truth” in the same way we expect to get the news from television, the unadulterated truth. (We will NOT be discussing media bias in this essay!)
I suspect part of the reason we expect “the truth” from documentary film can be accounted for by movements in documentary filmmaking that first became prominent in the 1950’s and 60’s, cinéma vérité and direct cinema. Although it might be said that cinéma vérité and direct cinema find their origins in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Russian for “cinema of truth”) it is more the technique of both cinéma vérité and direct cinema that give them their true meanings. With the advent of more mobile technology in the ‘50’s and 60’s such as smaller, lighter cameras, better lenses, synchronous recording capabilities, and faster film stock, the documentary filmmaker was granted access to their subjects as never before. The technology allowed the filmmaker to become somewhat “invisible” and minimize the effect they, as intrusive filmmakers in a situation, would have on the events filmed.
In 1958, Robert Drew at Time, Inc., in New York, assembled a group of filmmakers and technicians to experiment in documentary filmmaking with the burgeoning technology. The group included such now renowned filmmakers as D.A Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and David and Albert Maysles, all influenced by the cinéma vérité of France (such as Blood of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides from French filmmaker Georges Franju) and the Free Cinema filmmakers of Britain (such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson). With films like Primary (1960), Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), The Chair (1963) and, ironically, The Fischer Quintuplets, which was originally entitled Happy Mother’s Day but had been heavily re-edited and renamed for public consumption by ABC in 1963, the Drew group gave, with their “observer” techniques, the American public reason to believe that what it was viewing was, in fact, the truth and influenced many other documentary filmmakers in the process.
These films looked, for all the world, like reportage. The filmmakers had unbelievable access to their subjects and with minimal voice over narration to explain to the audience what they were seeing, and with the synchronous sound recording, “the truth” appeared evident. Without access to the film editing process (we only think about it once a year at the Oscars, and even then wish the presenters would hurry up and get to the REAL awards), nor any idea of how much film stock is used in documentary filmmaking, nor any indication of what scenes might have been minimally “staged” expressly for the camera, American documentary film audiences expect veracity. And so, it’s not surprising that a film like Wiseman’s Titicut Follies was banned from public viewing for 25 years. The “truth” about the Massachusetts asylum wasn’t very pretty in Wiseman’s camera’s eye and the Massachusetts Supreme Court didn’t want the public to see it. SOMEbody believed it was the truth!
Although possibly influenced in some ways by the Drew group and it’s films, Wiseman’s films exhibit the more stringent guidelines of direct cinema including no voice-over narration, no staging of anything for the camera, and no interviews. Eric Barnouw, in Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film says of Wiseman, “He foreswore narrative explanations and comments. He selected institutions through which society propagates itself, or which cushion—and therefore reflect—its strains and tensions. All his films became studies of the exercise of power in American society—not at high levels, but at the community level.”
In Titicut Follies, Wiseman’s unflinching camera eye takes us into the inner workings of a mental institution for the criminally insane. The first scene is a performance of “Strike Up the Band” by guards and inmates during an annual show called The Titicut Follies, from which the film takes its title. Just when the viewer is getting comfortable with the performance Wiseman cuts to an uncomfortable scene of the inmates, many of them naked, lining up to receive clean clothing from the guards. The camera pans a large room where the inmates are herded through like cattle (and basically treated as such by the guards) to be given their clothing and we recognize several of the guards and inmates as having been in the previous jocular scene of the performance. It is a stark contrastt to the previous scene and typical to Wiseman films.
The next scene is of an inmate, another we recognize from the follies lineup, being questioned by a doctor (obviously a psychiatrist) about his crime. The camera is focused in close-up on the young man’s face as he talks. Apparently the innocent looking fellow is, in fact, a convicted pedophile. The doctor’s questioning seems to have less to do with finding out what the inmate thinks of his own crimes and more to do with shaming the young man. We feel an instant empathy and discomfort for him. Abrupt cut again to the scene of the inmates disrobing to get their clean clothes. Another abrupt cut back to the doctor questioning the young man again, this time with the camera focused on the doctor, who comes off as arrogant and intent on cornering the young man verbally. Our empathy for the young man increases. Another abrupt cut, without explanation or context, to a few seconds of another tight close-up of an inmate attempting to talk through a profound stutter, which of course makes the observer even MORE uncomfortable, then abruptly back to the doctor and the young man, this time the camera is back to the young man’s face. The doctor says “You know you’re a sick man don’t you?” Whereupon he relates a litany of the young man’s crimes back to him and concludes with “Do you think you’re a normal man?” The poor young man replies “Yeah, I need help but I don’t know where I can get it.” To which the doctor answers laconically, “Well, you get it here, I guess.” There is no narrative voice-over telling us what to think of the young man and his crimes, no explanatory information about his treatment or the qualifications of the doctor. Nothing evident to inform the audience how to feel or what to think. Wiseman’s not telling us what to feel or what to think is he? What we think we’re seeing is an unbiased document of a filmed conversation but Wiseman has, through editing, told us what he thinks is going on in the scene. A Wikipedia article on Wiseman quotes him as saying:
In Titicut Follies, this pattern of abrupt cuts, and fragmentary views of life in the state mental hospital build to a crescendo. There is an excruciating jumble of scenes of guards hosing out dirty cells while speaking to a naked patient named Jim. The guards keep asking Jim why he has dirtied his cell. Jim has no comprehensible answers for the guards so he just keeps babbling at them, trying to answer but unable to, and the guards, who must be aware that the man can’t give them an answer, just keep badgering Jim until he starts to scream at them. In the last of this sequence of scenes, we hear an off-camera guard asking Jim about his life before coming to Bridgewater and we find out that Jim was once a school teacher, a sane man with a sane job. In another sequence of scenes we see an inmate who sounds sane attempting to explain to the doctor (who is mostly out of the frame) how being in Bridgewater is harming his mental health and arguing he should be transferred back to prison where he might have the chance of release. Later we hear the doctors discussing treatment for this same inmate. More drugs, they decide, are in order to make him less “confrontational” and more “manageable”.
In yet another excruciating sequence, we are shown another doctor putting a feeding tube through the nose and down the throat of an emaciated inmate who is all but catatonic. As the tube feeding begins the doctor’s cigarette dangles precariously from his mouth over the funnel containing the liquid nourishment. Interspersed throughout this scene are silent scenes of this same man, dead now, being prepared for burial by a technician. The implication is that the tube feeding has been in vain. But we’re not told that there is any direct correlation between the tube feeding and the man’s death. It’s just what Wiseman is implying by his editing choices.
There are very few scenes in Titicut Follies where the staff appears sympathetic or caring toward the inmates. For the most part, they seem condescending or indifferent, as if they are dealing with animals in a zoo rather than human beings. The film ends the way it began, with a different take, perhaps a rehearsal, of the same song in the Titicut Follies show, but we now see that jolly scene differently. How did Wiseman do that without voice-over narration, explanation, or any evidence of chronology of events? With careful editing, Wiseman constructed a narrative that gives the viewer the “truth” of his “experience [he] had making the movie.”
Wiseman does very little research on the subjects he chooses for his films and has often been quoted as saying they are his own explorations into the given subject matter. He became interested in making a film at Bridgewater State Hospital after taking his law students on field trips there. In an online interview with Neal Poppy of Salon.com Wiseman says, “I have no idea what the themes or the point of view are going to be until I get well into the editing. I don't have a story in mind in advance and I don't set out in these movies to prove a thesis. I discover what the themes are as I put the film together, as I edit the sequences and study the material.”
So the “truth” Frederick Wiseman is telling us is his truth, the truth of his experience making a film in a mental institution for the criminally insane, or a high school, or a basic training camp of the US Army, or Central Park, or juvenile court, or Belfast, Maine. Wiseman’s films are examinations of institutions alright, but through the process of editing, Wiseman is relating his own subjective opinion of those institutions. Titicut Follies is like a poem about a madhouse and I am reminded, in thinking about the film’s effect on me, of an Anne Sexton poem, from her book To Bedlam and Part Way Back, called Ringing the Bells :
And this is the way they ring
the bells in Bedlam
and this is the bell-lady
who comes each Tuesday morning
to give us a music lesson
and because the attendants make you go
and because we mind by instinct,
like bees caught in the wrong hive,
we are the circle of crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,
who points at my hand
that holds my bell, E flat,
and this is the gray dress next to me
who grumbles as if it were special
to be old, to be old,
and this is the small hunched squirrel girl
on the other side of me
who picks at the hairs over her lip,
who picks at the hairs over her lip all day,
and this is how the bells really sound,
as untroubled and clean
as a workable kitchen,
and this is always my bell responding
to my hand that responds to the lady
who points at me, E flat;
and although we are not better for it,
they tell you to go. And you do.
Both the poem and the film ask us, the audience and reader, to see through an artist’s eyes, what they are seeing. In assessing Frederick Wiseman’s film, Titicut Follies, for “truth”, I’ll go with number 3, from Dictionary.com, “sincerity, integrity”.
Sources
Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film
Oxford University Press, New York, 1993
Salon.com Frederick Wiseman
http://dir.salon.com/story/people/conv/2002/01/30/wiseman/index.html accessed 5/1/06
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Frederick Wiseman.
(Spotnitz, Frank: "Dialogue on film" American Film v.16 n.5 (May 1991): 16-21)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Wiseman, accessed 5/1/06
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Titicut Follies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicut_Follies accessed 5/1/06
Dictionary.com finds five entries for the word truth:
truth (tr th)
n. pl. truths (tr thz, tr ths)
1. Conformity to fact or actuality.
2. A statement proven to be or accepted as true.
3. Sincerity; integrity.
4. Fidelity to an original or standard.
5.
a. Reality; actuality.
b. That which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence.
Throughout the history of documentary filmmaking, the question of the “truth” in documentary filmmaking comes up over and over again. Did Robert Flaherty tell “the truth” about his subject in Nanook of the North (1922)? What was “the truth” that Leni Riefenstahl was telling in Triumph of the Will (1934)? Whose “truth” was Barbara Kopple documenting in American Dream (1991) or Connie Field in The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980)? Can we believe that we are viewing the objective truth about a subject when we are viewing a documentary film and if we, as viewers, do expect “the truth” from documentary, why? Do we imagine that the makers of such films have no opinions regarding their subjects, no agendas? If that were the case what would be the point of making the films in the first place? Still, we tend, in general, to separate fictional feature filmmaking from documentary as if one holds more veracity than the other. American audiences expect that the documentarian has an obligation to “the truth” in the same way we expect to get the news from television, the unadulterated truth. (We will NOT be discussing media bias in this essay!)
I suspect part of the reason we expect “the truth” from documentary film can be accounted for by movements in documentary filmmaking that first became prominent in the 1950’s and 60’s, cinéma vérité and direct cinema. Although it might be said that cinéma vérité and direct cinema find their origins in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Russian for “cinema of truth”) it is more the technique of both cinéma vérité and direct cinema that give them their true meanings. With the advent of more mobile technology in the ‘50’s and 60’s such as smaller, lighter cameras, better lenses, synchronous recording capabilities, and faster film stock, the documentary filmmaker was granted access to their subjects as never before. The technology allowed the filmmaker to become somewhat “invisible” and minimize the effect they, as intrusive filmmakers in a situation, would have on the events filmed.
In 1958, Robert Drew at Time, Inc., in New York, assembled a group of filmmakers and technicians to experiment in documentary filmmaking with the burgeoning technology. The group included such now renowned filmmakers as D.A Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and David and Albert Maysles, all influenced by the cinéma vérité of France (such as Blood of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides from French filmmaker Georges Franju) and the Free Cinema filmmakers of Britain (such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson). With films like Primary (1960), Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), The Chair (1963) and, ironically, The Fischer Quintuplets, which was originally entitled Happy Mother’s Day but had been heavily re-edited and renamed for public consumption by ABC in 1963, the Drew group gave, with their “observer” techniques, the American public reason to believe that what it was viewing was, in fact, the truth and influenced many other documentary filmmakers in the process.
These films looked, for all the world, like reportage. The filmmakers had unbelievable access to their subjects and with minimal voice over narration to explain to the audience what they were seeing, and with the synchronous sound recording, “the truth” appeared evident. Without access to the film editing process (we only think about it once a year at the Oscars, and even then wish the presenters would hurry up and get to the REAL awards), nor any idea of how much film stock is used in documentary filmmaking, nor any indication of what scenes might have been minimally “staged” expressly for the camera, American documentary film audiences expect veracity. And so, it’s not surprising that a film like Wiseman’s Titicut Follies was banned from public viewing for 25 years. The “truth” about the Massachusetts asylum wasn’t very pretty in Wiseman’s camera’s eye and the Massachusetts Supreme Court didn’t want the public to see it. SOMEbody believed it was the truth!
Although possibly influenced in some ways by the Drew group and it’s films, Wiseman’s films exhibit the more stringent guidelines of direct cinema including no voice-over narration, no staging of anything for the camera, and no interviews. Eric Barnouw, in Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film says of Wiseman, “He foreswore narrative explanations and comments. He selected institutions through which society propagates itself, or which cushion—and therefore reflect—its strains and tensions. All his films became studies of the exercise of power in American society—not at high levels, but at the community level.”
In Titicut Follies, Wiseman’s unflinching camera eye takes us into the inner workings of a mental institution for the criminally insane. The first scene is a performance of “Strike Up the Band” by guards and inmates during an annual show called The Titicut Follies, from which the film takes its title. Just when the viewer is getting comfortable with the performance Wiseman cuts to an uncomfortable scene of the inmates, many of them naked, lining up to receive clean clothing from the guards. The camera pans a large room where the inmates are herded through like cattle (and basically treated as such by the guards) to be given their clothing and we recognize several of the guards and inmates as having been in the previous jocular scene of the performance. It is a stark contrastt to the previous scene and typical to Wiseman films.
The next scene is of an inmate, another we recognize from the follies lineup, being questioned by a doctor (obviously a psychiatrist) about his crime. The camera is focused in close-up on the young man’s face as he talks. Apparently the innocent looking fellow is, in fact, a convicted pedophile. The doctor’s questioning seems to have less to do with finding out what the inmate thinks of his own crimes and more to do with shaming the young man. We feel an instant empathy and discomfort for him. Abrupt cut again to the scene of the inmates disrobing to get their clean clothes. Another abrupt cut back to the doctor questioning the young man again, this time with the camera focused on the doctor, who comes off as arrogant and intent on cornering the young man verbally. Our empathy for the young man increases. Another abrupt cut, without explanation or context, to a few seconds of another tight close-up of an inmate attempting to talk through a profound stutter, which of course makes the observer even MORE uncomfortable, then abruptly back to the doctor and the young man, this time the camera is back to the young man’s face. The doctor says “You know you’re a sick man don’t you?” Whereupon he relates a litany of the young man’s crimes back to him and concludes with “Do you think you’re a normal man?” The poor young man replies “Yeah, I need help but I don’t know where I can get it.” To which the doctor answers laconically, “Well, you get it here, I guess.” There is no narrative voice-over telling us what to think of the young man and his crimes, no explanatory information about his treatment or the qualifications of the doctor. Nothing evident to inform the audience how to feel or what to think. Wiseman’s not telling us what to feel or what to think is he? What we think we’re seeing is an unbiased document of a filmed conversation but Wiseman has, through editing, told us what he thinks is going on in the scene. A Wikipedia article on Wiseman quotes him as saying:
All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you have to ... try to make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your sense of what was going on. ... My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair. I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account of the experience I've had in making the movie. (Spotnitz)
In Titicut Follies, this pattern of abrupt cuts, and fragmentary views of life in the state mental hospital build to a crescendo. There is an excruciating jumble of scenes of guards hosing out dirty cells while speaking to a naked patient named Jim. The guards keep asking Jim why he has dirtied his cell. Jim has no comprehensible answers for the guards so he just keeps babbling at them, trying to answer but unable to, and the guards, who must be aware that the man can’t give them an answer, just keep badgering Jim until he starts to scream at them. In the last of this sequence of scenes, we hear an off-camera guard asking Jim about his life before coming to Bridgewater and we find out that Jim was once a school teacher, a sane man with a sane job. In another sequence of scenes we see an inmate who sounds sane attempting to explain to the doctor (who is mostly out of the frame) how being in Bridgewater is harming his mental health and arguing he should be transferred back to prison where he might have the chance of release. Later we hear the doctors discussing treatment for this same inmate. More drugs, they decide, are in order to make him less “confrontational” and more “manageable”.
In yet another excruciating sequence, we are shown another doctor putting a feeding tube through the nose and down the throat of an emaciated inmate who is all but catatonic. As the tube feeding begins the doctor’s cigarette dangles precariously from his mouth over the funnel containing the liquid nourishment. Interspersed throughout this scene are silent scenes of this same man, dead now, being prepared for burial by a technician. The implication is that the tube feeding has been in vain. But we’re not told that there is any direct correlation between the tube feeding and the man’s death. It’s just what Wiseman is implying by his editing choices.
There are very few scenes in Titicut Follies where the staff appears sympathetic or caring toward the inmates. For the most part, they seem condescending or indifferent, as if they are dealing with animals in a zoo rather than human beings. The film ends the way it began, with a different take, perhaps a rehearsal, of the same song in the Titicut Follies show, but we now see that jolly scene differently. How did Wiseman do that without voice-over narration, explanation, or any evidence of chronology of events? With careful editing, Wiseman constructed a narrative that gives the viewer the “truth” of his “experience [he] had making the movie.”
Wiseman does very little research on the subjects he chooses for his films and has often been quoted as saying they are his own explorations into the given subject matter. He became interested in making a film at Bridgewater State Hospital after taking his law students on field trips there. In an online interview with Neal Poppy of Salon.com Wiseman says, “I have no idea what the themes or the point of view are going to be until I get well into the editing. I don't have a story in mind in advance and I don't set out in these movies to prove a thesis. I discover what the themes are as I put the film together, as I edit the sequences and study the material.”
So the “truth” Frederick Wiseman is telling us is his truth, the truth of his experience making a film in a mental institution for the criminally insane, or a high school, or a basic training camp of the US Army, or Central Park, or juvenile court, or Belfast, Maine. Wiseman’s films are examinations of institutions alright, but through the process of editing, Wiseman is relating his own subjective opinion of those institutions. Titicut Follies is like a poem about a madhouse and I am reminded, in thinking about the film’s effect on me, of an Anne Sexton poem, from her book To Bedlam and Part Way Back, called Ringing the Bells :
And this is the way they ring
the bells in Bedlam
and this is the bell-lady
who comes each Tuesday morning
to give us a music lesson
and because the attendants make you go
and because we mind by instinct,
like bees caught in the wrong hive,
we are the circle of crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,
who points at my hand
that holds my bell, E flat,
and this is the gray dress next to me
who grumbles as if it were special
to be old, to be old,
and this is the small hunched squirrel girl
on the other side of me
who picks at the hairs over her lip,
who picks at the hairs over her lip all day,
and this is how the bells really sound,
as untroubled and clean
as a workable kitchen,
and this is always my bell responding
to my hand that responds to the lady
who points at me, E flat;
and although we are not better for it,
they tell you to go. And you do.
Both the poem and the film ask us, the audience and reader, to see through an artist’s eyes, what they are seeing. In assessing Frederick Wiseman’s film, Titicut Follies, for “truth”, I’ll go with number 3, from Dictionary.com, “sincerity, integrity”.
Sources
Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film
Oxford University Press, New York, 1993
Salon.com Frederick Wiseman
http://dir.salon.com/story/people/conv/2002/01/30/wiseman/index.html accessed 5/1/06
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1981
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Frederick Wiseman.
(Spotnitz, Frank: "Dialogue on film" American Film v.16 n.5 (May 1991): 16-21)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Wiseman, accessed 5/1/06
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Titicut Follies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicut_Follies accessed 5/1/06
9.15.2006
Meeting in Monterey
....for karen
This looks so familiar, I said to you that day,
on a bench, on Cannery Row,
and you nodded,
your long fingers pulling at the coppery sun in your hair.
Steinbeck's garden of priests and whores
were lost to us as we ate our sandwiches.
We could not see his footprints imbedded in the new pavement,
though we knew he had walked there.
Neither could we see our own,
nor how we got to that bench
from that inland place where we grew up,
where we spent our days
like change from our pockets.
But it was here we came,
out of the wild howling of our expectant hearts,
out of the hills where we had danced,
turning, through mazes,
across our sepatate high wires;
and if we knew each other as girls,
who can say?
There were no fishwives or winos
whistling spit on that street anymore,
and the blue water rose against us,
moored there in that spot;
and though we spoke in reminescent tones,
what bonds did we have before that day?
None,
that I can see,
but us two,
in Monterey.
This looks so familiar, I said to you that day,
on a bench, on Cannery Row,
and you nodded,
your long fingers pulling at the coppery sun in your hair.
Steinbeck's garden of priests and whores
were lost to us as we ate our sandwiches.
We could not see his footprints imbedded in the new pavement,
though we knew he had walked there.
Neither could we see our own,
nor how we got to that bench
from that inland place where we grew up,
where we spent our days
like change from our pockets.
But it was here we came,
out of the wild howling of our expectant hearts,
out of the hills where we had danced,
turning, through mazes,
across our sepatate high wires;
and if we knew each other as girls,
who can say?
There were no fishwives or winos
whistling spit on that street anymore,
and the blue water rose against us,
moored there in that spot;
and though we spoke in reminescent tones,
what bonds did we have before that day?
None,
that I can see,
but us two,
in Monterey.
7.16.2006
on Music
Music, he said, implies
motion that doesn't exist.
punctuation -
percussion -
a moment in time -
boom!
and suddenly someone is dancing?
what is that?
G.E.S / L.E.S.
motion that doesn't exist.
punctuation -
percussion -
a moment in time -
boom!
and suddenly someone is dancing?
what is that?
G.E.S / L.E.S.
6.12.2006
Implement
I lean across the field’s best places,
rock-strewn, weedy,
ready for the plow.
I hoe down the rows with my fingers,
turning loam over,
wishing for shade.
My watering can is empty and I need a gentle rain,
something to irrigate me,
make me worthy.
I know, in the soles
of my mud-crusted boots
that God loves a farmer.
rock-strewn, weedy,
ready for the plow.
I hoe down the rows with my fingers,
turning loam over,
wishing for shade.
My watering can is empty and I need a gentle rain,
something to irrigate me,
make me worthy.
I know, in the soles
of my mud-crusted boots
that God loves a farmer.
(The Tenderloin, part 10)
The Bonsai Juniper
I watch the sheffilera push out,
unfolding it’s tiny umbrellas of new growth,
so young they are still tinged ochre and aching for light.
There was a bonsai Juniper tree on the sill last year,
but I left it to you, and it died.
And you, I see, are sleeping,
some mild, soma dream creating creases in your forehead,
sleeping, as if you could escape me there.
The dotted landscape of the other side of day and night
will not protect you.
I have my hand in this soil.
You belong in my house like all the other living things here,
the cockroaches, the dust, the fungus on the bathroom tiles,
all things beloved for their sheer audacity to continue upward,
toward warmer regions.
They have made themselves at home in this atmosphere,
cat and lint alike,
but you sleep on while the parasites devour your spindly branches.
I am the woman who loves you.
Haven’t I cried enough to make you grow?
Push out,
collect over me,
run rampant through my kitchen like the pests.
Wake up now. Wake up.
I watch the sheffilera push out,
unfolding it’s tiny umbrellas of new growth,
so young they are still tinged ochre and aching for light.
There was a bonsai Juniper tree on the sill last year,
but I left it to you, and it died.
And you, I see, are sleeping,
some mild, soma dream creating creases in your forehead,
sleeping, as if you could escape me there.
The dotted landscape of the other side of day and night
will not protect you.
I have my hand in this soil.
You belong in my house like all the other living things here,
the cockroaches, the dust, the fungus on the bathroom tiles,
all things beloved for their sheer audacity to continue upward,
toward warmer regions.
They have made themselves at home in this atmosphere,
cat and lint alike,
but you sleep on while the parasites devour your spindly branches.
I am the woman who loves you.
Haven’t I cried enough to make you grow?
Push out,
collect over me,
run rampant through my kitchen like the pests.
Wake up now. Wake up.
Mercer County
I came up out of the tobacco fields covered
in small red welts like chiggers under my skin,
tiny bugs of fear and paranoia that itched
for the calamine lotion of Ebenezer Baptist Church,
and I shouted out the hymns
(would you be free from the burden of sin)
while the ladies of the congregation
gave each other permanent waves
and stitched together patchwork pieces
of Vacation Bible School and come-to-Jesus fabric,
biscuit-making, jam-canning women who won prizes
at fairs for their ability to produce perfect pie crusts.
while their men traded feed secrets
and hunted with howling coon dogs.
In the pitchblack country night
I lay under those redemption quilts
chanting the Twenty-Third Psalm
while all around me the evangelical
crickets jumped and sang
and even they, it seemed, knew God.
The Tattoo
I rise again from one more little death.
This city is not my enemy
nor any test of my good judgement.
It cannot bury me.
I have spoken to, dreamed of, and made love to
as many men as any of us have cried wasted tears
and I am a full-grown woman for it.
I was born to the South and force-fed
grits and Jesus until I could not breathe.
My lungs are full of riverwater
where I sank and drowned
and was saved over and over.
Sometimes I am martyred
Sometimes I am murdered
Sometimes I kill myself.
Saint, victim, sinner.
I have risen so many times that
every morning is another Easter.
There are lillies tatooed on my back
for all these recurrent ressurections.
This city is not my enemy
nor any test of my good judgement.
It cannot bury me.
I have spoken to, dreamed of, and made love to
as many men as any of us have cried wasted tears
and I am a full-grown woman for it.
I was born to the South and force-fed
grits and Jesus until I could not breathe.
My lungs are full of riverwater
where I sank and drowned
and was saved over and over.
Sometimes I am martyred
Sometimes I am murdered
Sometimes I kill myself.
Saint, victim, sinner.
I have risen so many times that
every morning is another Easter.
There are lillies tatooed on my back
for all these recurrent ressurections.
Deadfall
up here
the fireroad follows the ridge
spine on spine
God’s finger
furrowing out deadfall
flicking at cedar or redwood
to indicate this one or that one
food for all things small
and six or eight-legged
deadfall
charred and blackened
and laid to rest beside the fireroad
or hacked away and discarded
or uprooted by the seawind
found sometimes
carving through the niche between the hills,
this one or that one
covered with deadfall cedar or pine
to indicate the spine of the ridge
up here
we are lovers
following the ridge
following the fireroad
to the niche between the hills,
poems for one another,
beguiled by sunlight in the hair
and sillouettes against the eternal blue,
and below us, cows,
statued against
a shelf of land that
used to belong to the sea,
and below them the sea itself, glistening,
bluer than the air we stand in
up here.
and all of this for us,
all of this moment,
every piece of grass in place,
every branch stirred,
and even Spanish moss,
found sometimes miles beyond where it started,
miles beyond where it should be,
hanging on pine or cedar or redwood
deadfall.
the fireroad follows the ridge
spine on spine
God’s finger
furrowing out deadfall
flicking at cedar or redwood
to indicate this one or that one
food for all things small
and six or eight-legged
deadfall
charred and blackened
and laid to rest beside the fireroad
or hacked away and discarded
or uprooted by the seawind
found sometimes
carving through the niche between the hills,
this one or that one
covered with deadfall cedar or pine
to indicate the spine of the ridge
up here
we are lovers
following the ridge
following the fireroad
to the niche between the hills,
poems for one another,
beguiled by sunlight in the hair
and sillouettes against the eternal blue,
and below us, cows,
statued against
a shelf of land that
used to belong to the sea,
and below them the sea itself, glistening,
bluer than the air we stand in
up here.
and all of this for us,
all of this moment,
every piece of grass in place,
every branch stirred,
and even Spanish moss,
found sometimes miles beyond where it started,
miles beyond where it should be,
hanging on pine or cedar or redwood
deadfall.
3.10.2006
2.25.2006
'Night Oklahoma
for Jack Mongomery
He must have banged down out of the Big Sky,
and he must have hit hard
and rattled out all his teeth.
The black hole in his face said
"I'm from Oklahoma."
and I understood him.
"I'm from Kentucky, " I drawled
and the hole said "For real?" and chuckled
as if he knew the Dark and Bloody Ground.
The hole rambled on about
an old woman and a frog and
I realized I should be laughing.
The hole smelled like cheap,
Tennessee sour mash and
I shied away as he spoke Okie at me.
He sounded like Appalachia and lonely,
he looked like a dry river bed
and he had lightning bugs in his eyes.
He got up from the table and
went back to the doorstoop.
Some pork rinds disappeared
into the hole.
I must have looked like home to him,
must have seemed like a fishpond
or a sparrow nest, or maybe
an ear of corn off the stalk.
I should have laughed at
the old woman and the frog.
I should have said "For real?"
Later, when he vacated the stoop
he called out as he passed by my shoulder
"Good Luck, Kentucky!"
and I hollered back,
"'Night Oklahoma!"
one time i said to jack...
"i just like to picture you sleepin up there in that park
on Russian Hill, Jack, with the stars for a blanket and
wakin up with the birds singin."
and he says back to me...
"Try picturin me sleepin over there in that doorway
why don'tcha, cause that's where I'M sleepin and that's
what I'M talkin 'bout!" heh heh.
The Last Time I Wore A Dress
About My Mother's Business
I have never been about my mother's business.She sat starving while my father fed me.
It was he who painted on my lips, one Halloween,
and told me I looked like Bette Davis,
and I went around the house screaming "WHAT A DUMP!"
What a dump.
I learned to curse like my father
and bit the hand that fed me.
I flipped my silver Zippo
for anyone who needed fire
and changed the spelling of my name
because she said I was just like him.
No one called me hers.
Sometimes, I see my father's belly
swollen, with me inside.
And now I reach for my mother's part in me.
I ask her to hold me but her arms are indifferent.
The defection was completed long ago, hers and mine.
I have never been about my mother's business,
and now I am the hungry one.
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