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Flotilla, who performs regularly with the Amarillo Community Masquers and has always wanted to be a professional stage actress but does not have the resources or gumption to try to make a go of it, has gotten the notion that she can experience the life of a New York actor by persuading Castor Collins to try his hand at it and watch the whole of it through his eyes, maybe even whispering acting tips to him while he’s performing. This, in a very real sense, would be a collaboration. Due to public pressure, it is now illegal for an actor to portray a character who differs in any significant way from himself (herself, thonself). So Castor has an advantage auditioning for the role of Don Baker in Butterflies Are Still Free Again, as Don Baker is blind and so is Castor. There are, of course, other blind actors who are vying for the part, but not one of them appeared magically in a spaceship as an infant, which both the character of Don Baker and Castor Collins did.
The whale carries us along. It’s fairly comfortable in here. There’s a flashlight he must’ve swallowed at some point, as well as a bed. Although there is no refrigerator, there is a cooler he must’ve swallowed at some point, and it holds some soft drinks, luncheon meats, and a loaf of bread, which is a packaged white, but beggars, et chetera, and it’s really fine given the circumstances. I playfully coin the term glamonahing, which is a kind of portmanteau of glamorous and Jonahing. This results in a not unwelcome chuckle in these most dire of end-times. The dog pretends not to have heard. In addition, I stumble upon a library of partially digested mystery paperbacks. None of your highbrow Highsmiths, but I enjoy a decent dime-store procedural as well as the next man (woman, thon). Call it a guilty pleasure. The days pass. Since there is no sun, I count the days by novels completed. I know from experience I read forty-five thousand words an hour (three times the national average), and that’s for technical material. I’ve never timed my recreational reading (to what end? It is recreational, after all!), but let’s say double the technical speed. So that’s eighty thousand words per hour. No, ninety-five thousand words per hour. No, ninety thousand words per hour, which means I read an average-length pulp mystery an hour, which means, with time off for sleep (the bed, although somewhat soaked in gastric juices, is quite comfortable compared with my old sleeping chair) and bologna sandwiches, I guesstimate I’ve been in here for exactly three months when we start to spin. [...]
Approximately thirty “who are you?”s come back at me. It may not have been the best question to ask, as it’s conceivable they have been wondering who I am or even that they just don’t want to go first in answering. And, of course, were it an echo, it would sound like this as well. Although, I have to say, in at least some of the responses, it did seem as if the you was emphasized, which would point to this being about thirty Unseen others in the cave. Maybe some are an echo and some are Unseen others. Let’s split it down the middle and say fifteen of each. I decide to try again.
I DO NOT LIKE it here in this part of the cave. It is cold and dark. The air is soupy. The people are complex and hard to see. The ground is also hard and hard to see. I no longer have any sense of purpose. This morning, I woke up to find out it is yesterday. Right now, it is a week ago, and I’m not even here in the cave yet. And yet I am. I wander, disembodied, waiting for myself to show up, hoping I will be able to see myself once I do. How will I know? It is very dark. This new time wrinkle disorients me. I try to make sense of it by accessing my vast mental library of time travel literature, both literary and scientific (I minored in chronology at Harvard). I recall there was a fiction writer named Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., who, in the mid-twentieth century, wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, a space-time dimension in which one could be everywhere/everytime at once. It is an ingenious storytelling device. Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., was a fiction writer I loved dearly. I read all of his work as a child and also several pieces he wrote as an adult—wonderfully whimsical stuff heavily dosed with social satire, fully stocked with whimsical notions, doodads, geegaws. Utterly delightful. Of course, one wearies of such things as one matures, and by the time I was eleven, I was on to Stanislaw Lem, equally funny and clever but not to the average reader, who would find thonself stymied by Lem’s erudition and level of scientific discourse (Lem was himself a trained physician, as well as a trained seal trainer). To the layperson, Lem reads terribly dry and inscrutable, but of course he is among the funniest writers to have ever lived (up there with Marie-Henri Beyle). But I outgrew Lem as well, discovering him to be an imposter, bombastic and derivative.
When I was fourteen, my best friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, introduced me to the science fiction of R. Harrington Folt, whose sophisticated and irreverent spin on time travel made Lem look like the drooling imbecile it turns out he was. Folt’s novel Zahlungsaufforderung, which Gell-Mann gave to me with the inscription, B., You amaze me. And I won a Nobel Prize in physics, for Christ’s sake. Fondly, M., changed my young life. The book, written in prose at once transcendent and second-rate (how does one accomplish this miracle?), draws parallels between cervical and time dilation. Of course, those parallels seem obvious to all now, but Folt was the first person to understand it. As I was able to venture out from under Gell-Mann’s enormous shadow (I’m not saying he was fat, but, well…), I realized that Folt’s revelations were ludicrous and that he was, and remains, a complete fraud (turns out his editor Gordon Lish was the genius in that relationship), and I discovered Pleven, a writer so secretive, even his publisher has never met him (legend has it he lives among the Oromo people of Ethiopia). His recondite theories of time have perhaps been best characterized by literary critic George Steiner as “Chrono-synclastic infundibulum on acid.” Imagine, if you are able, a universe in which not only can an individual be everywhere/everytime, but time itself can be everywhere/everytime and nowhere/notime. Now multiply that by ten. Now unmultiply (or “divide”) it. There you have Pleven in a nutshell, a nutshell that exists in seventeen dimensions. My world was shook. It made Folt’s work appear to have been written by a common garden slug.
maybe the funniest line in the whole book
“Rosenberg’s cast, consisting entirely of animatronic, remote-controlled Trunks, does more than even a million Rosenbergen could to ease the dangerously escalating tensions in today’s cave. By peeling away the bombast to expose the tender humanity of these robots, Rosenberg allows the viewer to discover the common ground necessary for any real change to take place. Furthermore Ja—”
this kills me every time
And those still-sighted who have been moved by this astounding sermon pull out their very eyeballs, which then fall to the floor of the dim cave and roll around. It turns out it is not at all funny in real life, but rather horrifying, tragic, and disgusting. I snap some harrowing photos that, sadly, these Acolyti Edepol will never get to see. This is as they want it, apparently. Still, there is a sadness, at least for me as a neutral photojournalist, for my photos are spectacular, truth be told, capturing the brutality of war, its emotional toll, as well as hundreds of black, eyeless sockets, which parallel, metaphorically, the very inside of the cave in which we all currently find ourselves. I’m thinking Pulitzer for these, too, if it still exists. It suddenly crosses my mind that it may not. And how sad would that be, that this award, created by Joseph Pulitzer, the inventor of dyn-o-mite, who on his deathbed wanted to do one good thing to make up for this invention, would see his award disappear from the face of the Earth, if he were alive today to see it. As it is, he will surely roll over in his grave. In any event, I am certain Slammy’s has a photo competition of some sort, a prize, maybe a Slammy’s Bucks cash prize, which would be nice, as there’s a used Sega Pocket Gear that a seller called Grabyounow514 on Slambay is selling that I have my eye on. Although, let’s face it, just the recognition would be a tremendous boon, really. Just a trophy to put on my mantel. Well, I don’t have a mantel. Just a trophy to carry around with me. It’d be a great boon if it’s not too big. Maybe a plaque. A wallet-size plaque.
White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. Unlike Plato’s Cave, there are not even any shadows in this projection. Nothing from the world of the ideal is being projected onto this wall. Perhaps the lesson is that ideals are illusory, too. Perhaps that is what I am to take from this. But does that really require three months? It seems kind of excessive, to tell you the truth. White. White. White. White. White. White. White. But it is too early in the viewing process to pass judgment. Certainly this is an uncomfortable film, but audience discomfort is a valid artistic goal. Mamoud’s Lumpy Mattress (1958) is a masterpiece, as is Kitagawa’s Kitsui Kutsu (Tight Shoes) (1997). Both of these films are highly uncomfortable. Lumpy Mattress kept me up for nights. Kitsui Kutsu left me with psychic blisters all over my metaphoric feet. I thought I might never walk again, figuratively.
Reel 703. Something has changed. I am almost certain. I do not think I am imagining this. Not like the last time. Or the times before that. I am certain of it in this reel. There is a spot. A small spot in the center of the frame. I am compelled to watch it in this otherwise sea of white. A pinpoint of darkness. How fascinating! I am giddy. It has been worth the wait. Imagine if I had cheated, fast-forwarded, skimmed through the preceding 129 hours. This reveal would have had none of the power it has now. This tiny darkness. It is extraordinary. I settle in, putty in Ingo’s masterful African American hands. Was this really the film the last time I watched it? Did I perhaps misunderstand it entirely? Did my white privilege keep me from seeing it on its own terms, seeing its very whiteness? Have I grown? Is that why I can see it now for what it is? Huzzah! I change the reel.
I just leave him there and enter the shell of Ingo’s apartment. The masterwork is gone. My future is gone. I fall to my knees amidst the wet ashes and weep, for humanity as much as for myself. Perhaps this would have been the work of art that would do what no other work of art has ever been able to achieve: unite us, show us the best in ourselves, lead us on a collective journey toward compassion. I know it led me toward compassion, at least one-seventh of the way. Then I spot it, amidst the rubble: a frame. A single frame of film. I reach for it, hold it to the sunlight pouring in through where the window once was. Miracle of miracles, it is one of my favorite frames of a film filled with favorite frames. Out of context, it doesn’t seem like much—perhaps a crumb: a medium close-up of a young woman in a red cloche, facing away from the camera. In the distance and slightly soft, screen left, a little boy watches her. It is only through his rapturous expression that we are able to guess at her unbearable beauty. Indeed, her face remains unseen for the entirety of the film. We see her from this angle many times, always in her red cloche, always observed by a character in the distance. We long to see her face, to turn her around, either by force or seduction, but of course we cannot. Just as we can never see the face of God, we can never see this woman of presumably otherworldly beauty.