film explores death, naturally.
Morpheus, Terminal,
Expiry, or just The End,
the sweet kiss of poison
on curiosity's lips, probing
the world for mortality
with their lens to capture
the mystery of our
enchantment with the
loss of being. You see it
in the shadows, the ghosts,
as if their art breathes life
into some lifeless scene --
a blade flashing in the
blazing sun, a blind frigate
bird soaring to the sun
and then falling like some
dumb boomerang into the sea,
Dirk Bogarde, stumbling
and pathetic, sweating
in the plague-heat of the
Venice beach, puckering
on the sand like some
old carp. In my brother's film
I'm caught in slow motion,
a stupor, climbing a dune,
grasping the weeds to
pull myself up, then the
obligatory montage, cut
to the westbound Amtrak
effacing me, cut to
staring at the mirror
and seeing nothing but
the silvery darkness, the
liquid memory pool of
nothingness, the old
existentialist trappings,
cut to a graveyard,
lichen-spotted stones and
the camera swings skyward
to the November cold,
but once the production
is splashed on the screen
the great mystery is
reduced to a scrim of
slippery images sliding
before our eyes--there's no
transcendence, no epiphany,
no elegy, the sweet cello
fades, it's a film, after all,
about nothing, the other side
of a story, a sequence
of dead flowers left beside
the road, a field of chopped
corn stalks in the snow,
a redemption, a benediction,
a way of being that can't
be sensed or repeated,
and that failure, grandiose
or felt, cannot be captured
or known by image, it
can only be known by
surrender, whether
by the eros of music or
first person narrative,
limited.
