The Needle's Eye Read online

  We keep adapting to whatever we ourselves invented. Only boredom will free us from these devices, or a cosmic catastrophe.

  Babette Mangolte, the French filmmaker, wrote that now, with digital image, and “no shutter reprieve, no back and forth between one forty-eighth of a second of dark followed by one forty-eighth of a second of projective image, with no repetitive pattern as regular as your own heartbeat, you are unable to establish and construct an experiential sense of time passing.”

  Black-and-white films, and for some time, color, were simply a fast-moving series of stills; “there was a constantly changing emulsion grain from one frame to the next in the film image.” This is what created the soft filmy look. Now in digital, time is encoded and place is layered.

  In early black-and-white film there was entropy with each passing textural image.

  Your brain adjusted to the shutter as the eye adjusts to the blink and the body adjusts to its own decay.

  I think black-and-white film is closer to personal memory than it is to our dreams.

  The filmmaker Ricky Leacock said he wanted to make films that would give the feeling of being there, and this is what he did in his documentaries. With the Lionel Rogosin movie On the Bowery it was the same, but of course for me it was a place I had been, and so seeing it was being there again and carried with it the force of a return from the inactive reality, that which disappears daily and is never to be seen again.

  The inactive is so much greater than the active, it has to stay at a remove, weak beyond our abilities to see or hear it, or we would not survive. Or be sane.

  As Stan Brakhage wrote about Georges Méliès seeing film projected for the first time: “His thoughts entered the flickering corridor and dissolved in hypnotized ‘light-mares’ as they encountered some alien quality moving there, creeping steadily down the temporal ladders of off-on illumining.” He felt as if were pulling a veil off an underworld when he saw the images he had recorded moving.

  Film work by Gregory Markopoulos shows the before-life and after-life of a person simply by flashing the same image over and over again, as if the soul of the figure were desperate to return to a gesture and return again. Resurrect.

  Suffering is actually a jewel, precious and personal. Some might even say that it holds up the heavens with its radiance. How a person manages her suffering, and how it is managed by others, is often surprising. Some people never speak of it, and some give it away, some hold it tight, and some drop it on the path and run.

  Probably even in utero the little fetus can be wounded, and from this wound develop feelings that spread throughout it as a shape coating his insides. In life this fragile figure goes everywhere with the person, sealed up in shadowy folds.

  Although it seems that things cannot occupy the same place at the same time, and so necessarily limit one another, each vying for its own place, in fact things do not limit each other so much as influence their direction.

  Innokenty, like a schoolteacher in Uzbekistan during the war, said:

  “The part of the brain that produces color lies dormant when a person is imagining an experience. Color can be consciously added to a memory, but it doesn’t arise automatically, the way it does with a hallucination.

  “To the human brain, a hallucination is the exact same thing as seeing the world just as it is.”

  Old people, injured, narcotized, and ill people often hallucinate because their eyes and brain get weak in one spot and strong in another, and become mixed up. So they see armies, tanks, UFOs, flowers, armor, children, and tapestries pouring out of the walls of their sickroom. These phantoms prance around long enough for the people who see them to believe in them and even enjoy them.

  Other people in withdrawal from narcotics produce horrible hallucinations, monsters. Epileptics feel their fits before they hit, and an ecstatic expectation comes over them as the light enters. Some epileptics swear they would not want to live without the experience of ecstasy that comes just before the seizure.

  Blasts of cosmic energy can leak in, by stealth or by force. The brain is a filter carefully designed to keep out those phosphorescent forces that surround and then invade under the name of consciousness.

  Look

  Look at the snow, the ice, the rock

  that looks like a waterfall.

  No crocus, no beanstalk,

  no fruit or sun-dripping

  iridescent rain.

  There will be no list

  outside a courthouse door

  giving your name or the hour

  of your appearance.

  No announcement of

  which of your friends

  was first, last, or in the middle.

  No more nostalgia.

  You are a farmer in winter now.

  Innokenty

  My friend Innokenty is very sensitive and experiences frequent déjà vu, when he feels the slippage is occurring both in his mind and in the world outside him. The error is mutual but not exactly aligned. It is what I would call a horizontal shift that is permitted only when the brain is weary of its limits, its bastard ancestors.

  His libido died first, and slowly, over decades, no not his libido but his force, his love of strength and health in his person and in nature, his longing to become fully embodied in it. Without that longing, he had no temptation, was gladly celibate.

  This was when he developed his love of movies, the water of them before his eyes, but especially the ones that slid slowly and with full attention on each object or person, equalizing. These cameras saw each image on screen as equal to the next. Films allowed him to fondle human life in his heart and mind, to brood on features and hands, flickers of lips and eyelashes, human nature, to feel gratitude to directors and actors at a pitch of bliss. He was very chaste, even self-protective, and might have died a virgin. He made a decision to live alone, to repress his sex, for reasons unknown to himself.

  “Without a libido, colors brighten, and tears come to your eyes if you look too closely at the purple of a lilac. Every natural piece of the place you are in intensifies in shape and color, because it contains within it all the earlier times you saw it.

  “Smell intensifies but taste weakens, as does hearing, and so, in tiny incremental shifts, the instrument you carried so casually since infancy, your body, changes into a new species. Or is it the old infant you once were?

  “You are new to yourself, one unnoticed in society and conscious of another public, the spirits and goblins and coincidence makers that dash around you if you could only see them. You think of a friend, and the friend appears. You dream of a situation, and it is enacted within a week. You’re being herded into an invisible lake where what is coming and what has passed twirl around you in concentric circles so there is no distinction, only circular motion. It’s Gogol’s overcoat!

  “All this happens when your desires are diverted. It’s quite difficult to describe so that anyone believes you, or cares, because the report you are trying to give is the report of one who is a failure in the busy world. The trick up God’s sleeve is beauty! It is yours alone, free.

  “You want to sit safely in the outdoors and watch the habits of animals and cars and insects, then complete your daily routines, and then go to the movies!

  “You want to go to the movies because there, before the screen, you are given time to recognize what living is like for others: almost identical symptoms of synesthesia and submersion occur as those you have in extreme weakness.”

  One afternoon in a rickety theater on Bleecker Street he and I were watching The Cranes Are Flying together, entering side by side into the vanishing of each scene, we took a chance and let go of our mental processes. No words spoken. We felt each other up and down, we reached into each other’s clothing, we wrapped our legs together, we had no shame. We could see figures in color rather than have lonely visions. This was the arrival of color into the theater of our lives together. Color drained into our veins as we clutched and necked and yearned to become one. We
were more like vegetation than animal. Our hope lay in openness.

  My friend and I stayed in a chaste but impassioned embrace even after the lights had gone on in the theater.

  The new alphabet will begin in such heat, the letters on fire like a poem by Keats.

  My best friend doesn’t recognize me now but he once knew me from behind or from far away.

  Now in hospital his face is flattened in repose.

  I wonder if he is now in Umbria, a place we once entered as if asleep, wanting to locate the spirit that hides in its roads and weather. Silver olive trees, tall cypress, and turned-over rich brown fields. Roads still winding as they did in the time of Francis and Bonaventure. It is late October and the nut trees are yellowing: “hammered gold and gold enameling.”

  A rain has whitened the morning sky.

  There has been a phenomenon in certain high mountains called the Brocken specter. It shows the magnified form of a person woven into the mists. This voluminous human shadow takes on a Trinitarian shape, and the head of the figure is surrounded by glory—a rainbow halo. It looms in the sky, moves forward toward the witness, and then evaporates, is gone.

  A friend of his just watched this specter unfold before him in Ireland, and luckily knew what it was. On a blackboard in Germany, a professor was writing in chalk the facts about the Brocken specter and drawing a triangle with sun streaks shooting toward the antisolar point. He says, “This is what happens.”

  Here in Italy in the twenty-first century we enter medieval villages fortressed on high hills and inside them, their secrets: paintings and frescoes of an unfamiliar society. They seem to be messages from a higher consciousness, one close to the early Gnostic gospels and to the Psalms crying out about aliens and strangers.

  Or they are leftovers from an unexplored planet that happened to be the one we are also stuck to.

  What is the unconscious?

  My friend does not believe there is such a thing. Or else he says the unconscious is the clutter of a room you inhabit, a door opening, friends coming in, tea you spill, and paper blowing frantically near a fan. He thinks it’s the world itself and there is nowhere to put any of it. He seems to believe that dreams may have preceded existence.

  But we are eternal aliens studying the bones left behind. But behind what?

  The halos and wings on otherwise grounded beings, the serenity of their faces, the simultaneity of events (baby to man), spattered and diffused by faded paint or by narratives that jump from right to left, act to scene, all these are, in their way, emergent technologies, the first cinema made in caves.

  Swords, spears, helmets, horses, a buried cross that comes out of a mouth, a seed on the lip of Adam.

  An effort to recognize the figures of real people seems as wasted as the effort to decipher unrecorded events.

  We of the future are unable to recognize gold in the darkness because consciousness is airy, almost inoperative. Gold is only pure when it is torn from the stuff that is foreign to it. Then alone can we recognize it. We recognized gold spirits lying in bloodbaths. What is so nearly a scientific proof is that many children born without teaching in the existence of God still carry the knowledge of God (the good, the gold) at birth and onward. Now with this thought buried in his dream, he wants to jump out a window.

  Proust wrote down his experience of déjà vu on seeing three trees pass him on an avenue: “Was it simply my strained vision that made me see them double in time as one occasionally sees things doubly in space? … I was just as wretched as though I had just lost a friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or had denied my God.”

  Francis Ending

  After the six months of being far away, Francis went home with the spirit of an old person who has had enough of the world. Whatever had happened during those lost months, delightful or horrifying, made it impossible for him to return to his order full of new plans and advice. He was in his thirties, but he was old.

  Signs of leprosy must have begun to appear already. Since it was the most loathesome and fearful disease to him all through his childhood, his first revulsion to it was like a premonition.

  Only recently, from DNA samples of his bones, do we know that he died starving and with leprosy.

  His eyes had cataracts that doctors tried to burn away by a red-hot cauterizing that failed. Everything about him in those last six years reflected age, illness, decay, and a will to transcendence that appeared in his last writings and in his songs and poems.

  He lived in a grass hut on Mount Alverno, a mountain that had been given to him personally by a benefactor, and how he survived the icy cold winters up there is a mystery because he didn’t and he did.

  As Michel de Certeau has noted, mysticism “provides a path for those who ‘ask the way to get lost.’ … It teaches ‘how not to return.”’

  The mystical visions of Francis intensified in this time of self-deprivation, disappointment, renunciation, and illness. He wrote notes to his monks and sketched strange pictures, prayed fervently for the safety of his friend the sultan during another crusade, and became ever more committed to the importance of spreading a message of nonviolence as an ongoing way of living.

  His canticle, written in his last months when he stayed at San Damiano, blind, in great pain, and tended to by Clare, is a praise song to those who have forgiven others and who have suffered adversity without complaint. As in so much that we have known about him, Francis is not abstract but hyperalive.

  The story of his vision of the seraphim attached to a crucified Christ plunging through the clouds over Mount Alverno, and the oozing stigmata it left on Francis, all this happened before he wrote the Canticle of the Sun.

  One of his friends reported that he covered the wound in his side with his right hand, while he was dying, as if mortified.

  The word misericordia comes from Hebrew, which describes the way the entrails of a woman are twisted in terrible pain when she thinks of her child being far from her. She feels misericordia, suffering ropes twisting her guts and her heart.

  This suffering is like the Buddha’s pity for others, like the Pietà who is misericordia embodied. Through the child is still molded to her suffering body, she foresees its doom. Mercy sees everything, but we rarely see mercy.

  Magnificent Obsession

  As a youth, in the fifties, I went to loads of movies, from Tarzan and Lassie Come Home to Pather Panchali and Nights of Cabiria. I would wait impatiently for the light to swim into the oblong aquarium and deliver. Rainy days and nights, especially, but also on dull days years later in a Southern California mall, alone, down steep cement steps, I would find shelter in a movie house.

  I have learned only recently that films are very similar to hallucinations, which are physiologically the same as experience. My inward friend would say: “I am an inversion. I see the world as if in a mirror. Backward. Coming at me.”

  He was an hour early one day and sat in the dim light writing, and reading what he wrote.

  “Films provide us with a story produced in retrospect. Its creators and editor have composed it from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end. In this way they subvert the logic of living as a progressive march forward inside one body into oblivion. They enter from all sides of the screen and move like animals.”

  Stan Brakhage has written in his lectures that “motion pictures are a medium of both supernature and underworld—an instrument in unveiling the natural through reflection … and also the gateway for an alien world underneath the surface of our natural visual ability—an underworld that erupts into ‘ours’ through every machine which makes visible to us what we cannot naturally sense.”

  In the Catholic Mass, Jesus sits at the right hand of God. Does this mean he has his back to us, the onlookers whose right hand is his left? Does God reverse the heavens so we look at the backside of them?

  In New York City, between appointments, one might take a long steep escalator down to the cave of a multiplex. In London
and Dublin, always raining and cold, there are the film societies that take you to Brazil, Korea, Spain, and into a black-and-white time as elegant as the past tense in fiction.

  Two years ago I took shelter in a religious house outside Washington, DC, run by an old order of sisters from far away, and noticed young women also staying there wandering the halls with their laptops extended like beggars’ bowls, looking for a beam from the Internet satellite that might find its way in. Some of them were crouched in corners on floors hunched over lighted screens.

  I prayed as I was led to my room that the signal would follow me into bed in that lonely house, so steeped in alien smells, and illness. I prayed fervently that I could stream my way into a film. And my prayers were answered. Movies poured into my lap.

  Brakhage wrote in another place of Georges Méliès when he saw “the beam of widening illumination as a hallway he might almost climb, diminishing in size until he’d perhaps vanished into the tunnel of the lens: he knew from experience that any step into the light would tear his shadow off his back and hurl it against the screen behind; and so at first he avoided bodily intruding upon the apparitions of this machine.”

  Pavel Florensky, the scientist and artist, believed that God thinks through solid flesh and things. Even through donkeys and wood. The Truth, that is, is indistinguishable from itself. “Light is the Truth and the Truth unfailingly manifests itself,” he said, if you are watching for it, which he was with his board and brush. He said the icons of Andrei Rublev were proof that God exists. Light of course produces form and even color, so thinking up an image is cooperating with the soul of the cosmos. Florensky was imprisoned in a dungeon where he continued researching permafrost and iodine and gold for icons, until he was executed by Stalin in Lubyanka in 1937.