How strange it is to be anything at all. -- Jeff Mangum, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Content note: these writings include discussion of mental health, suicide, self-harm, drugs, gender, and sexuality. Most of these are tackled in symbolic ways, but they pop up regularly and many of these were written earnestly by me as a way to deal with my context.
Writings from junior high and high school. I have decided to share these in tribute to my past self, strong-willed girl she was and is. She’d be happy to know I’m a woman in love with a woman, studying philosophy and still churning out ideas and poems and rhymes and portmanteaus. There was no way she could have seen this horizon, as much as she leaned to it. Eternal return, I carry you with me. Noah, you have a future. (Noah was a name I used sometimes).
Roughly in chronological order. Lightly edited.
- God’s Boredom
- The Adventures of Nikolai Mutt
- The Mountain
- The Glass Bridge, or I, Mutt
- Genesis (0-yandxgen)
- Pilgrimage of the Emptys
- Somewhere Over the Rainbow
- Exercise in Reaction I
- Exercise in Reaction II
- Isolation
- Dear Dorothy Parker
- Dear Henry Miller
- Musings on Neurosis, or Fall of the White American Male
- Ode to Film
- Zampano & Gelsomina
- No One Plays the Blues Like Blind Willie McTell
- White Trash
- The Abyss of Being
- Ekpyrosis
- Metamorphosis (Script)
God’s Boredom
I spent my whole life. Prying, spying on the waitresses in the cabinet,
Their dresses blue and soft and shadowed by men’s hands.
40 years I spent through that hole in the wall.
The waitresses changed, got older, got heavier.
Some had kids, who later came and bought playing cards from the chef.
I spent my hours on a wooden stool shut in the corner of my apartment.
Every day I wrote another few words in my booklet,
“Being: a word meaning dead and or dying,”
I drank wine brought to me by my sister every Sunday morning,
And ate sandwiches procured from children’s school lunches,
Bribing them with new shiny pennies and bottles of sour milk,
But always returning to my hole, hungry and malnourished.
I watched the girls, angry and spastic, shut themselves in the back closet,
Before their boyfriends came and stole them from the side of the walls,
Screaming and spitting curse words and bits of rotten saliva.
I saw the chef, weary and old, in his attempts to earn money,
Coming back every day, whispery with new tears under his eyes,
But always un-drained in his ideas of a greater and healthier life.
I saw them all, changing, swearing, clamoring, dirty, broken, drunken,
The men in their sweatshirts procuring ladies from the back counter,
Their teeth white and pasty, swapping ideas with their bodies,
Shriveled and smelling like cheap drugs and nightly sweat,
The children bouncing rubber jacks off the kitchen counters at noon,
Hitting pots and pans with their little fists, rolled tightly and feverishly,
Babbling sounds and screaming at their parents for more candies,
The women wiping matted stains off their home-knitted tee shirts,
Holding the hands of babies, spitting and pulling at their hair like rope,
Choking and shaking, screaming with gusto and nervousness.
I saw nothing in my whole life spent on my little wooden stool,
Its legs bending and cracking under my elderly and diabetic weight.
I never saw anything that made me think I might want to join them,
But I stood and waited, their faces making me feel understood,
All alone, the jukebox playing in the back of my study, quiet and anemic.
I spent my whole life. Prying, spying, on the man in my study
The Adventures of Nikolai Mutt
He took out his toes and put them back in. It had been eleven years since he’d seen Christina and he was slowly falling apart. He took out his tongue and tasted his antlers. Oh, Betty’s gonna love this. The floor was solid wood oak and stunk of petroleum. In the mornings, the oil would jelly up the pipes and he’d have to wash the sides or else it’d get sticky. He hated it when it got sticky. It tended to burn the bottoms of his feet, though he’d developed some armor now. The rest of the time he could play in the oil and not get burned, though it tasted like rubber when it got in your mouth. And not the good kind neither.
Christina was in her white dress, the one with angels stitched into the sides. She looked sad, her blue eyes watering up like saliva. She stuck out her hand and he gabbed toward her purse. He felt it for a second. Leather, probably fake, slippery, wet. She pulled her arm back and grabbed his hand, her white glove growing yellow from the touch. She whispered no. He wished she’d talk louder, but she walked off without another word. She left that day and he’s never seen her since.
In 1948, Mutt and Christina separated. His dad was a Russian soldier, had fought the Finns and then the Germans before fucking a young Dutch lady named Marie. He was born, lived in his grandmother’s house for a bit, and then was torn apart. Christina lived with an old Swedish couple on the coast of Latvia when Mutt was sent there. He remembered the day she grew an egg and the egg turned into a baby. Sometimes he’d draw a line in the wood and place his hand in it. It looked just like baby. He only remembered the outside once, when the doctor came to visit and took him to the garden. He saw butterflies and flower petals and a blue thing his doctor called Swiss Sky. But a bumblebee stung him and he had to kill it. He never saw the outside again.
The Mountain
There’s a man on a mountain and the mountain is burning from the inside out. The trees are crumbling like little tin soldiers, rolling down the hills with a monotonous clang! and shattering their roots on the rocks. The rivers are reversing, raging rapidly and randomly over the blushing steppes of the land and cascading like serpents over the cliffs. The mountain is crumbling with the fire, melting shattering breaking exploding flying across heaven and up against the clouds. There’s a man on a mountain and the mountain is burning from the inside out.
I seen and heard and been it all, the man thinks to himself. He’s wearing an olive green jumpsuit like his grandpa used to wear in the military, crusted with dirt and his skin foaming out like fizz from a Pepsi bottle. For years now it’s been his job to destroy the mountain and he was tired of it. He was tired of getting up every morning, shitting, pissing, and eating, then digging up the mountain, boulder by boulder, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. He was tired of being a shovel for the Whatever, wearing his repulsive Jell-O armor and signing in day and night and noon and morning in an aluminum-can cabin out in the middle of FuckKnowsWhere. He was tired of the mountain, its gargantuan shadow soaking his life with a deep cola-colored stain, its iron rocks laughing at his pitiful body as he, Everymorning and Everyday, stabs and whacks and mauls and maims and shatters and rips and roars and breaks its surface with his sandbox tools.
He was tired of it, and now he had burned it all to the ground. Every rock, every pebble, every river, every stream, every tree, every bush, every shrub, every fruit, every vegetable, every animal, every man, woman, and child. He Burned It All Down. And he had no remorse.
What were the quote? Free yourself or you’ll be chained forever or something he thought with a deafening tone. He tapped his foot and scratched his ass and murmured his murmurs Hell if that Beast catch me dead. Hell if that Beast catch me at all.
Up on the mountain, the stones were melting and the bushes were foaming over the chest of the hills like primordial semen. For years, it had stood there in its mighty splendor, its crown of thorns bellowing like a trumpet over its forests and fields. For years, it had reigned unquestioned over the land and the crust and the frothing winters. For years its robe, its crown, its throne, its palace had stood unmoved and uninhabited. For years, it had been there, in its home, happy and humorous and light-hearted. And now it was all gone. Now He was gone. And what had happened?
He had been a good mountain, as far as mountains go. He had reigned peacefully, with no big laws or stigma. He had reigned fairly, only killing whenever he needed to. What happened? he thought.
What had happened was thirty tons of high powered explosives in its abdomen and one pissed-off middle-aged man. Like always. And now everything was burning: the soil was bubbling like a great molten hot tub, sucking in the things around it and spewing out the things inside it — the stones were dripping off the cliffs with a pitter-patter that echoed over the morning skyline and woke the birds from their steaming nests — the rivers were tripping over each other just to get the fuck out — the trees were spinning wildly like a hot silver spoon in a cup of magmic vinegar — the animals were carrying on and flipping out going Whatever and Which Way just to escape the dirty fireball — and the mountain itself, in all its regal power, was Screaming Screaming Screaming and whispering out its last breath into the winter air. There’s a man on the mountain and the mountain is burning from the inside out.
The Glass Bridge, or I, Mutt
All families have their secrets. Something wrong deep down in the root of the tree. For some, it’s nuclear catastrophe. For others, it’s a backyard orgy on a Wednesday night. For the Selavys, it was teeth-marks in the mattress.
Mutt Selavy found a bottle of bourbon and a dead bird on the floor of his flat at about 3 AM Friday night. He picked up the pieces of the bird and put them in a Rosebud sack with a deep Western-scented Humph. Craziness. For nights now things like this had been happening — a dead animal there, a burnt postcard here, dirt everywhere. He really didn’t care except for the smell. He was famous in these parts for the gruesome sculptures he made of his findings, and for the rumors that followed him.
It had only been a week ago that his mother had found bite marks on the mattress (wet ones). The finding had resulted in a harsh Catholic scolding and the throwing of cooking utensils. He loved his mother. He wondered if she would forgive him; if God would forgive him for what he’d done. In his dark-wood closet a glass doll with porcelain eyes and a chalky, ivory coating hid out of sight. He loved her. Sometimes when he was alone, the doll would come alive, paint her skin with a deep red tone and kiss him passionately. Everyone was jealous.
Genesis (0-yandxgen)
All the mundane wraps in coarse ribbons
around the dusk of the departed.
The unrelenting violent voice of things undone
shatters like glass on the morning air
and burns all creation in solitude.
It’s the collapse of the skyline bride;
the crash of nonsense burns the skin
with liquid-explosive birth of passion
and the truth solidifies around the steel of the living,
the untrue bubbling into reality.
Pilgrimage of the Emptys
There was a smile on her words
as she remarked to the Gospel beside her:
“We are all visitors to this time, this place
We are just passing through.” (Aboriginal Australian proverb)
and with a whisper of her wings she danced
down the streets of her urban mythology.
the angels on her feet echoing over the steel
of a Baptist empire a hundred miles high
and into the soot of a New Mexican Babylon,
a virgin city skyline in a black fossil Holyland.
She spoke to the sun in a frail ivory tone
where are your dreams? where did my life go?
and the honey of her brush dipped into her toes
a pilgrimage of the emptys there and back again.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
All is quiet. The silent whisper of snow falls on the crystalline sea, tiny mirrors dropping nervously into a silver lake. A boat floats anxiously through the reflections of the clouds, making its way through the stillness of its surroundings. Abigail, captain of the ship, scatters her eyes across the landscape. She spies another boat, an empire of steel steaming its way through the brine. Light drips down its iron frame, dead birds hooked to its side and a heavy static swallowing. Abigail’s toes tapped at her seat, her green eyes darting back and forth backanforth. All is quiet.
The ship is groaning towards her, cracking the water underneath it with its seismic weight. Nearer and Nearer…
Nearer and Nearer…
Lights are dripping across the sky, melting the stars and letting them spill across the surface of the earth. The water ripples. Abigail taps at her side; t-tap tap t-tap tap ; squinting through the light at the iron fortress ahead of her (her eyes darting from place to place, specters on the bow staring into her). Nearer and Nearer…
Nearer and Nearer…
The ship rises like a mountain before her, eyes watching from the ledge. Someone throws a ladder down. Everything is still. Motionless, resolute. A distortion vibrates in the air. Abigail reaches for the ladder. Its steps are warm and covered with a liquid, sticky honey. She climbs up, up, up to the top of the steps.
She climbs off the ladder and into her bed, hot, uncomfortable on a Saturday morning.
Exercise in Reaction I
Angels! Great rapturing angels — in the Bailey’s, ivory lips bubbling photographs, phlegm, limbs, stems of trees and golden glands of her lovely thighs — great enrapturing angels alive! Sth and pearls wide and dyed in live demons (girl! where you come from? here there and everywhere!)
Pheww… libido. Where’s the caramel? Bailey’s?
Where? In heat in heat! Now and then she spills secrets on tremmbling breasts alive.
Fox fur fiery, flailing fateful faces of forgotten fortunes — fame.
Exercise in Reaction II
Who!
Name em name em!
God!
God of who!
You them darling folks in rafters there!
Us!
And them!
Them! — God golden lips —
Them! — evil sidestep of fate —
These are a few of my favorite things —
Avengers airplanes animated aardvarks bellowing in birth burning in bells callous calls of cocksure cavaliers dying in dirges drunk in drains elevating elaborate entrails of elephants flailing in faceless forgotten focus fighting and fucking fisheries of fire gorgeous girls in glasses growing from grapes hailing hydroelectric heterosexuals hanging in hymen hazing hearts iodizing in iridescent ideologues and ivory isotopes in Jackson City jacking off the jeweled jazz of Jimenez killing Kuomintang krakens of kabbalistic kangaroos leaping into liar labia of licentious looming lords marrying multiple magics of martyred maximization and negating nefarious negligence of narcotic nepotism and neoliberalism operating oval omniscience of orbiting obsolescence painting pewter patriarchs of pale palindromes and predatory prunes quartering quintessential quails of quizzical quarks rattle-tailed reconnaissance ravens raving rambunctious rages of remnant rascals….
Isolation
Isolation — towns floating in a glass ocean, a black empire stretching to the end forgotten and alone endtoendtoendtoendtoend iso la tion.
Dear Dorothy Parker
All alone on a Tuesday night, a feeling grabs me of cosmic coincidence wrapped in warm fate singing the stars to sleep. As feeling wells up in my chest — I start to cry (deep, existential tears mourning family and miss Dorothy wrapped in a chardonnay bedroom on an alcoholic night) praying of lips choking on dull heroin feeling of lady stepping on an electric winter in the spring.
I wrote a letter:
Dear Dorothy,
You were young, so was I (one day, far away someday in the future when for a second I grab my chest and melt into cream) you were unhappy, so was I (right now or later or then or condescending and crushing the pills and petals of turquoise moneymakers things fall apart), you drowned yourself — in your sorrows, in your alcohol, in your guns and knives and figments of poetic imagination – will I? will I? growing up alone in a land and behind an American novel — suicidal pastoral. twenty years of soul and poetry or fifty concocting forever in my albino fingers. On second thought…
With Love,
[Dead Name]
I’d rather hang around and scatter my own ashes.
Dear Henry Miller
let’s blow it all out of proportion, Daedalus, in the center of the lazorine, fuming over the finer points of Rhino be-bop.
i’m disenchanted with the summer, the lonely circus in the melancholy… and the rest of it.
Swirling to fragments in a fitful bedroom on a fateful night. bless me, Henry Miller, sex was never one for a traveling businessman. now smoking out the loneliness in the sweat of Helena.
i’m disenchanted with the autumn, the lonely valentine and the melancholy… and the rest of it and the rest of it.
Dear Henry,
Trumpets blow in a windswept street in 1969. A priest wakes up to the smell of gin floating out of his mistress’s bed. Dorothy Parker in her sabbath grave. And so I gave myself to God and [Adonai] with a smile and a hand on the burgundy. How did you do it? Swathed in regal sin up to your knees. Everynight and everyday oh God of mine. All is desperation…
I’m disenchanted with the heavenly everything, the bloody Washington and the rest of it… and the rest of it and the rest of it.
Musings on Neurosis, or Fall of the White American Male
I’m a silohuette, fabricated out of Miss Memory, the Once and Faithful. Tenderly, a tragic fragment of self slips in and out of thought, but I’m just too tired to exist. Steamy monologues burn quietly in the corner — melancholy reminders of a living hell. Who is writing this? I speak but no one answers, just as I expect. It’s all another day in the career of non-existence, a faberge dream of noone and nowhere.
I hang my soul up and retire, forty days of the finer points of narration. It’s Spring again and again I’m lonely. And the rest of it.
All I want is all I am, forgotten for the memory. A disenchanted child, endless summers and endless winters, its all forgotten before anyone has a chance to notice the thoughts of suicide bubbling from the skull. I’m just a little Tolstoy, just a lot Rimbaud and helpless… help me? Before the rest of it.
I love you for ever, for every photographic memory of random, twisted manipulation. A chaste remainder, there and back again, suicidal pastoral. Oh, love of mine, tell me what’s empty and evermore. I’m a silohuette. I’m a shadow. I’m a wanderer in a state of statelessness…
It’s fall in the state of I Am, goodbye to the good riddance to the goodness sakes, to the way it should be. I’ve been assassinated on the stage of my worries and anxieties. Who am I? I’m so lonely. I’m falling out of place and out of touch. I’ve burned my soul to the edge of nothingness. I’m a silohuette. I am No One…
Ode to Film
Ode.
Ode to Bergman, petrified saint of claustrophobia, everlasting fire of silence, frustration, and arachnid existence;
Ode to Eisenstein, socialist tsar of montage, captain of the SS Mob and Metaphor, alighting cataclysm of evolution;
Ode to Bunuel, surrealist seraphim of movement, anarchist assassin of convention, morality, and iron dogmatism;
Ode to Fellini, God of dreaming non-existence, infinite mime of Christian desolation and ivory purity;
Ode to Ray, ever-brilliant [Adonai] of Indian cinema, fragmented cherub of adoration, escalation, insanity, and rapture;
Ode to Oshima, radical jihadist of thought and action, tortured figment of political, social, philosophical, and sexual liberation;
Ode to Godard, breathless artist of Coca-Cola Marxism, prophet of saintly youthhood, French Picasso of the modern inferno;
Ode to Paradjanov, symbolist poet of stained-glass divinity, golden pilgrim of Rumi and Tarkovsky, whisp of ancient Moloch;
Ode to Ozu, steel monolith of No evaporation, illuminating golem of domestic entropy, tranquil deacon of motionless truth.
Zampano & Gelsomina
Lord of Silence, light my way through the calvacades; the Catholic bunkers and deacon saints of this stoned hollow earth. Amen. and then some.
I’m a mime trapped inside a glass box built from silent insanity and claustrophobia. A stone facade of golden fortunes and debauchery gilded across my crucifixion — the St. John of anxiety, the St. Peter of suffocation.
I’m lost and alone in my own stoned landscape. Fetishist cathedrals and schizophrenic polytheism, stained-glass ebony cities with limitless medulla spinal cords and towers made of ivory bone and self-exhaustion. Monarch Noah the leather lord of artistic psychosis; Jonah the red-cheeked celibate of barbed-wire longing; Mutt the Corpus Christi of existential alienation, burned-out libertinism and sexuality; and St. Joan of Arc, the beautiful marble figment of dreams ever-lasting and monotone.
I’m a mime trapped in a glass box. It’s not stress, it’s not anxiety, it’s not alienation, it’s not depression, it’s not insanity, it’s not angst, it’s not nostalgia, it’s not claustrophobia, it’s not psychosis. It’s a fucking existential nightmare and I live it every fucking day.
No One Plays the Blues Like Blind Willie McTell
The truth has a wicked sense of humor. Wave a flag upside down — loyalty on fire.
Harsh, liquid light seeps into the faint medulla empire. Chemical animosity —
Life is unbearable — electro-shock therapy for the senses, vibrating and eradicating the last vestiges of human sanity. Alienation? No, alienation is a simple sponge-tactic, soaking up chemical and romantic debris even as you try to block yourself from it. Suicide? No, or at least not for now, your conscious keeps you dangerously afloat, playing old-time hymnals like radio signals in yr head. Hatred? No, your empathy for human beings is the last remnant of hope in yr life, the last physical and mental comfort in dystopia. Nihilism? No, more Absurdism, the philosophy of life in the face of defeat; however, for how long can you deny through yr actions the burning liquidity of life? Yes, to embrace the absurdity is a point of liberation, however, still, as you try to function in yr everyday life you are haunted by its sheer, harsh elimination — nothing out of nothing out of nothing. Nothing? Fuck if I know.
White Trash
Seen Willie Cunnin’ham lateli? Herd hes bout twenty yards under — broke-n-head allafuzzy; yknow thtype; told missus CIAs afterem, goinall loopy with twisty everynzarobot shit, liken weall dont no that — been lobotomized, undead likenwitcha stone monocle beasts, gargoylenrobotsnshit. Miss Hollywood tollme shesdasame, callit skitzo: skitzyfreenya, r sum medical shit likethat. I call it spooked, fuzzdoubt, loony, tincan, overthhillnbackagain — shet, fuckin’ loony-as yankee-queer. Goddam, mymotherd ben onmy case had I beenaskreemn’ bout such shet. I’memberen I came hallin’ater bout litesnaliens nallthese spooky dreams shtollme: “Sun, likenwitchthvirtyousovth good Lord I spare yer hideboy, iff I katchyashouten bout sm heathn queershet Iltanyerhide likeyuwdn belief, yere? Reedagud book sun and’one fuckarown withdat shit or I’ll beetcha tilltha son goes down!” Nosterner women live onths earth, I sweartagawd, butl’telya sheidntheera peep outtame from thenonout. Whathhell r aliens anyway? Fuckitall spooksnshet justspooknshet.
The Abyss of Being
All is nothingness. Void. A vacuum of eternal space. Ten trillion particles bouncing about in tempered chaos. The antithesis of the physical. This is the Real, the man behind the curtain, the reality of the universe. Hold out your hand: Is there anything there? All that is visible is the concentration of invisible molecules reflected through the distortionary apparatus of perception, and that itself by the static of the Real. Now, touch your lover’s face: is there anything seperating you from them? Your hand caresses their face, feeling a being of warmth and form. But nothing’s there. Nothing except lightning-fast ripples of the elementary Real, repelling and rebounding off the ghosts of Being. Your bodies seem to touch, you feel what you imagine to be them – a solid surface; the concrete Other – but in actuality there is nothing seperating you from them – as your flesh collides with theirs, the basic building-blocks of your existence trade with theirs, creating an abstract blur of Being. You are them and they are you, a distortionary concept of perception, a single fragment of the Real.
But, in truth, what is it that even seperates you from the Real? In fact, it is not even you who touches your lover, or your lover that touches you, but instead the Real carresing the Real, two tentacles of reality combining into an undefined solution of perception. The one hand swallows the other, and engorges itself upon the cloud of the immaterial self.
But, this perception, of time, of action, of self and other, must be of ordered meaning, right? Well, what is order? A determined construction of structured responses and reactions? In reality, the only constants of existence are entropy and the “chaoskampf” (“struggle against chaos”). The Real, and its molecular foundation, or physical perceptatory incarnation, has no discernable form or function except for a fluid haze of reaction, which is itself an illusory Whole created through the shattered reflections of our perception of reality as shown through molecular law. This means that our modes of perception have no basis in reality, and are instead artificial tools of understanding formed through the process of chaoskampf. Time, action, change, being, have no basis in reality, and are instead paradoxes of perception, the leftover radiation of the absurd practice of human logical ordering of the chaotic Real. Time, action, and change are rendered into meaningless photographs of perception, makeshift dreams of the illusory Present, and being into a fragmentary mirror of the imagined Real – a dream rather than a reality. In short, all of our existence is but an eternal struggle against the Real, an immortal chaoskampf.
Ekpyrosis
Reality is the imagined space between infinites. What we see are the averaged out variables of the conflicts of the infinitesimal. (The average of void and infinite density recreates imagined reality – basically the consequence of an existing infinite within finite reality) Reality is constantly recreating itself on the infinitesimal spectrum through a loose process of establishment and disestablishment through the function of existing non-existence (or a reality of nil function). The presence of the infinitesimal, of an ever-smaller, unending vacuum of space brings up the question of the stability of such a vacuum and the meaning of an infinite exiting in a finite reality. This is especially problematic when faced with objects, which take up infinitesimal infinites of space, thus being of an infinitely existing density. An infinitely existing entity, or an infinite of any kind for that matter, however, cannot exist in a finite space, and thus such an existence would result in reality being composed of a overlaying matrix ripped through with microbial holes. But what exists in such holes or rips? These rips are everywhere, yet reality seems static. This is because our functional reality is composed of the imagined spaces-in-between-things. As the whole of existent reality is composed of a nil function (or a matrix spiraling into conic absolutes – or, 1/i) this would result in present contradictions at the structural level. These contradictions must then compose our readily observed universe? But what is that composition? Simple (or not so simple): the readily observed universe is a macro-expansion of accumulated divisions of space, or the resulting imagined matrix of two competing functions sublimating each other: (1/i composing and recomposing structural reality).
Ekpyrosis?: Perhaps this internal contradiction results in the annihilation of certain functions, or an ekpyrosis (“conversion into fire”) which eliminates subgroups of conflicting particles, resulting in a bubbling structural stage which establishes temporary figures in space through a process of palingenesis, or rebirth, which magnified contributes to the imagined, or apparent, reality.
Metamorphosis (Script)
[Foreward shot of red, wooden building - almost a shrine, with a rectangular wooden archway, at the top of which hangs a large golden bell. The inside behind the archway (and the red wall the archway is composed of) is an open, red and white-wood church-like building with large black-iron windows and stylings. Flowers grow across the perimeter]
[Switch to a shot of a black-haired woman sitting in the building, with rays of light lilting lazily around her. She drinks tea from a porcelain cup. Her hair is up, curled and ornate. She wears a loose white tank top and dull green sweat pants. She lazily drinks the tea and seems to calmly contemplate something]
[Switch to shot down a dark hallway, with red walls and a medium-sized black-rounded clock on the left wall. At the end of the hallway is the room with the woman in it, now with her at a sideways angle, looking in front of her (the right of the screen). She is partially shadowed but the room behind her is illuminated by rays of light. The bell sounds. She looks at the camera and stands up, placing the tea cup on the table beside her]
[Switches to a low shot from behind her, where we see her from the waist down, looking down the hallway, down which lies a large wooden door with metal hinges. She walks towards it, and we watch her walk down the hallway]
[Switch to brightly lit shot of the door from the outside - close up. We watch her open the door and she peers around. We see only her head, neck, shoulders, and her hand on the door frame]
[Switch to a shot of see-through glass, through which we can see a small garden and the red walls of the building. Out of the frame from the right, the woman walks up and presses her hands against the glass and looks around]
[Switches to a shot from behind, where we see she is touching a large glass wall which peers out to a landscape]
[Switch to close-up of small square plot with flowers growing in it and a shovel beside it]
[Switch to shot of the garden from behind, including the woman and the plot. She slowly walks away from the glass wall and walks over to the plot. She picks up the shovel and begins to dig up from under the plot]
[Switch to a shot looking diagonal-forward from her left (our right) at her face and upper torso as she continues to dig. She is sweaty but in intense concentration]
[Switches to a close-but not too close-shot of the plot and we see that she has dug a large, human-sized hole]
[Switches to a slightly further back diagonal-shot of her, as she sits down at the edge of the hole and climbs inside]
[Switches to a diagonal-from-upper-right shot of her laying in the hole with her arms crossed around her chest. We suddenly see dirt being poured on her from some unseen person or force]
[Switches to shot from inside the hole as dirt is poured from some unseen object onto the camera until the camera is completely dark]
[Darkness]
[A single flame burns from nowhere and remains stationary]
[Suddenly, dark, shadowy moths move around the flame - we do not see the moths, but the shadows seem to dart around and disturb the camera]
[Suddenly, the shadows begin to gain color and start to resemble butterfly wings]
[The shadows/wings become more chaotic, and cover up the fire. They become more and more chaotic and colorful until... black]
[End Movie]
Fin.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Image: Death and Life by Gustav Klimt, 1910-1916 (I was/am a big Klimt fan)
Fish In the Afternoon 