This essay is a reflection on forever being left behind by infinity. The movies you may see before or after reading this reflection are:
Citizen Kane (1941,USA) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997,Canada).
Here are some thoughts of life that linger as I finish a film or a book, as I remember devouring movies back in 1990s, when I was in my twenties. I have watched movies the way I read the person, the character or the persona. And there is also almost always a reminder of a book I have read. I watch life at times like in a school, while being amid other lives being students, and a somewhat-classroom was that old theater with its seats for those to suspend themselves before returning to other realness of the world.
. . .
I am certain that I can’t figure out where Professor Higgins’ accents (Pygmalion, 1938) or Johnny Depp’s many accents are from; I am certain because you’re not supposed to be able to pinpoint it— his character or the pirate that he embodies has been around at sea, having been influenced by so many other languages from other isles. Meaning, if his character ever procreates and breeds a generation of Johnny Depp sparrows, then it would be a totally new race or culture in the way any Aus… developed their accent (whether Australian or Austrian or any other eastern).
I think that for anyone to smirk or to question the accent would be giving, inadvertently, a hint of racism. Since that reaction of cringe or dismissiveness is indicating a dislike and judgment of incorrectness for what may be the beginnings of a new language or accent or culture. Luckily, the excuse here is that the actor’s accent is being spoken by a fictional character. Luckily.
If you heard the accent in real-life by a recent citizen, you may retract or consider it wrong; if you heard the accent by a young one who seems to have been around for some time in the country, then I think you might be curious but still judge it to be incorrect, as if the correct one is the one you recognize (perhaps among those you consider close to your historical family). It doesn’t have to be accent, I suppose; it can be a personality that seems to be present in the next generation of a family.
And so to writers out there, many of your characters will have to be someone who will be considered not-white. You will have some interesting moments by yourself, voicing in your head the voice of that someone when you yourself are ‘white’. And vice versa, I have interesting moments voicing in my head the character of a… female, as I expect a character to be, when I read a book. How or why such a voice is chosen by my brain may have something to do with what I heard when I left the womb and thereon out.
Yet somehow, if the phrases or sentences are general or vague enough, the voice of the Black man or voice of the Asian man just might come through or come out, when the reader reads it, without the statements or quotes being overtly Indian or overtly Latin, however these mean.
We writers take chances. There are ones who have come before us to have gotten away with so much that we might question now as watcher and readers.
The future writer however can be with the times. I would imagine the more negative the character, the most negative it will become when you are brazen with her diction or with his lingo. The location of the character can be obvious through with the knowledge that the writer has been there. And when the location of the character is deep and abstract, then you can hope that the reader eventually locate your intentions deep in there as well. I wonder if I’d like a movie of a persistent mogul-man if he sounded like a Canadian or a Cherokee.
What can you create as names for a couple of new magazines, with you as editor, with a couple of purposes for the magazine, and with a couple of actresses or actors as your muse, just before the paper becomes extinct, without a sound of accentuated meaning?
The reality is that the speed of our hearing or reading can be spotted when we look at a row of magazines after magazines. With one look, I can tell which ones are interesting to me, and which ones are same-old-same from the previous issues and which ones were luring me like the magazine’s eyes were truly meant to bait me. And once in a while I may spot a magazine that tells me we as a society had a moment. When I see the row of magazines, I saw one literature in front of me, and I saw one particular first page of a chapter that stood out because my moment was its moment embedded, like a cover about the first woman…, or a cover about The Protest (or a cover on breastfeeding at the edge of our age).
I remember around 1998 or so, I was a basic EMT (this was a step before becoming a paramedic) my partner and I were called to a clinic to transport a patient to a hospital. I waited for the patient, and read some old issues of some magazine, usually all old and torn. When it was time to leave the clinic, I picked up one old magazine to bring with me, presuming that this was okay since the address on the magazines were not even from that clinic. I don’t think I even had the chance to read the magazine later.
I look back and thought that I think this could have been theft; and yet the magazines were located at the same place as some of the free brochures and free cards, like on a bulletin board. I never felt any wrongdoing until decades later when I was reminded of it, as if I became someone who should now be teaching rather than just being.
The risk of the writer is here; that upon writing I might lose an audience or reader because an act or behavior can now be associated with me. The fiction writer has some escape in that we don’t know if any of the wrongdoing or horrendous acts by any of the characters were by the author in real-life. Think of the felonies and depravity that are described in a fictional work. And for the most part, the author gets ‘away’ with such ‘crimes’ because it was someone else who is not real or not ‘really’ alive in the here and now of the audience.
But I write these because I am at that stage in my life when I am confident of my good in my now. I write these as well because it really does feel like it will help later when I am confronted with a scenario in which I want to act in the best standard of my principles. This writing is, in my way, my prayer. I never mind the religious aspect of society, not anymore, but I like the comparison because as I write these reviews, I know I will never remember them to memory, the bud of phrases or the scented blooms of sentences, without having to look at them written or published.
In a classroom and in a theater, there are chairs so close to each other. These are in rooms that may be small, and seemingly intimate. I have gone to long road-trips, highways and freeways and rural roads; and I see America as this gigantic kind of open room, from Pacific to Atlantic.
There is this place called England; and there is even smaller place called Cambridge or Oxford which, by comparison, feels that small intimate room. Quaint; maybe. Intimate; depending. Cozy; though apparently more like cosy.
At the utterance of Cambridge or Oxford, or England itself, there is a visual effect in me. Bicycles: because of some movie, probably. I see an enclosed bridge. And spires that inspire.
I have some good guesses as to what Cambridge or Canada would be like hundreds of years from now. But it won’t happen until someone like me becomes part of it—whether the first x or the first ‘y’ or the first z to ever be. You, the reader and watcher, may have guesses on what D.C. or New York would be like hundreds of years from now; but none of that futuristic will happen until you become part of it now, and do… something. I’d like to hear folk music from the East to Iberia, while in some small pub or while I watch a far-away movie. Maybe it’s there already in Cambridge. I’d like to wear a simple sunglass that happens to be an advanced virtual ocular device that integrates with books, movies and my motorbike and groceries, like I am part of a birth of the new Neighbor shown.
There was a time decades ago, before 1999, I used to go stop on almost every used bookstores in the city of Chicago, because sometimes the staff of the shops would put out a box of free books, and anyone can rummage through it and get how many they like. It was great, and I couldn’t finish reading most of the books anyway because I always thought that because they were free I could pick them up its delicious cover again, in a week or so; whereas if I bought one at regular price, I wouldn’t think of wasting the pages, in case the book is injured or the book is ripped, the book is lost.
I do look at some of the books which I have not finished and I wonder how they can be better. Then I move on. I do the same with some films I start—with its trailer, its previews, or its first 10 minutes.
You might look at some people the same way, as some stranger; and you are quiet with yourself that you would wish they would dress one way, or not speak the other way. Or I do wish at times that when there is no one at a shop that this would be a perfect time to see someone famous I have never met.
It also happens that when I plan a visit to a new place, I wish it to be the place to start over and try a starting over in contra-distinction to a place in which I was younger and could have been braver.
I’d like to look at that last phrase of that last sentence I just wrote, and its structure brings me to youth and bravery and time. Any structuralist in me may not want to change that sentence to ‘younger and less brave’. I must have had a reason to structure my sentence in that way. I think in the end, it is because of my sense of time— that is, I still think that I at once feel I was braver when I was younger, and I also feel that that in that time of now, as I remember that past, I am braver by way of my future plans.
An old writer named Erasmus once wrote In Praise of Folly. It is about ridiculousness of seriousness. I haven’t read it-- in its original pages; the illustrations look seriously nice, less serious than the calligraphy. Any humor in the book is clearly not in the seriousness of the handwritings. It almost reads like boys having fun-- unless the clergy was made up of women, then this book would sound insulting when written by a man. Times change our interpretations. A row of beautiful ancient texts in calligraphy are among the great choices to lose oneself in and dwell in about the serious past to which I would love to time-travel, and change the worst to have crashed and the most undesirable to have existed.
The 1500s would have been a time of danger for a writer like me, and I probably would have had to repeat their norms like mantra. Even the writer Erasmus wrote something called Complaint of Peace. I wonder of the atmosphere when this was written. I imagine of the title that would have been different if it was Autumn. It is usually the cold that calms people like you and me—usually, maybe the breathless freeze of an atmosphere, for some.
L.A.
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