film edits for my 29th birthday
The thought of having to watch || again and again || a series of my mistakes at first seemed intolerable to me. But of course there was a lesson in what she was saying. Your sense of the film, of its possibilities, went deeper by having a better copy of it in your mind. There was the flawed thing you kept watching and the fixed thing in your head. One physical, one virtual. || Strange to think that || The imagined version would have been the truer one, closer to the finished film. The physical film, whirring through the edit table’s rollers, was already a previous draft.
A few days later, she was hit by a moped running a red light. Bleeding in the road. Crawling to the sidewalk. There was something unbearable in the way she sighed it, when she limped back into the office the next week: You just have to live your life.
—✄—
|| Soon it will be my birthday. || I often draft this weekly letter while I run. Not the whole thing, of course, but a handful of sentences or ideas that, for some reason, get better when I’m on my feet. || Or at least they begin to || I rarely start entirely anew, but I can edit or arrive at some things faster on a run. Once || I return || home, I’ll go straight to the computer to get the few phrases down. || as if possessed, which in a way is what I am ||
I wonder what would happen to those phrases if I got hit by a bus while jogging home. I imagine them as residue on the windshield, ghostly letters like the glue left by a whiskey bottle’s peeled-off label. A few gone-forever phrases my footsteps had just made better.
—✄—
Soon it will be my birthday. Last March, I sat with my friend in the Park. She’s an artist and art therapist, and had an array of colored pencils in her bag. She began to draw while we talked and so I took a black or gray pencil and began to draw myself. I’m far more suited to recording and rearranging than illustrating, so I started to draw the sapling that stood before us. Fractal twigs in pencil. In art therapy, my friend told me, trees are often considered representations of the self or self-state. The sketched tree revealing something about the sketcher. I looked down at mine. Was I doing that? I thought I was drawing a tree. This tree. || , both physical and virtual ||
A few days later I would lose my voice to Covid. Some days after that I would turn twenty-eight. || A year later now || The tree is still in the Park. I am still in the City. || The self— || Selves || return to what? || I wonder if the tree is budding yet. If the tree’s in bloom.
—✄—
Attempting to mark time, like in birthdays or notebooks or newsletters, can seem to banish too much life to the cutting-room floor. I have noted this here before.
Clocking into one of memory’s edit rooms, switching on the lights, picking up discarded filmstrips from the floor and holding them to light—what can you even see? Random scraps:
|| , editing not with a compulsion to perfection but with a deferral towards completion. || again and again || Strange to think that || Soon it will be my birthday. || Or at least they begin to || I return || as if possessed, which in a way is what I am || , both physical and virtual || A year later now || The self— || Selves || return to what? || , one hopes || , though really I am always here. ||
But look: improving them || , one hopes ||, making them actually mean something, is often a matter of rearrangement:
|| Soon it will be my birthday. || Strange to think that || A year later now || I return || again and again || as if possessed, which in a way is what I am || , editing not with a compulsion to perfection but with a deferral towards completion. || Selves || return to what? || The self— || , one hopes || Or at least they begin to || , both physical and virtual || , though really I am always here. ||
—✄—
Soon it will be my birthday, and I am back at this edit table || , though really I am always here. || This workbench of remembering and writing and living, none of which is long without the others. The mistakes are not humiliating, and perhaps worth getting used to. There are many changes to make, of course. Many things to go back and do better, or to do better going forward. Though sometimes I can hardly tell the difference.
And the thing in my mind? My motion makes the rollers go, and the more things I see that need to change, the more complete that virtual reel will be as it spools through my head. There is only much to do because it is all already finished. The mistakes will be corrected because in a way they have been yet. It is always happening, already being done and redone. The tree begins to bloom. The bus rolls past harmlessly. You just have to live your life.
ben tapeworm