I have just seen a film, an in-tight drama about a man losing his sight, the sort of thing that has perhaps become unfashionable because there is no way to be ironic about it, no way to sneer at it without exposing yourself. The ease of online communication has made us more cowardly instead of less so as the wizards claim; I include myself. We censor ourselves more heavily than ever before because always someone is reading, someone is watching. So we go to films that do the sneering for us and avoid those that still try to hold up a mirror.
In the golden age of Hollywood this sort of story was the bread and butter of the big studios: sentimental morality plays set against a modern backdrop. Those pictures that succeeded even beyond the narrow expectations of the producers did so because the emotion was real and overpowered whatever hackneyed "message" insisted on by the studio. In this picture, Light of Mine, there is no such studio hovering over the shoulder of the cinematographer, editor, actors and director; there is only the success or failure of the film as an artistic whole.
And what I have seen is the American west and its unique status as a monument you can travel through, lose yourself in and die under, or any combination thereof; a vast reflection of the loneliness of our nuclear selves and our popped-together cars; a fountain of youth for those with the fiber and wit to see it. Perhaps I see this, I think as I pass a porch cluttered with huddled chairs and trikes, one of which I suppose, at first, is the owner sitting and quietly regarding me; perhaps I see this or perhaps I am only seeing my own track through the lava fields of the past.
But even allowing for this, I am safe in my assumption. Am I not, after all, with all my warts and shortcomings, an American? Have I not also planted my corner stake here, no matter why or how? Mustn't it all come down to that, that we have our families and then we have our land, so different from the Old Country, where somewhere and somewhen they were the same?
The polis dozes. The only thing watchful here are the buzzing streetlamps, the pink/orange eyes that sleep during the day. I am glad; I can creep through unnoticed, continue to pace without attracting conversation. The film did succeed, it succeeded in the best way, really the only way a complete piece of art can succeed: in a way not intended by its creators. I did see the lava fields, I did see the granite mountains taking the sun full-on, now and then, at the same time. I did grieve, am grieving, have grieved, all while watching in the back row and now as I walk back through the last two hours.
The city wakes again; cars whip by like drone flies, tuned to a pitch of idiot frenzy to get there. Bicyclists ratchet down the chilly ways blithely, calm on the foundation that the entire mechanized world is out to get them. The customers of the all-night coffee shop sit in front of their devices, their faces dimly lit by their monitors, their mouths open. I don't want to see but I do see; there is no way to avoid it. I do the next best thing and hurry by, pressing to reach the next blank wall, the next pool of darkness. In a dark bus shelter across the street someone is shouting a song while their friend laughs.
Perhaps the blind man stays there in that darkness, reaching out to the textures he supposed in his sighted life, taking the measure of those odors and sounds that were merely color then; or perhaps it is more profound, perhaps more otherworldly. I pause and collect myself with him, what my father would call "getting a handle on the job"; I take the weight and measure of all that grief and expecting and waiting and lay it out on the arcade before me, the dim tunnel on Franklin Bluff. My own memories crowd in as I walk; this is the old neighborhood, after all. My own distant past has become a strata, a subject for a Piranesi to sketch in carefully-controlled vignette.
Here is the old apartment, another Waterloo; was there, in fact, any other kind of battlefield? After all, I endure, that is not the question; the question is what remains of affection, what remains of honor... Long after the cartridges are spent, long after the ball. Here the air weighs heavy on the silences and the drooping birches in the front yard. The lights of the doors are blank again, obtuse, with nothing to offer me but a muddy reflection of my own face. In a cowardly spirit I choose this street but hurry by when I see the familiar columns, the birches, so that farther down, by the church, maybe, I can repeat the old catechisms, the old responses: does she even think of this place any more? Probably not, and if so, not often. Why do I come this way? How can I not, I live here. What difference does it make if I take another street? It is still there, still speaking. So saying I hurry along in my grimy tunic with its tarnished epaulets like sofa upholstery.
