One Chance

A couple of weeks ago, I drove six hours round trip to see a film I might never have a chance to see again, Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, a French film shot in 3D. I knew it would never play in a theatre near me and, once released on home video, it wouldn’t be available in its original form. So, I drove to a film festival in another state. There was only one showing.

I'm old enough to remember the time, before video, before a thousand channels, before the internet, when movies were things I might never see again. They played for a week or two in the local theatre then vanished. The midnight movies offered single screenings, often never repeated. Movies could be events, much like theatre, in that one often saw them only once, yet  that single viewing could spark endless conversation and discussion.

In college, still before video, I discovered foreign films. Somewhere on campus, someone was always running something in a classroom or a basement. The Italian Department played Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini. The French Department played Truffaut, Resnais, Godard. I saw Bunuel, Kurosawa, Lang, Pabst. Often in scratchy, jumpy prints, sometimes without subtitles. Every film taught me something about a world I'd never known, every film taught me about film itself. I was hungry for them. I sought them out. I believed, at the time, that one viewing was all I’d have. I wanted to remember them, but how do we watch something we know we’ll never see again?

At first, I tried watching them as a kind of visual catalog. This was the type of memorization I'd been taught in school. I worked to commit every angle, every camera movement, every gesture to memory, but I couldn't repeat the experience over and over in the same way I mouthed dates and events for a History exam until they were stored away. Still, my mind scrambled over details in an attempt to find patterns. Like history class, I was trying to figure out beforehand which elements were important (which might be on the test), so I could concentrate on remembering only those. My mind was working to supply meaning as the film unfolded. The problem with this approach was not only that it didn't work, but that I stopped seeing the film itself; instead I broke it down into pieces in an attempt to memorize manageable fragments. I lost the feel of the film and removed myself from the experience.

Eventually, in the dank basement rooms of the library, I found another kind of observation, a way of giving up to the film in an active way. Much of what I thought of as my mind was turned down low, or off altogether. I was fully engaged, yet quiet; my mind merely one element of the full sensation. I didn’t realize it then, but I was discovering the distinction between mind-memory and body-memory.

It's nearly impossible to see anything on a merely visual level. Seeing itself is irrevocably linked with context and content, with our place in the experience. In memory we may recall the circumstance of the seeing, our position in the room and its temperature, the moment just before. We may remember odd details while dropping supposedly important ones. Because seeing isn't a simple recording; it's a complex of information and response in which we, the observers, are inextricably bound. A camera records, it creates a simple visual representation. We observe.

Seeing happens in our bodies, not simply in our eyes and our head. It’s a fully engaged immersion in the world. Our bodies hold memory in a different way from our minds. Our mind searches for pattern and story, that's its job; our bodies hold a more personal record of our past. Seeing can bring the illusion of objectivity, the cool and passive role of the observer but, in the end, observation is engagement, an active interaction with the world around us.

Mind-memory searches for patterns in what falls within its gaze. Body-memory is omni-present, as the body is always engaged, consciously and subconsciously, in the world around us. Mind-memory constructs pictures of the working of the world while body-memory synthesizes our thoughts and feelings with our physical sensations. Mind-memory is recalled in something akin to a file search, often assembling a picture one piece at a time; body-memory is more unpredictable, often coming upon us all at once.

In the absence of a full memory our mind works to construct one. We can feel it struggling to piece one detail after another into a full picture. These blanks aren’t important to body memory. Body memory is incomplete but whole; it arises of-a-piece and reveals itself with attention.

Let’s say I’ve lost my car keys. The first impulse is to retrace my steps, to try to recall where I might have put them. I methodically attempt to assemble the past, moment by moment, aware of large gaps in memory while uncertain my chronology is correct. This assemblage is just that. It comes about one piece at a time, one image at a time.

Instead, I might suddenly remember myself standing beside the bedside table: the thought I had at the moment, the keys in my hand, the sound they made as I laid them on the tabletop. The first is mind-memory, the second body-memory. Each has their purpose.

As writers, our raw material arises from the creative juxtaposition of what we have experienced and what we can imagine. Our experience can arise from events (seeing more things, going more places) or from deepening our engagement with the world around us. One is outwardly directed while the other is more inward.

Observation, in the sense of being fully engaged with the world, is the first act of the writer. Part of our discipline as writers is to deepen our own experiences of the everyday world and the degree to which we can be engaged, physically, mentally and emotionally. Regardless of what we write, historical romance or hard science fiction, our personal experience allows us to ground our writing in what it means to be human.

This observation is not a passive act. It is fundamentally creative. However, if the mind is already imposing patterns, ideas, beliefs, stories, upon the world as we observe, it occludes our ability to see.

I have to find my own ways of subverting the desire of my mind to capture and claim what I experience. I want to actually have the experience as fully as possible before I try to assess its meaning. I accept something is meaningful simply because it is observed. Other meanings arise later.

I work to find ways to bring this more and more into my life, this initial gesture away from pattern and story toward the richness of experience itself. I want a balance between recognition and the thrill and terror in noticing the world around me.

So here’s, in part, what I’ll remember about Goodbye to Language: the light in the fall leaves as I drove into Southern Virginia, the crisp air and the coffee at an outside café near the theatre, the silly 3D glasses wrapped in plastic, a sense of space and depth widening before me as the film progressed, two hands on a chain link fence in the foreground as a woman watched in the background, a dog by a river in a shifting landscape of color as if I were suddenly seeing somehow deeper into nature, the tone of a voice struggling to find the right words, the silence of the car on the drive back.

This euphoria and confusion is indistinguishable from the film. And it’s important to me to initially reject as little as possible, to allow the experience to manifest in fullness, to be as aware as possible. Later I separate the impressions, later I can tease the brilliant colors of the leaves from my feelings at the precise moment the fingers curled into the chain link fence. Later, a certain discernment or discrimination.

Observation doesn’t just have to do with film or writing. Observation, then, becomes inseparable from life, an essential way of living. Essential, because no moment of our lives ever comes again.

-Steve Mitchell