“I snap the twig to try to trap
the springing and I relearn the same lesson.
You cannot make a keepsake of this season.
Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,
lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,
though for a moment it’s your guilty fist
that’s flowering…”
Just watched an awesome film this weekend, brought to you by National Geographic, called “Life in a Day.”
“What happens when you send a request out to the world to chronicle, via video, a single day on Earth? You get 80,000 submissions and 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries. Producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald took this raw material — all shot on July 24, 2010 — and created Life in a Day, a groundbreaking, feature-length documentary that portrays this kaleidoscope of images we call life.”
Amazing. I’d never been so captivated just watching footage after footage of all these people from different corners of the earth, whose names, languages, and countries are all unknown to the viewer, whose borders dissolve to form a truly global, human vision. So often our reality is singular, and we forget that life is a conglomerate of all these realities, that when we first open our eyes in the morning, someone else on the opposite end of the world is putting out the light. The film presents the different rhythms we live by, our fears, griefs, loves, our material possessions, the spaces we occupy. All of this in just one day of existence!
At the end, a girl who is driving home in a dark rainstorm says: “I filmed myself today expecting something great was going to happen. And even though nothing great happened…it did.” The movie of our lives isn’t a story, it’s a collection of mundane moments in a day that we hardly give importance to. After watching this film, every step I took became colossal.
My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.
I can’t walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.
I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.
The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.
The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods
are shuttered I don’t know why.
“Try,” say the good people who bring me my food,
“to make your secret anguish your secret weapon.
Otherwise, your immortality will be
an exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book.”
But I can’t get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.
It takes so long for the human to become a human!
He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,
the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.
Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair
but the two together like curettes
and peel back the pitch-black integuments
to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,
sitting on the sketch of a boulder below
his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
mabel lee 