chase scenes serial #4
but I feel like those French bastards took away all the fun of reading their novels by laying bare the mechanisms, like, “you see, this is automatic writing” or “chronology is bourgoise,” and hell I even spelled that wrong, I can’t spell anything without the dictionary, no, without the internet, dictionaries are for Scrabble and bantering about what other animals are marsupials, the internet is where you find words to write with. I’m slowing now, I’m getting self-concious of the process, I’m letting myself hear the voices going up and down the hall outside the door. The children from the pool, go back to the pool children, you seemed so much to enjoy it. I also would like to state that a very clear sign that you are in a barren, desolate, and abstract land is that you can see definitive shadows of clouds on the ground. You see them ahead of you, their complete form, then you drive into them and then out, then they appear in their entirety in your rearview mirror‡. I believe everyone is here in this hotel in order to kill things. Except for the children and their mothers, they are here to enable their fathers to kill things. Or perhaps they are here to kill my night’s rest. It has been a long day of driving through clouds. I want
‡ The Doppler effect does upsetting things to the sound plane engines make, jet engines, as they pass over my house. The sound tends to deepen in such a way that it forms a visual arc of the plane falling from the sky. My house is in a flight path from the Atlanta airport. In fact we flew over it on the way out to the Twin Cities. I was comforted by my recent memories of standing on the lawn and seeing up through the trees the slightly darker than sky coloured plane bellies coasting ably through empty space, that none had crashed into my house, and that we would not. The sounds empty from the night, the diving sounds of jet engines leave me listening to ‘The Wardrobe’ with two (2) lamps on in my room. Perhaps this music will someday carry this moment for me, or many moments. I believe the first song is a reworking of the carnivalesque theme from ‘The Elephant Man’ which I was just watching. On our drive down the Enchanted Highway, two lanes over rolling North Dakota prairies, we listened to the soundtrack from ‘The Straight Story’ and what it brought along to me was both the film, its confrontation of vast mortality and insignificance but also this little room I am now back in where I have listened to it so many times. Now, were I to listen to it here, I shall, I am placed not here, where I was brought when I was not here, but back to the car driving through the pure sunlight of the empty North Dakota sky, my delight at the green and red faces and gold bodies of the prairie pheasants, their heads bobbing up through tall grass, the peace I felt in relaxing and stepping off the beaten path with my father, and the haunting silence of the giant 20:1 prairie pheasant sculptures that were part of the Enchanted Highway’s draw. I feel the peace that Straight felt looking up at the night sky with his brother, of passing through cloud shadows with my father, and sharing, while in the secrecy of my mind, sitting back in my room on a dark night like this one.
