Le scaphandre et le papillon

Review of Le scaphandre et le papillon. (“The Diving Bell [sic] and the Butterfly.”) Theme of the movie: we are imprisoned in the murky depths of a hostile element in our flesh-encased diving suits (i.e. our bodies).  French scaphandre: old-fashioned salvage-diver's suit with copper helmet, air hose (lifeline to the true world of imagination and memory) thick rubber skin and leaden shoes. Not a "diving bell." Cocooned in the present within these clumsy “diving suits” (bodies) catastrophic illness—a massive stroke for example—forces a rare few of us to find our butterfly "wings," our past and future. That is, to emerge from the chrysalis of the present into the past and future and transcend death through imagination and memory. This is what happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby, managing editor of Elle magazine, and this movie is his story. Julien Schnabel's cinematic realization is uncluttered, from the painful recreation of Bauby's post-traumatic awakening in a hospital in Berck, Calais, in 1998 to the closing credits, which feature planetary ballet on an epic scale: triumphantly upward-leaping glacial ice filmed in reverse motion to the singing of Joe Strummer and Tom Waits.

2008

On Hearing a Musette in a Rameau Opera

Prancing ponies! High-kicking cancan girls! The skip, step and cha-cha of things! The choreography of time. Space furnished like a wardrobe with cumulus clouds, frilly knee-high petticoats and marching boots. Making a fool of distance, which collapses like an accordion dresser screen painted with Chinese landscapes! O landscape of time in a Rameau opera! From whence did you import your measures? And the stamping, sliding, tumbling objects of the earth, silly creatures of the forest, sky and workshop waiting in a long line at the backstage entrance for an audition—how much did you pay those clubfoot jesters, those upstart hooligan extras to portray time intervals in your opera? And the marble nude in the shrubbery showing her derriere: even she seems like a distillation of quotidian time in a moonlit operatic garden. The seldom-revealed, still backside of time. Her stone buttocks make your optical glands throb with the imminence of motion. Frozen in time, commanded into stillness by a poised orchestra conductor’s baton.

The garden of movement. When did movement coarsen, become false? When did it lose its luster and become dingy? Behold motion, new-washed by music. Plunge your body into freshly-laundered space like an arm through the sleeve of a crisp white Sunday linen shirt. I am here. Presto! Now I’m there. It’s as easy as music. Or dancing. The thing in motion is matter daydreaming. Mind made flesh. Wanting without remorse, hungrily, as a petal lunges to the earth, gracefully falling through space as a dancer hurls herself through time from one sequence of movements to another, always falling to a new height which overlooks all the previous history of the dance.

O sound of musettes in a Rameau opera! Sounds I never heard before until now! (Or maybe I heard you in a former life—eighteenth century France, par example, since even my present life feels decidedly ancien régime.) Why has it taken me so long to hear you again, unknown familiar sound? Whose voice are you? To which of these moving things, these gallant moving things stampeding like circus animals through the sky, along the sidewalk, down our department store aisles and tumbling off our desks and out of our kitchen pantries and from the top shelves of our closets, do you belong? Must that thing not stop in its tracks and channel all its energy through its nose in order to make that sound, the sound of a musette? It seems to twist all the diffuse strands of life into a metaphysical circus act. It bristles with obscene chalumeaux. “Some men, when the bagpipe sings in the nose, cannot contain their urine” said the slandered Venetian. It waddles, the vulgar French musette, like a bawdy-looking brown leather duck into the blazing center ring and draws a reedy, whining acrobatic high-wire out of its nose along which an absurd assembly of goofy cartoon characters slide in pompous, stately procession, with heart-breaking precision, solemnity and nonchalance. Like Philippe Petit between the World Trade towers—which no longer exist (like Rameau). Suspended in time like a conductor’s baton,

6/12/2015

Trees

Are trees bodies? Or merely nerve synapses, sky sutures, marshy river deltas with no defined geographical boundaries where night flows into day? Portals between dimensions? In the roots of the elm, earth plants her feet, reaches upward to the sky. In its leaves, the sky palpates with tender fingers the mortal flesh of the beloved, showers the earth with gifts of light and rain. There are no “trees,” only the wedding feast of the marriage of heaven and earth.

Lords and ladies in attendance. Vertumnus and Pomona. Vertumnus has sturdy limbs, split, crackled seams under his knees and smooth, silver, livid-blotchy bark with assorted lesions, knots, burls, cankers, butt swell and minor girdling at the soil line caused by root weevils. Pomona is graceful-limbed, purple-shaded, polished  bronze, with tarnished bosses, light verdigris and a speckled bole. Ruddy-skinned pamplemousses glow like orbed lanterns in the glade. Amid the darkness at the center of the fruittree, the lemon glow of unblinking gapefruit (grapefruit). Wedding in the orchard. Lords and ladies in attendance. Pre-school flower girls in festive leaf, dressed in orange blossom cambric. Tall willowy bridesmaids in peachskin satin sway over the assembled throng, the verdant multitude of earthly foliage.