At the formula movies

Life is a movie formula. We, old fans who have always been at the movies, do not let prescience of the end (death = end of the movies) bother us too much. We sit back in the dark as the projector runs itself out on the glassy screen, in alternating, pulsating shades of incandescent, dull and sombre, as hombres bursting out of the projector’s luminous alchemy spread themselves out on the white screen (but we will call it silver, not because of bromide, but because we worry about the image, of the things we see and the way they show us and the way we see ourselves in them), once vitreous diamond, one sweating, glistening coal.

And we return every night so that we can sit in masochistic darkness blacker than the tenebrity outside, and watch shafts of light overhead torch the silk(y) screen that we have built for ourselves in a distant, visible, conspicuous yet where-else corner of our daily theatre, so that it flares into life (illumining only the smoothly stretched, taut screen, but we feel a soothing glow , and our grateful eyes sparkle and our shining clothes always crackle in movie halls) and onereic, phantasmagoric yet so veritable figures (that we credulous folks, believe that we are going to be just like them, and they are just like ‘me’) twinkle into vivification and we really don’t care whether these apparitions laugh or cry or brood or exult or suffer (for they are pretence anyway !), all that we want to do, while we have the time, while the movie runs and we are more animate than the projector’s people, is to be happy, to make the best out of it.

Our whole life is onanism to these movies, and the movies are peccavis of our hieratic wet- dreams. We sit like paramours with inamoratas, in the last row of the balcony, gazing at the unnaturally clear, epidermal screen, the cleanest part of the theater, a sacred palimpsest of our guilt and desire apropos our neighbor in the theatre and the searing pilgrim urge for exoneration (or exorcism), whilst the screen flickers and crumbles into vitality; but across our uncertain exculpation hangs the pallid aureole of impotent remorse, because we cannot help knowing that every time a movie begins it begins to end. We have amortized the movies with our pertinacious solipsism. We have become the movies. We are the movies.

Is this then the formula? The lord said: let there be life, and there were movies. We, old fans, who have always been at the movies, know this formula by heart, and thrive on its empathetic benison. We are ashamed for we know we are as parasitic as fetus, but we still buy umbilical chords at ticket counters and flee into wombs where these shadowy projectors wait for us amidst deception of the nocturne, with their ephemeral light and their quasi-catoptric grasp and suzerainty over our gullible sentience. We sleep among them because they are our oldest friends and their life makes our own lives luminescent by proxy. We go to these chthonian places because they are ‘it’, because there is no other place to go. Amidst all the prestidigitation, we have no illusions. Yet, we hasten lest we miss the beginning, but everyone knows the end. The formula rules. We know that the gamin will get the gamine, but will it be a happy ending? We have always wondered.

This then is the formula. We like to fly so high that our wings melt and we fall from the sky. But the formula stares me so close in the eye; it is too far for you, too near for I.