Not only was I over 2 weeks late in realising, (and this was after I’d already written the following piece on a train journey to Sheffield) I also wasn’t aware that there was a specific brief to which I subsequently did not adhere!

Yes, I’m terrible with deadlines and guidelines.

But I thought I’d share it anyhow.

900 words (to tell you that I love you)

We’ve just met and already it feels like an Epic. Yet time is short. Thin, voluptuous lips etch words in the space between us. I cling to them like a shipwrecked sailor to driftwood. I feel myself leaning toward you, into the abyss between my awkward grin and your twinkling eyes. You’ve finished your piece and, as per the laws of conversation, it’s my turn to say something: Of course! I blurt unknowingly. In a conspicuous plea for support I turn to the gentleman to my left. But he just smiles – a tacit acknowledgment that he too has found himself lost in your eyes.

In this silence I whisk you away to the set of my fantasy – not a beach on a remote tropical island, or a moonlit balcony overlooking twilight Paris – we are on the platform of a train station in an unnamed and featureless place. It is cold, dark, and quiet. You rummage frantically in your handbag, its contents spewing on to the concrete platform. Tears stain lilywhite cheeks beneath tired eyes. The conductor’s whistle sounds its farewell and, with one foot crossing the platform-train threshold, I pause to observe you give in to the weight of misfortune. From over your shoulder I try to speak without shattering you into a million pieces. You are still; the only sign of life I can determine is the condensation of your breath against the crisp winter air. You’ve lost your purse. You’ve lost your ticket. And you’re about to lose your father.

The gentleman to the left is speaking now. I’m not paying attention but his subject sounds vaguely political. You indulge him politely, occasionally taking delicate sips from the glass of wine that appears happy in your supple grip. For a moment I wish I am the glass – and then the wine. I take a moment to check myself: I haven’t shifted my weight, drained my glass or blinked for a few minutes. Through a series of choreographed moves I switch drinking hands, replant my left foot, sip my beer and blink as I swallow. You notice and flick a glance in my direction: I’m still here. The gentleman appears to be eloping with his opinions and indignation.

Our eyes meet briefly and you manage a frail smile that turns forlorn in another moment. I busy myself rounding up the strewn contents of your bag, allowing you a moment to collect yourself. Romantic lines bursting through my head, I resist to a fault and offer my credit card and a paper timetable. The emotional is replaced with the material; the cold reminds us of her presence.

Mr Obnoxious is reaching the climax of his complaint about everything but the right to an opinion. Your sips are becoming more frequent; your glances also. I don’t have long it appears: 428 words.

Two coffees steam atop the table between us. You stare out the window, fully occupied to the point of serenity; I stare at you, waiting patiently for your confidence. Your fingers roll anxiously around each other. I attempt my best clichéd Such is life comforter, but get as far as Sometimes before your eye lids gently close and the image of a million fragments dissuades me.

In the hospital I gaze at your back from outside the window. Your hands embrace your father’s with the same gentle grip that the glass of wine enjoys. Each peak on the monitor sends a shiver down my spine. I fear for its influence and contemplate how it would be possible to send the signal from my own to pick yours up and carry it, once set adrift, independent, alone. It is a matter of minutes now. The coffees are lead weights in my hands and I try to remain still and silent so as to not disturb the moments left that you may share. The gap between electronic peaks lengthens. The rhythm struggles to remain a rhythm. It is sporadic now; but not erratic. The struggle is peaceful, dignified.

The gentleman’s story reaches its peak; he gestures wildly to indicate the room or the city, an ideology or an idea. With his scowl the story flatlines.

The monitor sleeps. Your father sleeps. Your hands return to your lap. I cannot hear your heart, and I’m convinced I should be able to.

Mr Obnoxious feigns indifference to our lack of response to his epic tale of…something.

You exit the hospital room, the same tracks of tears staining cheeks that seem to be flushing ever so slightly. You take the cups of coffee from my hands, place them on the table, and fold inwardly into the cavity of my chest.

You drain the glass of wine; a single tear flows from the rim back to the bottom of the glass and for a second I think the glass might be crying.

I can feel your heart thumping powerfully in the wake of despair; renewed and full of life. Our rhythms synchronize.

My glass is empty. Mr Obnoxious has spied other prey. You step through the abyss and take my hand, interlacing your warm fingers with mine. The fantasy world begins to fade, giving way to a deluge of forgotten thoughts, feelings, and memories. Let’s go home you say, placing your light kiss on my grateful cheek. And I realise, to my delight, that it doesn’t take 900 words to tell you that I –

(900 words)

“Stop trying to say something and say it!”

These words pounce on to the page as I try to write the introduction to a response to watching 21 grams for the first time. Appropriate, as I stared at the three previous abortive attempts. And further appropriate as they sum up what I actually want to say…

A lot is made of narrative structure: the kind that accommodates pragmatically measured ‘acts’; reveals, clinchers, revelations, restoration, progress, catharsis. I have found that in recent years a lot of cinema has been released solely to satisfy this kind of ‘fix’-narrative, providing highly satisfying experiences… at the expense of moving its audience.

Is this done in anticipation of reviews? Of expectancy? Of an apparent decreasing span of attention and/or sensitivity to stimuli in new audiences?

Two films I have seen recently utterly resist the lure of trying to say something; trying to stoke the headlines and anticipate how it shall be remembered in captions and quips; of how it may be referred to in the historical canon of cinema. Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (TTSS) and 21 grams unapologetically show a story, and make no song and dance of it (though…TTSP’s trailer tries its best to defy this and is partially to blame for an emphatically confused reception among the majority audience).

TTSP is so straightforward in its depiction of the novel that even the ‘great reveal’ is somewhat muted. Bold; seeing as the film was billed as being an epic whodunit (again, naughty trailer!) while the readers of the novel will tell you that the story is less about the criminal mastermind and more about the understated hero amidst his ambling and troubled marriage. In fact, the revelation of identifying the mole is only as such (in the book) because it is considered in respect of our hero’s relationship with the mole; his betrayal, now made complete and, moreover, ‘official’. That this doesn’t translate well to film, I believe, is down to motion picture’s natural or modal aversion to depicting the inner cogs of a highly intricate and pragmatic brain/mind, without resorting to banal voiceover (which in essence destroys that which it attempts to depict). The story is told, in spite of its literary origins, with great economy. It doesn’t TRY to say what happens in the novel, in a way that attempts to capture the reading experience: it just gets on and shows the story with the tools at its disposal: the key events, with the key characters, in the key locations.
21 grams tells a similar story (not THE story, but the production of it). Initially I was guilty of acknowledging a fragmented, ends-against-the-middle plot device, in which I could expect a revelatory discovery of how things came to be at the end of the film (where we find ourselves at the beginning and are referred to the end). Though this is partially true, I would be absolutely blind and ignorant to the film’s genius if I were to stop at this first analysis. The film seamlessly – almost clandestinely – drifts through time between(recent) nuclear points in the lives of various characters, who are about to become forever entwined in time and its relentless march. The audience cannot help but be challenged to start putting things in a ‘correct’ chronological order; hence the confused notion that the film would hang its success on a neatly unravelled, chronologically plotted reveal. Before long, however, you begin to realise that only a few possibilities exist for how the characters have ended up where, presumably, they are (for you can say with no degree of certainty that you have even been shown the ‘end’ in the opening few scenes). You become enraptured in whichever moment you are seeing, as though each is contained on its own parallel timeline, and that each story could diverge and conclude in its own mini-narrative/film. And here is the genius: the sense of the inevitable; something predictable that you simply don’t want proven correct. The film looms with a ‘sense’ of history about it; a full sense of lives lived, choices made, desires followed and consequences faced. And because of this your attention is not geared towards finding out what happens in the ‘chronological’ end, but observing how each character is dealing in and with the present. Opposed to any over-used narrative devices seen in many a modern drama, wherein the entire film experience balances on a precariously feeble reveal that has been driven towards with no other alternative – and yet still trying to hide itself – from the very first seconds of the film….

21 grams embodies the sense of tragic inevitability and yet engages so deeply its audience in every moment of the characters’ lives that it ceases to be about any narrative climax. It is testament to a reliance not on the audience’s hunger for cheap momentary satisfaction, but their natural interest in humans and human lives; in characters and their actions. The subject of 21 grams is not the intricate way in which people can be connected by a single event, or any such ‘butterfly effect’; 21 grams’ subject is its subjects. It is a feast of human emotion that discourages its audience to view it in a plot-reveal oriented fashion, by the fragmented displacement of narrative time and the purposeful avoidance of transitional devices or nearly plotted ‘acts’. The film tells, and doesn’t TRY to tell. There is no grand showdown between Christina Peck and Jack Jordan. There is not even the slightest hint towards the state of Paul Rivers and Christina’s relationship after the shooting; no bedside shot with Christina lovingly, tragically nursing Paul in his final moments. There is no word of a bastard child.

In 21 grams: the time of before, during and after; each scene, each period of time, and each narrative off-shoot, professes that, even at the end of the film….life goes on.

And this brings me back to the introductory quote on Kundera. Kitsch is described as the absolute denial of shit: the denial of imperfection in order to ‘realise’ an ideal. Yet Kundera argues that to deny the existence of shit is to falsify the world we see in front of us. And if art…if literature, cinema, theatre and performance are to formulate ‘ideal’ ways in which to tell a story; ways in which to maximise ‘effect’, and structure the experience of the re-telling of our lives, then what we are experiencing is life told to us from a dishonest or distorted point of view. If a story is truly moving, then where is the need for the reason for its being moving to be told to us? Why do the events have to be regimented into measured ‘acts’ and ‘arcs’ that remove the imperfections – in many cases the actual ‘humanity’ of characters – to be replaced by the ‘mathematics’ of an ideal narrative/plot?

Recently I found myself watching an American drama series after having skipped roughly one and half season’s worth of programming and narrative development.

No, I did not do this for kicks.

It was curious viewing, seeing vastly different circumstances for many of the characters and any number of references to things that have just happened; large events… life-changing events. Some were accounted for in the usual ‘Previously on…’ introductory montage; but there was so much more I had to try to ‘backtrace’…really concentrate to speculate on what has happened in order to bring myself up to speed….

…and I found this wholly complelling.

What I was dealing with was potential: a whole heap of ways to explain why Character A and Character B’s relationship had gone from best of friends to frosty at best; or even in trying to explain the marked absence of Character C. This, I speculated, is what you might call making your audience work for their story. Giving them potential narrative, yet not telling them what is/has happened and how they should feel about it.

In August we performed a piece at Bootleggers and Baptists, in Sheffield. Our intention was to begin playing with this gap: attempting to synthesize the narrative ‘skip’ that had my mind working on overdrive to backtrace stories through a wilderness of narrative space. It is a convention used by many playwrights: the kind that sees a ‘flashforward’ of some years without so much as a warning or montage of the passing time. And yet this is accounted for by the writer… the gap is filled by clever expository dialogue and action; or else used in itself as a device to lure the audience toward a revelatory climax.

It is a design. It is thought out. Yet, in accidentally skipping hours of narrative development, the TV Drama series  (which had no intention of using a narrative gap as a device) appeared to achieve this very intrigue and allure; the same expository moments of dialogue and action that tingled with possibility and natural intrigue….. without ever intending to do so.

Some weeks ago I posted this TED lecture on the website. In the lecture Daniel Kahneman describes there being a confusion in thoughts about well-being and/or happiness where two forms of ‘self’ appear to come into conflict:

there is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, and is capable of reliving the past but basically it has only the present. It’s the experiencing self that the doctor approaches when the doctor asks, “Does it hurt now when I touch you here?”.

And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score and maintains the story of our life and its the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, “How have you been feeling lately?” or “How was your trip to Albania?” or something like that. (Kahneman, D. TED2010, February 2010)

A working example of the conflict between these two ‘selves’ he gives us is as follows:

[A man explained, during a Q&A session that he] had been listening to a symphony and it was absolutely glorious music, and at the very end of the recording there was a dreadful screeching sound; and then he added, really quite emotionally: “It ruined the whole experience.” But it hadn’t. What it had ruined was the memory of the experience; he had had the experience, he had had twenty minutes of glorious music: they counted for nothing, because he was left with a memory, the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.

In trying to give a visual for this, I imagine memories of experiences as cities…; cities that, when experiencing them, you walked through. I then imagine that remembering the city is rather like looking upon a greast mist in which only the skyscrapers of the Remembering Self can be seen, and this new image is forever preserved as the memory of that place. Indeed, Daniel Kahneman goes on to offer that what remains of the experiences we have is the way our ‘Remembering Self’ tells the story back to us….: That our Remembering Self is a storyteller.

….and more than this: from the experience of remembering experience, under the jurisdiction of the Remembering Self, we are able to anticipate how our Remebering Self will encounter (and then remember) future events.

Wordy, no?

Essentially, we anticipate the direction of, and the way we shall feel about, future events in the same way we remember a holiday; a peice of music; a past relationship; a dramatic story….

As the Remembering Self tells the story of our life with its subjectified accounts of our Experiencing Self’s experiences….so too does our tendancy towards such stories bring to bear the anticipation of one that unfolds in front of us…: the only difference is that our judgements do not become roots liek those that feed the ‘tree’-story of our lives ’to date’, but change and grow like a narrative rhizome, ceaselessly undoing and redoing themselves until the curtain falls.

As part of Bootleggers and Baptists quarterly night of theatre, performance and comedy,

Alea Theatre Presents…..

Friday 19th August, 2011 – 7.30pm

@

The Greystones,

Greystones Road,

Sheffield

S11 7BS

TICKETS £2.50

>>>>>>>>>>>> Book @ http://www.wegottickets.com/event/128202 <<<<<<<<<<<<<

LINEUP:

‘Taking Fifteen Minutes To Remember You’ by Alea Theatre

‘The Interview’ by Ray Castleton

‘Balham Vs. Clapham’ by Tom Yarwood

‘Whiteout’ by Elise Rohde

Get your tickets quickly, as they’re selling out fast!

We look forward to seeing you there.

Regards,

Qfwfq