tonight was movie night. hm. well, last night now, i suppose. two movies on the list one an indulgence in sci-fi not worth mention and the other, the title of this piece.
this was no hollywood flick. from what i gather, not quite independent, either. somewhere inbetween, which seems fitting considering the story told within it.
a true story, written by a man who blinked every damn word of it. with one eye. i have no idea how long it took them to write it. i suppose it was mentioned, but i didn’t notice in the midst of being purely boggled, fucking humbled, really.
this fellow, 42, was editor of a major magazine. he had a stroke that left him completely paralyzed. ‘locked in syndrome’ they called it. all he could manage was to blink. but there was something wrong with the right eye as a result of the stroke and it was not irrigating properly. so they had to sew it closed in hopes of saving it.
which left him with his left. and from there, with the help of a therapist, they worked out a system by which one could recite letters in the order of their use/frequency and he would blink when they correct letter was sounded.
and from this, they wrote a book.
can you even fucking imagine?
i’m not even going into the grit and courage it took to get to the point where such a thought could even be possible. i suspect the book has it in spades. the movie only points to it indirectly. outlining its shape in the vignettes and interactions occurring in disjointed manner, it speaks eloquence and a pensive sorrow that is heavy to experience (don’t get me wrong, the movie is a fucking masterpiece of declarative reality… you have the clearest view imaginable on it all. written from the man’s perspective, narrated by the voice of the man in the diving bell).
i don’t even know what to say. some things are just so far beyond the pale of wonder that it seems almost wrong to try and talk about them at all. some things deserve more than words. so i cried. still am, really. the sheer idiocy of the things we call life. how many people are living epics we’ll never know?
i’m trembling on the edge of a tangent that has nothing whatever to do with this movie other than sharing a slender thread here, in my thoughts.
it is a thought i have had before. many times, actually. usually when i am in that mood that has to do with wishing i were more than one person, or perhaps a better person… someone who was capable of doing more than giving teary tributes to amazing people i’ll never know in the middle of the night.
with stupid words that stumble and fall all over themselves.
have you ever had that feeling when you think you should be able to do more? be more? or the sick sense of frustration when you finally start to realize you were wrong? or the one where you can’t help but feel you are not at all wrong in the notion, but somehow you’ve fucked up so badly that the chance has passed you by?
all around us, every day, strangers and people we think we know. and you simply never know more than what you think you see. what you tell yourself you ‘know’. and you never really know at all. you never know that somewhere inside that hospital there are people like this fellow in this movie. it’s probable, but you don’t spend much time thinking about it.
you know it but you don’t. and you hide in the not knowing because it’s the only way you can bear it…. the only way you can stand being someone who isn’t able to do more than flounder around in life.
this man lost the chance to live normally. and he still managed to live as he could. and write a book. with one fucking eyelid. blinking.
he died ten days after it made publication. the feeling of that last paragraph on the screen was… existential.
silly me. i wanted him to live. i wanted him to battle his way back and if not fully, then at least to the point where he wasn’t blinking at the world for the rest of his life.
but he did more than blink. see how easily it gets snarled? the conditioned response of horror or pity. i am sick with myself for it. the girls are all in an uproar… courageous, that man. sad, that man. dead, that man.
the fragile beauty of a transient thing. that’s life. i watched this movie and i came away from it feeling as if i really should live before i die. i suppose that’s about as good an outcome for spending two and a half hours staring at a screen that one can hope for, isn’t it?
i know what i would do. i know what i’d like to do. and i know that i have spent all my life thinking and wishing and dreaming and waiting… anything but doing.
i don’t know if i have managed a recommendation. i would like to give one. but i suppose i should instead give a warning…. if you are at all ambivalent about your life, avoid this movie like the plague. it will make you think much more than you will find comfortable, and make you want to do things you always said you would do but have never quite managed.
in this moment, sitting here at 2am, i think of the one person i would gladly spend the rest of my life with… and i wish i could look at them and say, “come on… don’t you think we should live before we die?”
but i do not ask. mostly because i am afraid they would reply, “i am.”
why do i have the feeling that i don’t have the slightest fucking clue how to live?