'Which dream is this?'

Twelve hours after the film.

And more. Always more. The movie in question: Paterson. But, there are always more movies. Today there was also 13th. Yesterday: 20th Century Women and Hidden Figures. Nothing the day before.

Insert a sad emoji here.

Sing and Assassin's Creed the day before that, Fences the day before that. And, the day before that was Christmas with Gremlins and A Christmas Story to celebrate. And the list goes on. On the one hand, it is December, awards season, and a whole lot of good films show up at once. On the other hand, I am on winter break from teaching and I have extra time to see those movies. On a third hand, 2016 has been depressing, 2017 probably will not be better, may even be worse, so I want to enjoy what I can enjoy while I can enjoy it.

But, I want to talk about Paterson. I want to talk about the poetry of everyday life. I want to talk about how I have not seen nearly enough Jim Jarmusch movies. Seriously, I realized today that Broken Flowers--sixteen years after the film--may be the only other Jarmusch film I have seen start to finish. And, while I only vaguely remember liking Broken Flowers, I loved Paterson. I loved the way Jarmusch plays with audience expectations, offering up a...

Assume SPOILERS, when I can actually bother to be specific about the film.

Also, assume that I will probably ramble about other things because that is what I do, that is how I live, writing like I am running out of time, a la Hamilton, but too much of what I write is in one-hundred-forty-character snippets, Facebook comments, D&D notes. Offer me the space of a thing like a blog and I will use it. With my Groundhog Day Project, I aimed for a thousand words a day and regularly exceeded it. If I remember correctly from the data I put together for my Master's Thesis, the average length of entries was somewhere around sixteen hundred words.

(I did a cursory check of my data and found only where I cited the average as "over a thousand words each." I think the specific number is on a post-it amidst all my thesis notes and I am not going there right now.)

That is my thing. I write. Excessively. I say with many words what I could easily say with few. When I aim for poetry, sometimes I can be succinct. But, it is rare.

But, that does not mean that I do not recognize the poetry of every day, that I do not enjoy the sound of the rain out the window as I fell asleep last night, that I do not enjoy the cute usher at the movie theater saying, "See you later, alligator" as I leave the theater today, that I not appreciate the people around me (the good, the bad, and the ugly), the things around me, the places, the sights.

Like tonight, the fog and rain as my daughter and I left my sister's house to drive home.

Like a well-drawn map.

A well-constructed LEGO project.

A blog entry or a story that still holds up long after I have written it.

A marriage left behind.

Chapters of my life finished.

Pages turned.

Bridges burned.

Or maybe just the overt use of black and white in Paterson to distract from the play of blue, or the sudden appearance of red at a climactic moment.

Or how Jarmusch uses a setup that implies a protagonist trying to escape the doldrums of his everyday life only for us to gradually realize that his poetry is already doing that, that his girlfriend's penchant for acting on her whims is played as flighty except she is doing what the film seems to expect us to want him to do. She has a dream. She tells him about it. She acts on it (when applicable).

Or how the mundane is poetic and poetry is mundane.

Or how film can suck me in and let me live in it, in my version of it, in my version of my life around it, in a world where it exists and I exist and we get twisted together into something anew.

Or just how one of our cats just glanced at me as he walked past and I imagined him casually saying "hey" because sometimes cats talk and they talk casually and life keeps going on anyway. Regardless of who might be president. Regardless of what direction the world might be going. Regardless of violence and rhetoric and everything else under the sun.

Pages turned.

Bridges burned.

With Ohio Blue Tip Matches.

And the people who get that.

 

 

 

 

 

And, I realize that the phrasing of that last line implies that I will be using people as kindling to go with those matches. While that is not what I meant, the poetry of it still works for me so I will leave it as is.