by Harvey Lillywhite
WARNING: Objects may appear more distant in the mirror
The world we experience is a foreign movie. Subtitles help us understand what’s going on. But they are never a direct translation. We may see a character’s lips moving for several minutes but read only, “Help me!” Or we may see a look in a character’s eyes that moves us and hear only three syllables uttered in the foreign tongue of our actual lives, yet we read, “Because I know the language of your hips, the vast sea of your kisses, the chill of your hands, the blood of your heart, and the silent night of your dreams, where there is little peace, I must tell you, my love, that you are my roots; all my tomorrows stir in your embrace.”
Late one afternoon it may seem that we walk in disappointment out of our own theater, out of our own dark movies, into the harsh bright light that stabs our eyes leaving us briefly blind—even while a saxophone plays bossa nova from a sad café just a few doors away. But our “real world” is still a part of the foreign movie. It is a movie we can never leave until we die, and then…who knows?
So I think I hear the morning birds chirping to keep themselves company with the late-spring droning of the lawn mowers that keep every plot of grass under control, with the far-off grating sound the three branches of government make as some houses grow larger and still larger and turn suddenly into mansions on the sly while other houses, foreclosed, dwindle to cardboard hovels the cliffdwellers shelter in beneath the underpass, and the newspaper arrives, tossed before dawn from the window of a passing car completely dark inside—more subtitles that seek to prove the illusion of science while more firmly establishing the inescapable subjectivity that surrounds us.
Subtitles are clever. They seem to bring us closer to the action. But it must be admitted that they are the vehicles that launch us into our transcendence where we can deal with the world we experience from some more comfortable distance, the way we might view zoo animals whether in their barbaric 19th-century cages where we approach near enough to be snapped at or in more modern habitats that remind the captured animals of home and keep us respectfully detached.
Don’t confuse the subtitles for the truth. Only the eyes speak the soundless language of the heart, which is as close as we can get to the underlying idiom of true reality.
Seek direct contact. Pay a certain polite respect to the subtitles. Certainly acknowledge their persistence; after all, they imitate the swarm of begging children who accost a tourist as she exits her cab in the narrow street of all the poorest countries. Except the poor children, as nearly as I can name them, are a real part of the world we experience and not themselves subtitles. In fact, our subtitles swarm all over them when they approach us to keep us safe. Luckily, the children, too, have their subtitles—sutures and sutras—though they are ragged and extremely difficult for us to read let alone use.
Give up traveling for a little while. Grow some vegetables. Let the world speak as you prepare the soil with your hands and then broadcast the seeds or tuck them individually into their own moist graves and wait for them to live again. You might imagine a prayer to help them grow and bear fruit—always more delicious than our ideas—after all, we are all just seeds.
The famous sea of troubles surrounding us is not real although the subtitles our troubles spin fool us. It is tromp l’oeil. Listen to the animals. Listen to a cloud. Listen to the rain if you’re fortunate enough to have any. If you listen with great care, the subtitles may fade for an instant. You may feel a moment when everything is connected, all part of the one big thing, a moment before the subtitles come back and atomize the world into letters and words whose sounds, spoken aloud, symbolize our deep need for love.
Otherwise, be aware. Understand how the subtitles’ chatter works. Don’t confuse them for the world we experience itself. Be as emotional as you can be because emotions attach us to the world we experience. It’s only later that the subtitles tumble in, bringing their own circus, their own clowns, mixed metaphors, their own indirection. Somewhere in the mix, magic is possible. The magic is really all that matters. If you come to rely mainly on the magic, I think you’ll be okay.