threads

[note #13]

My friends Nuar and Olena came over for dinner last week. Nuar and Olena had never met, but we’re all poets and we know each other’s work. Nuar is also a psychoanalyst, Olena is also a lawyer. I’m just a poet. We talked for a while about what used to be called headlines, how the world seems to be in the middle of something, how it might be that what we have always feared is happening. At one point I said we could be in the beginning of a bad joke: an Arab and a Ukrainian walk into a bar….Nuar is Arab, Olena is Ukrainian, ha ha.

In some workshops, Nuar has shown the first few minutes of the film In The Bedroom to her students—if you haven’t seen it you should (warning—I will spoil it below). The film involves murder and love and guilt (like Charlotte’s Web). Nuar show her students the first scene of the film, which begins with a woman screaming while the screen is still dark, but then we see her running through a meadow and the scream might be one of joy, as she falls into an embrace with her male lover. Nuar asks her students what they imagine, from this short opening excerpt, the film will be about. What I remember of the scene is an ant that crawls across the man’s collarbone. The ant seems like it could be a mistake, yet it contains a lot of mysterious energy. And (spoiler alert), since this man will soon be killed by the woman’s estranged husband, the ant could be a portent of what’s to come—like it or not we will all, one day, become food for insects. Nuar calls this a thread, how an image carries through a work, to deepen and complicate and reveal.