Ha, I brought two
books, the paddie and a notebook to the coffee place to spend a couple of
chillaxing hours while G is at his last few hours of physical therapy, his
broken wing finally starting to resemble its former glory (hush, don't jinx
it!), but I am so tired I cannot focus on anything for longer than a few
minutes :D A round of Plants vs Zombies, a few pages of The Art of Fielding by
some Chad fella, a few lines of Ulysses (homework) and a few paragraphs of
Mireille's musings, trying to ink down what her face says on film. I really
hope I will do justice to the actress in that movie. She is so absurdly
beautiful and I am getting such sublime material, I just can't decide how I
should be using it. It has grown way beyond my simplistic, meditative script.
It feels like riding a wild horse – an exhilarating experience, but, man, way
above my pay grade! Even the slightest shift in the tone tells a different
story and I am constantly combating the only three elements I should be
harnessing: editing, music and overtones. If it was up to me, I wouldn't
edit a thing, tone or sound anything at all. I think it's perfect just the way
it is. But this is like the books I write - the most terrific fun to write and
not quite so much to read. If successful directors have taught me anything is
that you don't enforce your vision and expect people to appreciate it. People
want to be entertained. Even if it is a profound piece of true art. It has to
be coherent. This is not a documentary, although it pretends to be, and it is
not an invitation, it's a manual. This is as far from various Justin Biebers,
One Directions, Miley Cyruses and fat Britney Spears' as is possible, if you
will, still originating from the same Milky Way.
Blame it on the damn dog, I haven't slept much tonight. Funny how these
hairy little fuckers worry us and from her reaction to finding us I can't
decide if she was late because she was having so much fun or was she actually
unhappy, sleeping outdoors for once. Mental note to invest into a telemetric
collar on a civilian level. The weather this morning was an aftermath of an Atlantic
typhoon: winds from the arctic wasteland, rain as cold as snow, trees billowing
so vehemently that the General heard a warning announcement to stay out of the
woods five minutes after he dropped me off on top of a deep forest hill and had
a thought to return for me. I started to holler and descend at the top of the
terrain (Drej took the fairly straightforward forest road I took yestereve and
the General went and found the dog). On top of all my wear, he also gave me a
large, hard raincoat and that pretty much turned me into a sail. If I walked
the ridge, hoping to scream loud enough against the wind for a hound to notice in
the northern side of the drop, I was at peril of being rolled around. But as
soon as I started sliding downhill (easy 45% angle and wet branches under wet
leaves), the wind also shot me over. The yelling was easier here, and it's
possible the mutt actually heard me (she was seen sprinting in my direction
down at the bottom of the field), although my concern weighted the effect of
three people searching the same valley as opposed to each searching one. As it
turns out, the infamous beagle ability to remember where she is usually picked
up actually came to fruition and she was waiting for us in the right valley.
The search was over in half an hour - just by the time I found a non windy
terrain and got warm sporting. It would have taken me a while to get out of it
downhill (foliage getting more and more serious the lower towards water you
got, resulting in obstacles akin to a knitted curtains of barbed wire and some
more barbed wire.. ) so in a rare decision to backtrack, I followed my own
trail back up, on all fours, and then spent a few elevating minutes walking
down the hill on a road with the dramatically changing weather making love to
the really lovely countryside.
I had
plans to treat Drej to a coffee as my way of saying big thanks, but almost all
of the involved parties passed out under cushy blankies as soon as we got home
and that will have to wait. The dog hasn't recovered yet and only time will
tell if she is feeling miserable because she had to cot under a wet spruce or
because we brought her back to doggie bags and concrete. I would pay money to
be able to hear her side of the story. And what are the odds we’ll be
having puppies come New year’s?
To Miraille everything
was interesting. She loved shadows, as they gave character to otherwise shy
objects. She loved light in every shade, shape or form. Even if she knew none
of their names, she would slide though them like a tourist on the first day of
a very crowded spice bazaar. It didn’t matter things were great or small, grave
or gay, well cut or thrown aside or if they were things at all. She liked all
the sounds and all the secrets. Faces, oh, she was in awe of faces. Beastly
eyes, baby lips. The hair. The features. People gave her dirty looks and
hateful glances or they fell in love without ever getting from her more than a
single fleeting moment. A woman, enthralled while flipping through cheap pages
of a gossip magazine. Grand, important men, looking down from election posters.
Mireille loved all the faces. These were all interesting people to her.
It
didn't matter if Mireille was a person or a sprite. Alive or a reflection, it
didn't change the way she saw shapes made. If she was an old soul or an
excellent creature from the future, mattered none the way she stared. She was all
eyes, all senses, she was the brain, the heart behind the skin. To her the
advancing sights were what to other people is iron in their blood, a feeding
life force, and she never stopped moving, never stopped wondering. Even every
pain she felt was curious, complicated. She kept every thing that made her
smile, every thing that made her cry; she called this collection a planet.
Except for a handful of practical items like shoes or a blanket - all of which
she's only ever been given, her only possessions besides her existence, a far
more fleeting thing than one might think, were fragments of her past lives, her
former stories. The shards of her soul. What reason it had to shatter so,
Mireille neither knew nor worried. To her none of them had sharp, cutting
edges, they were just little crumpets on a fair winding path. If history was a
tale on frail stationery, mailed to dusty bespectacled scholars, these shards
were the stamps. Even how she knew these were things that were important to
past Mireilles, didn't matter. She knew. They knew. She carried them around,
adding them to shape a puppet that bore her semblance. A silly, sentimental
thing, perhaps a ticket of courage, some might imagine, abstractly, by the look
of it. But as irony, another grand life stream of the world, would have it,
that rag reyna with a clay face and jewel mouth was more alive than Mireille herself.
