The sculpture, designed by Fernando Botero (not Henry Moore as has been previously written) and constructed by the artisans of the St. Augustine Children’s Foundry, is notable for a naïve exuberance as well as the distinct lack of skill demonstrated by the young foundry-working orphans. Even so, at six hundred feet long (thirty times the estimated length of the original), it is no small feat of casting. These child foundrymen (and women and thon) are to be applauded, if not for their skill then for their temerity and wit.
The ancient globster puts me in mind of the passage of time. On this very spot over one hundred years ago, a momentous event occurred, and now in the blink of an eye in cosmic time, there is no sign of it, other than a six-hundred-foot-long monument. We are all of us casualties of time’s passage. Casualties of causality, I muse, and write that down in my notebook for later. There is no one, nothing of such importance that they will not be forgotten within decades. Does anyone today remember Bertram Graelton, Davis Schimm, Magnus Pratt, or Clavia Stamm, all arguably the most celebrated individuals of their respective times? The answer is a resounding no. That two of them are still alive today only cements my argument and leaves them both very lonely in their respective retirement villages. We live in a time of constant, tumultuous change. A child born in 2000 will change her mind 507,000 times in her life, twice more than her counterpart born only sixty years earlier. Why is that? “The world is a fluid place,” explains the great ethnobotanist Clavia Stamm. “The truth is an ever-blossoming flowering shrub. Just as soon as one flower is revealed to us, another and contradictory flower blooms. Which flower is true? According to contemporary theory, the most recent flower is the true one. So even though this creates an endlessly complex world, we must always keep current. We cannot rest on our laurel trees, as the old aphorism aphorizes. We must constantly evolve with the evolving truth. Please don’t forget me.”
I muse for a bit on my own cryptid screenplay, my very first cryptid screenplay, the one I wrote for my seventh grade Cryptids in Cinema course at St. Colman of Lindisfarne’s School for Boys (my professor, the young William Dear, as everyone knows, went on to make that charming trifle known the world over as Harry and the Hendersons). My script was entitled Trunko, and it was, of course, about the so-called Trunko, a globster that had washed up in 1924 on a beach in South Africa. My idea at the time was that Trunko could very well have been a sort of “rat king” made of the congealed souls of the chivalrous drowned crew of the HMS Birkenhead, which sank off the coast of Cape Town in 1852. It was just a pet theory, but I felt I could back it up with science and it might very well be a fascinating new direction in naval horror cinema, a genre that had obsessed me since early childhood, when I first viewed Nunley’s Jolly Roger (1952), about the well-documented “Action of 9 November 1822,” except in Nunley’s version, the killed pirates formed a globster that washed up on the Cuban coast and haunted the indigenous people. I wonder where my screenplay is now.
I snap out of my reverie to dial my editor, Arvide Chim, who has the distinction of being the only film journal editor to have been exonerated for fifteen brutal murders, in fifteen separate trials. He is a soft-spoken fellow.
“What the hell happened to you?” he whispers.
“I have stumbled upon the greatest filmic masterpiece of perhaps all time. Including future time, I feel confident. And I didn’t just add future time to be hyperbolic. There is a reason.”
“Not again.”
“A method to my madness, as it were. The reason will become clear in—”
“B., I’ve heard this very speech before—”
“This film is different. It engulfed me, Arvide. It birthed me. It married me. It killed me. It ate me. It shit me out. It married me and shit me out again. And from that fertile spot, glorious flowers blossomed.”
“OK, cool. How’s the gender piece on Enchantment going?”
“Listen, that’s garbage. I want to do something on this masterwork instead.”
“I’m very busy right now, B. We have Wilk’s essay ‘Lifting: Tippy Walker and the World of The World of Henry Orient’ coming in today, and it needs a great deal of title editing. You can’t keep changing your mind.”
“Do we really need another Henry Orient piece? Didn’t I put that movie squarely in the dustbin of history with my piece ‘Whitewashing: Why Wasn’t an Asian Actor Cast as Henry Orient and Why Wasn’t It Called Henry Asia?’”
“I recall the essay. You do know that Henry Orient wasn’t an Asian character, right?”
“I am offering you access to the greatest cinematic masterpiece of perhaps all time, including future time. I am laying it at your feet.”
“Yes, you mentioned.”
“No. I said filmic earlier.”
“I have to run, B.”
“Did I mention that it has never been seen by anyone other than myself and its now-deceased creator, so this would be an exclusive. A scoop!”
“Now you have. You didn’t kill the guy, did you? Because you know how I, because of my legal situation, need to steer clear of—”
“I think we can monetize this, Arvide. Remember how popular Darger stuff is.”
“Wilk is on his way up.”
“This man was a genius and not because he was a man, which would be sexist of me to say, of course. Had he been a woman, I would be saying the same thing, except not referring to him as a man. And he was African American to boot. It’s Oscars So Black these days, Davis. Think about it. We could be swimming in glory—”
“Why are you calling me Davis?”
“It’s a three-month-long masterpiece. He worked on it for ninety years. Do you—”
“Three months long? Like, three months to watch it?”
“Give or take. There are bathroom breaks. It really flies by.”
“OK, my curiosity is piqued. What is it about?”
“My God, man. It is about everything. It is a comedy about the nightmare that is humor—a critique of comedy, if you will. It postulates the coming end of comedy, the need for its abolition, the need for us to learn empathy, to never laugh at others. To never laugh again. It is a movie about racism, made by an African American—did I mention that?—which depicts nary a single African American. And wait till you learn why! It is a movie about time, the arrow as well as the boomerang of it. It is about artifice and fiction and the paucity of truth in our culture. It is about meanness, Arvide. It is about the block theory of the universe. It is about the future and the past, the history and future of cinema. It is about you, Davis. It is about me. I mean this in the most literal of sense. It is about me and you. More me, though.”
“Well, look, B., bring it to the city for us to check out. If it is all that you say it—”
“It is.”
“If it is all that you say it—”
“It is!”
“Let me finish my fucking sentence!” he whispers. “If it’s all that you say it—”
Arvide pauses, but I bite my tongue.
“—is, then you can write about it. In the meantime, Enchantment is scheduled for the October issue, so it needs to get done. Email your notes to Dinsmore. I’m giving them the assignment. It’s their area of expertise, anyway. They’ll finish it.”
“Thon’ll.”
“Come again?”
“I’m giving thon the assignment. It’s thon’s area of expertise,