Three minutes come and go. I cannot look away. I am witnessing something, the first human to pull himself from the primordial ooze of animal unconsciousness to marvel at the beauty of a sunrise. And Ingo witnesses me witnessing it. I am distrustful. Is there a long-dead animator whose life’s work Ingo had stolen to play off as his own? Did Ingo murder him (her, thon)? Was I to be his next victim? Would my as-yet-unpublished monographs soon bear his name as author? But I cannot turn away. I cannot run. In a flash, the first nineteen hours pass. Ingo turns on the lights.
“Now sleep,” he says. “I will wake you in five hours and we will begin again.”
My world is now upside down and I do as I am told. As Ingo predicted, my night is fevered, the characters in the movie ripping into my dreams, infecting them with their gags and punch lines. Where does the movie end and my mind begin? I can no longer say. And I laugh and laugh in my dreams until blood pours from my torn esophagus like so much rainwater from a gutter on a stormy night. In the morning, the movie picks up not where it ended last night but where my dream ended. Or so it seems. How could this be? Perhaps it is a trick of psychology. Perhaps Ingo understood that the human brain will always fill in blanks, will want to weave disparate parts into a cohesive whole. Could Ingo have studied the work of Pudovkin? I refuse to believe he was educated in the montage theory of Soviet cinema. Yet the seamless blending of Ingo’s movie and my life seems to belie my conviction. It is as if the melding of cinema and dream has turned me into another character in Ingo’s film. I am the one who watches, and so I dutifully play my role and continue to watch the film.
The weeks pass. I neglect my monograph. I neglect my relationship. Ingo hovers.
As much as I feel I should not pull myself away from this experience, there are things in my life to which I need to attend. Perhaps five hours’ sleep plus an additional two hours to eat, bathe, and take care of personal and professional obligations. The remaining seventeen hours a day would belong to this nameless film.
“This is not ideal,” Ingo tells me.
A very different Ingo from the Ingo of a few weeks ago: confident now, demanding, an exacting artist who knows just how his film is to be experienced, oddly handsome now, his snub nose at a jaunty and dashing angle, like an admiral’s cap. I have to admire this new and emboldened Ingo. Am I perhaps a little sexually excited by him now? I will acknowledge that I do very much want to please him. But, no, I will take my two extra hours a day. I must assert myself. Wouldn’t Ingo respect me more if I don’t make myself his doormat? I tell him I must. He nods assent, but I have disappointed him.
“Your film is magnificent,” I say: an olive branch.
I cannot bear to see this look in his eyes, eyes that see right through me to my soul. I’m sorry, Daddy, flashes in my sleep-deprived brain. Is this even happening? Is this part of the movie? I can no longer tell. I decide I must not disappoint Ingo. I will continue with his prescribed regimen. And then a strange thing happens: Ingo dies. I try to revive him by yelling his name over and over, but to no avail. I call the police.
OR, WAIT, IS that right? Or was he an African American Outsider Filmmaker whom I discovered and perhaps mentored? I am still a little foggy on details. I remember both versions of him. I do, in no uncertain terms, feel the absence of his film, the hole it has left in my brain. I know it gave me reason. I know it was like falling in love, like that feeling of something new, that realization that goes, oh yeah, there’s that in the world. The world contains that. The world contains the possibility to feel like that. And now it is gone, and I know I can no longer feel it or know for certain that such a thing exists in the world. My fire, my reason, is gone, but the massive imprint it left on my soul is still extant, just as a deep meteor crater remains at the site of its earthly collision, the meteor vaporized upon impact. The damage is all that remains of Ingo’s meteor, the hole, the emptiness, the ever-present missing thing, whose presence is its absence, whose meaning is its loss, whose value is a profound mystery that can only be guessed at. As I walk the perimeter of the negative space of Ingo’s film, something comes to me, something I read a long time ago, perhaps at Harvard, where I believe I studied:
All that is not the man describes the man, just as the negative space in a silhouette tells us every bit as much about the sitter as the positive. —DEBECCA DEMARCUS, Solving for X
DeMarcus, an Appalachian poet, woodcarver, and professor of optometry at West Virginia Wesleyan, had served as my first guide through the labyrinthine world of ma, the Japanese concept of the “space between,” the interaction between the mind and the object. Now, finally, I find myself confronted with ma, not as a poetic abstraction, but as the terrible reality at the core of my being. The film is gone, and therefore, the part of me that merged with it, that changed with it, that saw the universe in a fresh way because of it, is gone as well.
I stare out the window at the tire plant across the street. I think about tires, how they’re round and have holes in their centers. It’s analogous to the missing film. Yet the empty space in the center of a tire is useful; it allows the tire to attach to the wheel, which allows it to turn on the axle, which allows the car to move forward. This gives me some hope. Perhaps this missing film will allow me to move forward. Perhaps the missing film is the hole in the tire that is my brain.
We must look at loss in all its forms, mustn’t we? Loss of relationships, loss of love, loss of power, loss of memory, loss of status and the panic that ensues. We must accept that loss is a basic element of existence. The element of absence. All will be lost. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” says replicant Batty of Blade Runner fame, in a rare moment of poetry and coherence in that inept, wrongheaded film by a director who cut his teeth in television adverts and seems unwilling or unable to recognize that the purpose of cinema is antithetical to that of selling toilet tissue. Be that as it may, this is a profound line that exists only because it was improvised by the brilliant Dutch acteur Rutger Hauer. So I am forever grateful to him and his gevoelige geest.
Another thought plays over in my head as well. There are so many things playing over in my head now that it has become difficult to pick out the separate quotes. With a little effort, I get this: “Each insect death is a loss from which we cannot recover. The world needs to be reinvented each time.” Of course! The great Hindu saint Jiva Goswami. There was a time, not that long ago, when I carelessly and selfishly regarded dead insects on my windshield as an inconvenience rather than a thousand, nay, a million tragedies. But those insects, and the hundreds of millions of their squashed fellows, need to be acknowledged. They lived. Their presence changed the world. I did not get to know them all very well. I never got to know them as individuals and now I never will, because they are forever gone, scrubbed from my windshield with my shirt, itself the dead bodies of many cotton plants I will never know. Did I treat Ingo with similar disregard? Was I ever able to see him as an essential, irreplaceable entity? Or was Ingo a means to an end for me? I am put in mind of the Jain Insect Hospital in Delhi. Jainism is, of course, an ancient and profound religious philosophy that, among many other wonderful notions, teaches of the sacredness of all life. Thus, they have a bird hospital, a cow hospital, a shrimp hospital, and the aforementioned insect hospital. There are other hospitals for other creatures in the works, but changing humanity for the good takes time and money.
I visited the insect hospital in 2006 for a feature on the movie The Ant Bully, in which I planned to take the movie to task for its unrealistic depiction of ant hospitals. I felt it was a necessary point to make, but I had to travel all the way to India to gather my proof. In the end, the piece got axed in favor of some drivel by Dinsmore about how A Bug’s Life got insect circuses wrong. But in the process I learned about