More Outtakes
from Cut for the Dog & Other Strategies for Writing Personal Narrative
(Imaginary Movie Poster, Photomontage)
1
“Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert.” So begins the chapter “Two Arrowheads” in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. “It wasn’t the particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation.”
The opening two paragraphs go on this way, with Solnit letting the reader know exactly what the desert means, offers, and provides for her. “It was the vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous.” For another long paragraph we get the description of a late-into-the-night conversation she has with a man living in the desert. “We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link.” The pair are surrounded by wildlife—a kangaroo mouse, bats, coyote. It’s quite a first date. At the end of her description, Solnit makes this pronouncement:
Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond
a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species
as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
By dramatizing this encounter with a man she calls “a desert hermit,” and by allowing the drama of the desert to become not just a backdrop for this encounter but a central character, Solnit has given us a fantastic sense of momentness. The pair are encapsulated by their environs, at times dwarfed by the night sky and at times brought into intimate proximity with nature, such as when a bobcat strolls through the yard or Solnit watches through her window as rabbits dance in the morning chill. It’s all there in the opening beats: the attraction to both man and desert, their shared bond through their love of this place. But, even more importantly for Solnit, not so much an autobiographical writer as one who turns to her life for material, all the major ideas are present. As the reader will soon discover, this story is not about the desert, or the man, or about Solnit. It’s about absence and presence, the known vs. the unknowable. It’s about solitude and connection, silence vs. words. It won’t be long before, like a coyote on a fresh scent, Solnit veers off in an entirely new direction.
But before we take that leap with her, let’s stay in the desert a little longer and watch as Solnit begins to find her place inside this new home environment.
One perfect midsummer day three years after that evening I’d arrived in the hermit’s life and he in mine, I had gotten up early in that shack whose back bedroom window opened onto one of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen and whose kitchen window was up against a slope, so that as I filled the kettle I was eye to eye with a young cottontail, unafraid as I remained unseen through the glass, its eye a round black mirror for creosote bush and window frame.
Notice how Solnit sets up the space—spectacular view in the back window, kitchen window up against a slope—with her in the middle, moving from one window to the next. She has put us inside the cabin with her so we can observe what she notices outside it. At first you think she turns back to the back window: “The yard was full of cottontails that day, and then I found a huge desert tortoise strolling up to chomp on the prickly pears…” But she has actually left the window and gone out to the yard. She calls the man outside to see the tortoise; but then, within a few sentences, we’re back inside another cabin watching the pair feed an acquaintance’s cats.
Solnit starts with a lovely opening “shot” in the kitchen, placing herself nicely between inside and out, domesticity and wildness. From there, with cinematic cuts, Solnit brings us outside the cabin and then some distance away to another residence. Morning becomes afternoon becomes evening in a mere four sentences. We are comfortable with these shifts because we have been placed in Solnit’s world, alongside her, and move with her from scene to scene. In actuality, we’re inside the narrator’s memory, out of which she is telling these stories, but it feels like we are in the moment with Solnit as she acts it all out. She has given us the before, the during, and the after.
2
Blue is the first movie in Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy. The main character, Julie (played by the uber intense Juliette Binoche), has survived a car crash that has killed her husband and daughter. She gets out of the hospital, still in shock—suffering from major grief and PTSD. Alone in this huge, walled-in mansion, Julie’s old lover/friend, Olivier, arrives. It’s raining outside. He’s wet, so Julie orders him to strip. As he bends down to untie his shoes, she takes off her top. She says to the guy as they kiss: “They took everything.” Then: “Only the mattress is left.”
Cut to morning. Julie brings a sleeping Olivier coffee (cup, saucer, spoon) and promptly asks him to leave. Says, essentially, thanks for the last night and for everything you’ve done for me in the past. Says: “I’m like any other woman” then leaves, telling him to shut the door behind him when he goes.
An obviously distraught Binoche walks away from her house carrying a package; as he passes along the outer wall of her property, the camera closes in on her hand as she runs it along the stones, bloodying her knuckles. She convulses briefly in sadness and hurt. It is clear that she will not return to that house, and that this is the end of stage in her life. There is no looking back.
Cut to Julie walking up from the subway onto a crowded city street, moving from dark into light, underground up to street level. Above her, topping the frame, we see green foliage then a green neon cross blinking on top of a drug store. Julie walks around a public market, teaming with flowers and greenery. Still holding her package as she walks past a café on the corner. We know she is carrying a chandelier made of blue glass. It’s all she is bringing with her from her past life. It is her dead family. Her grief. Her old self. She is surrounded by green, vegetation, which stands for renewal and growth. Blue represents the past, green the present and future.
Julie’s left a dead life back in the country, shed a lover, and now she rises up into the bustle of the city, ready to start over. Now she’s standing alone in her new apartment. It’s a dump but has awesome greenhouse-type windows on all sides. She takes out her box and opens it, pulling out the blue glass. She hangs it up then runs her hurt hand inside the pieces. We watch a spasm of grief run through her body.
There’s a fistfight going on between green and blue. Blue neon lights outside her new apartment, green stained-glass in the hall. The blue and green are the palette of her emotional life, post-accident. She’s still in shock, experiencing PTSD symptoms. The blue stands for her old life, her old soul and passions; the green stands for the possibility of new life, for risk, for change and growth. Green is where she’s heading, blue where she’s come out of.
3
In Kevin McIlvoy’s novel At the Gates of All Wonder, Samantha Peabody, a bio-acoustician and eccentric recluse living in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, recalls in her journal the year she spent teaching two young girls, Betty and Janet—who she calls “the one” and “the other”—deep into the woods on what she calls a “Sonic Adventure Program.” During this strange summer camp excursion, which at times feel like an abduction, Samantha prepares her two charges for the act of true listening:
Reversing our movement, we walked around and toward the shallow pond. The bed of it was a dense collection of leaves and twigs, of saturated berries and acorns and shagbark hickory nuts, of blighted buds and shrub scale and animal underfur. It affected the drum of the pond surface responding to the wind. Together we subtracted from the soundscape the wind luffing our clothing. We subtracted the sounds of our mouths and nasal cavities. As much as possible, we subtracted from our singular hearing our accurate and inaccurate perceptions of what the other two heard. We subtracted October and November sonic memories of this pond, and subtracted the educing fantasies that cause a sensitive hearer to hear what is there, inside, but not there, outside. This sound subtraction is one of many procedures I taught them for refreshing their hearing.
I find this list of subtractions both beautiful and stunning. What the narrator is showing us is, as with a field recorder picking up on the sounds of airplanes, highway rumble, and electrical wire hum, in nature the serious listener must remove extraneous noise—including body sounds and inner thoughts—before being able to truly listen to a pond. One must refresh one’s hearing, as the singular Samantha Peabody puts it. So too does the creative nonfiction writer.
4
Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai is a wonderful example of open form, depth of field mise-en-scène, and territorial space. The movie starts with a line of bandits riding horses through a tract of trees. Soon the gang comes upon a hill overlooking a secluded village. The leaders pull up their horses just before the group storms down the to raid the village. One of them tells the other that they’ve already raided this particular hamlet last year; they should wait a while longer before returning for the new barley crop. After they leave, a terrified villager rises up out of the grass from the bottom of the frame. With the sky towering above—and with the camera looking down on him—the man is literally of the earth—therefore, by association, subterranean, dark, dumb. To reinforce this visual truth, Kurosawa places a load of sticks on the man’s back as camouflage.
The invaders have come from on high—literally skywalkers, air warriors. The attention they pay to the season and the possible crop it will yield not unlike a hawk scanning a field for a mouse.
The camera follows the frightened man as he turns and makes for the village to deliver the news. He disappears from the screen as the camera tips down a little and comes to rest on the view below. This is the place where the bandits will return after the next harvest. With that information placed in our mind, Kurosawa jumps us straight into the village with a hard cut, placing us in the middle of the scene. The town will need to find a way to defend itself; the need for protection will soon become clear.
The essential plot point (they are about to be raided) and the key place in which the drama will unfold (the small village) get introduced all in one elegantly staged scene: by a simple shift in point of view and by one simple jump cut that follows the dictates of our curiosity. We don’t really even need the talk between the two raiders to know what’s going on. It’s all there in the mise-en-scène. And the power dynamics are made clear in Kurosawa’s masterful use of territorial space.