Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain
Screenwriter Ernest Lehman on working with Alfred Hitchcock: “Hitch took me to dinner and he suddenly got very serious. He said, “Ernie, you know, we’re not making a movie. We’re constructing an organ, the kind of organ that you see in a theater. And we press this chord and now the audience laughs. And we press that chord, and they gasp. And we press these notes, and they chuckle.” He said, “Some day we won’t have to make the movie. We’ll just attach them to electrodes and play the various emotions for them to experience in the theater.”
The first time, the first many times, it was the music that did it. Music and a medley of lost summer smells as precise as a fingerprint. I awoke to slivers of morning sunlight stealing through the gaps in the curtains. The droning attic fan drawing in a hundred fragrances, the piercing birdsongs in the trees and bushes outside my open window, and an unmistakeable sensation of liberation, all said early June. That song was playing—one I knew well—that had in countless earlier times evoked such a morning, doing its artful job—but this was no evocation, this was the morning itself.
No, I couldn’t explain the song, but I didn’t care—I wanted only to lie there, tasting all the details of that rich sensation, enthralled by the lightness and innocence of my anxiety-free mind. I caught the faint scent of almost-burning fabric, and could hear Mama in the middle room, humming, ironing before the morning became so hot. What was that—a recent memory of chlorine lingering in my nostrils from an afternoon at the pool? The ghost taste of a banana popsicle? The smell of wet earth and cooled leaves after a thundershower, and the fading rumbles when it passed?
I did not want time to move beyond that moment. But this is the trouble with eternity: it imprisons us in time.
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Let me make clear that I came here of my own will. I admit one’s options in life’s later years narrow like a funnel, but until they disappear one still has choices. I wasn’t forced here. I only fell for the sales pitch.
An infinite keyboard, not only playing an infinity of subtle emotions, completely convincing, but the specific subtle emotions stored in my own neural archive. I used to read about the Akashic record, as an idea, nothing more, but now I know it’s real and like everything that can’t save us, lies within.
That’s the trouble with existence: it imprisons us in space.
Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but I don’t think he could have imagined this place. At first the novelty allowed me to reconcile a world of decrepitude, the stench of bodies rotting within, excretions, vile food, and the systematic dismantling of selves, with visits to a narcotic reality. But in the end, like all of us, I succumbed to the lie inherent in every salvation.
I remember reading once about an old couple in Kyrgyzstan who lost all eleven of their children, and having abandoned all hope of purpose or meaning in life, and assuming they were despised by whatever God they no longer believed in, retreated into the consolations and terrors of opium. Not trying to find a way to live, but to outlive, life.
Imagine waking up wondering, “What hellish place is this?”—what imperious red light in the ceiling corner, what sensed door of what forbidden room?—in a congregation of dissolving people helplessly reliving their finished eras, in full headgear and contorted in tears, not for the joys of nostalgia, but the terrors. Something in memory shuddering with gleams of that other place—and a restless compulsion to know which one is the dream?—even knowing you never would.
Experiencing is no match for knowing you can’t.
The final wish of the human heart is not to be.
August 19, 2023