The Long Highway Pt. 46

Akemi's diary continues

translated by Hiroko

At the college yesterday, Mitchell saw a student talking via a video link to a friend about a coach he both feared and admired, wanted to be like. The smart phone wasn't Mitchell's but another student's. Mitchell called me over to look as well, not because the content interested him- it was forgettable, an experience of note only to the people involved- and probably less to the coach than to the impressionable student (who was as unremarkable in looks as in speech. Crew-cut square-faced fair-complexioned, he was a boring Midwestern type, according to Mitchell's account later)

All the same Mitchell found the video compelling. What he responded to, he explained to me as I joined him and the other person to watch, was the quality of the images. Something stupendous was there, he claimed. "Look at the light, the space, the way the light shapes the space and vice versa." Without in anyway intending to, the man had set the camera and his table at a time and place that made art. Purely by accident, art had ignited. Mitchell said.

You couldn't see the window the light fell through or even what room the shooting was done. A kitchen, maybe. You sensed a fairly enclosed space- walls were close- yet daylight, fine daylight, lent a sense of wide openness, almost as if you were in the vortex of outer space, exposed to the elements, the primordial.

It was Mitchell who talked like this (later, mostly). I wasn't as impressed, though I saw a little what he meant. Unlike him, I was busy trying to understand what the student was saying about the sports coach about whom he had mixed feelings. Even as he criticized him, he couldn't disguise his respect- awe might be too strong a word but a sense came through of something close to it. The student was pudgy and the coach probably had a powerful lean body with big rounded shoulders.

The air, Mitchell said, seemed to vibrate around the young man (he looked barely old enough to be a college student). The lighting was indirect, bounced from a wall off-camera or a complex series of walls, not a single angle, producing a baffle effect, registered as an echo, pale blue-green, swimming colors- imagine the light, how it twirls, underwater in a swimming pool. The student's head, centered in the frame and large, and his torso in a light-colored rough cotton jersey looked ethereal. His face appeared light, as if lit from another world. The eerie reflected ambient light soaked the neutral-colored (off-white) jersey in very pale blue, a hue almost too faint to see but you felt (That isn't white. What is it?)

The way the student droned on about the dull details of his interaction with a coach (student wasn't on a team, just took a gym class) enhanced the sense that the motion we looked at and the sound synchronized to it were extraordinary, connected not only to the banal subject matter but to something divine.

Mitchell said to me that was "cinema magic." Nelson the accomplished independent film-maker had told him about such moments, ones that rise beyond the given context, transcend the narrative or purpose of the work. It happens as if by accident, Nelson had said. There are moments that take on a life of their own, live as art. Mitchell felt he had seen one in those simple images of the college student talking. He wished he could save them. I commiserated, said it was too bad he couldn't, though honestly I saw nothing special about the smart phone presentation.

Did that student's ambivalent complaint about his coach attract Mitchell's attention because it matches what he feels about Nelson, fear and admiration?

Did Mitchell wish he could be a film-maker like Nelson?

All he's got for visual art are the photographs he takes, mostly of me but not only.

On a cold day last spring, when we were looking for houses, we drove to see one that was in a remote part of a rural state. To get there we had to veer off the paved road at the right point and ascend a steep dirt road that cut back into a densely forested hillside- not high, we thought but weren't sure as we couldn't see the top; the paved road we'd left was too narrow to give a view beyond the trunks- of tall, slim trees so closely packed they let in little light; the bark looked dark and rough in the nearly unbroken shadow, cast over centuries- you felt the time. Light would greet us when we reached our destination.

On the dirt road Mitchell almost took a wrong turn, drove deeper into the woods rather than up through the trees to the house we were going to see, which turned out to be even more rustic than we imagined, almost frighteningly so. To live there would be to walk away from conveniences and reassurances of society as we know it. It was a low, long dark log cabin (bark also nearly black, as if rained upon) someone had built on a narrow green clearing halfway up the hillside looking forward from the slope to a view of more green, trees and clouds beyond. You couldn't see the road we'd traveled to get there. Trees nearby, lower down than the house, ones we'd driven through on our way up, blocked the sight line.

No one was home. We couldn't go in and look at the place as planned but didn't mind. Even Mitchell, who dreams of moving away from the city, wouldn't have wanted to live there. It was too far from everything.

Through a window we saw a black cat in the gloaming of the interior. The animal was on a desk with a computer monitor. The desk surface- it looked black but might have had a color light was too low to see- appeared dusty. Or maybe I only imagined that. How could I have seen something so fine as dust when so little else was visible? I guess I was wondering whether anyone had been in the house lately or it had been left idle a long time. I could easily imagine the site was abandoned, but the presence of the cat argued against that possibility. The cat glared at us, seeming not to see. It had the cold regard of a stray and I supposed it and its owner both were accustomed to the wild, more so than to the domesticated zone most of us inhabit. Was there even electricity there? (yes, the computer made that clear).

What did a resident of such a remote place- no other houses were around- look at on a computer monitor? Pornography or anti-civilization terror websites? Whoever called that place their home- a single person, I'll bet- seemed to live outside the modern world, even outside time.

The road that led to the house- we hoped but weren't sure- was very steep, as I said, and unpaved. The soil churned under the tires, making the drive difficult. I wondered if Mitchell could handle it, but he could, as he can handle me in bed. Don't get the wrong impression. I talk about his troubles, his shortcomings. There are some. But I should make clear: He's not a weak man.

Nelson is strong but so is Mitchell. They just are in different ways.