There's always this unbridgeable distance between the eye and its object. If I were to bridge it, what then?
—-Robert Coover, "The Phantom of the Movie Palace" (from A Night at the Movies)
Coover’s projectionist, alone among the reels, considering this idea of distance that feels almost elocutionary to me; the witness and the object fashioned by the projected image.
What Coover called the “filmic syntax” comes to mind when I think of Marguerite Duras’ books, and how much this particular way of seeing or “reelizing” touches the intervals she draws into the field of the page.
A projectionist and a poem this morning—-
—- the poem by Carl Phillips first published in The Paris Review issue no. 148 (Fall 1998) — for the way it moves down the page like a column that collects the words exchanged between strangers and crushed paper cups, and the momentum created by putting pressure on the clean/unclean antimony.
Of That City, the Heart
You lived here once. City—remember?—
of formerly your own, of the forever beloved,
of the dead,
for some part of you, this part,
is dead, you have said so, and it is fitting:
a city of monuments, monuments to what is
gone, leaving us with our human need always
to impose on memory a body language, some
shape that holds.
I can picture you walking
this canal, this park, this predictably steep
gorge through which predictably runs a river,
in which river, earlier today, I saw stranded
a bent hubcap, spent condoms, a cup by
someone crushed, said enough to, tossed …
City in which—what happened? or did not
happen? what chance (of limbs, of spoils)
escaped you?
And yet … I have sometimes
imagined you nowhere happier than here, in
that time before me.
I can even, from what
little you have told me, imagine your first
coming here, trouble ahead but still far,
you innocent—of disappointment, still
clean. In those historical years preceding
the sufferings
of Christ, there were cities
whose precincts no one could enter unclean,
be their stains those of murder, defilement
of the wrong body, or at what was holy some
outrage. There were rituals for cleaning;
behind them, unshakeable laws, or—
they seemed so … But this city is not
ancient. And it is late inside a century
in which clean and unclean,
less and less,
figure. At this hour of sun, in clubs of
light, in broad beams failing, I do not
stop it: I love you. Let us finally, un‐
daunted, slow, with the slowness that a
jaded ease engenders, together
step into
—this hour, this sun: city of trumpets,
noteless now; of tracks whose end is here.