SILENCE MAKING
EMOTIONS MORE
EXTREME
The man with an extra finger (he's already shown me)
is cutting a tree - some pretty major chain-saw stuff I'd
imagine he feels pretty safe doing; extra-finger and all.
He can always stand to lose one, better than you or me.
Oh sure, we can withstand blows, but, c'mon, I mean.
He looks funny anyway, all those jagged saw-motions,
like something strange, or from another world. Anyway.
You know how, in one of those old silent films, the action
is jerky, things are speeded up; well, that comes from
film speed and the hand-held crank of the first cameras :
varying speeds, a language of gestures, stares and flapping
mouths, with halting or skittering walks. Early on, shot at
sixteen or eighteen frames per second, they were projected
a little faster. By the late 1920's they were they were often
shot at higher frame rates, maybe twenty-two. Then, later,
when music was added, they suddenly HAD to move through
the projector at twenty-four frames per second so the optical
sound reader could handle the music track. Those are the
ones we see : Expressions of intimacy and beauty? Emotions
recollected in tranquility? The paraphrase of love and heart
in the flickering light of a vast, dark room? What a world it
must have been, what a new world in all ways to see.
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