Worldspace
<<2003-01-15 - 12:04 a.m.>>

What a movie.

The way things knit together.

Sometimes you can just hold your hand up and feel the fibers of things, you know?

The Meryl Streep character dressed like my mother. My mother with the crazy mother. That little boy and his tight anxious stare.

The richness of things.

I think saying things instead of Life sounds right because things is a better word. More movement in the mouth. The sibilant sound at the end. Plural. Because Life isn't one thing that you do every day, like a routine, like brushing your teeth, not some single unit that subsumes your chronology—rather, a whole multitude of everythings, a flock of it all, hovering and shifting and breathing the gentle impact of its breath against your skin and the solid branching thereness of you.

People come home and they leave their coats and sweaters in a pile. People buy flowers. People bake cakes. And people die. They close their mouth on things, finish the word, sliding their lips around the S and letting its tail drift off. Like smoke.

I have so many things to say. This towel, this thread.

I am biting at the beginning of happiness and trying to hold on. I am hoping there is more. I am learning that this is more.

I think this may be the only movie I've ever seen that made me want to cry after it was over, that left me not with a quiet solitude but with a desire to put my head down in my hands and sob. Not in a sad way. Not in a watching-a-sad-movie way. More.

A desire to have my own quick speech and nimble voice, so that I could have said No instead of Sure when my mother said, Do you want to get a cab now?

No. I want to go get a cup of coffee and learn to know you.

But I swallowed my words and cried in the cab home. Because the poet died. The visionary.

I cry in a strange way. No tissues. I don't wipe my eyes unless I'm with someone and need to not have tears streaked down my cheeks. Let the cold track down my face, collect, splash against the base of my neck where my collarbones would catch the light if they were visible.

I thought how much I wanted to let this movie change me. Oh, how we want to be taken and changed, mended by what we enter.

I do. I want to give myself over to the world. Taken. Borne away, not because I don't want to be here, but because I want to feel the swell and whorl of the world all around me. Like seaglass. Worldglass. (Weltraum, Rilke said, "Worldspace"—the wind full of worldspace.)

And this is what my mother was born to, the world of women who stayed home all day and kept house. This is a movie for grown-ups I said to my mother as we left the theater. This is a movie for women. This is a movie that somehow brought home to me the newness of my opportunity, the availability of the world that I take so much for granted.

Come, eddy, keep me, close.

Rich and tender and full of references and knitting together, tendrilling out and around and knotting itself into a thickness that you can breathe.

No room even for self-consciousness. I'll regret it in the morning. God, I hope not.

<< - >>