Encounters with the snuffling numinous: more VIFF (The Mountain, EO), a Todd Serious memory, and more health crap

...So that was stupid of me. I decided that I was going to not take pain meds today, because they take all the joy out of cinema and are not all conducive to my getting out and about. I had had two T3s and some CBD yesterday, and one T3 the day before, and both days were kind of grey and flat and lazy, kind of depressing, really, with me barely moving off the couch. (I did some writing, that's about it). This is no good; we are now guessing my fast-growing lump is lymphedema - fitting the description of the condition to a tee - and movement is good for lymphedema, and gentle massage of the skin below the affected area, encouraging lymph to depart from the swollen area into other zones of the body. But if I was going to the movies, to get out and about, I didn't want to dull my perceptions...  

By the way, it turns out that almost everything I was doing when we thought it was a blocked salivary gland or swollen lymph node was, apparently, bad for me. Hot compresses. Cold compresses. Gentle massage of the area itself (which would be unthinkable now anyway, it is so sore and swollen). The antibiotics (2000 mg a day, a "hefty dose," my GP says - I'm back to liking her) were not exactly bad, but not at all helpful. My specialist has told me to do none of those things. He hasn't explicitly ruled out lymphatic massage, but there is no indication it is helping much. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

It's funny - half of what I know about lymph comes from Cronenberg. I re-watched Robert A. Silverman's big scene in The Brood yesterday. I have not been rolling around on the floor, but I did put on some music and dance around the apartment a little, since the lymphatic system (Silverman says) has no heart, and needs you to move around to make the lymph flow. So getting high and flopping on the couch seemed counter-productive, and I still have a media pass, so... 

In fact, not taking my pill this morning was pretty much okay until I went to eat lunch, and then it was pretty goddamned painful, actually. Chewing. Swallowing. Moving my tongue. But the TRULY stupid part was not that I didn't take the pills this morning, it's that I didn't BRING THEM WITH ME, in case I needed them. I just left them at home, defiantly sentencing myself to a day without pain relief.

STUUUUUpid.     

Anyhow, I am glad I got out to see The Mountain, before pain became a factor in the day (the chicken ranch burrito at Taco Time is pretty good, but anything that involves chewing at this point hurts like hell). The Mountain reminded me of a great song by the Rebel Spell, whose singer was an avid rock climber, who died in a fall on my birthday in 2015 (RIP, Todd Serious). In interviewing him about their last album - Last Run, which is packed with ominous echoes of mortality - I focused a bit on that song "I Heard You Singing," which seemed to me to describe an encounter with "the numinous" in the forest - that quality CS Lewis focuses on (I think in The Problem of Pain?) as proof of the existence of God. 

Short of the psychedelic explorations of my younger days, I am no expert on the numinous, but the song seems to describe the pull of the otherworld, finding oneself in the wilderness and being drawn to something beyond not only civilization, but beyond life itself, some deeper underlying reality best seen in nature that makes all our human bullshit seem small and trivial. It reminded me of my own experiences sitting in the forests around Maple Ridge, years ago, trying to quiet my mind, usually watching rivers flow by (I favour water). In fact- tho' I was more a lower Alouette guy, really, and remember magical moments watching bats skim the river for bugs and maybe sips - I once sat out most of a night in a clearing over the banks of the Fraser River, the dramatic high point of which was the sounds of some small animal passing through the clearing behind me (raccoon? beaver? possum? ...I figured if I would turn to see I would spook it, and it was so clearly not hurrying as it went on its way that I didn't turn to look, enjoying its quasi-asthmatic wheeze). I think I went home after about five hours, but it was great, just sitting there. I didn't hear anything singing - the animal was more snuffling, I guess you could say, and "I Heard You Snuffling" just doesn't have the same poetry - but the pull of the unknown was strong, soothing: It felt like a magical reward, a spiritual experience. I could just disappear into this and be done. Not the snuffling, but just being out there in nature, a silent thing, looking and listening and just sitting there, trying my hardest to disappear into my perceptions. 

Todd, a materialist, would have not one lick of that, I don't think. Skyping in from his computer in Lillooet (why the fuck did I originally write "Grand Forks?"), he sort of hardened up (the whole conversation is here, if you like) he flatly denied any belief in any spiritual realm, however you defined it. Since I think of myself as mostly a materialist/ rationalist myself, it made me realize how far I actually did extend into the realms of what my pal Jude Beeman would describe as the "woo woo" (seriously, Judith, I had never heard the phrase until you used it). 

Maybe I just did too many psychedelics. I might actually have been stone cold sober that night at the Fraser, but my other most memorable encounters with the numinous were definitely psychedelics-related. One night on acid? 'shrooms? - I forget - I was walking down a hill in the dark in the part of Laity Street where, at the time, the homes thinned out and the farmland began (one of which was, I believe, the Laity farm - I knew Gord Laity when I was in elementary school, actually, and was always impressed that the family had a street named for them, like their farm was, once upon a time, all that was down there). Anyhow, the drugs were just taking hold and I looked back up the hill I had just walked down, heading into the countryside, I think hoping I would find a field with magic mushrooms growing - it was October or such, maybe 1993 or 1994. 'shroom season in the middle of my "wasted years," so to speak - and my heart gave a start: there was something running down the hill, coming towards me! Then my brain did that thing: "Oh, no, it's nothing running towards me, it's just a leaf blowing," then flipped again: "No, it really is something running down the middle of the road towards me."

It was a mouse. 

I stood stock still. The mouse got closer and closer, its shadow bopping along with it, and then it approached me and looked up. It might have sniffed (it was too tiny for me to hear it). And then...

...it climbed up onto my shoe and looked up at me. Sniffed my pant leg. It didn't speak (the Lakota fella I mentioned in the Todd Serious interview had a talking mouse story, but he was a bit of an odd guy, and I think he'd been up fasting for four days straight on some sort of meditation; I will leave what the mouse said to him out of this, since it's his story, but profanity was involved). It didn't do anything weirder than climb up on my shoe. I was probably going "hello, little fella!' in a high voice, or something. It felt like MAGIC, that this tiny wild creature would trust me and be curious about me, enough to actually climb up onto me. My heart was probably pounding in my throat from the weird excitement of it. 

Then it hopped off and ran away, continuing down the street. I stood there gobsmacked for awhile. 

It's all I remember from that night. The OTHER encounter with the numinous, oddly enough, also involved wild animals. A friend and I were in a patch of forest in the suburbs, on 'shrooms, trippin' on every sound, freaking out a little at each twig rustling that we heard that we had not caused. We had gotten off the beaten trail and found ourselves (quite by accident) on the borders of someone's back yard, where we encountered two deer, who were doing normal deer things (eating plants in someone's fenced-in garden, the fence of which they cleared in stunning, seemingly effortless leaps - it was maybe eight feet high?). The two deer and their ability to just fly over a fence like that seemed a parallel for my friend and I, a lesson, since we were also numbered two and coming across the garden from the forest (we didn't have to leap any fences, tho'). It made the trip into a sort of experiential learning exercise about crossing boundaries, with my friend (earlier that night) having hoped to crawl onto the ceiling ("I want to be up there!" - standing on a sofa, reaching) and me at one point, AFTER we saw the deer, marveling at the LINES we were living inside, at the sheer, unquestioned confining power of the sidewalk, this human construct that we were staying on, invisibly fenced in ourselves (to demonstrate the ability to liberate myself from these lines, I recall stepping onto the grass - it felt like a revolution - and hugging somebody's house, pressing up against the wall - "see, I'm free, I can cross the line and hug the house, but who would do this? We never question the lines!" - or something like that, my rant voiced in breathless awe). The universe took some tobacco from us, that night - which I was accustomed to offering in exchange for certain experiences, which was something that Lakota fella taught me to do: if I saw a feather I liked, and picked it up to take it, I sprinkled some tobacco in return, but I hadn't intended to lose a whole pouch of the stuff. The numinous can be expensive!

It was worth the price of admission, regardless. I would actually describe that, too, as a spiritual experience, the powerful sense of meaning, of teaching, flooding into me. It didn't really require any woo-woo sense of things - nothing about either night involved the presence of supernatural beings or such - but there was a lesson imparted through both experiences. Not sure if I've lived up to the lesson, actually, but I'll never forget those moments.

So: back to The Mountain. Tom Charity had posted about it on Facebook, advising people not to inquire into the mysteries of the film before seeing it - a sort of "just trust me" review. If I recall, it was his top-rated film at TIFF, or maybe just under the new McDonagh (which I didn't catch, but so be it - it will be playing theatrically soon enough; it blows my mind a bit that some of the biggest ticket items at the fest are films you'll likely get to see in a few weeks at any theatre in town). I spent the first hour of the movie thinking that the numinous that the main character would encounter would just involve sitting in nature, and I was fine with that. I don't sit in nature nearly as much as I used to in my 20s, preferring to do it cinematically; in lieu of a new James Benning film, the shots of the character looking out over the landscape were as close as I was going to come to a "meditative" film experience this VIFF. The film's main character - played by the film's writer/ director, Thomas Salvador - is a novice mountaineer who hears the mountain "singing" to him in much the way Todd talked about. He buys a tent, lies to his boss, and leaves his entire life behind to just go live on the mountain (if there are any other factors in his life that inform this decision - which pisses off his family a bit! - he doesn't voice them). He sits silent on the side of it for long periods. We get to sit with him. Sometimes he climbs or hikes.

I was thinking, "Hm, this is just a mid-life crisis movie, really." And then something happens that changes him. If you're already sold on seeing the film, just skip the indented portion, below, tho' it still is pretty much spoiler free.

But "spoilers" aren't really the issue, even - it's the impossibility of capturing the magic in language, here. It would be folly. It did occur to me that Tom's electing not to write about the specifics of what the character experiences was a bit of an easy way out, because it would be really hard to put what we see into words without those words lessening the experience. I mean, I could do it easily enough,  but put into simple descriptive language, it's gonna just make the film sound like a full-on trip to flakesville, is going to make a reader tune out, think they're talking to a nutter: "A mouse spoke to me once," "I was taught a lesson in freedom by two deer," or - I mean, I could put the core experiences of the film into a sentence - "I was transformed into a __________ by ___________" for example (maybe if you've seen the film, you can fill the missing phrases in yourself, but I balk, I balk, I cannot write them, sorry). It would sound silly, trying to explain in words experiences that are pointedly, deliberately inexplicable, and to some extent, ruin the experience for potential audiences, which - like any encounter with the numinous - must be lived, felt, known. By making the film mysterious, we do live and know and feel the experience in a way we would not otherwise; it's actually very powerful, very moving, very beautiful, and VERY BRAVE, letting the numinous sit on its own terms. 

It gets a fair bit weirder, mind you, than having a mouse run onto your foot, but you have to get weird to really convey these sorts of experiences in a way a cinema audience would feel them. (Most acid trip movies contain things that would never happen on an acid trip, too!). Just sitting on a mountainside like these would be magical enough, in real life, but you have to go a bit further in a movie. 

But I've already said too much. Just go and see The Mountain. I wonder what Todd would have made of it?

I also really liked Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, playing tonight at 9:30, but I felt pretty bad about it. First off, if you just went, "Jerzy who?" in fact, you know him: he's the cranky uncle in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. He is not a young man. He's 84.  The reason I feel guilty is that it may be my favourite Jerzy Skolimowski movie. I've seen four, besides EO, but not including his most famous one, Moonlighting, with Jeremy Irons as a Polish migrant worker in London (just never got around to it). Deep End is about a troubled young boy fixated on a beautiful girl, sort of in swingin' London motif; it is interesting, but remains, for me, mostly notable because it uses (very effectively) one of my very favourite songs by Can, "Mother Sky." The Shout is a very strange movie about a sound recording artist (John Hurt) visited by a mysterious figure trained in aboriginal mysticism (Alan Bates) with designs on his wife (Susannah York), being relayed after the fact during a cricket game at a mental hospital with an insane tree in the yard. Tim Curry is in it but I don't recall exactly what he does. It's also sort of a one-hand-clapping kind of film, except you might be a little tempted to applaud it in the manner of Bart Simpson, afterwards - it's pretty, uh, woo-woo, but the main interest is that it's a film you can see more than once and not feel like you've understood a damn thing (or maybe it's me. I've only seen it twice, so far!). The Lightship is a filmed parable that, as I remember, is about authority and inflexibility and fathers, but it feels too much like a filmed parable to really be effective as an emotional experience; you can't really appreciate or feel the story, because you're too aware of being clubbed over the head with the theme. And then there's Essential Killing, which felt too much like an Islamic Figures in a Landscape, to me. 

EO also owes, very transparently, to Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, in that it is a story about a donkey and its encounters with humanity, but it's a lot more fun to watch than any Bresson I've seen (I find Bresson too dour, and while I do enjoy a couple of his films - Pickpocket, A Man Escaped - I don't visit them often). I kind of wish it didn't have as many upsetting moments, because for the most part, EO would be a great film for cinephile parents to take their children to, to instruct them in the ways of the scopophile: any eight year old could understand it, but it's gorgeously cinematic and profoundly rich (and occasionally a bit weird - why the robot?, for example - but that's neither here nor there). The plot isn't much: a donkey is taken from the circus, where he has a human friend; he is given a job at a farm that he is not very good at; he is given a different role, at a petting zoo, and then sets out on his own adventure, perhaps hoping to be reunited with his human friend, with a few odd and sometimes quite violent encounters with humans along the way (including some soccer hooligans!). The film effortlessly brings you to identify with EO, so much so that when he kicks a human in the face, at one point, you cheer for the donkey more than you worry for the person. There should be more movies that do that, that invite you to partake in non-human subjectivity like this (Planet of the Apes movies don't really count). I was really hoping Skolimowski, at the end, would choose to end on a positive note, but such is our treatment of animals that he really couldn't. If I had a kid, I might still play them this film, but that's me.

And I don't have a kid.

Anyhow, I liked it. I probably don't need to see it again, but it was immersive and highly visual and very entertaining. Sorry to those other movies I liked less (though I did enjoy The Shout and might try it again someday, in the spirit of, "Maybe I'll understand it better this time?"). 

My lack of pain meds nearly cut the day short, but I was also really glad to see Know Your Place in the theatre (and give Zia a copy of CineAction with my Charles Mudede interview). When I first wrote this, it was before I headed back to the hospital, and I mentioned here that I was excited to catch De Humani Corporis Fabrica at the Cinematheque, but I was so medicated and in discomfort - fever and shivers set in - that I'm half-consdiering seeing it again, tonight, at the Vancity Theatre. I figured that taking meds to see a film about surgery wasn't entirely inappropriate. But then my throat really started hurting, so... 

I hope my lump goes down soon. Even sipping water hurts - worst pain I've had in my face since last September, when they intubated me so poorly that I was blowing giant jellyfish of blood and tissue out of my nose (I posted a photo here, if you wanna go back and see it). 

Top 10 VIFF experiences (updated):

1. De Humani Corporis Fabrica

2. The Mountain 

3. Know Your Place

4. Klondike (see next blogpost!)

5. Tori and Lokita

6. OKAY! The ASD Band Film

7. Soviet Bus Stops

8. Anyox

9. The Killing of a Journalist

10. EO

Also gather Holy Spider, a pissed off feminist movie about a serial killer preying on sex workers in Iran, is remarkable - it was missing that that led me to Klondike, subject of my next post, but it screens again Sunday. We will see where I am and how I feel - it's gonna be crowded, methinks. See viff.org for more!