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| Edvard Munch, "Two Women on the Shore" (1898) |
I am pleased I will soon die and with me the pressing need to make a terrible, terribly poignant film, and the pressure to put a writing desk by a window exceptionally permeable to sunlight. On my left on the green shore with no wind, a black-clad woman is killing time. I would give the film a contemporary title, most likely absence makes the heart grow moss. It would complicate the question of mourning a living subject. The premise a string of mornings where my paper-fingers massage the secret trees in your head. My unseeable hand in death’s unseeable hand, I am pouring my eyes into a sea of ink. All the summers that would have come now come at once, the light at a distance that will never change. Like our memory of the future, the film’s ending would change every time. One time, my hand of paper will croak in the wind. Another, I will finally curl to sleep on your tongue. Finally, a borrowed ending: within eyesight of the shore, a maniacal orange cloud will swallow a ship. A few seconds before, a pianist born and raised in the hull will take a final look at the sea, his fingers stroking what he remembers of the finite black and white keys. I do not know the first thing about making a film, but I know what wanting does to time. In the future outside our window, moss mantled the lava fields.
Sara Elkamel. Two Women on the Shore, 1998. Chicago: Poetry Foundation.
