He enters, he sees his wife. He greets her with a kiss and waits for her to respond. The disappointment is drawn on his face. His wife moves toward the room. When the woman returns, she offhandedly leaves on the table the small orange box with green lettering, and the contract with which Muro will commit himself to be a lab rat. Ricardo looks at the box and sees that a neuron, with axon and dendrites represents the isotype of the remedy for his “illness.” They sit at the table. His wife returns with noodles on a platter. Ricardo feels sad and woozy, nearly sobbing. His wife tells him, as she serves the pasta, that at first it may seem strange, as the doctor had confided. That also, according to the doctor, it would involve a more in-depth investigation to overcome emotional upheavals, to supress the common sexual desire in order to control an entire archaic retrograde cerebral process. In a short time, kisses, caresses or the sex act (more correctly, these three expressions together) would become atavisms in the bosom of a superior, more productive society. There would be no more suffering. Afterward the woman begins to eat but feels the gaze of her husband Ricardo (the famous actor, the unknown man) because she returns the gaze with the intention of being a little warmer behind those nordic eyes of a disjointed Ariadne as her words excuse her “Sorry dear, I didn’t notice” and she hands him the platter so he can serve himself lunch.
This scene obsesses me, sometimes the speech, or the situation changed but something similar had occurred in reality. Ricardo Muro had told me, very shortly after having taken the emotion pill, he started to become insensitive. One time, when he saw the doctor at the laboratory, it had been hard for him to get up from the cot due to his weight. Ricardo had complained and wasted his time asking rhetorically the reason for these demonic changes. But doctors don’t believe in rhetorical questions and usually are too practical to believe in demonic things. Ricardo Muro left the laboratory much heavier than when he had entered.
It was still a few months before his forty fourth birthday, that last night of his life. Ricardo died like someone who truly had followed his doctrine with passion. He died while bidding farewell to the work which had made him famous. Some legends say Ricardo Muro’s death was pathetic.
The performance was about to begin when the room shook with a joint exclamation of surprise by those present. The poignant mass, now shapeless, which represented the body of Richard, descended the stairs on the way to the seat reserved for him. He had been replaced in the play due to his “strange illness,” as stated by the headlines of the gossip columns. The play had been delicately modified for the new actor. Muro did not cease to imagine that, while the rest of the public was moved by the pathetic scenes, he, incapacitated for anything else, had dedicated himself to analyzing the acting technique, to monitor the lighting, to hear the text... lifeless, emotionless.
I believe Ricardo Muro’s struggle began near the end of that play. I have been told what happened. Ricardo started squirming around uneasily in his special seat. It is likely the onset occurred some time prior to the manifestation – deep inside his brain. It was inevitable. The tension became unmanagable. Ricardo acted on impulse. He got up. He ascended the stairs ponderously, slowly, flacidly. A viscous silence throughout the audience. The actor moved to his replacement, sweating from the effort, his breathing increasing in volume. The stench of a drug-laden body, hormones pressed into the closeness to the point of collapsing into liquids and humors. For an instant Ricardo Muro again personified the star. The co-star knew it as do artists, by the gaze, in spite of the inmense obesity one could still see the grey, labyrinthian eyes, the palace from within which the scene’s magic emerged.
For an instant, he and his fictional wife gazed into each other’s eyes. Ricardo (or the character) joined forces to talk. It surely happened in that moment. He realized, suddenly, that he had understood everything. His monstruous body, huge as a barn, seemed to levitate beyond control of his brain. Ricardo noted his heart palpitations although it would have seemed to him that his entire body was a heart. And it exploded. Literally. Thousands of pieces of flesh, grease and blood sprinkled the spectators in the front rows. Only Ricardo Muro’s heart remained: that of he who had been an actor (and who would have wanted to be a man) bathed in the spotlight of that same reflector which had shined on him so many times.
Before that boisterous crowd, among hysterical, painful clapping, anxiously seeking an explanation, so ambiguous and irrational of the spectators, Ricardo Muro had exploded.
| ENCLEVE PRISON |
“They certainly would,” he said.
PLATO, The Republic, VII-517a
Never has there been seen such a beautiful and enchanting, fragrant and marvellous place as the settlement of Encleve. It has never been seen (and will never be seen ever) the archaic greenness with the promise of renewed mosses; the silence of the stones, ennobled by mineral accumulation into a spire, where a bell, hanging from its tip, rang only once. And hardly has there ever been seen such a colorful site, such that it is hard to believe that Encleve was also the worst place ever conceived.
Encleve was a beautiful prison from which escaping was very difficult, since beauty and wonder were the shackles, as well as the bars and chains, of those condemned to endless happiness. One morning I saw a strange light sparkling beyond the walls. I decided not to wake my mates up, and rather, to study the origin of that marvel. As I approached I began to hear the rippling of the main river and the song of the birds – those priviledged citizens of this luxuriant vegetation. The glitter dimmed, and my pupils adapted to the new light. I saw the beauty of Encleve in its magnitude and that was the first time I felt the pain.
I returned, running back into the interior of the cave, my eyes still burning with pain. I woke Lana and Redo, and dragged them toward the doors. We could not believe the wonder that we saw, which was even more beautiful than our life within the walls. That ceaseless breeze carried to me the unknown voice of the far-off sun. All day long we planned the evasion and, at the last darkest instant of the night, we began the escape.
My friend Redo ran ahead with torches. I heard Lana’s altered breathing by my side, and her feet, running on dry leaves. The guards detected our flight and sounded the alarm. Suddenly the shouts and thumps mixed with the bustle of our agile steps. Arrows whistled around and, for the first time, the bell of Encleve began to shake the half-light of the hour.
Soon we left the guards far behind and, exhausted, we arrived at the entrance gates, the farthest limit of that prison where we fed on the beauty. I tried to get across the wall but Lana’s hand held me back. Redo was at her side, perspiring from the run, watching me with the eyes of a good friend. Lana let out a shout and then I realized I had an arrow stuck in my side. I smelled the perfume of that wound, and it seemed to me that the sun was pouring down my sides. Then I heard the voices of the guards who were quickly approaching.
As the clapper clanged on the metal of the bell, Lana looked anxiously at me and I witnessed the greatest of miracles. In the mirror of her pupils I saw the horizon which extended behind me in a line - an endless golden yellow light. The dawn began to break and I felt a warmth like I had never noticed before. Then instinctively, I recommenced running.
And I ran. I ran. I distanced myself from my friends, less to save myself than to save them. And I imagined the guards would take my friends, that Lana would return, sobbing, to the prison, supported on Redo’s brawny shoulders. For them, the beauty of the place would turn into something even more beautiful after my absence. And I ran. I ran until my breath ran out. And as I ran I felt that a new pain had developed, a different nostalgia had taken over my memory.
And I ran, I ran, until I could no longer hear the Encleve bell. And I ran, I ran to drink in that sun which was being born above that unreachable line. And then I knew, now that my friends were no longer with me, that never - never- would I forget the beauty of the prison of Encleve reflected in Lana’s pupils.
| UNRAVELLED FRAMES |
I really don’t know why I have t
aken on the task of editing movie trailers. And I don’t know why I have undertaken this task when, for nearly all my life I have suspected that it was totally harmful to me. It is strange to confess to it. I could say it is contradictory. Seeing images in motion, those details which for others go unnoticed, makes me tremble in terror; as though I were facing a phantom (after all, an image is nothing more than this: the projection of a specter, the shadow of the light). But when this shadow uses your own retina for a screen, when what is projected on your own retina is the image of another image...Oh my God!
No one could figure it out. Nor could I. No physician ever figured out this phobia of images. Nor could I. Actually, the first hint I had of this illness (or, condition?) was at a time when I was over thirty-some, and I had been a professional editor for some time.
At that time, during a therapy session, I had blurted out to my psychologist “I just can’t see images.” My psychologist looked at me, trying to interpret what I was trying to say.
“But you can see me now.” She answered. And then I knew she had not understood anything.
“I’m not saying that.” I complained, almost irritated. And I clarified: “I can’t look at images projected onto a screen. And especially if they are moving. The negatives are even worse! And still worse if those negatives are moving! All that horrifies me!”
“But your work is precisely that...manipulating those images!” she tried to rationalize.
“You have no idea the constant feeling of nausea, dizziness and horror that posesses me throughout the whole work day! It’s a kind of repulsion and attraction at the same time. Would you believe I work with my eyes half closed because of the fear?”
My psychologist observed me for a while. Perhaps an axiom of the discipline, which is not to speak when there is nothing to say, but to wait for the patient to react to the tension caused by his own silence. What is true is that my psychologist did not speak and sought, for several long minutes, to believe me. I could guess her thoughts. I knew perfectly well that the physician was relating all those issues to some kind of trauma of my own, thanks to the impunity granted by her qualifications (in other words, only those who are free of the suspicion of being obsessed are the ones entitled to be obsessive.) A sexual trauma from childhood? Some kind of paranoid projection? Some kind of ill-fated transference with one of my parents and perhaps now with her? But she didn‘t say anything. Finally, the requisite hour was over. The session was over.
We didn’t mention the subject that next week. I can’t remember how long after that session my phobia of images was addressed. I do remember that I brought it up immediately at the begining of the session when I referred to my experience at work that same afternoon.
In the usual editing program, the timeline on the screen of my computer showed each frame, an action divided into many stopped images which only the illusion of movement can rebuild. Each of these stills, at first glance, seemed identical to the previous, or subsequent, or several stills beyond.
The difference to the human eye was minimal, nearly imperceptible although the evolution of movement, by the end of the clip was apparent. I found myself selecting the precise moment of this fragment to “paste” it to the sequence I was editing. I sought a rhythm in the succession to give the trailer an emotional appeal for the movie that needed to be promoted. It was then the phenomenon occurred.
Before my eyes, without having touched a key on my computer or pushing any buttons, the images I was seeing on the screen, which I had considered static, began moving by themselves. Each one of the frames made all at once the entire motion they represented. No matter how many times I looked, each picture moved and that movement was reproduced in an infernal loop.
But that alone was not what terrified me. What happened almost immediately caused my desperation from fear and vertigo.
Everything around me, the real world —my hands, my hairs— began to display in a juxtapositioned sequence of stopped images, as though testifying to more than the sequence of movement, the stills of daily life which surrounded me. Wherever I looked I could see the structured, retarded movement, as if it was a living dream's record or a broken-down carrousel. I could see each suspended speck of light in detail, the actual composition of the day, of each beating cell, each thought suspended along the millenniums, which had been thought by past individuals and those to come. My whole body and my entire being experienced this fragmentation of the continuum of space and time. For the first time, I realized how the eye actually “sees," just before the processes of the mind interpret the information transmitted by the nerves. And it was very clearly a rhythmic, bass sound as if it was the soundtrack of that extraordinary experience. This was horror in the state of highest agony.
When I finished telling about my experience I saw in Doctor Gorser’s eyes, my psychologist, a more or less disguised hint of incomprehension or suspicion.
“Are you currently having that experience?” she wanted to know.
“No, not now.” I responded, “It only lasted a few minutes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. I can’t calculate that now.”
“Let’s see. We’ll try.”
“But does that matter?”
“Perhaps. What time did that happen?”
“I can’t remember for sure but not before three pm and not much later than three thirty.”
“What did you do immediately afterward?”
“I just waited for that “thing” to pass.”
“Well, what did you do after that?”
“I conveyed my regrets to my co-workers who were in the other room, and I left with the excuse that I was nauseous.”
“And then? Please tell me what you did then.”
“I went out for a walk. I went to the plaza to clear my head.”
“Did the experience continue at the plaza?”
“No, not at all. The sunlight was warm. As you know, it was not very long ago.”
“So, did something —or somebody come to your attention?”
“No, I don’t think so. I just wanted to feel the warmth of the sun.”
“Some strong feeling? I don’t know, some untimely desire?”
“Wait a minute! You don‘t think I’m some kind of...?”
“I don’t think anything. For now.”
“That experience was real. As real as the conversation we’re having at this moment.”
“Yes, I have no doubt that it seemed that way to you.”
“What do you mean ‘seemed that way to you?’”
“Look, I know that you told me you never did drugs or...”
“I’m not hallucinating! It’s the truth! This really happened!”
“How long has this been happening to you?”
“I don’t really know.”
“But it happened two or three times?”
“As a child, it used to happen to me when I looked at slides or home-made movies in family meetings. Then as an adolescent, I don’t remember any fit. As a filmmaking student, I began to be worried because of my gooseflesh every time I passed by a screen over which some images had just been projected. The photography classes were a constant feeling of physical danger, practical sessions of photographic processing were real torture. But it never went beyond those feelings, portenders of what, later on, began to happen more frequently and, above all, with different kinds of experiences. Fortunately, technology has changed. Perhaps that's why, during my youth, I didn’t suffer the frequency of 'that,’ though it still left a little bit longer for the total transition from analogue to digital techniques.”
“Some time ago, an event began to happen every month or so. But the way I experienced all that today, seeing the reality as a frozen movement or as though the world’s screen was ripped from top to bottom and I walked between the seams; that was the first time in my life.”
The psychologist was mute as the session ran out the last few seconds. Before leaving the office, she recommended I see
a neurologist. From that moment, I began seeing doctors and specialists in every discipline. They ruled out tumors, drug dependency, a mixed bag of personality disorders. In fact, from a clinical perspective I was a healthy woman.
The therapy sessions of course continued exclusively on the topic of that phenomenon that was happening to me. Psychologist Gorser exhibited a personal interest in investigating and getting to the bottom of the problem. I allowed her to investigate that "problem", although I did not consider it as a problem but as a "skill.” She insisted on calling it a “problem” and not a gift, for two reasons. The first reason, according to her, because it was an unprecedented scientific riddle that she had to elucidate. The second one, because a "skill" would imply a kind of will by the owner. On the other hand, in my case, I was absolutely under its control.
While she carried out her clinical studies and awaited the results, the psychologist had transformed her consulting office into an actual replica of my workplace. She had brought in two colleagues: one of them, a neuropsychiatrist; the other, one of her advanced students of psychiatry - for Doctor Gorser was, in fact, a psychiatrist. All three of them began to examine the syndrome during the events: the reduction of pupil size; the mild erythema; the change in pitch of the voice; the associated alterations of temperament and mood, with the orientation in time and space, with the threshold of hearing and pain, and many other details they might take as meaningful. Everything was recorded, everything was observed.
One day, one of the professionals suggested carrying out a kind of hypnosis on me. He thought something new might surface that would give him the key. With some misgivings, I agreed to the experience. Of course, the professional was right. But that key meant more to me than to my examiners. I won't waste time describing the means used to take me to the depth of my psyche since hypnosis is no longer extraordinary stuff. But the experience itself was very intense.
The Unravelled Frames Page 4
