I still have stashed away a Cannon 514XL Super 8. Shooting with Kodak
Tri-X super 8, 200 ASA negative film. One may say cinematic methodology;
a snapshot sequence. Written in the days before was written The Day Lady
Died; youthful blond curly locks is this child's soft hair. Our lady of
the flowers. A violet hole.
* * *
Strike hard; cries the blow hard. The tie is still on the table. Tying
it harder and harder around his neck is this trial of death. Is it to be
a guillotine for our Lady Divine.
Indictment. The clock has struck five and our Lady Divine is seated.
Between an inner courtyard of apartments on which all the kitchen and
bathroom windows look out. Through the gloom of the kitchen, star
spangled opulent ivory headed old men watch with tranquil eyes for
approaching murderers in slippers.
Our Lady at the bottom of this well. The guards demand he stand.
The judge requests he speak his defense.
To be natural at that moment was to be theatrical. His maladroitness
saves him from ridicule.
He was truly great, he said;
The old guy was washed up. He couldn't even get it ...
The last word did not need to pass his soft little lips.
The virility of the twelve old men of the jury
and the judges, hands over ears, mouths open;
words as big as an organ enters open mouths
With mincing little farts under his robe
the defending lawyer makes a plea bargain.
Our Lady being told to behave with decorum.
Lawyer speaking of being raised in the gutter,
of hunger and thirst. (My God; what was he going
to make of this innocent child.)
Gentlemen, he is a child! He said.
Our Lady, face screwed up said; Ah no, please not the reforms promised
by your Christian youth. Rather to croak it right away.
The cruelty of the word left the judges stripped of their splendor.
Let's not rush matters. Sitting on his wooden bench squarely and solidly
between his guards Our Lady felt triumph. Known as Our Lady of the
Flowers. Though he was no longer intact for white robes, he held ground
and the world was no longer in the room.
Our Lady was given the death sentence. Forty days later, on a blue sky
spring morning, in the prison yard.
At dawn it was processed and ready to cut. Our Lady of the Flowers had
his head cut off with a knife. And nothing happened. No need for the
veil to be ripped off because some god gives up the ghost.
I see myself, a child, laughs and smiles, breaks the drama constructed
and when I think back destroys it, makes a false power, manifests an
attitude which the character could not have had. Tearing to bits the
harmony life forces, painfully. To see myself becoming another, and on
the first drama grafts another, again.
(Post Bergson, transversal cinematic cut; yet again the etymology is
queer, diagonal cut, across black and white grains of super 8 film.)
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