The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

Saw Monster yesterday and was struck at various points by the question: am I watching a less than stellar performance inside a shell of nervous-making makeup? Wuornos, when in a social milieu, always looks much more affected than those around her, although we know that they're all extras, working for less than Theron, of course, but nevertheless mindful of mimesis. I would have to do a little digging to find out if the postures that Theron assigned to Wuornos, including one (her most common) in which she looks like someone is pulling her shoulders back behind her, were genuine...

I witnessed an argument between two subway riders yesterday, something about one woman's complaint that the other woman was muscling her over so that she would occupy two seats instead of one, an unusually long conversation given its subject, one of those conversations in which the momentum that carries it seems to coming from somewhere else entirely, WAY outside the conversation, and it occurred to me that each of us carry around, in our public emergences, our own very particular moral sense which is by definition in flux, so that the smallest change in external or internal conditions might show as a change on the moral scale as well. The catalyst could be a splattering of muddy water by a passing car, a collision with an oblivious drone on the sidewalk, or a sudden noticing of, of all things, the weather, which might either be a good thing or a bad thing. To say that there is no abstract morality is not original but to see it in action was like having my hair combed with one of the doorknobs of perception. And then I got off the train.

I have been accused of not writing "posts" with enough moment in them. It's possible that's true. I tend to be drawn to things without much moment in them, because those are the things that keep us relatively sane, and I have an ongoing project in mind of accumulating bits of relative sanity into one large piece of sanity which might, if properly aimed and launched, make its own life, separate from me, someday, floating on the horizon much like the enormous craft at the end of Close Encounters. Sort of a pre-emptive strike on posterity.

Ah, Lordy. I was supposed to give my beloved (stranded in the outback, without an alarm clock) a wake-up call this morning, and I was so distracted by a reference to myself I found by accident that I forgot completely, only to be called by the already awakened aforementioned beloved with a more-than-faint note of dismay, only to greet the note of dismay with a symphony of (probably annoying) nonchalance, whose starting chord was, "I mean, it was nothing urgent, was it?" I'm incorrigible, but my awareness of my incorrigibility, and my accompanying reluctance to do anything to rectify same, has magnified into narcissism. But at least I notice it. Of course the current activity does a lot to intensify things, doesn't it? To even write a word is to publish a small memoir of one's self.

But all the same, I should have called. It wasn't that big a reference.