remembering three days in Gainesville

day 1

Last year my yin and I drove to Gainesville on a Friday morning. I was presenting at a conference at the University of Florida:

She had returned from India only two days earlier, and being a true trooper (a trueper?) she agreed to come with me in spite of the jet lag. Our drive was uneventful, and we arrived in time for me to catch the final afternoon session. Neither of us knew that in one year's time, I would be exiting the academy, rendering superfluous and obsolete the dream I was chasing during those days at UF.  This would not be the first time Gainesville played host to my future disillusionment.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the keynote address was given that night by "mumblecore" director Andrew Bujalski. Prior to the talk, I was wholly unfamiliar with his work, and he spoke for about an hour or so before finally introducing his latest film Beeswax:

This film blew me away: 16mm, understated, and permeated with a wonderful tension of what lies ahead of us, just beyond our field of vision, on the other side of the morning.

(One year later, the read prophetic.)

The characters themselves remain largely unknowable, not in the Brechtian sense of distantiation, but in the same manner as our everyday encounters. The film is a fascinating exploration of the forces that structure quotidian, and it begs the question:

How well do we really know what motivates the actions of those around us?

Bujalski spoke to this in his keynote, telling us that he liked to keep his performers confused because real people rarely have the same clarity of intent and purpose as the images of people we see on the screen. This made sense to me, and I thought of a playwright friend of mine I had seen the week before. We were once in a graduate seminar together, and she had written of Brecht and Godard. I wondered what she would think of Beeswax, or if it was any of mine.

day 2

I presented a paper on Chris Marker's Sans soleil on the second day of the conference:

My paper dealt with memory, which is unremarkable given its author, but I was caught off guard by the questions that came at the end of the presentation. I had prefaced my talk by referencing my interest in Vedic thought, and specifically mentioned smriti vritti, a thoughtform of the past that imposes itself upon the present.

(The importance of these questions, 

and of the superimposition of thoughtforms, 

only continues to grow with each passing year.)

A number of questions arose from this brief aside, which was intended as nothing more than window dressing for the paper proper. And yet, this was what spoke to people – this was what people wanted to know more about. It reminded me that one can never know the karma created of our words any more than we can know the reason why we speak them.

This is the sublime space of not knowing what comes next, when we speak from our hearts and rely upon the mind only to provide the words that others might comprehend.

But this, too, is beside the point.

The point is that I saw one of my best friends from high school that night, the one who introduced me to Nancy on a cold January night in 2000. We reminisced our various exploits in the company of two dogs with eight legs and three eyes between them. He apologized for that fateful introduction, and I told him there was no need, that Nancy remains my most important teacher to this day.

(This same friend, 

not by coincidence, 

wrote me this very morning.)

day 3

The third day was more relaxed; everyone knew each other, and my own anxiety regarding my presentation was no longer corrupting my consciousness. The panels were excellent, and the midday keynote helped to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the one the night before, when a windbag from Harvard bored everyone out of their seats. The man on Sunday, though, was humble, soft-spoken, and had the self-assuredness found so often in those who have less life in front of them than behind.

He spoke of stasis and silence, and their ability to communicate knowledge in a way impossible with words. He described a barrier as "that which can be crossed," and of all the speeches and presentations I heard over the weekend, his was the only one that approached the realm of poetry:

But this, three, is beside the point.

The point is that my yin and I left after his lecture, and it was the perfect way to close out the weekend. We both had to teach early the following day, and on the way home we saw one final notable sight, something that made me wish I had my camera.

(The definition of "my camera" has since changed;

the same can be said of all definitions.)

We stopped at a rest stop somewhere south of Orlando, and out of the corner of my eye I saw two Buddhist monks walking inside. The one on the right held a small white box in his hand, and I rushed ahead to see if my imagination had commandeered my visual cortex:

It didn't, and my mind flooded with questions, all of them an attempt to resolve the contradiction in front of me. Why? How? But– maybe... There were a million broken utterances lurking in the central Florida night, but I did nothing. As we were leaving I told my yin, "Maybe i should have talked to him."

"Don't worry," she responded. "You can always ask him next time."