Brake for Stan

Written October 28, 2002, four years before this blog began about avant garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

In the poem I try to convey an image from a documentary about the filmmaker that stuck with me. A clip of sunlight piercing the trees at sunset seen through the open rear window of a speeding car. Meanwhile, a friend of the filmmaker relates in voice over how Stan enjoyed 'mickey-mousing' in time, which in the context of the documentary had something to do with images that could jump from the future to the past and back again. From men in space to dinosaurs on earth.

According to sources, Mickey mousing has to do with the total synchronization of image and sound first highlighted in the animated short Steamboat Willie (1928). What Stan's friend meant exactly by his comment is tantalizingly just beyond my present comprehension.

In interviews, Brakhage often returns to the question of how the untrained eye must see the world in terms of unknown, hence uncategorized, experiences, how a simple lawn must radiate with colours before the eye learns to interpret all the variations as green. From other sources, once there is a schema, the eye often never sees the object again, which accounts for the inability of most people to identify defining details of their own national currencies. From Dan Norman, author of the Design of Everyday Things, we have the example of the american penny. Is Lincoln facing left or right? Where is the year of minting? Most are unsure when presented with a set of 16 alternatives and of those who are sure, not all get it right more than chance would predict.

I felt sad for Stan Brakhage, I can't articulate why.  I never watched the documentary again and my memories are corrupted reconstructions. But the poem exists.

That's enough backstory.

BRAKE FOR STAN.

Mickey Mousing in time;

to the future and

the primeval forests;

sunlight strobing

past us through

the curtain of trees;

masking gracefully

the veils, the holes,

the whole veil unto

which these souls

of mass and quantity

have willed themselves

projected.