Love before Talkies

The first time I got so excited I ran all the way

down the street and knocked on Dana’s window:

these weren’t photos but moving photos, motion

in motion instead of the lie of “captured” moments,

which were too overtly artificial. Like the one

of my best friend and true love making a face

I never saw her make, not even as the picture

was taken. But one day in a dark theater

she leaned over and in a hushed voice told me

that what I was watching were discontinuous,

totally not moving images. So that constant motion

was an illusion too, and the joy I felt just a conspiracy

between the camera shutter and either my eyes

or brain or both. There were no alternatives

outside of real time experience, which was now

tainted by my inability to stifle the feeling that

some kind of ontological metaphor was going on.

“On the surface,” I told Dana, “deep down

it’s all disjointed.” “So adjust your strategy,”

she told me, “learn to admire the first illusion

for being more obvious yet more strange, and the second

for being so convincing and unashamed.”

There was honesty and truth in that —

but then I walked into Dana’s new mom’s

new dining room, and my voice echoing against a room

void of carpet or furniture sounded more false

than either of these and more strange because

more true, with no manmade tricks of technology,

just available acoustics. The fundamental truths

of hearing and seeing I’d grown up believing

had been irreversibly subverted and I’d only

been dating Dana for four months. That it felt like

we’d been together forever only compounded

my confusion, which, combined with my lack

of official parentage and spotty memory, made

for an ever-increasing empirical mess of affairs.

How could I propose in this condition?

But Dana wasn’t interested in marriage,

she told me, “Look, if I believed in state-

sanctioned love or public validation of my feelings

or (when it comes down to it) if elegantly tacky rituals

didn’t make me totally uncomfortable — but I just

want somebody to understand what I’m saying

without me having to say anything, or to understand me

without understanding sometimes what I just said.

Both of these. The rest is icing or just details,

but not really.” I told her I felt the same way

and that no amount of italicizing could ever

put the emphasis in the right place. But by then

the cinema was all the rage and I remember the day

we came face to face with the tangible impact of

silent stars, and their over-enunciating arms and faces.

It was night. We cowered between the restaurant

and the theater as the gestures became more and more

pronounced. It would be years before the talkies,

and years before the talkies restored subtlety

to modern courtship, only to take it back.

If we knew then what we know now — but then

we wouldn’t know now what we knew then,

which I’d know if only I could remember.

Or forget. I had to remember to forget so I could

“know now what you know right now,”

that was Dana’s new mother’s advice

that we ignored along with her admonitions.

Either way we ran into the theater, because

it was dark in there and the “collective dream”

as Dana called it had already started, meaning

the patrons were passive and figuratively sleeping,

so long as nobody yelled “fire” we were safe.