Somebody Else’s Perfect Moment

There’s a particular category of human experience unlike any other. It’s got nothing to do with personality or intelligence; it crosses geographic and linguistic borders as if they didn’t exist (because they don’t, except in our minds and on the paper where we record the products of those faulty machines). Such an experience comes and goes so quickly that a single blink of the eye, the least distraction can cause us to miss it. It’s grounded in the senses, not in words — nor even in the heart, except in retrospect.

There’s really no way to sum up this category except via the facile phrase the perfect moment.

The work of the late, great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson came to be associated with the phrase “the decisive moment.” He adopted it as the title of his 1952 collection (all of which is online), having borrowed it from a seventeenth century Cardinal de Retz:

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.

I’ve been considering a series of occasional posts on this subject for a couple of months now. The essence of what I hope to get at with these perfect-moment posts is embodied in a passage from Cartier-Bresson’s introduction to the great book:

…the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

He was speaking of photography, of course, and therefore speaking of the visual sense. But we’re awash in sensory experiences of all kinds, tumbling through them as though bobbing and thrashing about in whitewater rapids. Every now and then, without conscious thought, we grab hold of a rock. For a fraction of a second, we’re completely engaged with it — the way the light darts over its wet surface, the feel of its grainy bumpy surface beneath our fingertips or against the palm of our hands, the background roar of water and its smell as it floods our nostrils and its taste in our screaming mouth, perhaps the sixth-sense fear of what will happen when we lose our hold on the rock…

Then we’re moving on, tugged away by the rush of events and voices, the sheer force of all the moments still blasting by. We never go back to that rock. But we never forget it, either.

Those are the perfect moments I’m going to be seeking out here.

Having pondered the matter for a while now, I have a backlog of perfect moments of my own to write about. But this morning, in one of those serendipitous hops-skips-jumps with which the Web excels at distracting us, I came across a site called BrewTV (an offshoot of the Cartoon Brew site). BrewTV is a blog, whose posts consist of videos of cartoons and other animations of interest — as well as background notes and commentary. There I found a recent post about a three-minute animation called The Last Temptation of Crust, by an animator named Dax Norman. Norman introduces the video with (in part) these words:

It was less than a year before I was to start production on my senior thesis at Ringling School of Art and Design, in Sarasota, Florida. As I was walking home from school I noticed something glowing. This object that caught my eye would later capture my imagination. Sitting on a bus stop bench, with a streetlight shining upon it, was a perfectly pristine piece of cherry pie, encapsulated in a clear to-go box.

Here is where most people would say they looked around, wondering if anyone was watching, or if it was some kind of trap. I guess that’s just not the kind of person I am. I inhaled the pie. It was absolutely scrumptious.

One of the factors that might have contributed to this automatic response I had to the pie would be my love for food, and more particular, free food, as anyone who witnessed me trolling all of the free pizza events at Ringling can surely attest.

So after this happened, I went about my walk home, and thought little of it.

Now, as any good storyteller can tell you, a tale of “a funny thing happened to me once…”-type events often includes, just before its climax, a phrase like “…and I thought little of it.” It signals an epiphany, moving at the speed of a bullet in the direction of the narrator’s awareness: a signal of the passing of a perfect moment.

And indeed, Dax Norman’s perfect moment had its creative result, in his graduation film which I offer below.

Important note: If you’re squeamish about encounters with “found food,” you almost certainly do not want to watch this. (Just examine the frame captured here before it starts playing to see what I mean: pie; flies; something besides pie filling and crust in the hands of a very hungry character… Got it?) I’ve got a pretty high squeamishness threshold, but I know this isn’t likely to be viewed as a typical perfect moment for anyone, including me, although it apparently worked that way for the animator.

Nevertheless, I decided to use it to kick off the Perfect Moments series for three reasons:

1. It does, after all, make the point that one man’s perfect moment can be another man’s perfect excuse to walk briskly in the opposite direction.
2. It also illustrates that — despite some of my high-flown verbiage above — perfect moments can be perfectly silly, even stupid: they needn’t be momentous or portentous. (Some of my own perfect moments will absolutely fall in the silly category.)
3. Finally, the moral here is: Even ugly perfect moments can have other-than-ugly consequences, if only we’re open to them.

So then, at last, here’s The Last Temptation of Crust. (And here‘s the BrewTV post about it.) If you do decide to watch it, be sure to watch it through the closing credits.