All in Good Time

[A favorite minute from Citizen Kane. See the note at the end of this post.]

From whiskey river:

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

(W. S. Merwin, from Present Company [source])

…and:

We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

(Jeanette Winterson. from Lighthousekeeping [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Mother and Child

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting
family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don’t remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?

(Louise Glück [source])

…and (writing of an imaginary journey, in the Triassic era, across what is now North America):

As you come off the red flats to cross western Utah, two hundred and ten million years before the present, you travel in the dark, there being not one grain of evidence to suggest its Triassic appearance, no paleoenvironmental clue. Ahead, though, in eastern Nevada, is a line of mountains that are much of an age with the peaks of New Jersey — a little rounded, beginning to show age — and after you climb them and go down off their western slopes you discern before you the white summits of alpine fresh terrain, of new rough mountains rammed into thin air, with snow banners flying off the matterhorns, ridges, crests, and spurs. You are in central Nevada, about four hundred miles east of San Francisco, and after you have climbed these mountains you look out upon (as it appears in present theory) open sea. You drop swiftly to the coast, and then move on across moderately profound water full of pelagic squid, water that is quietly accumulating the sediments which — ages in the future — will become the roof rock of the rising Sierra. Tall volcanoes are standing in the sea. Then, at roughly the point where the Sierran foothills will end and the Great Valley will begin — at Auburn, California — you move beyond the shelf and over deep ocean. There are probably some islands out there somewhere, but fundamentally you are crossing above ocean crustal floor that reaches to the China Sea. Below you there is no hint of North America, no hint of the valley or the hills where Sacramento and San Francisco will be.

(John McPhee, Annals of the Former World [source])

…and:

We’re lost, but we’re making good time.

(attributed to Yogi Berra)

__________________________

Note: I first saw Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane in (I think) 1970, in a movie theater. A few years later, I saw it again on TV as one entry in a PBS great-movies anthology series called Film Odyssey. (Remind me to tell you about that series sometime — surely one of the peak “movie-going” experiences of my life.)

I confess: on first viewing, I thought it interesting but didn’t really “get” it. By the second, I must have been mulling it over, subconsciously, in the interim — I started to notice little bits that I’d missed. The mulling-over was aided, no doubt, by the appearance in The New Yorker of a loooong, two-part essay by critic Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane” (1971).

The essay is available online (that link goes to Part 1) in the magazine’s archives, but a subscription is required. You can find excerpts of it around the Web, and it was also included in a couple of collections of Kael’s film writing.

Kael covered the film in exhaustive detail: how and why it was made; what fights it started and finished, and whose feelings it hurt; which real-world people were represented by which characters; what other movies it borrowed from; what innovations (real and bogus) it introduced; how it was received when it opened; and of course, why it keeps showing up, year after year, at or very close to the top of “greatest movies ever” lists.

“Raising Kane” is by no means a glorification of the film: it’s clear-eyed, laughs quite a bit at Orson Welles, notes the controversies and cheap tricks it used. But when you’re done reading it, you can’t help thinking, Damn. That really is the greatest film ever made. How could I not have seen that before?!?

The scene captured on YouTube in that inexpertly uploaded, squashed-video form is among my very favorites. The reporter, Thompson, is crossing the country, interviewing the late Kane’s closest associates, to try to pick apart the meaning of his last word: the famous “Rosebud…” Thompson challenges what he believes to be the simplistic interpretation offered by Mr. Bernstein (Kane’s business manager) — and Bernstein sets him straight with a lovely, concise story. Good for him.

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