The art of going in blind
Exquisite Practice no. 2 : Some personal lore, a practice to build your capacity for the unknown, and a fun list for August.
THE LORE
If you’ve been following me for a while, then you know I’m a dedicated disciple of the cult of cinema. It got me young too. Growing up under the care of an authoritarian single-parent who bounced us from actual cult to cult (a whole-ass topic for another newsletter…), I was forbidden to watch most media. “See no evil, hear no evil” was something that got repeated a lot. Yet, to my boundless frustration, what counted as “evil” seemed entirely subjective and dependent on my mother’s whims. Pokémon and the Powerpuff Girls? So so evil. The Matrix? Wholesome family fun!
Around the same time all this was going on, we were v strapped for cash. So instead of shelling out for childcare while she was busy working, my mother dropped me off at our local library, not to return for another four to eight hours. She must have figured the library was a place I was unlikely to be corrupted. And I mean, fair play. Aged eight, I wasn’t exactly bursting to borrow Mein Kampf. I was, however, bursting to sneak into the library’s VHS collection to discover the worlds so forbidden to me.
I vividly recall the electric quiver of my nerves as I inserted a recording of The Marriage of Figaro into the VCR in the library’s private viewing room. Utterly captivated. My world was blown open. After that came The Magic Flute, La Bohème, and Carmen.
Once I’d exhausted the library’s opera section—and my gymnastics coach’s patience as I strained to replicate Diana Damrau’s epic rendition of 'Der Hölle Rache' in screechy kid-voice to impress my teammates during practice (note: unsuccessful)—I moved on to old Hollywood. Then to post-war Italy. Then to the marvelously bizarre world of golden-age Czech animation (Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, anyone?). By the time I reached high school, I was making weekly trips to Frontier Video, a rental joint just a few blocks down from the library, for their Thursday special: four films for $8. By graduation, I’d made my way through their entire foreign film section—about 300 films. More importantly, I’d successfully subverted the rigid bounds of my mother’s censorship.
Though she sheltered me to the point of debilitation in nearly every other important aspect of life—for example, pulling me from all sex education classes and mandatory vaccinations at school—film exposed me to realities that were supposed to remain unknown to me.
As a child, these realities provided a needed escape from the bleakness of my upbringing, but as an adult, they supported me to locate and embody my own reality more fully.
Which brings me to our practice for August…