To Me

[Lauren]

Malle's Phantom India makes you look at the

vulture

feeding on the buffalo carcass, its featherless

fleshy neck smeared with blood, the entire screen

an image of curved, hooking beak, ripping

and gulping bits of entrails. You look away,

cover your eyes, hoping the scene will change.

When you glance again, there's the bloated corpse

and flies and greedy inflamed eye of the buzzard

which now plunges its whole head and neck

into the buffalo's asshole, picking out coils

of intestine.

The camera doesn't move, the film continues

to scroll.

Eventually you have to look, you've paid

to see this mess, but the more you look the less

distant it is--the deeper into it, the more

it becomes

un-ugly, becomes just bird feeding on body,

until you're cleaned out, gutted, empty inside

yourself, fighting back all those memories of her,

of being in this same theater, shoulder

to shoulder in the dark, deep into Les Enfants

du Paradis, Jules et Jim--all unreeled at last now,

the film coiling on the projection floor as you sit

in the present with your head plunged

into memories, the way love will leave you,

unspooled, the way you become your own vulture

tearing and feasting on the past.

[lostsoul]

wow

[Daisy]

definatly WOW