BY KIY
A burst of green and purple. Hundreds of amoebas multiply across a petri dish. The silhouette of a body. Trees bowl past the car window too fast to be individually discerned, softening into a blur that ripples like water. Fade to white. A shirtless man eclipses the sun. He raises an axe above his head and swings it wildly toward the ground. Crash zoom on a fallen log covered with snow. The red glow of ember, and the man appears again bathed in its light. Closeup of a vagina. A woman’s head bends into the frame before distorting into the man’s. He writhes in agony. Footage of a solar flare in black and white. The moon.
The paragraph above is a description of 19:58-20:47 of Stan Brakhage’s film Dog Star Man. By way of plot, setting, character, or conflict, I couldn’t tell you what these 49 seconds, much less the rest of the movie, really mean. But when I was 22, it moved me in a way you can only be moved a handful of times in a life. This story is about a profound experience with art.
I spent that summer working as something like a traveling survey for a non-profit in Appalachia. The organization repaired homes, and each week they sent me to a different county to interview 3-4 residents who were receiving aid. More often than not, these families had been subjected to some freak disaster—electrical fire, landslide, flash flood…—and the stories they told me were shot through with the pathos that comes from knowing your situation is almost cosmologically cruel.
I’ll give you an example.
Greg and his family lived on a small farm in Eastern Kentucky where the livestock roamed free of any pen. When I arrived, dogs ran around my legs. A couple of goats and a cow ate at some grass together in the front yard. I knocked on the door, and the tree to my right came alive in a frenzy of squawks and clucks. I flinched hard and threw my arms up in front of my head, but when nothing attacked, I looked and saw about 30 chickens nestled in its branches. Greg opened the door and laughed when he saw me cowering.
“My alarm.”
The year prior, a particularly vicious storm had ripped through his property, knocking down the tree on the other side of the house. It fell over the children’s room, collapsing the roof and two walls. While thankfully no one was hurt, his family didn’t have the money for such an expensive repair, and they were forced to place tarps and scrap over the hole. Winter had been harsh, he told me, and something had to change.
I arrived after new walls had been put up, and he invited me in to see the progress. But I couldn’t have anticipated what I saw when I stepped inside; his living room walls were covered floor to ceiling in Thomas Kinkade paintings. Even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve surely seen his work: a red-walled barn under a permanent sunset, a stream leading through a valley to a chapel, a saturated landscape. Greg had them in posters, prints, and cutouts from magazines. Every square inch was decorated. I saw a puzzle glued together and hung that featured snow-covered cabins under a purple sky, and I remembered that I had done this same one as a child. I pointed it out to him.
“The kids and I did that one over the winter,” he said.
He stepped back and took a wide view of the room, taking it in for a moment before speaking again.
“Sometimes I can just sit on the couch and stare at them for hours until I forget I’m here.”
While these interviews were some of the most humbling moments of my life, their cumulative effect overwhelmed me. I was young and naive and lacked the steel nerve of a TV news anchor or journalist. Confronting the black ball of human suffering daily left me catatonic. I lost weight. Drove around in the middle of the night. Kudzu even grew over the telephone poles. God did not exist.
But late one night, close to the end of the summer, I found Dog Star Man on Youtube. The Pollock-looking thumbnail caught my eye, and I clicked. The first minute played in silence with footage of what looked like a hand covering the lens. I scrolled down to the comments. Stoners argued over which ambient slog fit best as the soundtrack. I went to Spotify, chose Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening, and restarted the film.
The basic plot of Dog Star Man is a man climbs a mountain and tries to chop down a tree but instead has supernatural visions. Why is never answered. Brakhage used an assortment of techniques to instill the cosmos: multiple exposures, superimpositions, fast cutting, and even painting directly onto the film. The movie has been explained as an epic and a creation myth, but that night, it was a mirror.
There was no continuity, no clear narrative thread. The shots cut between a forest, white siding on a house, and car headlights at night. Its pattern struck me as familiar. Cut to tree limbs breaking in the wind, to flame. Yes, that was what came next; that was what I was told of. But it went beyond simple representation. Abstract patterns and geometric shapes took form and faded again in rapid succession. Raw color appeared. When it survived longer than a frame or two, it became kinetic. I saw red worked hard into white, finally mixing into a pink that just as soon tore itself apart in scratches. Blue and green flashed in concussive bursts, leaving dim afterimages. Were these the phosphenes I saw when I closed my eyes? I knew Isaac Newton heightened the effect by sticking a bodkin under his own, and I felt like I was seeing his visions and so much more. Organs pumped in a pool of blood. A baby’s fingers curled. An eclipse. It was birth, life, sex, death, everything firing off like axons at 24 frames a second. It was the onslaught of perception. It was beautiful and horrifying. I felt small, so small I was an entoptic speck on a retina, squirming under an unbearable light. 19:58 is when I first felt the sob forming in the back of my throat; 20:47 is when I opened. I cried. I cried real ugly with snot dripping down my chin like a baby. But it wasn’t from these 49 seconds, and it didn’t come from a place of sadness or fear. I broke because, under it all, I felt a conviction name itself in me for the first time. Under the strata of dejection that had hardened over me, I found a belief so plain it crushed: I am deeply in love with this world.
Let me put it another way.
I recently read an essay on Joy Williams where the author said she “recognizes that there is a tide of life that carries us away from wonder and in the direction of fear.” The sum of my experience agrees, but I’m always looking for ways to inch back. At my most optimistic, I believe art can be like an undertow, pulling us back toward latitudes of awe.