A poem a day

Regurgitate me whole

So today we shall parallel park. Starting a new series of a poem a day, we'll discuss new prisons, gargantuan Redwoods and of course; a rum of a thorn called "My dinner with Andre". The film canonizes a glib-talker-thespian and is a rare, direct insight into what makes people submit themselves into tiny fractions of nothing on demand. A free-flowing conversation masquerading as a film over a dinner - not between friends, lovers, guru and protege but between two people, one of whom could be reborn as Jim Jones and the other as your friendly neighbourhood nobody. I always cry at the end of the film, right before the dinner wraps. As the film ends, with many multitudes in me - I crash like a cheap hard drive with no agency. Link to film in segment 3.    

In my very own tradition of breaking all promises, leaving you all with Goya's final torment and a scrawny seed of my Himalayan Cedar in your sweaty palms.  

Sample the dinner, the conversations, the film here. 

 “ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.” ― Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With André

This film is a love letter - to no particular feeling, thing or man. It sits in your wallet like a picture of freshly done ikebana. Who am I kidding, no one savours such a mid century filial joy. But I digress. The moment the end credits rolled in, I couldn't stop weeping. Andre's dazy monologue drops with a very spa-like sentence. "Where's that son?" Pause. As Andre finished our total hypnosis, he also pays for this dinner. What a world. Why did it have to end. If only someone would put this on a loop like the nyan cat video. I would sleep to this sound and replace my current jam of collective mating ritual humming sounds made by plainfin midshipman .