Cave of Broken Dreams

I've been trying to tell you a thing here for the past half hour.  All that I have written sits underneath this line not yet deleted.  It is horrible data.  Not even stuff.  Perhaps it is agenda-driven.  Or I am too aware of myself as I write it, perhaps, a sure knell for writers unless you are David Foster Wallace.  I am not.  But it is horrible not to be able to articulate an observation, an emotion. . . a story.  Perhaps this is a preview of my after-life, the punishment to which I'll be subjected for eternity.

I don't think that way, but last night I went to see Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams."  It has had rave reviews and my friends have urged me to see it.  In 3D.  So I did.  A quick stop at the sushi bar beforehand.  There was not much time before the movie, but I wanted a simple tuna roll and some sake.  As I walked to the bar, the hostess came up and said, "You no sit outside?  We turn off music for you.  No music."

"I know," I said.  "That is wonderful.  Everyone will appreciate it.  But I am just getting something quick before the movie."

"Oh," she said rather disappointed.  "What see?"

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams."

"What that like?"

"I haven't seen it yet, but it is about ancient cave painters."  I could see the confusion on her face.  She said something I couldn't make out, then asked me,

"You still want go to Vietnam?"

That is where she is from, and I had plans at one time to go but in the end could not.  The person I was to go with just got back and was not taken with Vietnam but loved Cambodia.  And that is what I told the hostess.

"Too much communism, she said, and they didn't really seem to like Americans."

The sushi chef cried out, "Hate them," and the others laughed.  I began to get curious about my food.  Did they hate me, too?

The hostess went back to work and two servers came up.

"Why you no sit outside?  We turn off music for you."

Ibid.

I like eating there because it is like dreaming across a cultural void.  We communicate something, but surely not what we intend.  Even looking into one another's eyes is a mystery.  Maybe not so much, though.  They always keep the prettiest waitresses away from me.  It is true and verifiable.  They send the males and the older, married women.  I can only watch the others who studiously avoid my eyes.  Surely it is only I who dreams across this cultural void.  Maybe they are too busy living.

I carried my 3D glasses and glass of wine into the movie theater.  It was terribly small, and the seats were not centered with the screen so that what looked like the middle was very left of center.  There were not many people seated, but they were all seated in the same area, the only one, really, that didn't have you too close or looking to the screen at a right angle.  Being only one, though, I found a decent seat next to a couple.  Of course, the woman I sat next to was irritated.  They had planted themselves with an empty seat next to each of them.  I was disappointed, too.  Jesus Christ, she smelled bad.  Really bad.  I was tempted to move but in the end just leaned to the other side.  What the hell was the smell?  It was like she hadn't bathed in a month and then put on cheap, horrible perfume.  I kept sipping the wine trying to stay my gag reflex.

During the previews, I thought about two things that had bothered me earlier.  I had seen an elderly black man walking his bike on the sidewalk.  Nothing looked broken.  The tires weren't flat.  The chain was on. Why would he walk his bicycle?  It is an awkward thing to do.  Did he get tired?  Or had he just wanted to slow down?  As I watched him, a truck approached in the oncoming lane.  The driver honked the horn briefly, and I looked to see if he knew the man walking the bike.  Something made it difficult, though, to see inside the cab.  As I passed him his arm came out the window and gave me a thumbs up.  It was a big fellow with a muscular arm, but I couldn't really see him.  Who was it, I wondered looking in my rear view mirror trying to make him out.  The bed of the truck carried something, a couch, it seemed.  But it wasn't a couch, it was a casket!  I had only a glimpse of the driver's smile.  If I were a different type. . . well, it was still spooky.

I am still chewing on the thing I started to tell this morning, the thing I can't get out.  It was the night of the full moon.

Herzog, on the other hand, made an hour and a half postcard from a handful of 30,000 year old paintings.  They are incredible, alright, more beautiful than you might imagine.  Picasso tried but did not capture what this ancient artist did.  In his time, Neanderthals still roamed the earth.  Extinct cave lions and cave bears lived where the artist worked.  Outside were wooly mammoths and mastodons and rhinos and wolves, all at the same time.  Impalas and ibex and reindeer.  Unimaginable.  His work is staggering.

More so than the film.  He hadn't enough material to make it so long.  The interviews are terrible.  His narration is melodramatic and often borders on silliness.  The soundtrack is distracting.  The film is best when it simply presents images, the ancient cave paintings and the contemporary 3D images of silent living people staring at the camera as if they were photographs of ghosts.  In those things, he succeeds in making something something that is haunting.

I am not myself today.  Strange forces conspire.  The story is left untold.  I will let it stew, I guess.  If I had the talent, I would draw it on a wall.