I Don't Want to Be An Ant

[bcholmes]

I picked up a coupl'a new DVDs this past weekend. One of them was Wild Strawberries, which I had never seen before. They say that if you've seen all of Ingmar Bergman's films, you've seen one.

I also bought a copy of Waking Life, which really interested me. It's a disjointed story about a guy who can't wake up from a dream. And he talks to people about life, and postmodernism, and God, and whether or not we're all just sleep-walking through life. Really interesting film. The sequence about the woman who decides to have a real conversation with someone she passes in a stairway because she doesn't want to be an ant is just great. And the Holy Moment. And the pinball player who talks about time being our perception of a moment when God asks us a question.

How did this movie get made? It's weird and erudite and amusing and philosophical. Perhaps a bit dry at times, and its lack of narrative focalization is probably a turn-off to many, but I liked it.

"Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day
In a vision, or in none
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."

- Edgar Allen Poe

There's a scene in Waking Life where someone talks about the tell-tale signs of dreams: inability to read digital clocks or small print on things. And the inability to change the light levels. Go over to a light switch and try to change turn the lights on or off. If the light doesn't change, you know you're in a dream.

Steve Wright has a gag:

In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany.

She said, "Cut it out"

I have a light switch like that in my house. Every once in a while, I flick it on and off, and if there's someone nearby, I tell them the Steve Wright story.

Not every moment in our lives can be the Holy Moment.