In Which We Address The Skaters

My Own Invention

by ALICE BOLIN

The usual anagrams of moonlight — a story
That subsides quietly into plain historical fact.

– John Ashbery, “The Skaters”

Late last August I crossed a bridge over the Clark Fork River in Missoula, Montana, and, looking east, saw a dense cloud swelling behind the mountain. I couldn’t tell whether it was a thunderhead or a plume from the huge forest fire that was growing through the nearby Blackfoot Valley. There had been rain and there had been fires in the mountains to both the east and west of town so the air just sort of hung there, heavy with water and smoke.

A lot of things were ending. The short Montana summer — properly spent drinking in public and idling down majestic rivers in an inner tube — was ending and along with it, more or less, my life. In spring I had finished a graduate program in creative writing, and I managed for the summer to postpone my departure from writer-land. But fall in Missoula was closing in on me, and I wandered from coffee shop to burrito shop to bar feeling uniquely unsure what to do with myself. Post-graduation ennui is not original — it afflicts everyone with nothing better to worry about. But to go from happily aimless to unhappily aimless, following an experience that in retrospect was both profound and pointless, to stand alone on the cusp of a cold gray season, it can seem quite convincingly poetic.

It was around that time that I found a recording of John Ashbery giving a reading at the Washington Square Art Gallery in New York in 1964 of his long poem “The Skaters,” which became an object of minor obsession for me. Poetry at its heart is a game of endurance, and through his sixty-year career Ashbery has become the unlikely patriarch of the American poetry establishment, winning every major literary award, including most recently the National Medal of Arts — all in spite of his work’s utter bizarreness. Influenced by the Surrealists and the Symbolists, his poetry evades traditional demands for subject and narrative, moving liberally from image to image and speaker to mysterious speaker.

Ashbery was far from his future eminence at the time of the recording, one of a vanguard of strange young poets that would come to be known as the New York School, along with Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch. He had published his second book, The Tennis Court Oath, two years before, and it is maybe still the most difficult of all of his twenty-five collections, containing poetic experiments that are, in Ashbery’s words, “so fragmentary as to defeat most readers.” The time following the release of The Tennis Court Oath was a pivotal one in his career. In his speech upon receiving the Robert Frost Medal, Ashbery said that the poems of The Tennis Court Oath were “a stage on the way to something else, which I knew nothing of then, when I would be able to reassemble language into something that would satisfy me in the way my early poems had once done but no longer did.”

That “The Skaters” was written in a period of artistic in-between-ness does something to explain my attachment to it in the fall. The recording is forty-seven minutes long, meandering in the poem’s four sections through a strange repertory of places and voices, wondering about the weather, travel, and the use of narrative. The original setting of the reading is very present in the recording, which is one of its pleasures — cars honk their horns, trains rumble by, and his lively audience laughs at lines as tame as “Mild effects are the result.”

I listened to “The Skaters” so many times that it took on a kind of Ouija-board mysticism for me. I felt I was one of the characters materializing and dissolving in the kaleidoscope eye of the poem — Helga in Jersey City, maybe, or the apartment-dweller who feels “cut off from the life in the streets,” or a figure in the sad old-fashioned vision of poverty, with its geranium in a rusting tomato can. “All this, wedged in a pyramidal ray of light, is my own invention,” writes Ashbery; it was invented, but it couldn’t have been a false vision, because I was living in it. My studio apartment in a converted motel in downtown Missoula, with hotplate and mini-fridge for a kitchen, heavy brown curtains and olive shag carpeting, was the poem’s adopted home, as much the true setting of the reading as the Washington Square Art Gallery in 1964.

“The Skaters” is a beacon when I try to reconstruct my memories of this fall. I remember mostly the weird and sad things — I got pneumonia right before Halloween and didn’t feel better until Thanksgiving. I had a job selling coffee in an outdoor outfitting store and once one of my co-workers detailed to me the circumstances of all of the boating deaths in the state that year. I used to listen to the poem while I was making dinner and one time I broke down in tears, crying into my cutting board. “You look like you’re in a movie written by a man,” I said to my reflection in the mirror on the wall in front of me, a woman crying while chopping vegetables.

Something came up over the mountain and I couldn’t tell if it was rain or smoke and this is all I remember about it. “Nature is still liable to pull a few fast ones,” Ashbery writes in “The Skaters,” and this is one main idea — the activities of nature, particularly storms and fires, are figures for impermanence in the poem. Rain and snowstorms appear in every section, always threatening forces that impede action. In the second section an oracular fire fountain is created, displaying a detailed spring scene. The action of fire is to consume, and the fountain devours its own images, leaving the outline of a landscape in ashes, until “this vision, too, fades slowly away.”

Fire, weather, sex, and everyday experience: these are the models of a kind of movement which has no beginning or end point, which erases itself with repetition, whose rhythms are its meaning. Opposing this is movement with a reasonable trajectory — progress toward a destination or the single consequential gesture, as exemplified by travel, romance, or history. The second section of “The Skaters” discusses travel, associating it with the projections of fantasy. “This cruise can never last long enough for me,” Ashbery writes. “But once more, office desks, radiators — No! That is behind me./No more dullness, only movies and love and laughter, sex and fun.”

With increasing self-consciousness, travel becomes a metaphor for the idealized course of life — “Here I am, continuing but ever beginning/My perennial voyage, into new memories” — and modes of travel elide as the symbolic meaning inflates. “The train we are getting onto is a boat train,” declares the speaker. “And the boats are really boats this time.” It is clear in the poem that travel as a notion is inconsistent with reality: the more elusive fluctuations of nature, the humdrum grief of modern life.

Nor in fact is this movement consistent with the ever-turning mechanism of poetry. This is where “The Skaters” functions as a covert poetics, as good a statement as I have found on how Ashbery’s famously enigmatic poems work. The central image, a group of ice skaters on a winter day, illustrates the kind of spontaneous coordination that he is replicating, with each skater “elaborat[ing] their distances” and then returning to the mass of other bodies, indistinguishable from the next. This alternating motion speaks to a poem like a snowstorm, a poet whose genius is to recreate this effect. “Neither the importance of the individual flake,” he writes, “nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is,/But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract.”

The mission, it seems, is to create a poem that is closer to the true experience of perception. “The carnivorous way/Of these lines is to devour their own nature,” the poem says of itself. “Leaving/Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.” This is why Ashbery’s poems are often so difficult to decipher; the lines seem to evaporate the moment they are read, like a dream or a season leaving the mind with a determined impression but few specifics. The contours of a cloud, a one-room apartment tracing its angles, a feeling weary as a white sky.

I spent much of the fall trying to write a poem called “Hard Feelings,” collecting unusable phrases like “I’m as sad as I can” and “You just want to have someone else around.” Then as now, I wanted to create a testament to that indeterminate time, to feeling dissatisfied and confused, to not much happening. But to do this requires a return to the kind of travel-movement. Sentiments are monumentalized; certain details are exaggerated and others are left out. What speaks more to this romanticism than my effort not only to know “The Skaters” but actually to be in it?

“The Skaters” is preoccupied by the idea of “leaving out” and of which details survive — that narrative requires the intentional selecting of what will evoke feeling, and history, the “natural” erosion of what is unimportant. Both create inaccurate accounts, not because they are incomplete, but because their emphasis on particulars distracts from the anonymous repetitions that carry life’s true meaning. As Ashbery writes, “There is error in so much precision.” It sure is cozy, though, the cloak of memories and fantasies and possessions — “Through the years/You have approached an inventory/And it is now that tomorrow/Is going to be the climax of your casual/Statement about yourself,” he says in the last section of the poem. To make and remake ourselves. It’s only human.

Indeed, for all his proclaiming in “The Skaters,” Ashbery seems ambivalent about any attempt to escape the bounds of narrative, though he does want to rework it. “I am fascinated,” he writes, “with the urge to get out of it all, by going/Further in and correcting the whole mismanaged mess.” The poem resembles Ashbery’s description of Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist novel Hebdomeros, with its central character, “a kind of ‘metaphysician’ who evolves through various landscapes and situations.” “In this fluid medium,” Ashbery wrote in his 1966 review of the novel, “trivial images can suddenly congeal and take on a greater specific gravity, much as a banal object in a de Chirico painting — a rubber glove or an artichoke — can rivet our attention merely through being present.” In the same way, the people and objects that occupy “The Skaters” don’t dictate the meaning of the poem, instead acting as momentary resting places for the reader’s attention.

Recently I found tucked under my mattress a page of lists I made in September: “Goals for This Week,” “What I Want To Happen This Week,” “This Week I Will….” I’d begun writing a lot of these letters, lists, and reminders to myself to allay existential panic. My favorite of that week’s lists is at the bottom of the page: “Uncertainty I’ll Allow For,” with its three items, “employment, friendship, love.” In post-grad school life as in poetry we must allow for some ambiguity; there is more than one right answer, if there’s an answer at all. The angst just doesn’t end.

It is lucky, then, that memory is as unsound as history or narrative — it helps provide the impression that things eventually get resolved. Even if I’m still living with the same unknowns, still crossing the same bridges and bumming in and out of the same coffee shops, looking back now, the fall’s uncertainty only says a cryptic but profound certainty. My memories point, if not at something, at least in the same direction. “Scarcely we know where to turn to avoid suffering,” writes Ashbery. “I mean,/There are so many places.”

Considering the geography of Missoula it is a lovely coincidence that “The Skaters” is in a collection titled Rivers and Mountains. The title refers to Chinese landscape scrolls; in an essay about space in poetry, Ashbery wrote of the perspective in these scrolls, “The incorrectly rendered space [turns] out to be something far more enchanting than space in the world could ever be.” This is something close to my purpose in stockpiling memories of this fall: to say something more precisely but less accurately, to see the whole expanse from one vantage. Hard feelings and uncertainty I’ll allow for. Something about a whiskey sky turning through the valley. A bench by the river in the sand-colored grasses.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about The Bachelor.

Photographs by Zoey Farber.

"Aurora Lies" - Work Drugs (mp3)

"Daddy Bear" - Work Drugs (mp3)

"Ice Wharf" - Work Drugs (mp3)

In Which The Bachelor Is A Sight For Sore Eyes

Love Fool

by ALICE BOLIN

The contestants on this season of The Bachelor would like to emphasize that they’re not used to being around this many women. “I’ve always had more boy friends,” says one bachelorette in an interview. “I’m not a girl, if that makes any sense,” says another to the current Bachelor, Ben Flajnik. “I appreciate that,” he says.

We recognize this as the female misogynist’s standard line. They complain of “drama,” of women being cruel and catty, when of course they are the ones who have abandoned the communal duty of women to be kind to one another. Reality television is rife with these self-hating women — since the goal is often to portray them as petty and irrational, it helps to cast those who already see their fellow women that way.

This is part of what sometimes makes The Bachelor such a sorry display. This season the contestants target one woman, Blakeley Shea, 34, as being a slut — even though she has done nothing more than kiss Ben, who makes out with nearly all of them every episode. They make fun of her large breasts and her job as a cocktail waitress. “She’s the kind of girl your boyfriend cheats on you with,” says one contestant. When Blakeley, a former college softball player, excels in the latest episode’s baseball game, one of them says, “Who knew strippers could play baseball?” This is the first problem. These women have no respect for women.

But of course, the contestants tearing each other apart is only one attraction in the circus that is The Bachelor, in which women make lovesick idiots of themselves for our entertainment. The first episode features a parade of gimmicks, as the twenty-five contestants try to gain the attention of the singularly not-all-that Ben Flajnik, 28, who is like a goofier-looking Josh Groban with Paul Rudd’s voice.

One woman rides in on a horse. One comes wearing a massive hat, another a beauty queen’s sash. One contestant actually brings her grandmother, and Ben worries he’ll have to make out with her too. Emily O'Brien, 27, a PhD student in epidemiology, writes Ben an amazing rap — "Love is like disease, always spreading," she flows. "You can get it from a friend, you can get it at a wedding." One contestant whose name is Amber Bacon makes Ben lick her hand. "Did you know that was actually Canadian bacon?” she says.

Thus begins the season-long spectacle of indignities the women endure for the chance to date Ben, apparently the last man on earth. Ben takes upwards of twelve of them at a time on absurd "group dates," like downhill skiing in bikinis through the streets of San Francisco — because he’s looking for someone who’s up for anything, obviously. The contestants are made to perform a play written by children who may actually have promising futures in the entertainment biz. “Do a sexy dance!” they bark at the women during their "auditions." "Run in slow motion!"

It’s not only that the dates are ludicrous; it’s the glow of positivity all the traumatizing activities on the show are washed in. On a one-on-one date, Ben and a woman propel into a deep ravine. "Relationships are all about trust," says Ben; "I'm 'falling' for Ben," says the obviously terrified woman. Later she says it was the best day of her life. Most harrowing, though, is when Ben makes Emily the epidemiologist climb to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. "I'd rather do anything than climb up a bridge," Emily says before the date. After having a panic attack while teetering on a cable several hundred feet above the ocean, she is reflective. "A bridge takes two things that are separate and brings them together," she says. "And here Ben and I are, two different people from two different places, different backgrounds, and we’re coming together. On this bridge.”

The contestants have to constantly chatter about how lucky they are, how perfect Ben is, and how magical the experience on The Bachelor is. It’s necessary for addressing the show’s major problem: its desperate need for filler. The episodes contain not even close to the action needed to accommodate their two-hour timeslot — instead they rely on several redundant "Coming up on…" preview segments, the rose ceremonies that drag on and on, and useless host Chris Harrison who appears at the beginning and ending of every episode to reiterate the format of the show. They also linger for endless uncomfortable minutes on the sobbing faces of the rejected contestants who hiccup and wipe snot from their noses, wondering aloud what they did wrong, as their cycle of humiliation is complete.

But the women’s effusions don’t just help to fill out the eighty-five-minute episodes; it goes deeper than that. "I think Ben and I have a really special connection," the contestants all gush, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are filler. It is clear from the very beginning that a majority of them have zero chance of winning Ben’s heart — they must appear so invested in him in order to rescue the show from pointlessness. In fact, nine minutes into the first episode, when a woman appears and says, "Hi, I’m Courtney, and I’ve been modeling for the past ten years," it is clear the way the season will end.

"Courtney is like a statue made of marble,” Emily says. “It’s really beautiful, but it’s cold and hard on the inside." Courtney Robertson, 28, is this season’s frontrunner and its villain, which makes for a compelling combination. She is weird and easy to hate, scrunching her mouth, sipping her signature glass of read wine, and borrowing Charlie Sheen’s catchphrase "Winning!" to sinister effect. She is also the season’s most gifted shit talker. "I hope I’m a sight for sore eyes. Because after the date with Elyse his eyes are probably pretty sore,” she says in a creepy deadpan. The other frontrunner is Kacie Boguskie, 24, a sweet baton twirler from Tennessee. She and Courtney are predictably contrasting female archetypes — fawning and innocent versus beautiful and manipulative, Snow White versus the evil queen.

These two are bound to be the last women standing. Ben was dumped by Ashley Hebert on the last season of The Bachelorette after proposing to her, and there has been some pretty clear foreshadowing that he could walk away empty handed again. He will choose the evil Courtney over Kacie B. in the finale, and Courtney will refuse his proposal; Kacie B. has a lock on being the focus of the show's sister series The Bachelorette. Make no mistake: only the promise of this sad end, not some desire to take part in Ben’s “journey,” will keep us watching.

Of all The Bachelor’s offenses, I think the worst is its self-seriousness. The greatest sin in the world of she show is to be guarded — Ben talks constantly about being "open" and "available," always asks the women about their past romantic lives and rewards the ones who seem to reveal the most. What’s cruel about this is that it is a good idea to take your guard down when looking for love in the real world, but it is almost certainly a recipe for embarrassment and heartbreak on The Bachelor, where there is such a small chance of finding lasting romance, and such a large chance of looking really stupid.

At least Flavor of Love and the show’s other trashy cable cousins didn’t act as if they were helping their contestants to do anything other than be on TV; The Bachelor actually portrays itself as a beneficial, therapeutic, or even spiritual experience, which makes it the most cynical of them all. Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields once said that love songs were "very far away from anything to do with love," and that goes double for love TV shows. The Bachelor was never about love — it was created with the knowledge that heartbreak is hypnotic.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Agnes Varda.

"Too Late" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)

"Slow Me Down" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)

"My Boy" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)

In Which We Admire Ourselves From Up Close

La Misérable

by ALICE BOLIN

I have, as I write this, an earache and pain in the left side of my neck, symptoms of a sinus infection that was impervious to Amoxicillin. Periods of mild terror have accompanied this sickness, as they have most other physical discomfort I’ve experienced in the last year or so. Something I read or heard once about cancer or meningitis or parasites, about women knowing their bodies, knowing when something is wrong, will couple with any slight symptom in a wave of obsessive thoughts that locks up my stomach and convulses my legs and makes my heart beat in my teeth. The fear of illness has physical symptoms. I know that worrying isn’t helping anything.

And it’s not even a complicated problem. It’s easy to reason out the origins of my recent hypochondria. This nebulous time of my life would explain it — that I’m not sure where I’ll live or what I’ll be doing in a few months, and it’s hard to picture myself moving beyond my current confusion. This sort of anxiety can’t be simply analyzed away — because it is, taken broadly, valid. How do I talk myself out of a fear of what might only be forestalled, but not avoided? Here is dread at its most basic, and most founded: the day will come when I no longer control my body. It controls me.

Still these tricks I play on myself, the counterfeiting of signs and certainty, are not valid. The border between confronting life’s hardest truth and indulging in the most juvenile self-deception is the hypochondriac’s domain. As Antoine, the young soldier of Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7, says to the title character, "Every great feeling is full of little vanities, also the great spirit of silliness."

Death omens disguising themselves as license-plate numbers and offhand remarks are preferable to an unknowable future, promising loss stranger and more painful than I am imagining. Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of the greatest investigations of hypochondria as a modern ailment and fear as a kind of decadence. Cléo meets Antoine in a park after she has spent the day in mental agony, waiting for test results that will tell her whether her stomach illness is something serious. Antoine comments that it is the first day of summer: "It’s the longest day of the year," he says. "Today the sun leaves Gemini for Cancer." "Shut your mouth," Cléo says.

Cléo, a pop star who is remarkable for her vanity and childishness, does what she can to ransom some knowledge of the future from the present — content to exchange good fortune for certainty, she sees calamity at every turn. The first scene of the film shows Cléo visiting a psychic for a tarot reading, one which presages “evil forces,” illness, and even death. “The cards said I was sick,” Cléo sobs to her assistant after the reading. “Is it written on my face?”

Her question is central — what can be known from what can be seen? Just as we attempt to divine the future from the present, we want to read the internal in the external. Cléo regards herself in mirrors constantly, and we often hear her thoughts in voiceover as she does. “Ugliness is a kind of death,” she thinks. “As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.” Her life is distinguished by that most modern activity: to look, to watch. As a pop singer she participates in creating the cultural spectacle, and she either sees or imagines people leering at her everywhere she goes. On the streets of Paris large crowds surround a man swallowing frogs and another piercing his arm with a long piece of wire, the coarsest embodiments of what it is to be public, what it is to be on display.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is not a meta-film, concerned with filmmaking and theory, but in its exploration of spectatorship and consumerism, Varda's film does seem aware of itself as a product. At one point Cléo and her friend Dorothée go to a movie theatre where they watch a silent short featuring French New Wave superstars Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Godard plays a man who watches his lover, played by Karina, walk down a flight of stairs and trip on a hose. Godard puts on his signature dark glasses and everything turns black — including Karina’s dress and her complexion. It seems Karina has died in the fall, and a sooty workman, played by Constantine, sprays her corpse with the hose. An undertaker appears in a hearse to remove her body. Godard is inconsolable, but as he removes his sunglasses to wipe his tears, he sees the scene take place another way. After Karina trips, a doctor in an ambulance appears, rather than the undertaker in the hearse. As if she were looking in a mirror, Cléo sees her own problems reflected on the screen. Cléo from 5 to 7 shows the act of watching as directing the self inward, rather than outward. Like hypochondria, it allows for the illusion that everything is about you.

The filmmakers of the French New Wave knew that the great unfulfilled promise of spectatorship is escape, and dread lingers on the periphery of every happy distraction. In one scene, Cléo tries on hats, blissfully taking in her face in many mirrors, thinking, “Everything suits me. Trying things on intoxicates me.” Then the camera moves outside, and the cars and passersby on the street are reflected in the window of the hat shop. This is an intrusion: traffic sounds drown out the scene’s romantic music as the real world is superimposed on Cléo’s fantasy world.

Afterward, in a taxi with her assistant, Cléo listens to news dispatches on the radio. She can only hear herself in one item, a story about the singer Edith Piaf recovering from an operation. The rest tell of farmers’ unrest and military tribunals, and they are unwelcome reminders that most of the world does not concern her, and larger troubles than hers exist. Other envoys of the outside world disturb Cléo during the ride — large African sculptures in a window display, a group of art students who descend on their cab wearing masks. These are hints of the specter haunting the film, the true source of dread, the greatest proof in France in 1962 that the world is neither good nor predictable — the Algerian War.

Cléo from 5 to 7 was released in April 1962, a month after a ceasefire was declared between French troops in Algeria and the National Liberation Front (FLN) insurgents, and just two months before Algeria was declared independent. The Algerian War exemplified particular type of modern war: one waged against communist or Muslim insurgencies; one which resists the word “war” (in Algeria, the term of choice was “pacification”); one marked by the use of terrorism and torture; one in which victory is impossible, and anyway, beside the point. (The history class I dropped in my junior year of college on twentieth-century Algeria would probably have been relevant here; I was so depressed then that all I could do was read fashion magazines, and that might also be relevant.) That this kind of warfare gnaws at the liberal western conscience and undermines the security wealthy countries believe they have earned is something any American living in 2012 knows.

For France, this was not merely a far-flung colonial conflict. Cléo’s Paris was shaken by ancillary violence, including the Paris Massacre of 1961 where perhaps hundreds of pro-FLN Algerians were killed by law enforcement. Acts of terrorism known as the Café Wars claimed civilian lives in Paris throughout the war. But the terrorist, like the filmmaker, acts with knowledge of the spectacle, and where apparent comfort still exists, fear is often sublimated to fascination. Cléo listens to news of Algeria on the radio with the partial attention that she listens to her own songs. A crowd surrounds a window shattered by a bullet hole as if it were a man swallowing frogs.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is a covertly political film, and in this way, it is didactic. The viewer is meant to uncomfortably identify with Cléo; she is a sympathetic figure, but not an attractive one. Signs of cruelty and devastation surround her, but her terror manifests itself as self-absorption. Only when Cléo can truly accept the scale of horror and destruction is she able to free herself from some anxiety. Antoine is on leave from Algeria, a visitor from the heart of danger. "I'm afraid of everything," Cléo tells him. "Birds, storms, elevators, needles, and now this great fear of death." "In Algeria, you’d be afraid all the time,” Antoine says.

He has to return to Algeria that night, and he agrees to go to the hospital with her to get the results of her test if she will see him off at the train station. On the hospital grounds, Cléo is overcome by the smallness of her problems. "We've got so little time,” she says. "It's silly to go looking for the doctor. It doesn’t matter. I can phone him later." Her doctor then speeds up in his convertible and tells her blithely that her illness is not serious. "My fear seems to have gone," Cléo says. "I seem to be happy." It is unclear whether she is released from her despair by the diagnosis, or by a realization that the diagnosis is ultimately insignificant.

The entire film depicts Cléo’s journey to find peace in the universe’s indifference. She realizes halfway through the film that everyone is as self-interested as she is, that her feeling of specialness is an illusion. “I thought everyone looked at me,” she thinks to her reflection in the mirror. "I only look at myself." Just as Dorothée explains about her job as a nude model for a sculpture class: "They’re looking at more than just me. A shape, an idea… it’s as if I weren’t there."

Cléo is amazed by her friend’s job. "You don't mind posing,” she says to Dorothée. "I’d feel so exposed, afraid people would find a fault." Dorothée replies, “My body makes me happy, not proud." There is some freedom in the body’s impermanence — but I still haven’t found a way to stop grieving it. It would be noble to let go of worrying about my body’s ultimate decline, but there is the illusion of nobility in tormenting myself with the inevitability of death. It reminds me of a line from John Ashbery, that "the agony is permanent,/rather than eternal" — though that is what I have referred to before as a “feelings distinction,” rather than a logical one.

In the most amazing scene of Cléo from 5 to 7, Cléo is practicing new songs with her songwriters. One song, a ballad called “Cri d’Amour” ascends from a simple rehearsal to a full musical number, complete with an accompanying orchestra. Cléo’s performance is affecting — tears stream down her face as she sings of a lost love. The lyrics emphasize how the sorrow has manifested itself physically: “With beauty unseen, exposed to cruel winter,” she sings. “I’m an empty house without you.” After the performance, her songwriters congratulate themselves. “This song will revolutionize the music business,” they say. “What’s a song?” says a sobbing Cléo. “How long can it last?”

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Great Expectations.

"Rubbernecking" - The Big Pink (mp3)

"Future This" - The Big Pink (mp3)

"Lose Your Mind" - The Big Pink (mp3)