“Recognizing Prose as Translation, and Wim Wenders”
by Marion Cline
I am firstly, conforming us all to the miracle I dreamt of.
He asks for a car, soliciting his childhood home, ignoring the long shadows cast by hickories that guild a brick frame at the end of the slope. At the end of a cul-de-sac in fact. We have all lived within this frame, within the larger frame, each to their own smaller flimsy frame.
He has a few court dates lined up for speeding. One day, finally, I’m not sure if it was on his last birthday, one year ago, Dad drove him to the dealership and picked out a car. Stick-shift, so that he had to put some work into it. This event was off-screen, layered with lazy sedimentary stones.
Much discourse leading up to the day of the car. Elijah visited me at the olive grove I was tending to at the time. We took a trip to the cliff town. We made a good hitchhiking team. He ushers us forward, prompting a further walk beside the road, while I search for eye contact behind each enclosing steering wheel. I chat giddy in broken Italian with the driver, Elijah sits in the back, hoping he won’t get sick, as we wind through vineyards.
It’s important to note the sensation of car-sickness as a result of lost agency. From my surveys, most people agree that car sickness eludes them if they assume the driving position.
We ate bread beside the Duomo, a black and white alternating facade. Inside, every facial likeness in the frescoes are identical. The painter mourns his lost son in this way.
In Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders, Travis, the forlorn and ruggedly laconic protagonist, finds his lost wife at a peep-show parlor. They sit on opposite sides of reflective glass. Travis can see her, but she is peering into a mirror framed by an exposed wall, talking to an obtuse voice emanating from her own likeness. “I don’t mind listening. I do it all the time,” she pacifies him. He abandons her to her reflection the first time. The second time, he turns his chair away from her, to make the oblivion mutual, to extend equity? He reveals himself by telling their story in the third person, translating their experience by assuming omniscience, to grant her this moment of realization, which she responds to by weeping. She calls his name, and for a moment his face is projected on the glass shrouding her own, obscured. Do you recognize me? Travis asks. Oh, Travis, she responds, not necessarily in the affirmative. I can’t see you Jane, Travis says.
Jane turns around, which affirms and accepts their misunderstanding. She talks in slow sentences, eliciting and slightly morphing out of the jovial Texan slur. She confesses to the period of imagining him, imagining his responses, until his memory dissolved from her mind. “Now, I work here,” she says, “I hear your voice all the time. Every man has your voice.” This was the moment where my high school self wept bitterly.
I do not want to expose myself by saying that my weeping, especially for films, is an act of recognition.
Crying, for others as well, is an overwhelmed response to the mental formulation conceived through the stimulus provoked by visual mediums.
In Wender’s example, I am mapped. As a youth, this moment of recognition through a film medium, among others, mapped a future, as Don Mee Choi puts it.
The second party translator (Wenders) is conveying heartache to the third party receiver (high school girl) who weeps in recognition, because her brain has flagged a truth, and she proceeds in life to the point of telling the story of her prodigal brother, using the scene from Paris, Texas as a map, or prototype for heartache that she will reference instead of speaking on the personal situation directly.
Weeping indicates a visceral connection, what I mean by “recognition”. Fear and Trembling. (The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, if you perceive the notion of god as unwavering truth.)
There is no bond greater than that between an older sister and her baby brother, a teacher of mine said. By stating this dogmatic sentiment, my teacher was translating her experience into an unwavering sentiment, that one could only discern as wavering from its matter of fact delivery. Through further contact, I realized that she was alluding to her and the younger brother’s shared mutiny against their mother. (Nevermind)
Yesterday was my brother’s birthday. After a few months of owning the car, he sold it, spent the money somehow, was evicted from his apartment, moved into the woods, until our dad found him and drove him home. Obviously there is a deeper, more profound biblical analogy that I could indulge in, but what I’m trying to convey is the writer’s preconceptions, and the acknowledgment of storytelling as translation. The films and literature that I’ve consumed therefore map my language, which converts the ineffable vignettes of real-time into sorry stories, such as this.
losing our grip on purpose 