FLICKERS

John Updike: from "Falling Asleep Up North" (1991)

“Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, or one’s bed partner shifting position on the remarkably noisy sheets. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams’ uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unraveling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. The brain, circling in the cell of wakefulness, panics at the poverty of its domain—these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Life itself, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity, a hellish endless churning, in which one is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on every side the wide world gently, blessedly snores.” (John Updike)

 

John Updike 1932-2009

 

from "In the Beauty of the Lillies", a novel (1996)

 

“During the summer Clarence took his own defeat indoors, deserting the sunny harsh streets of door-to-door rejection for the shadowy interiors of those moving-picture houses that, like museums of tawdry curiosities, opened their doors during the day….When Clarence had paid his nickel — one of the brand-new Indian-head nickels, with a buffalo hulking on the reverse side —and settled into his hard chair in the dark, carefully placing his leather salesman’s case upright between his ankles, it was as if his eyes drank a flickering liquor. The passionate, comical, swift-moving action on the screen, speckled with bright scratches, entered him like an essential food which he had been hitherto denied.

          …Within the movie theatre, amid the other scarcely seen slumped bodies, he felt released from accusation. The moving pictures’ flutter of agitation and gesticulated emotion from women of a luminous and ideal pallor licked at his fevered brain soothingly….Before the lights were lowered there was a murmur of indolent conversation and a crackle of paper bags holding sweets and sugar buns and Polish sausages and cups of ice chips; then came a hush of expectation when the projectionist could be heard moving in his cubicle behind them; his little square windows emitted unscheduled blue flashes and whiffs of smoke that testified to the dangerous spark at the root of his sorcery. Then the projector, turned by hand, began to spin overhead its chuckling whir. There were splinters of daylight at the back of the building which Clarence ceased to see once the great screen came alive. This was a church with its mysteries looming brilliantly, undeniably, above the expectant rows. The projectionist slowed or speeded up the reel like a conductor regulating a symphony’s tempo, and the piano player in the corner, huddled beneath his sallow lamp like a monk at his candlelit prayers, sought to inscribe the silent images with thunders and tinklings that channeled the unified emotions of the audience into surging indignation, distress, suspense, and a relief that verged upon the comic in the violence of its discharge.

          …Watching the “movies” took no strength, but recovering from them did — climbing again out of their scintillating bath into the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal. He felt himself fading away, but for the hour when the incandescent power of these manufactured visions filled him. Those black-lipped heart-shaped faces, those shapely and agitated eye-whites ringed in kohl, those imperiled round-limbed actresses in glitter pagan undress. Those Babylonian temples, their papier-mâché façades blending into painted images of their rear porticos and extensions. Those rough men combative and ready to die in their shaggy chaps and ornately stitched boots. Those exotic places where life occurred and where he would never go. When the film was over, and the pales lights of the world came back on, he stood and looked kindly upon the dazed and sated faces of the others in the audience, who had been motionlessly pursuing the same adventures as he, and who now awoke from the same dream.

          

                     fromJohn Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)