NORMAN CRANE

Give a man a book, he'll burn it for a day. But give a man a typewriter: his mind will burn forever.

[norman-crane]

I lived with my parents on a suburban street ending in a cul-de-sac. Our neighbour, Mr Maxwell, was a widower who brought us home baked pies and helped my sister with her math homework. My high school crush, Natalia, lived in a brick bungalow three houses down. On Sundays we all went to church, and twice a month during the summer there was a street-wide BBQ. In the winters the kids went sledding on a nearby hill. Growing up, I considered it boring. Looking back, it was paradise.

The Abaroas moved in in November. From the beginning it was obvious they were different. They didn't attend our church or make small talk by the community mailbox. Instead, they smiled and spoke about their own faith, Aknaism. "Buddhist and Maya thought is connected," Mr Abaroa once told me, "because the Maya crossed the Pacific and colonized Asia."

Although they were never aggressive in their proselytizing, it was their one topic of conversation, and we quickly learned to avoid them altogether. However, this didn't seem to faze them, and many of us recalled their polite but ominous refrain: "Unfortunate, but you will soon see the truth."

Those words echoed in my head when on a particularly dark February night the pyramid appeared at the end of the street.

It was ethereal, an effervescent volume of red mist, and one by one we came out of our houses to gaze upon its impossible appearance until every house was empty and the street was filled with silent awe.

The pyramid pulled us toward itself.

And like human ice breaking from a glacier, individually we went, freeing ourselves from the loving grips of our neighbours and families.

I watched as Mr Maxwell drifted toward the pyramid and disappeared into it.

Then it took me.

Despite its tangible exterior dimensions, the pyramid was infinitely vast on the inside. Its crimson redness pulsed, and space itself hummed, and from the hum emanated the voice of Mr Abaroa. "Welcome, Norman. Tonight you shall know enlightenment."

I fell.

On impact, I arose and saw before me an axe and the kneeling, crying figure of Mr Maxwell.

"Don't," he sobbed.

Bloody spray adorned his face.

"Take the axe," instructed Mr Abaroa. "This is your destiny."

I hesitated.

Mr Maxwell cried hysterically. His hands were bloody too.

"Understand, Norman. Everything up to now: it has been for you. All life has been for you."

My heart pumped hotly. I picked up the axe.

"You are the one."

And somewhere deep inside I knew he was right. I was special. Mr Maxwell raised his eyes to look at me—

I crushed his skull.

His body crumpled. His blood painted my face, and I fell to my knees, tossing the axe aside. I had done it!

Mr Maxwell's body disappeared.

Natalia landed in front of me.

Our eyes met.

"Take the axe," Mr Abaroa instructed her out of the hum. "This is your destiny. All life has been for you."

"Don't," I sobbed.

[norman-crane]

The foam began washing up on our shores two years ago. At first, it was sparse, resembled barely beaten egg whites, and most of us paid it scant attention. Because it posed no immediate threat, we relegated it to "scientific interest." Over time, however, as it persisted, flowed and thickened into the consistency of properly steamed cappuccino froth, stories started appearing in the news: online, then on television. We traced its origins to deep within the Marianas Trench. But foam is boring, even as it subtly changes hue from ghostly white to green tea. Thus the first images of the foam most of us remember were mechanical, of urban plows pushing it back into the sea. That worked, for a while. But the foam inevitably returned, subtly thicker, greener and more expansive than before. By the time the plows ceased their effectiveness, we had already identified the asteroid ("Isaacasimov") but had not yet made the connection. The foam, albeit having covered much of our coastline, remained more of a nuisance than a threat, for it *did* nothing. As Earth worked to track the asteroid, then scrambled to destroy it, the foam crept silently inland. As you may be able to deduce, we were successful in neutralizing the asteroid. The world watched united as our international mission broke the asteroid apart and diverted its larger chunks safely away from our planet. We expected the atmosphere to deal with the resulting debris, to watch the pieces burn as they descended, but our expectations proved incorrect. Instead of a display of shooting stars we witnessed a rain of cosmic dust. The atmosphere proved porous. Most grains fell upon the dry earth, but some landed in the now luminous green foam. Protected, they sprouted as seeds. Fertilized, they grew. There was an elegance to it: ancient nutrients from deep within the Earth and life from outer space. The resulting organisms, alien in the true sense of the word, were impervious to our weapons and excreted tiny spore-like particles as they matured. Within weeks, our skies were so polluted we could barely see the sun. We choked, and our immune systems reacted: we began foaming. Like our planet, our bodies betrayed us, and the particles took up residence in our moist and fertile viscera. They fed on us to breed. Once infected, an individual had only days left, but as a species we adapted, segregated and furiously engineered. I am one of the final survivors and personally witnessed the completion of the wormhole generator, via which I shall within the hour send this, my final communique, into an unknown past. Or should I say your present. But I, too, am foaming now, and my fate has already been sealed. I am by nature a pessimist, but if my pessimism is misplaced, heed my warning: Beware the foam!

[norman-crane]

The river snakes forever through the continent of myself, leading perhaps toward an unreachable heart of darkness.

[norman-crane]

Enlightened the builders became structures. In time, on the desiccated planet, the structures turned to dust. Now only monks make pilgrimage. Understanding, they soar.

[norman-crane]

Terminus

I found the two-headed baby deer dying on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak not five kilometres from my cottage. Its lungs still pumped, and its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin, translucent skin that decayed before my eyes until there was no skin and all the organs lay warm and still in a heap upon the earth like waste.

A god evaporated.

It is human nature to disbelieve that one may be witness to epochal events, so I did not believe that I, of all people, should be witness to the death of time.

Epochal: the concept itself is dead.

How lucky we were to know time at its cleanest and most linear!

We know now that such constant linearity was the consequence of a living entity. It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk, and we basked in it as if it was the natural state of the world.

No more.

Time no longer heals. Things do not pass, or pass only to return.

At first we believed this would be manageable. Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love. Everything shall be magnified! Welcome to an age of great emotions, a new Romanticism!

Yet we overestimated how much we help. We failed to accept how much we hurt.

And we did not realize the nature of evil, which accumulates in a way love does not. To re-experience our love is to know it again and again at the same intensity, but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us, deafening us to everything else.

I will never forget the creature’s eyes, full of hatred or hubris yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.

How does one save a dying god?

It was not my fault!

I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation expressed in an undiscovered mathematics. I had to fail, yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.

I relive it constantly.

Every time its eyes are louder.

But it is the hour for my afternoon walk, so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.

I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city and sit on the iron bench, from where the view is magnificent. Above me, the clouds will form, a tangle of pain and human corpses, and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall. Then the screaming will begin and the final storm will rage. Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin of dissipating reality, raining blood until we are left warm and still upon the earth…

[norman-crane]

[norman-crane]

[annoyingthemesong]

SUBLIME CINEMA #22 - OZU’S FLOATING WEEDS

One of the gentlest of all films, told in beautiful tableaus, often at ground level.

[tofuconspiracy]

An Autumn Afternoon, (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

[plotholesandlostsouls]

my words are the ticking of a mind in decay,

a staggering scrawl,

the hop from one syllable to the next.

the pulse of a thought, choked through my mouth, twitched through my thumbs, etched into papers and stale air.

my words, i leave them everywhere, the curled corners of yellowed pages and the archives of digital databases.

i leave my words everywhere, i cough them out into the sun, i retch them into a crowded room.

i speak my words, but they don't reverberate, they don't ring, they don't echo into a part of you. they pierce, they stab, awkward pauses and drawn out points.

unorganized and wandering, trailing over town, my words are my being, too loud but no sound.

[my-russia]

They’re Calling, Open the Door (1965) 

Directed by Alexander Mitta Cinematography by Alexander Panasyuk

[norman-crane]

[nostalgic-solitude7]

Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows (1955)

[jareckiworld]

Migotanie na ekranie czyli Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey  Carla Theodora Dreyera (1932)

[mozart-1053]

Præsidenten (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919)

[lubezki]

Ordet (1955) dir. Carl Theodor  Dreyer

[hooray-for-annie-may-deactivate]

Howls Moving Castle - Directed by Hayao Miyazaki