Sometimes, a director will make use of continuity shots in a film – shots that divide scenes of action. Shots, then, that are not scenes at all, but only resting places, non-incidents that have no real place in the storytelling. Of course, we barely notice them, these shots. They are supposed to blend in with what happens before and after them. They set a scene, or carry something over from a previous scene; they are supposed to be nothing in themselves.
But imagine this, the poet says. Imagine a shot that would break such continuity. Imagine those moments that couldn't be gathered into a narrative. Shots of discontinuity. Discontinuity shots: now the narrative is broken. Now the story is broken, it shows its joints. The story is unjoined, showing that it was ever thus, that no story was ever whole, unbroken.
You cauterise a wound to close it, burning it to draw its edges together. But is there a kind of fire that belongs to a wound that can never be closed? Will o'wisps. St Elmo's fire. Or the aurora borealis, burning coldly in the sky.
'I think there is something disclosed to the weak, to the very weak', the poet says. 'I think they see something that is broken in the world. Is that what I would have told Ann, if I could have phoned her? Is that what I would have said in the message I left on her answering machine? But how can you tell a story that never reached a beginning?
'We speak of failure, but that is too easy. We can become content with failure; and besides, the very notion of failure it gives creedence to the idea of success.
'There are some stories we cannot tell. Perhaps they tell themselves in their own way. Then the events we might relate do not matter at all – or rather, what matters does so by way of them. What is important, then, is not what is told – this incident, that, but something else, something for which those events, and even the story itself, stands in.
'Moments pass – how could they do otherwise? But we remember them in their passing; in terms of what came next, or what came before. But what of the moment without succession? This moment, now', the poet says. 'Right now. And now, too – and now. How will you record that? How will you put that in your interview?'
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