Three Versions Of The Man In The Basement (excerpt) Allie Light
The film story, then, surpasses real life by transforming experience, clarifying intent, linking cause to effect, adding perspective, telescoping and/or combining memories, sorting the remembered from the forgotten and imposing narrative onto the experience.In some respects a story—whatever the medium—cannot encompass all the truths of a life. In other respects the life, from which the story is being spun, is enlarged. This happens in the transformation of life to story. The characters become larger than the individuals, the story becomes clearer because the irrelevant, the trivial is abandoned. And always in the re-telling the present is imposed upon the past.Each tale—life story, literary story and film story—is a mutation of the others, yet each exists independently of the others and of its creator. Are the stories true? After all, everything really happened, though not in the manner portrayed. “Realism, in any case,” says Godard, “is never exactly the truth…behind the theater is life and behind life, the theater. My point of departure was the imaginary and I discovered the real; but behind the real there was the imaginary.
”from: Writing Our Way Out Of The Dark
Edited by Elizabeth Claman, Queen of Swords Press, 1995
Thorazine Shuffle (excerpt) Allie Light
And then there were the women in perpetual motion: they paced, lurched, fled. Some moved like sleepwalkers, somniferous in their tranquility, others were propelled by rages, by the snare of waking dreams unfolding before them. These women did not see us, did not hear us. The voices they heard were not ours, yet they flung themselves upon us. I was stalked by the cocoa spitter. She saved her nightly cocoa for me. She watched me and she followed me, cup in hand. I could keep her at bay with my eyes, but if I looked away, she was immediately in my face, spraying me with cocoa from her mouth or flicking it at me with her fingers--throwing only bits each time, measuring her supply. I had become so undifferentiated, permeable, that these hopeless women seemed like aspects of myself. They--we--were acting out parts of our lives that we had once lived through, or could not live through.
from: Out of Her Mind, Women Writing on Madness
Edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse, Random House2000
