Mise en scene

Imagine that you see before you a scene, one which you could easily observe in a museum of natural history, or else, if you were so placed in the history of time, in front of what is happening. You see before yourself a woman, standing with the weight of her body swung to the left, hip protruding to accentuate her waist. You see the hair between her legs, thinning as it reaches her thighs. One hand is resting between her two bare breasts, the other looks as if it should sit on the head of a child: hand raised slightly, fingers apart. Her dark hair is swung down her back, and she is focussed on some distant view. As for her environment, we see nothing: the scene is incomplete. As your focus moves from the slightly indecent exposure of this woman (filling your modern mind with a sense of modest unease, or else a perverse enjoyment of a scene which you have been taught ought not bring enjoyment unless in the right circumstance, regardless of natural instinct) your eyes will begin to roam, searching the rest of her environment for clues to place on her a ‘what’ and a ‘who’.

As observers, we might begin to discuss the ‘what’ of what she is doing. Removed from context, you may begin to explain, as all who are faced with an uncertainty tend to fall to, the ‘who’ that she could be. After a moment of deliberation, you say she could be any woman in history, a prehistoric dweller of caves, tending to her family, a matriarch of sorts, or else a Roman prostitute in the moments before the Pompeian landscape was caressed by the power of Vesuvius. At my silence your uncertainty is magnified, you begin to doubt whether you were correct, and begin to offer more possibilities as to what this woman is doing. An Icelandic native perhaps, relishing the moments alone as her husband leaves for his morning duties; the victim of a horrendous crime; the maid caught in the act of sodomising.

You, as the reader, now placed through address a fraction above the observer in levels of omniscience, may begin to notice a pattern in the explanations of the observer, that being an attachment of a ‘who’ to the ‘what’ that we see. In order to explain to ourselves and to compartmentalise the world, before understanding a ‘what’, we almost certainly rely on a ‘who’ to contextualise, to colour our view with what we expect is typical behaviour of such a ‘who’.

Imagine now that our discussion as author and reader had happened before the discussion as observers. As I ask you in a conversational manner of the ‘what’ that you think this woman, motionless in front of you, is doing, you may reply that she is doing nothing, with all the knowledge of a partially omniscient being, that which knows information which before he did not and now thinks of himself as supremely wiser and more enlightened. However, most times that is as far as the ‘what’ can go in the minds of those who require an identity to attach meaning. If I were to say to you that she was in the midst of watching her lover silently leave her, immediately you, as observer, would place around this woman an environment fitting the ‘who’ that your consciousness, after observing your own world with a singular intensity, found to be most fitting for such a character. In this woman’s blank surroundings, you would place bedchamber, rumpled sheets, the sound of a sleeping manor, or else the murmurs from the neighbouring rooms in a brothel.

This, however, is a flawed interpretation, for every woman in the history of the world has had the capability to watch her lover silently leave her as she stands motionless and naked. A ‘who’ needn’t be attached in order for an observer to sympathise with the feeling that part of oneself is being stretched further and further away, that watching a lover leave whilst one stands completely exposed is in a sense, a universal emotion of sorts. Two galaxies for example, caught in a dance for millions of years, may find that the gravitational pull of a nearby galaxy, rather than being an ineffectual force of nature in the background, is actually pulling one galaxy further from the other. In that moment, stretched out slowly into thousands, perhaps even millions of agonising years, one galaxy watches, exposed as its lover silently leaves. Even this woman’s nudity need not be a definite, for one does not require a lack of clothing to stand exposed as a lover leaves.

Having now established in our mutual understanding that of the ‘what’ this woman is doing in cosmetic terms, perhaps we should delve further into the deeper realms of ‘what’, before a ‘who’ is finally attached to this anonymous woman. This is where I pull forth from the depths of the past our post-enlightened conversation regarding the ‘what’. You may recall that after removing the ‘who’, you were left with an inconsistency. With no way to assign context to her position, you stated that she was ‘doing nothing’. There, I shall address a flaw. An expected flaw, but a flaw just the same. By declaring that the woman before us is doing nothing is an understatement. Underneath her skin, the central nervous system is tingling, shaking her insides so she feels as if she could not bear to stand anymore. Adrenaline, blood, oxygen and sugars are all being pushed through her veins, thundering and throbbing and reminding her that she is very much still alive. Her brain sends commands to each part of her body, tightening and relaxing muscles, causing lungs to pull and push air through her pipes and nose. Her stomach muscles tighten, sending a message to her brain that she might be hungry, which she dismisses as unimportant, while being a little amazed at her body’s insensitivity. 

Burst blood vessels are forming a deep bruise on her right shin from where she knocked it against something as she hurried to stand. You notice again that her weight rests on her left. Cells are constantly dying and becoming re-born, repairing and repelling. DNA in its many varied states twists and turns in its double helix, declaring the irregularities that keep fingers in their places. Atoms of carbon and H2O move, protons, electrons and neutrons dance in their distant loneliness. Gluons twist and turn and hold together quarks and deep down, the vibrations of tiny strings of energy give it all meaning. Even that is not all. As she stands without moving herself, the earth that she stands on is rotating, spinning around the warped space that the sun and its gravity makes. At 486,000 miles per hour, the sun is speeding around the centre of the Milky Way as the Milky Way dances it’s own pattern of steps across the grand distance of the known universe. Each movement we make brings us into a place that we have never yet been, and even standing still breaks new ground as a pioneer. 

And this woman stands still, one hand reaching for her heart, the other lost in unexplored space as her galaxy is pulled further and further away.