Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

Author:Charlie Kaufman [Kaufman, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780399589683
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 44

I sit in my sleep chair, close my eyes, try to remember. How does it begin? A man. In a top hat? Bowler? I’m not certain. There have been so many hats in this movie. So many hats. So many beginnings. How can I remember it with any accuracy? There are indeed so many men’s hats from this period. That I took a course on men’s hats at FIT, as research for a think piece on the Diener-Hauser poster for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, is not helping. My brain is full of hats: boater, bowler, fedora, homburg, top. I’m fairly confident it’s a top hat, but that I’m struggling with the first hat of what might very well be a ten-thousand-hat movie gives me pause. This jumble of hats is illustrative of the jumble of everything in my mind, memories of childhood, things learned, things seen, moments of happiness (have there been any? Surely there must have been. And yet … ). The progressive decay of my memory, my ability to concentrate, my … critical faculties—the only elements of me that had ever been of even slight interest to others—is, not to put too fine a point on it, catastrophic to my sense of self. I find myself falling humiliatingly short of the task at hand. Where do things go when we forget them? The miracle is, perhaps, that there ever was a mechanism with which to trap parts of the world as they pass through us. It is nothing less than the miracle of consciousness. Without memory, one does not exist. Perhaps that despiser of the natural world Descartes would have been more accurate had he said, I remember, therefore I am. If we are witnesses without memory, we are not witnesses at all. A hollow cylinder through which the wind blows will not remember the whistle it produces. The terrible irony of my circumstance, and the only reason I am perhaps more tragic than a toilet paper roll, is that I remember that I can’t remember. And that is a punishment worthy of Tartarus. Only, for what am I being punished thusly? Have I not been an ethical if uninspired didact? Have I not worked diligently? Have I not loved well? Perhaps I have not. No, I have not. I deserve all the lightning bolts Zeus would hurl at me. I, as an expert in the chemistry of film stocks (I studied under Edwin Land at the Rowland Institute—he was on the fourth floor and I was on the third) carelessly, in the excitement of my discovery, let Ingo’s masterpiece be destroyed.

Eventually I doze, strapped, once again, too tightly into my sleeping chair.

In the dreams, I am a novelizer. At least at first. In later dreams, I will become other people. Many others. Still, I will remain a novelizer, but I will become these many other people as well, in addition, all at the same time. No, more like one at a time. Well, one

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