OUTSIDE IN

It's an old movie trick:
First (with close-ups of anguished eyes,
alternated with flashes of what those eyes see)
they get you inside a head.

Then the camera backs away
to place the tiny body
in a vast reach of red sunset,

but the whole thing is still inside
that head, as we experience
that character's taking in
that sunset,

which is, of course,
inside YOUR head,
which is inside
wherever YOU are
or maybe are not,

all of it, maybe, inside
that little imaginary TV head,

where, perhaps, you've been
ever since.
_________

[Note: Probably those readers who didn't get this one won't get as far as this note, but here goes: It's a kind of math exercise: The camera (or the use of pronouns!) gets you into a viewpoint (into someone's head). You're seeing the world from that viewpoint. Then the camera zooms out, and, still caught up in that viewpoint, that head, you're including that body in your viewpoint. It's concentric -- an aesthetically created viewpoint contains you containing that body on the beach, and the viewpoints we thus occupy can get further contained in new ones, or we can back out to what contains "our own" viewpoints (that is, who or what is being "us"?) -- quite a game of nested Russian dolls we play, all the identities we've ever assumed still there -- until we become sufficiently aware of them to dispense with them. Or to have some choice about them. It fascinates me how easily this is done. I say "you" to you, and instantly you are enlisted. Join a pronoun, see my world. We are shown a cityscape -- perhaps a helicopter view of sky scrapers, then a sign in front of a building, then a name on an office door, then what appears to be an office with a desk, then a face, and we have the idea that we are in that city and in that building in that city and in that office and even in that head. Magic! I'll bet some of you, right now, imagine you're in a body.]

Dean Blehert
Blogs:
http://deanotations.blogspot.com (short poems)
http://dearreader08.blogspot.com (essays and longer poems)
WWW.BLEHERT.COM