Or Would You Rather Be a Fish?

Words have always held their ground for me, even as the world has moved on to the other, more engaging tools at its disposal. In our media-centric culture, I feel the written word has become somewhat antiquated, perhaps even a bit irrelevant now that images have supplanted them as our language of choice. The reason? Images take so little effort. They impart their message with an immediacy that easily satisfies the appetite. We even catalog our most meaningful moments, not in words written from personal, heartfelt impressions, but in photographs. Images are the shorthand, the “Cliff Notes” we employee to parse the world around us as we causally nibble on headlines, like finger food, instead of doing the hard work of digging into the details of the thing.

You ask why?  Well words are metaphorical and require effort, and in a culture progressing as fast as ours, few have the time, nor the inclination to invest in the effort, it would seem. But as I was so charmingly reminded last night, words still rule where it matters most and remains the most effective tool we possess to pry open our uniqueness and express what it means to experience an examined life.

If you’re curious where that little diatribe came from, you can blame it on the movie ‘Paterson’, an independent, arthouse film that Debbie and I caught at the Belcourt Theater last night. Earlier in the week I had read an engaging review in ‘The Nashville Scene’ and knew it fit comfortably in my aesthetic wheelhouse.

With this film, Jim Jarmusch, the films writer, and director, has created a story about a would-be poet named Paterson, and his poems. It covers a single week in his life, seven separate days, much like seven stanzas of a poem, with each day exposing the wide and seemingly irreconcilable chasm between the monotony of his daily routine and the astute awareness he articulates out of that routine. And by extension, Jarmusch has also crafted a poignant narrative that exposes the humbling vulnerability endured by amateur artists, who like Paterson, pour all their passion into their art in near complete anonymity. More on that latter.

One of the engaging visual tools Jarmusch employs is that we get to watch Patterson create his poems on screen, as this photo depicts. There, Patterson isn’t statically reading his poem, but rather speaking them out while writing them, which created a rare, unsuspected intimacy.

Paterson’s character is well played by Adam Driver, while Golshifteh Farahani plays his devoted girlfriend. They live in the city of Paterson, New Jersey, prophetically, in distinctly working-class surroundings that appears unchanged for quite some time, which provides a seamless backdrop to Paterson’s well-worn sensibilities. Like his unchanging routine, the city of Paterson offers a stagnate, unchanging canvas that mirrors the monotony of his daily life. But beneath that surface illusion, we get to witness the contrast of his astutely perceptive mind.

Paterson’s dominant trait throughout the film, as I’ve alluded, is his pathological submission to routine, as each day plays out in much the same manner as the previous day. He wakes at the same time each morning as he grabs his carefully folded clothes from the chair next to his bed. He then eats the same cereal from the same bowl and walks the same route to his job as he prepares for his day as a city bus driver, precisely as he does every other day. Then each evening he walks their dog and has a single beer from the local pub, then goes home. Yet despite this tedium, Paterson navigates through all of those mundane rituals with an untroubled ease. There is an undisturbed, Zen-like calm in the way that he moves through his days, which I believe anchors the film.

The decision to make him a city bus driver was also a deceptively clever choice by Jarmusch, for it allowed Paterson to experience the public in close proximity as he comes in contact with a wide variety of people, overhearing all their random conversations during his route, yet it also provides him with hours of isolation behind the wheel, which works as an incubator for his thoughts. In a well written review of the movie by Richard Brody in ‘The New Yorker’, I found the following paragraph that precisely describes the slippery dilemma that Paterson and other artists like him face.

“In depicting Paterson’s day-to-day rituals, Jarmusch evokes something essential about the artist’s way: how he or she must seesaw between observation and insularity, maintaining a firm sphere of privacy while being open to everything. I’ve never seen a film that captures the inner world of an artist with such delicacy.”

One of the more poignant themes throughout the film, for me at least, is that Paterson randomly stumbles across a few fellow poets with each providing him with a sense of kinship, people who like himself, are on their knees at the altar of words. In one wonderful encounter, he comes across a thoughtful young girl sitting alone in an alley waiting for her mother. Understanding how vulnerable the girl appeared in that setting, he asked if he could wait with her until her mother arrives and in due course is told that she considers herself a poet and writes them in a “secret notebook”, just as he does, and even shared a poem with him.

The actual poetry in Paterson was written by the poet Ron Padgett, and it’s important to note that it is not Longfellow, Whitman nor Wordsworth…and it is not supposed to be. The poems we hear are conversational in style, just as is the poetry of William Carlos Williams, the movie’s poetic inspiration. This style of poetry rarely rhymes and is structured out of common speech, which can easily shield their depth. There is no need to laboriously decipher their structure or rhyme techniques; the poems we hear hit their mark precisely because they appear to be the unfiltered passions of his inner dialog.

To give you a quick example of this casual manner of writing, here is a poem that we watch Paterson craft for Laura early in the film, across several different scenes as it slowly comes together and culminates with an escalating wave of passion at the end.

Love Poem

We have plenty of matches in our house
We keep them on hand always
Currently our favorite brand
Is Ohio Blue Tip
Though we used to prefer Diamond Brand
That was before we discovered
Ohio Blue Tip matches
They are excellently packaged
Sturdy little boxes
With dark and light blue and white labels
With words lettered
In the shape of a megaphone
As if to say even louder to the world
Here is the most beautiful match in the world
It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem
Capped by a grainy dark purple head
So sober and furious and stubbornly ready
To burst into flame
Lighting, perhaps the cigarette of the woman you love
For the first time
And it was never really the same after that

All this will I give you
That is what you gave me
I become the cigarette and you the match
Or I the match and you the cigarette
Blazing with kisses that smolder towards heaven

Paterson’s girlfriend/muse presents an interesting counterpoint in that she represents everything that he is not. Richard Brody, once again, sums up her place in the movie far more eloquently that I’m capable of.

“In Paterson’s narrowly practical and orderly life, Laura embodies the principle of disorder and ornamental impracticality; her idiosyncrasies, her surprises, her caprices, her stylish inventions—all coupled with her unfailing, worshipful devotion—are the stimuli to his creation, the irritants and inspirations that sharpen his perceptions and bring his emotions to life.

And it is precisely her belief in him as a poet that sets up an oddly reoccurring theme throughout the film, which is the continual appearance of twins within the story. This pattern of twins is used by Jarmusch to offer subtle clues to Patterson to take Laura’s advice to make “copies” of his poetry, since all his poems are hand-written in a single notebook, which prophetically alludes to the looming catastrophe.

At Laura’s persistent urging, Paterson finally gives in and assures her that he’ll get a copy made over the weekend, but before he does, the unthinkable occurs. When he and Laura arrive back home after seeing a movie, they step into their home to find that their dog, Marvin, had chewed Paterson’s notebook to shreds, destroying all his poems. At the sight of his notebook in fragments strewn across the room, I was initially surprised that it was Laura who seemed more emotional at the loss. Paterson himself seemed too numb to fathom what it meant, or perhaps he knew precisely what it meant and simply couldn’t reconcile it. Like losing an appendage, his mind struggled to calculate the dimensions of the loss.

Obviously, Paterson was shaken to his core and barely able to speak, and in that void, I could sense that he simply didn’t know how to proceed. All the evidence of his emotional life evaporated in an instant, and because of his aversion to acknowledge to anyone that he even wrote poetry meant that his little book held the only key to unlock who he really was. There was simply no other evidence to suspect that he was anything other than a city bus driver. With his poetry destroyed, I could sense that he was evaluating the whole cost/benefit ratio of his investment in writing them. There is, after all, an exhausting commitment of time and emotional energy in creating art that is impossible to comprehend or calculate. Yet Jarmusch ends the movie with two scenes that I believe provides a brilliant poignancy to Paterson’s dilemma, as it does for all artists.

The next day, still numb from the loss, Paterson decides to go for a walk and ends up at his favorite spot overlooking the Great Falls of the Passaic River. While sitting there, observing the view that inspired so many of his poems, and likely trying to reconcile life without them, a stranger enters the screen and asks to sit down next to him. This stranger, we learn, is a Japanese poet, played by Masatoshi Nagase, who is on a pilgrimage to visit the city of his favorite poet, William Carlos Williams, who was born there in Paterson.

After a few minutes of awkward dialog between the two, Masatoshi politely asked Paterson if he happened to be a poet, to which Paterson dodges by answering, ‘uh no, no……I’m a bus driver myself………just a bus driver”, adding that last line as if to further distance himself from the loss of his poems. Masatoshi then asks if he knew of an obscure poet name Frank O’Hara, and when Paterson acknowledged that he did indeed know him and stated that he liked his work, even referencing a specific poem, Masatoshi looked at him, now with the glow of kinship in his eyes, said, ‘a-ha’, as if to confirm what he had suspected; that Paterson was indeed a poet, in spirit, if not in practice.

That exchange is key here, for it is that single phrase, “a-ha”, spoken by Masatoshi and delivered with deliberate curiosity, that works as the provocation that brings Paterson back from despair, and truly stands out to me as THE critical moment in the film. But more than being a simple phrase, it’s Masatoshi’s delivery, conveying it with an inquisitive, even probing interest that exposes its true meaning. It seems that Jarmusch purposely set up that phrase as a personal call-to-arms, as a life-affirming mantra, a shield of armor against the chill of indifference. Just listen to it and understand what’s I’m inferring. 

To make that point even more explicit, Jarmusch then frames the phrase even more prominently. At the end of their encounter, Masatoshi gets up to leave, but suddenly stops, opens his satchel and hands Paterson a gift, a small book of blank pages, and tells him, “sometimes empty page presents new possibilities”, then turns and begins to walk away, but after just a few steps, turns to address Paterson one last time…….and this is key, he stops, turns back to Paterson and says, “excuse me”. Once Paterson turns to face him, Masatoshi states with deliberate poignancy, “a-ha”, spoken as a clear imperative, almost as a challenge, then walks away. It’s in this final utterance of the phrase that confirms its true talismanic implications for Paterson.

Stay with me now, because the homerun swing is coming up……that scene and Masatoshi’s phrase can not be overstated, and together with the following scene, shows that Jarmuch has written the quintessential ending for a movie based on the problem faced by artists of all stripes, which is the whole cost/benefit ratio involved in the creative process. Paterson’s dilemma is no different than all would-be artists, which is the time and emotional toil spent pouring all of your passion into an endeavor that will likely make very little difference to anyone beyond your most immediate relationships, as happened with Paterson. With that context in mind, sit back and marvel at how Jarmusch’s finale beautifully resolves this dilemma.

After Masatoshi walks away, Paterson casually stares down at the booklet for several seconds, contemplating perhaps whether he has the strength to start over, then casually mutters Masatoshi’s expression to himself, “a-ha”, and with that casual utterance, begins to grasp the true gift that was just bestowed to him, because he then reaches into his pocket for the pen he always carried, opens the booklet to it’s first page and simply let’s his mind do what it was born to do.

Here is the poem he then writes, which draws the movie to a beautifully affecting close.

The Line

There’s an old song
My grandfather used to sing
That has the question
“or would you rather be a fish?”
In the same song
Is the same question
But with a mule and a pig,
But the one I hear sometimes
In my head is the fish one.
Just that one line.
Would you rather be a fish?
As if the rest of the song
Didn’t have to be there.

Although the poem may read as a simple rumination of a childhood memory, it delivers the necessary goods because its main premise is this; ‘would you rather be anything other than who you are?’, which was the only relevant question to ask at that point in the story (as if the rest of the song didn’t have to be there). After losing his poems, Paterson had that single choice to confront, just as all artists do, and with this poignant new poem, his choice was clear. And with that, the movie ends precisely as it began, with Paterson sleeping next to Laura before waking up for work, just as he does every day.

Paterson seemed to absorb the idea that although the loss of his poems was significant, the most important facets of his life were still very much intact. He still had his life with Laura (his muse), and regardless of what may come from his efforts, he was indeed a poet.

I