Sam Rasnake

On The Midnight Hour

– in memory of Cheryl Dodds and Larry Richman

I’m thinking this morning of Jean-Luc Godard, seated at his desk, writing his epic, Histoire(s) du cinema, his voice speaking over himself watching films unfold: “In effect, cinema is not part of the communication industry, or the entertainment industry, but the cosmetics, the industry of masks” – And I know I wear a mask – just like Godard is wearing one of his many masks while being a character in the film he’s written, speaking to himself, to an audience he can’t see, speaking to the universe, I guess – pulling, layer by layer, his own closed world out into the open. I’m not certain I can find “Godard” in there though – not the child anyway – raised in comfort by Lake Geneva, his father a doctor, his mother a medical assistant – meanwhile Godard the child is growing into Godard the artistic revolutionary, bent on a journey into an unknown that only he can map – and somewhere in the midst of that he found or began making his masks – the ones he would need to change the world. I’ve no masks like that. 

When I speak to you, I’ll be wearing one of mine I’ve gathered, stolen, or made over the years. I’ve gotten better at it. I have a mask for every occasion – always one to see me through. I wear it because I’m completely afraid – serial-killer-fear, bodies-in-the-basement scared of who you would see and know and hear if I weren’t wearing one. Don’t ask me to take it off or leave it behind as we go. Don’t ask me to take off my mask when we make love or go to the store or if I’m the walking streets in the rain – Don’t ask me not to wear it when I’m hiking the woods or playing guitar late at night when the house sleeps. Don’t ask. Please. 

Over the years I’ve perfected it. Don’t ask me how. I know the how but can’t explain it. Maybe years rubbing truth with perception, but I’m speculating now. I have one mask that is many – but I’m afraid to wear it, afraid not to, afraid to hide it – sleepless nights worried it could be stolen – and if you believe it may be stolen, it will be of course. Don’t ask me to wake up one morning and say I’m not doing it anymore, not wearing it again. Don’t. I’ll take it from the shelf where I place it at night. Eventually, or so believed Kierkegaard, we all must take off our masks – “a midnight hour comes,” he said – and we become who we’ve always been. No one can avoid this. I place mine on the shelf and try to sleep. I’ll explain it this way: if one is trying to sleep, one never does – closer and closer but no rest, no end, no pieces put back together. The brain continues its work, work, work. Never stopping. And so, I never sleep. I do take off the mask, but when I do, I don’t see me. Haven’t in years.

When I decide to get up from bed, I take my mask from its shelf, squeeze it onto my face – and hide from everyone – I even hide from me. I don’t really know me without my mask – or I’ve forgotten if I ever knew. Do we ever really know who we are? I’m not so sure anymore. I can’t live without it. Can’t live. Maybe that should have been the lyric for Harry Nilsson’s cover of a Badfinger song – his voice, singing: “can’t live if living is without my mask”. What a different world it would have been if I’d been warned or taught a different way, different path. But my life is my life. And this is universally true or I believe it to be true, want it to be true. Isn’t that the goal? Not to be alone? 

At some point last year – maybe spring? I can’t be certain, didn’t leave a date – I wrote in my journal: Don’t want to write anything relevant – to do that is not to be. What I should have written: “Only the mask gives me relevance. Otherwise, I’m as meaningful as a pebble tossed into a great river. It sinks, slowly settling onto the dark bed. The currents are constant, and the bed always changing, always shifting until the pebble is no longer a pebble but is a river that’s going, going, going…” 

What I’ve learned is this: my thought is not my own – it belongs to itself. I’m only witness to it. Maybe my mask is not mine. Maybe it belongs to itself – always has. There’s an end even if there isn’t one. The only constant I know is contradiction. We are not who we are – never have been, never will be. Emily Dickinson wrote that the lady – herself, I’m sure – dare not lift the veil from her face. We don’t know what would have happened in the upstairs room in Amherst, but if she had lifted the veil – her mask – the universe would surely have tilted – north to south, night to day, the hunter to the hunted, grief to joy. And I would not be writing these words. It would be someone else finishing this sentence.