Copyright ©2000 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
When it first appeared in the cable listings, I thought it might be a political program. The Common View. Something with Washingtonian talking heads and coifed commentators, or maybe a local lineup of paunches and elbows endlessly discussing budget stresses and perceived offenses to decorum.
It took me a full minute to realize what I was seeing. And then I stood. And stood, clicker transfixed, watching ... what was I watching? Nothing. I laughed. Whose twisted sense of humor was manifested in this meaningless and unblinking crow's-eye view of Northfield's Common?
Then I had a wave of revulsion. Here was Big Brother come to the small town, to Main Street U-S-of-A. This was the omniscient eye unflinchingly capturing private gestures of disgruntled locals and unsuspecting tourists, revealing roving pizza boxes and bobbing teens and illegal parking. The easy, sleazy, police-state response to complaints, the demise of privacy, the end of civilization.
The feelings folded over each other and then faded, and my clicker was in motion again past Dan Rather, Gold Bond, and Monster Trux. Yet I began to be drawn to this peculiar Zen exercise in 262-and-a-half scan lines. Each day the news and announcements and temperature and psychic hot-line hustles more often yielded to this almost-still-life. It became my meditation.
It's 2:45 in the morning now. The screen is a throbbing sepia. Details are drowned in low light and low resolution, and nearby snow rushes sideways and up and down while far away in the streetlights there are a hundred barn dances in the air. The Common's lamps look sprouted to frost-dandelions. Pale light rolls out of store windows onto the snow-smoothed sidewalk like a Hopper painting, but there are no bars, no lonesome tipplers facing themselves in forlorn mirrors, no weighty urban implications -- just light and shadow.
A small car is going round and round the Common in the warm, slippery snowfall, its back wheels sliding out from under it. I imagine the driver is whooping. Person Unknown comes out a door to the left to put one-small-step-for-man-like footprints in the snow -- or perhaps I imagine the footprints, because much of the fuzzy image is left to imagination.
When nothing happens, everything is an event.
An occasional snowflake dashes itself into an otherwise invisible glass shield, exploding slowly into white-wet fireworks (I blink), and resolving into a sinking halo. A truck has stopped to talk with footprint-person. Both leave.
At daybreak, sun streams forward in blinding whiteness. I momentarily wish to freeze this Kandinsky abstract of bright colors and sharp geometries. Though the forms and angles soon again devolve into recognizable objects, I know I'll remember how ideas are born.
The 4x4 always parks outside the white lines, and I invent stories about this imaginary revolutionary. I'm constantly surprised by the carousel of pickups and SUVs. By the vast number of drivers and paltry number of walkers. By the roving pizza boxes (Can spy satellites see pizza boxes? I wonder).
During any snowy Vermont day -- except for the absent horses -- the image could have been snatched from an album of the turn-of-the-(last)-century New York Photo Secession.
Sometimes the View is on all night, as it is now, or all day, its wide lens slowing rush and hubbub and schedule and fear and deadline and tragedy into a kind of circular embrace. The sound, whether it's the cheerful daytime radio or the incongruous late-night thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of some north-of-the-border mix of trance and hiphop, is off, always off.
I've only spent two seasons meditating on the abstract of our lives with The Common View. I anticipate the muck of spring and the colors of fall, but most of all I look forward to a hot late summer night when I'm unable to sleep as I watch sweeps of rain and dazzles of lightning painting their way toward me.