SMOKE GETS IN my eyes. And in its new, particulated form, I see the film again and for the last time. I know this smoke can never be put back into a movie. I know enough about entropy to know this. The universe is on a constant slope toward greater and greater disorganization.
And then in an instant, humanity is extinguished. Only ants now. And fungus. And some occasional strange mutated flowers, roses of an unearthly hue, colors without precedent or explanation. How is it possible that Ingo created a color never before imagined? It is the color of a scream, the color of paradox, the color of nothing. And for a million years, there is no sound, as ants and fungus and flowers have no ears. There is no comedy or tragedy in this world. For ants could not comprehend of it, have no need for it. Ants, you see, are perfect beings. They know who they are without knowing they know who they are. There is no shame or hubris. Their antness is unapologetic, clean. There is no need to tell themselves stories, create mythologies or gods. And this section of the movie, which is a month long, is not here to entertain me. I am simply a fly on the wall of antkind, and I can watch it or not. And I watch it.
There are entire days of film in which no ants appear at all. Just rocks. Just fungus. Just preternatural flowers. It is not about me. Of course, simply not being about me makes it about me. Everything is about me. Everything is understood in relation to me. There is no way around this. This is the imperfect mechanism of consciousness. I remember the experience of sitting through this month of the film as entering a new state of being. Everything slowed. There being no choice of focus by the director (other than camera placement, for you can’t get completely away from subjectivity), I found my eyes free to wander the frame. It was frightening at first, as when a child is given a school assignment with no instructions. But over time—and there was much time—I began to find this freedom exhilarating and, just as in self-guided meditation, I became painfully aware of my own “monkey mind,” then gradually started to gently quiet it.
By the second week, I watched the ants, the no ants, the rocks, the fungus, the flowers without judgment, without assigning human motivations to any of the goings-on, without anthropomorphism. In a word, I simply lived there. It’s true that at the end of each day, while I tried to sleep, there were elaborate and manic masturbation sessions with fantasies I had never before entertained, but I understood those to, again, be the result of my “monkey” mind leaving my body, like so much semen in a spasm of surrender. I began to suspect that all that came before was presented only to clear the way for this essential transformative experience. And even after my epiphany, the million-year sequence persisted for another two weeks, during which nothing at all happened. Enough is enough, I finally thought. Really, I get it. And with that, everything changed. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.