Owl Man’s attempt to reconcile reality and imagination ... 

“Left Out 7” arrived in the mail this morning. The previous evening I had watched a remarkable movie, Arrival. I wanted to watch it again because, like a dog worrying a bone, I have returned to a fundamental question that seems to hound me. It goes something like this, I think:

How can you say what is about to happen when you know it has already happened? How can you in fact consult that future in a way that the already-happened future begins to affect you now, shaping your actions so that already-happened future begins to happen?

Something like that!

The focus of the movie is communication between humans and an alien species—a problem in language! The movie was so edited to give us an experience of the difficulties in the effort to communicate. The difficulty has to do with temporality and how different “time structures” are reflected in language. The director attempted to express fundamental differences in experience of time, i.e. between the aliens and us humans, both within the story and in the structure of the movie itself. To give two examples: 

At the end of the movie Dr. Banks meets the Chinese ambassador who tells her how she had averted disaster during the crisis by calling him and telling him, in Mandarin, the one thing that could change his mind about starting a war—his dying wife’s last words. He then whispered those words in Dr. Bank’s ear for the first time. And yet Dr. Banks had known and spoken those very words, during the crisis, years before. How would she have known those words? 

Is your mind bending a little?

The second example: The movie is edited so that we are not sure if we are viewing a scene that hasn’t happened yet, e.g. Dr, Banks having and losing a child with the physicist she hasn’t met yet. Yet the scene is presented as having happened.

How’s the mind-bending going? By the way, Fex and Coo is filled with these mind-bending moments.

Dr. Banks, the movie's linguistic expert, ended up writing a book called Universal Language. She had understood the aliens’ language because she already had the seed within her—she was prescient but did not know it--at first!

The movie shows all the difficulties that Owl Man and Jasmine also experience in trying to reconcile imagination and reality. Owl Man’s facial distortions and Jasmine’s terror are a wonderful description of the phenomenon—how to say the reality of your experience in language that insists on dividing that experience: 

“Owlie, my love. I already told you—I didn’t bring you the espresso. You either dreamed it, or else you imagined it.” 

Note Jasmine’s “life-saving” gesture! She brought Owl Man back to ordinary reality from the “place” of Universal Language. It can get hair-raising! Many have succumbed, unable to get back across the threshold. I wonder about Nietzsche ("eternal recurrence of the same") who was "comatose" for the last ten years of his life, unable to return.

By the way, the threshold is well-represented in the movie and that medium is the imagination—i.e. the image maker—able to represent the otherwise unreachable alien language in picture form.

Yes the answer lies in a Universal Language….