The Concealed Bargain
There are undertakings which arrive disguised as modest errands.
A man decides, for instance, that he ought to speak more clearly. He has noticed that his thoughts, when released into ordinary conversation, sometimes emerge wearing slippers: they shuffle, they hesitate, they reach for the nearest “you know” as though it were a handrail in a dark stairwell. He wishes to become more articulate, more composed, less vulnerable to the small betrayals of nervous language. So he places a camera before him—not as an altar, certainly, and not yet as a profession, but as one might place a mirror in a room whose dimensions have become uncertain.
At first, the arrangement appears simple. There is a face, a lens, a subject. One speaks. One makes mistakes. One speaks again.
But the lens is not a mirror. A mirror is indulgent. It permits the subject to turn away, to adjust the collar, to admire the agreeable accident of an eyebrow. The camera is a small black magistrate. It listens to every evasive qualification, every overfed sentence, every word chosen because the sharper word had not yet been found. It detects the little fog banks of thought in which a man may live quite comfortably until he hears himself trying to navigate them aloud.
Thus a seemingly modest effort—to become a more presentable speaker, a more persuasive man, a better salesman of his own ideas—quietly becomes something larger.
The camera begins demanding material.
And material, if it is not to be mere upholstery, demands attention. One cannot make a portrait of a composer, speak of an instrument, examine the manners of a civilization, or defend elegance against the various cheap triumphs of the age without first developing a more exact relation to those things. One must listen with greater care. One must read past the anecdote. One must distinguish an idea from the decorative mist that often surrounds it. One must learn when a joke is a scalpel and when it is merely a spoon dropped at dinner.
This is where the enterprise becomes self-reinforcing.
A video requires a subject. The subject requires research. Research produces language. Language gives shape to perception. Perception changes conduct. Conduct changes the person who returns, a few days later, to stand once more before the camera.
The work becomes a kind of internal circulation: not a factory line, in which the soul is marched past fluorescent light and instructed to manufacture relevance, but a more delicate mechanism—a clock made of attention, taste, curiosity, discipline, and a faint but useful dissatisfaction with one’s present limitations.
Each motion supplies energy for the next.
One begins by wanting to speak better. Soon one is speaking about better things. Then, in order to speak about them honestly, one must become a little better oneself.
This is the concealed bargain
