“For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me.” Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

1

A wren flies into the house, a sign, someone’s coming to support and uplift her, even if she is that person. Peripheral vision tells her it’s a fly, but it’s too big, and it’s the wrong season for Mason bees that swarm the sour cherry in spring. She texts Steve. Later, she hears a noise coming from her upstairs studio and finds the House Wren. She directs the bird back downstairs by holding up a long piece of silk unfolded from a studio shelf.

2

That night, she and Steve watch a Netflix movie about aspiring filmmakers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who discover and co-manage the UK rock band The Who. In Lambert & Stamp, two friends plan to make their first film about the band, to chronicle its success, which peaks with the album and opera, Tommy. The filmmakers see the events leading up to Tommy as their film, but it doesn’t happen for them. The Who makes their own movie.

3

The two managers are as much band members as the four musicians. Whatever each member of the group imagines the band to be, is what it becomes. Roger Daltrey wishes it to be a success; Pete Townshend wants to compose; Lambert composes vicariously through Townshend; Stamp imagines a film about a seminal rock band.

4

In the underground club circuit, the band copies the fashion of the club-goers, and the club-goers copy the band, a mirroring that produces looks akin to Prada now—classic and eccentric, frumpy and hip. The clubbers, known as Mods, are a small group of Londoners in tailored suits, who like soul, rhythm and blues, and jazz. They hang out at all-night clubs, wearing neat white Italian round-collared shirts, short Roman jackets with two vents and three buttons, narrow trousers, and pointed-toe shoes, sharp and clean.

5

Songs the band produces are not so much broken into shorter segments as composed of them, like a film or lyrics:

“Listening to you, I get the music

Gazing at you, I get the heat

Following you, I climb the mountain

I get excitement at your feet.”

In art school Townshend was urged to get a patron. Enter the Mods, in Union Jack waistcoats, tailored suits with vests and mid-cut suede chukka-style shoes, with borrowed elements: European scooters; Caribbean ska.

6

At the end of the night shiny people in white jeans and polos emblazoned with Royal Air Force roundels, protected by fish-tail parkas, Vespa home. The next day they gather again around fashion and rock, or so she imagines.

7

What counts here is less the movie as text than the impressions it leaves on her, the sense memories it conjures. Of being 23 in art school in LA. Her friend Gabriel’s younger sister in a photograph, riding a Lambretta and wearing an M65 parka and Wayfarers.

8

Two things happen in one day. Why do they feel significant? Does she feel like the bird? Not really, but she thinks of her own body. Does she relate to Pete Townshend? Like a composer, yes, of sorts. How to be more like Pete? Does she feel like Lambert and Stamp, like putting two heads together, leading to such treasures as Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and Moon?

9

She first heard The Who in the early ‘70s. Liberace’s piano cover of The Overture from Tommy was charting in Europe, onconstant rotation on the car radio and in her head between stations.

10

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with lingering on the past and her attraction to certain eras, but as she surely knows, the sentiment applies to so much else, and leads to an occasional devastating question—how to work with the backwash of failed dreams? How to survive an extended mourning or melancholy?

11

Towards the end of the movie, Chris Stamp addresses the camera. Is that the end of the reel? I guess it’s done, then. I didn’t get to make the film I dreamed of since I was 16. Or so she remembers him saying. She asks Steve a question but he’s asleep, as is Hazel. Don’t you think this is the movie Chris Stamp wanted to make? Yes, she tells herself, this is it.

12

The bird’s feathers are pinkish brown, rippled with ore or meteor deposits from space or the DNA of Giant Pacific Octopuses. A tiny dinosaur that flies to a downstairs window and clings to the screen, then moves to the adjacent bathroom and into the tub. Wings fan flat against water drops on porcelain under the silk she drops over the bird. It’s okay, she tells it, and palms it through the mesh. Once outside, she watches the wren fall through filament to the lawn in a blur, and take off again, sharp and clean.

13

Some mornings when she’s walking with Hazel she hears tone combinations in her mind, in the calm keys of C and C minor. They may come off Queen Anne’s Lace with blood spot eyes out on the Chief Sealth trail. Or from more urgent flowers—Nasturtiums and Clematis from the alley; green trimmings from a young Apricot tree; spring things, like Forsythia and Blueberry branches. If she were a flower, she’d stick to Sealth grasses and turn their same gold every August.

14

The following night she wakes up pre-dawn in the usual panic and puts her hand on her chest to calm down. It’s okay, she tells herself.

Text by Gretchen Bennett