I sometimes feel like I have an overly inquisitive mind. I just have this sense of wonder and mystery in my head that I can’t switch off. Ultimately my imagination runs wild with it creating possible scenarios and plausible characters in a story I invent. The dog-eared page is a prefect example of what I mean.

A few weeks back I was wandering the halls of the University’s vast library. My preferred location is the fifth floor because of the view over campus but also because that floor is dedicated to performing arts media as well as classic literature section. Up there, there are an abundance of books and DVD’s on film and just about any aspect of such you can imagine: It’s effects on society, film in relation to storytelling, gender and social politics on the screen, etc. And in this wide array of books I saw one that caught my eye: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, The Imaginary Signifier. So I checked it out, just in case I needed some light reading before bed. (Yes that is sarcasm)

To be honest I didn’t read much of the book at all. It was originally written in French and its translation is extremely dense. It’s the type of book where I’d be happy to understand about 1/3 of the text and then lend it to Aaron Draughty to have him tell me about the rest in words I’d look up later. But just as I was thinking to myself “what is this doing in the library? I bet it hasn’t been checked out in years,” I came across something: a dog-eared page. And even more surprising was an underlined sentence on the page.

Instantly my mind was going through possible people who would have checked out the book and underlined it. Since the spine was very rigid and unworn even though the book is 15 years old I knew it couldn’t be just anybody. For the same reasons it seemed to eliminate film-studies students as well, because if the book was assigned reading or even suggested reading, this only copy would be much more worn and more often checked out. So my initial conclusion was a professor of some sort. Someone who knew exactly what was in the book, where to find it, and was merely using it as a quote to support his own teaching or beliefs. But then I turned the page.

Not only were there more sentences underlined, but in the margin there was also distinctly female writing. Now I’m not expect on handwriting analysis but I learned a thing or two from Megan about it, and I knew enough to know that the way her S’s swooped and her T’s swayed she wasn’t at all the person you’d picture reading this book, let alone finding things she felt were important enough to mark for later. Now I’m sure there are cynics reading this who would just assume it was some random college girl, writing some random paper. But I couldn’t accept that.

My mind tried to cover over the possibilities of what the words meant to her. Sentences like: “Between the logic of the most ‘absurd’ film and that of the dream, there will always remain a difference, because in the latter what is astonishing does not astonish and consequently nothing is absurd: whence, precisely, the astonishment and the impression of the absurd one feel on waking.” All the underlined sections were in the chapter Film and Dream, and it was as if the other sections of the book weren’t even touched. What was she looking for? And more importantly, why?

I decided that perhaps she had seen a dream sequence in a film that affected her in an unexplainable way, and she was looking for answers to what she felt. Or perhaps she has powerful dreams that she thinks will translate well into film but is looking for ways to interpret them for the screen. Whatever the case she seems to have a strong connection to both film and dreams and I therefore felt a fabricated comradely with her. My mind had run rampant with questions, I wanted to meet her and get answers.

And this is what I do. I don’t mean to, it’s just that my mind will take a small bite and then my imagination will go into a frenzy of possibilities. Like every time I buy second hand clothes I can’t help but wonder about the person that wore them before. Obviously since we both bought the same garment we have similar clothing taste, so what else do we have in common? I wonder too what happened in the clothes before I had them. Was love found in them, love lost? Was life created while they lay on the floor, or was life lost in them? Dose the small hole have a story behind it? What is the significance of the sewn on patch, is it a statement or just aesthetics?

This is much more of a muse than a blog post, but I wanted to see if I was alone in this. I see everything as having a story behind it, and surely someone out there has an equally wandering mind. Surely.