I saw a film yesterday at the Angelika. It was one of those rare serendipitous movie-going experiences where I had not chosen the movie, so I could watch with no expectations, meet it on its own terms.
It was called “The Oldest Person In the World” by Sam Green. We were there because Sam happened to be married to Aya’s choreographer, Kat. We had met both of them briefly maybe a decade earlier but the combination of my terrible memory and being in the fog of early parenthood rendered them essentially strangers to me.
It was a documentary, told in first person by Sam, a handsome middle-aged man with piercing gray eyes, who searches out and interviews the oldest people in the world (who all happen to be women). It begins coincidentally because the title of oldest person in the world at the time happened to pass to a woman living near Green in Brooklyn, and moves to different contenders as the title-holders sadly and silently pass away off camera.
You had to admire Sam’s confidence in his filmmaking and his voice. He began with a risky but compelling premise but he admittedly did not know where it was going or where it would take him. You can see him starting down various branches, surfacing personal demons and life events as they arose, dipping his toes in but never falling fully down rabbitholes, and he eventually returned back to the simple idea of being in the room with the most ancient human being on the planet and turning on the camera.
One of these ladies got to me in such a deep way. I wasn’t expecting it at all. Her name was Violet Mosse Brown. Her hair was thinned down to the point that I thought at first that she was a man. And like all centenarians she was gnarled and twisted by gravity and age. Through a translator/aide shouting into her good ear, she was asked the standard “what’s your advice/how do you do it?” question and she began slowly by saying “Catch, and hold.”
She continued, by talking about when she was in elementary school, her teacher had them learn a poem by heart, “The Vision of Belshazzar” by Lord Byron. After more than a hundred years, she still had it. And with incredible ferocity of purpose, she launched into a steady, slow recitation:
”The King was on his throne,
The Satraps throng’d the hall:
A thousand bright lamps shone
O’er that high festival.
A thousand cups of gold,
In Judah deem’d divine—
Jehovah’s vessels hold
The godless Heathen’s wine!”
Her forceful delivery as her cataract-filled eyes stared defiantly into the camera brought tears to my eyes. I don’t know exactly why. It wasn’t the words or the meaning of the verse that got to me. Perhaps it was just the defiance in her voice that seemed to be shaking a fist at Father Time and forgetfulness that, now that I think about it, perfectly embodied what I find so compelling about orality.
What mattered was her voice, the way she spoke the words, the inflection and the particular way her Jamaican accent made the rhymes land in a way my American accent didn’t (“hall”…”festival”). It was a performance that far surpassed any silent, visual reading of the poem in affect and emotional power. Tears streamed down from my eyes.
It was only later, when I got home and looked up the poem and its exegesis, did I realize how uncannily it resonated with the themes of my book, of scribes and writing, orality and interpretation, as if Ms. Brown had somehow instinctively reached back into her memory, like placing the needle down on a record player, and delivered the words right into my soul.
