Rainbow Connection, Digitally Transferred Super 8, TRT 5:00 minutes, 2021
Early in the Spring of 2020 I accidentally got a rainbow-colored soccer ball stuck in the high branches of an old oak tree in my front yard. My youngest kid and I had been happily kicking bouncing and throwing the ball back and forth to one another in the front yard, when in a style of play endemic to fathers of my age I kicked the ball too hard and it became stuck on the end of a long branch more than 40 feet in the air. Our mutual surprise quickly devolved into guilt on my part and irritation and disappointment on the part of my kiddo – the ball was a gift they had received for their recent birthday. Predictably, my guilty feelings almost immediately morphed into a sense of determination to get the ball down somehow. This situation primed a dynamic in which my kid would observe my attempt to correct a self-generated problem, the positive outcome of which would likely elicit a misplaced sense of accomplishment. The situation was one in which failure was immediately reframed within a narrative trajectory of possible success.
To get the ball down would require persistence, exertion of energy, luck, and the expenditure of resources - time in particular. I made the decision to document my relationship to the ball in the tree. Having already thrown tennis balls hundreds of times at the ball stuck in the tree without success, I began filming subsequent attempts on super 8. In several attempts captured on film a tennis ball makes contact with the ball stuck in the tree, though none with enough force to dislodge the ball. I made the difficult decision to stop filming with super 8 after shooting 3 entire cartridges of film. I continued throwing tennis balls at the ball stuck in the tree for several days after I stopped filming. I threw tennis balls thousands of times more before finally knocking the ball stuck in the tree free in the evening of October 17, 2020. I was by myself when I finally knocked the ball loose, which seemed appropriate, and my feelings of accomplishment were mixed with a feeling of mourning for the desire1 I once felt for the ball stuck in the tree, which now lay at my feet in the yard.
1. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2004.) p. 300. “For it is clear here that man’s continued nescience of his desire is not so much nescience of what he demands, which may after all be isolated, as nescience of whence he desires.”