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They pursue the wind, nay, labor in the very fire, and after all reap but vanity. Sugar cane tassels lined the roads like tourists, or hatemongers with flags. We drove over the bridge into Selma and it seemed that no one was there. She confused “bear” with “barren,” which is its opposite. To bear his memory was to carry it over their heads or to give it birth. The theater showed Selma and (on two screens) American Sniper. You could feel him in the film, like the boy in the mirror who came from another time. So many trailers about time travel; it's always spooky. You lose your girl mid-frame, your leader at a motel in Tennessee. The road was pretty, ribboning over rolling hills, dotted by trees and meadows. At the end we heard actual audio, as if cut off from visual time, the grainy images of men with truncheons, marchers in their hats. John Lewis's voice thickened in a single day. A brochure I picked up read, “the houses of Selma looked proudly on, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his supporters crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge.” LBJ, staring down George Wallace: “are you shitting me?!”

--17 January 2015