Driving to pick Leo up from doggy daycare, listening to a conversation on the CBC with a playwright turned director. His latest movie is winning some prestigious award. As I’m turning into the strip mall where the daycare is the program plays a clip from the previous year’s New Yorker Festival: “When you sit down to write something,” a man’s voice says, a new man. “How do you know if it’s a movie or a play?” 

“If it has four characters, and it’s set indoors, it’s a play,” the director replies. And then, after a pause, “—If it doesn’t have any donkeys or dogs.”

His response seems so logistical that the crowd bursts out laughing, surprised at how obvious an answer to this great man’s creative process could be. Or maybe they thought he was really joking, which could also be the case. I’ve seen plays with dogs and movies set indoors, but something in the way he says it makes me believe him. Or maybe it’s that I want to believe him, that somebody has found such pragmatic solutions for their art. 

As a curtesy I always wait outside the glass door, knowing the sound of me opening it will send all the dogs barking. Eventually the woman who runs the daycare sees me and smiles, then goes to get Leo. I love watching them return. Leo sitting at each door, obeying her, following her command cues, her body language, which is so different from mine but still he knows it. He always looks like such a puppy to me in these moments. As I unclip the daycare leash, scratching behind his ears, noticing how matted his coat is with the other dogs’ slobber, she gives me the routine summary of the day—who he played with, how he should be tired tonight after all the play-play. I get the impression the other dogs are finding him annoying—again, he was too busy during the 8 hours to take a nap, playing with one dog until they got tired then moving on to the next, cycling through the entire daycare this way. The staff has told me he’s hilarious to watch, but I know it’s a lot. 

“Bye-bye baby Leo!” 

“Bye-bye!” My voice is little and squeaky, baby Leo saying bye to the nice lady, on his way to the grassy patch by the dumpsters before the drive home, since he won’t do his business at daycare. 

The entire drive home I’m thinking about space, its narrative potential and its implicit narrative; the spaces we find ourselves in and the ones we create. I figure since we’re driving and there’s a dog in the back seat that this would be a movie, not a play, but it would be the slow atmospheric kind, the kind that rarely wins awards or makes money. The ‘empty scenes’ in Chantel Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, where Delphine Seyrig leaves the camera’s steady frame to open the refrigerator or to check the time, giving her actions a reality outside the eye of the film, and the way this manipulation of space gives Seyrig’s actions a true-to-life pace. Sometimes there’s sound to indicate what she’s doing, the muffled tones of a conversation or the shutting off of lights, but not always. The scene, of course, is never actually ‘empty,’ it’s just not occupied by what the viewer’s expectations may assume to be the central action, i.e. what the protagonist is doing. This is unintentionally happening all the time in books, where the action passes just outside the frame. Narration, or sometimes the thoughts that furnish a character’s interior space, occluding the window that looks onto the lives they have out there, in the world.  

Annie Ernaux’s narrator walking for hours through Florence, going into churches, to Santa Croce to see the partly erased frescoes—their fragmentation moving her, for in them she sees the gradual erasure of her memory and his, her lover’s, of her own fading story. “I couldn’t understand why people looked up the date and the history of each painting in their guidebook. Such things had nothing to do with their own lives. My approach to works of art was purely emotional.” 

I’m realizing my approach to the crystals and her approach to art are the exact same. Besides the feelings they rouse in me, I’ve never tried learning anything about them—their healing powers or what zodiac signs they’re meant to pair with. People always already knew this stuff from articles they’d read on the internet anyway. I mainly sweep the corners, dust display shelves, and in the window I engineer the crystals into colourful arrangements to collide with the heart. Standing outside looking in at my displays, I like to imagine the person who arranged them the way a passer-by might—glancing past the artifact to the process that made it be, what must be alive in a person to desire to dress a window with beauty, if anything. Outside, looking in at the coloured crystals and their beauty, I believe there is. But then when I’m back inside I’m not so sure.