Visual Poems 

Maria Fee

Recently viewing Terrence Malick’s visually stunning, Tree of Life, I revisited another visual treasure, Julian Schnabel’s poetic film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Diving Bell and the Butterflybeautifully conveys the human capacity to create and generate art despite tragic and confining perimeters through the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, jet setter and fashion editor of Elle magazine. After a stroke leaves him paralyzed with Lock-in Syndrome, Bauby grapples with the meaning of life. However, Bauby still possesses control of one body part, an eyelid. It is through the means of blinking, Bauby slowly communicate his story.

After such accomplishments do we dare utter excuses for not making art? The Diving Bell and the Butterfly discloses how our particular vantage point of the world must be shared, even if the sole instrument toward production is the blink of an eye. To work through brokenness is to honor and own our humanness; this is heroic poetry.Tree of Life offers the same message, the cosmic proportions of our spiritual journey, comes through the broken, small and mundane; poetry in motion.

Poetry constructs a defense against despair, and it takes battling despondency for Jean-Dominique Bauby to realize not all human actions had been taken from him, he continues to own and utilize memory and imagination. Memory allows him to cherish relationships and past events—the sensory world he so took for granted—while imagination offers the freedom to visit these moments with a fresh perspective. For Bauby memory becomes aligned with the intrepid explorer clad in an ancient diving bell suit; an ambivalent symbol for both discovery (about himself, the world, his relationships) and claustrophobic confines. The butterfly is the flight of imagination; it signifies incomprehensible hope, beauty and the true freedom our souls and bodies long for.

Schnabel’s film draws on visual and linguistic metaphors to produce a tale of a man and his physical constraints that also relates to our lives. Unfamiliar hardships—the diving bell or personal constrains of our lives--together with the winged butterfly of our imaginations, allow for murky-watered journeys in under-visited and unfamiliar places. The film makes a case for beauty and creativity and how they sanction and hallow our existence.

If our tendency is to think outside of our bodies, as some suggest, Schnabel accomplishes an act of incarnation by placing us inside a body. The camera skirts by eyelashes to view the world through Bauby’s good eye. We, thereby, are forced to enter into the “skin” of Jean-Dominique Bauby. Within his metaphorical shoes we join the groping action of human creativity that strives to make sense of the world. Likewise, as we watch and hear Bauby “grope” to find import within his meaningless body, we too begin to discover the implications of our broken and encumbered lives. Much like Tree of Life, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly celebrates life, and that’s poetry, too.

Be a poem.