AFFIRMATION By Dick Croy Introduced by our instructor, the filmmaker rose from his seat in the front row

and, with what appeared to be several strands of baling wire pinioning his arms at his sides, climbed the three steps to the narrow stage in front of the movie screen; at the top he was caught by a moving chain which pulled him jerkily over to the podium. As soon as he was nudged in the back by one of the rods that projected at regular intervals from the flat, heavy chain rumbling across the stage floor, he quit moving his legs, using them only for support. Because his feet didnt slide well on the wooden floor, he kept having to make minor adjustments to maintain his balance, so that he resembled some sort of shuffling mechanical man. When he reached the podium, he was whipped around by the action of the chain and immediately began speaking in a dry inflectionless voice: My films are windows. Looking through them for the first time, I glimpsed the flow of cosmic energy through my mind. I saw that film translucent matrix for cellular ideas is a more lucid language of intuition than literature or philosophy. Its a glass house to their timbered structure; its walls do not obscure with wordwork.

He got no further. Several rows behind me, a man on the aisle whom we later identified at the Zen Master himself an amateur filmmaker shouted and jumped to his feet. He flung his arm contemptuously toward the screen and, at the same instant, the lights went out, the projector came to life in the booth behind us, and on the screen appeared the image of a window with one of those obvious Manhattan nighttime sets behind it. The Zen Master yelled again, an apparently Japanese word or phrase, and leaped into flight down the aisle. Five or six long strides took him to the foot of the proscenium where, leaving his feet, he hurtled headfirst across the stage and through the closed window with such force that glass shattered clear into the front rows of the auditorium.