tonight I dreamed a dream which wasn't mine. I can't remember the details. It wasn't mine. Someone said to me, 'I dreamed you were going to die a tragic death'. But the dream wasn't mine.

a note on narcissism, or an abrupt post-scriptum to an encounter

A compliment paid reveals but what one desires, and a criticism brings to light what, within oneself, one most fears or reviles. The truth of one's remark lies, perhaps, only in the varying degrees of the generosity of the soul.

There is no generosity without self-knowledge. For only one able to view the world as independent of one's own self -- not indifferent but invested with responsibility -- can be generous. Generosity requires courage: to view the world as independent of oneself means to have envisaged a world from which one is absent. And that is also the highest form of self-knowledge.

Narcissism is the opposite of generosity. For the narcissist, the world's existence stands in causal relation to the existence of the self. A narcissist views the world selectively: only that which sheds a positive light on his person is worth preserving. It is in the nature of narcissism to destroy everything else and, in doing so, to feel justified by safeguarding a part of himself.

... the deadline was a deafline... and this only made the matters worse!

07.11.09

                         solitary walk. Rather than
a crowd colorful explosions a rock band --
water winds round my waist:

if I had a Guide for each of my False steps
and satin sleeves to pass over their heads as I pass --

"the night is still young"
the wind lies in wait

his face lights up, purple, in an instant
I turn --

Time flies
multiply
slower
than
other flies.

Scripta manent verba volant.

"The written word stays, the spoken word flies," said the sage.

"The written word says, the spoken word lies," noted his disciple.

in the margins of a Peter Hutton film

The film tore                    just where
the glass      spilled                    Cleft
thinner than     a                mica leaf
Calmer than l                     A wraith-
note

Sung in slow            tide       Round
under my tongue               No more
but so?              Of winter blossoms
lace-leaf                        & thale cress
spoke

The sheet frayed               just where
the drop        fell                         Words
skip across water                  & catch
flame            White burns the crystal
rose

Asleep                          as deep as river
silt            Eyelashes & lime          Fall
now           or learn to fly          Sooth-
sight is breath you touch               Or
snow

The ice broke                      just where
the wing           stirred            The sun
ached     in its sheath             of cirrus
plume      Frost-leaf             & lucent
stone

Feather upon my lip              A voice
parts wisps                                 of hair
& lulls the wave                  Ice floats
upstream              Ink-white the river
wrote

A warm evening in the Heath. Gossamer bridges between blades of dry grass. The oak above my head alive with the flutter of wings, bird quarrels and terrors. The sun going down behind the line of trees: shadows grow taller and cold. I bike over the hilltop. A green woodpecker , hidden in the grass, takes fright at the approach of two large wheels, and rests on a sunlit tree trunk. Colored fungi grow in secret. Rare happiness: to desire to be nowhere else.

"so much insomnia, and what more do I know of humanity?"

dream phrase:

green pearl hunters

the subversive nature of poetry: the last wealth in poverty, the resistance of grass in a storm

the hour when windows turn into mirrors

Quitter la ville: quitter l'absence de quelqu'un qui n'est nulle part aussi absent qu'ici. Est-ce pour la chercher, cette absence, ailleurs? Ou, au contraire, s'agit-il de la quitter, elle aussi; l'abandonner comme la ville, et à la ville, afin de chercher, plutôt, l'absence de cette absence?

Ce qui manque, c'est une présence, dit-on. Une présence qui désormais hante les rêves; une présence absente, à peine quittée au réveil, mais dont ne persiste aucun souvenir sauf celui du manque.

Quitter la ville: s'en absenter. Abandonner l'absence de quelqu'un qui n'est aussi absent nulle part ailleurs. Ici, l'absence est la plus profonde, puisque la douleur qu'elle provoque reste toujours dans l'intimité de cette présence qui n'est plus.

Ailleurs œuvre déjà une autre absence: l'absence de soi à qui manquait une présence; l'oubli du temps et de l'espace de l'absence douloureux. Le vent caresse les feuilles blanches, et la plume écrit en givre.

Je vais quitter la ville. Mon absence y restera encore un instant, inaperçue de personne.

An imp of flânerie must have prompted us to follow a woman on rue de la Volta through a shabby unlocked door. I thought it would lead into one of those secret courtyards, so frequent in Paris. Instead, we found ourselves at an AA meeting, held at the headquarters of a Communist party. Gathered in a room lit only by tea candles, round a long table covered with white table cloth, were middle-aged Americans, intent on a female voice which seemed to flow from a speaker. Soothing and hypnotic, the voice guided the group through a series of facial exercises: "Raise your brows as high as you can," "Now shut your eyes as tight as possible, now open them as wide as you can." It also described the sensations that the participants should feel at each step: the alteration of tension and relaxation, in their temples, or in the corners of their mouths. On the table, there were white cards with cliché sayings printed on them: "Keep an open mind," "First thing first"... and plates with barely visible cookies, and pitchers of presumably non-alcoholic punch. "This is a cult," A. whispered, none too softly. "Let's go," I said, unsure how much longer A. would want to observe this strange ceremony. "Let's go," she answered in a tone suggesting we were here against our will.

fatal accident: unpremeditated suicide

pain is always experienced as an injustice

La parole des vrais amis est comme de l'air frais à quelqu'un qui a mal à respirer. Parole, poésie: la santé... Est-ce qu'il y a vraiment des corps si robustes qu'ils n'ont pas besoin de l'un pour pouvoir profiter de l'autre?

(from a letter to a friend)

Two sources of writing: the urgent response to an experience (which, regardless of its apparent nature, is an experience of beauty); or the patience of the pen moving across the page, waiting for something, a shard of beauty, to appear. The plentiful source and the arid source. Both equally invaluable.

On attend. Il devrait arriver quelque chose qui résoudrait l'attente, lui donnerait un sens et annulerait le mur, ou au moins découvrirait qu'il n'est pas insurmontable. Un événement, un accident, quelque chose, on se contenterait de peu, sans que l'on puisse deviner ce que cela pourrait être. On écrit donc en attendant mieux, sans savoir ce qui viendra, pour être là quand cela se produira, pour occuper l'attente et rester en éveil. Si on cessait d'écrire, on est sûr que cela n'arriverait pas. On ne voit pas comment, mais on s'accroche à l'espoir que l'événement surviendra aussi puissamment que le mur, un jour, s'est élevé, devant. Il faudrait que cette paroi disparaisse comme elle est venue. Alors, on se souviendra surtout du mur comme d'un temps mort. On respirera à nouveau. On respire déjà mieux de peut-être, un jour, respirer davantage et se trouver dans un espace délié. On respire déjà mieux d'écrire que quelque chose déliera. On écrit qu'on respire déjà mieux, mais ce n'est pas ce qui doit venir. En attendant, on écrit pour respirer un peu.

~ Antoine Emaz, Poème du mur

il y a des êtres incapables de sortir d'eux-mêmes: même pour aimer. ainsi, ils attendent en vain que quelque chose leur arrive, vienne du dehors, qui percerait une issue.

un jour de pluie, le miracle passe inaperçu.

chemin étroit,
au bord des larmes,
n'aura
jamais
aucun raccourci

Guillotine makes a good headline.

NO COMMENT

a thieving dream

I was a thief's "girlfriend"--an "honorable thief's"--and was bound to him by respect and a high code of loyalty. Vague scenes of hotel lobbies or shopping mall window displays, with models (not sure whether live women or mannequins [interchangeable in Fr]). The "thief" had no physical presence in the dream. Suddenly, however, I became aware that the police were after him. A state of crisis. Yet I knew exactly what I had to do. I got into a car, a large 1970s vehicle, and told the driver to go as fast as he could. The driver didn't think this was the best idea: we could be stopped by the police, if only for a traffic violation. But he did what he was told. Indeed, a clumsy police van was tailing us: it resembled a boxy old-style ambulance. As we neared a large bank, which for some reason I considered as the least likely, and hence the safest place for a fugitive to hide, I told the driver to rapidly pull over and park. The police passed us in their pursuit. I needed to make a quick money withdrawal and give it to the thief, along with another important item: his leather jacket which I had been holding all that time. A successful escape was guaranteed.

*

I am not too fond of dream interpretation because, most often, I think that the visual qualities trump any psychological interpretation. This dream, however, is banal enough to sustain some analysis. It seems to offer some comfort amidst the uncertainties of daily life; to counter a sense of things being up in the air, undecided, undecidable, by presenting a simple story with a problem and a rational, swiftly implemented solution. The fact that the quick-minded action is in the service of another has nothing unusual about it: it is when faced with other people's problems that one is able to think most rationally and be most effective. The two props--the warm leather jacket and money--pertain perhaps to my own situation: the basic worries of food & shelter. The need to escape--escape the confinement, institutions (banks, police, ambulance)...--is perhaps also mine. And if we are indeed all the characters in our dreams, what kind of a thief am I?

il pleut et j'écoute tomber des petits soleils

the rustling of syllables, a serpent in the grass: a fleck of color, immobility and rapid flight

an impish dream

The heavy door was locked and students were at the mercy of a wicked school mistress, robed in grey like a nun, yet whose dress combined strange austerity with Victorian lace. She ordered everyone to climb the stairs. I was among the students, yet without feeling I belonged there. The stairwell was made of wood: beautiful carved balustrades, tall columns at each bend, warm wooden paneling with painted motifs high up by the ceiling. There were no windows and I couldn't tell the source of light, yet the stairwell was not dark but bathed in uniform orange light that made the wood seem even warmer. The climb was interminable, and I didn't enjoy the beauty of the carvings or the wooden lacework. Even though I wasn't tired, each step filled me with despair: it would never end. And when it seemed that we might be closer to the top, the stairs would suddenly descend a flight, only to start climbing up again. As if we were trapped in an Escher drawing.

Finally, we reached a landing where a large set of glassed doors swung open. The stairs, however, continued on, and three students kept on climbing, as if in a daze, while the rest of the "class" walked out through the door. I stayed on the landing. I knew that the stairs led into a trap and I needed to rescue the three girls.

Suddenly, one of them tumbled back down. She was Asian and I seemed to know her in the dream, as I did other students, although there were no faces familiar from real life. The girl cowered on the floor and buried her face in her hands. She cried out in a moaning voice, unintelligibly describing the horrors she'd been through, then asked: "How long have I been away?"

"Only a moment," I answered. "No, no," she moaned again, "it's been a hundred years, a hundred years." I noticed a school notebook on the floor next to her. I opened it: it was a diary she kept while away: it was filled cover to cover, and backwards again using any available space.

At that moment, an imp appeared. He was a rather short, perhaps 4ft tall man, with a face that was neither ugly nor handsome, dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. I do not remember our exact conversation. I made a bargain with him and agreed to go to his world in exchange for the lives of the two other girls. He touched my arm, and the stairwell disappeared. We were now in a painting: a world painted with pastel crayons, in vivid reds and yellows, with visible traits of sketched lines and strokes. The imp was now a devilish character, his face a red mask with lips curved downwards and ending in a small half-spiral in either corner of his mouth. He also had two sets of horns. His appearance didn't make him any more frightening. Rather, there was a sense he merely adapted his looks to the surroundings and by putting on this devilish mask he was playing with his audience's expectations. The two other girls were there, as well. The imp was now very powerful and able to control our bodies. I attempted to reason with him: "You could easily kill us," I said, "but if we're dead, there won't be anyone to admire how powerful you are."

I am not sure whether my argument worked. Suddenly, I was back in the "real world." The imp had been arrested and was now sitting in the back of a police car. In the front, a policeman and a policewoman were asking him questions. The man was trying to convince his partner to be less gentle with their prisoner because it "was the most evil creature that ever lived." The woman, on the other hand, had hard time believing that. The imp wasn't either a man nor a cartoon devil anymore, but a beautiful woman dressed as a prostitute. He easily played with the policewoman's feelings. In a sugared, uncanny cadence, he said: "Oh, now I understand, thank you for rescuing me!"

I wasn't really present at the scene. It was as if I were an omniscient observer: able to see the imp from the front seat of the car, as well as the police car from the outside. Now the car door was pulled shut and I was looking inside through the back passenger window. The imp turned towards me and once more I saw the male face. He smiled slyly and said: "They won't hold me long."

A beginning is a rare thing.

Rip what you sew.

dream of tongues

On an ocean shore, or rather, a small bay: one can see both the calm open sea, and what looks like a narrow tongue of sand separating it from the bay. A Wild Girl makes her way across the shallow water, tearing off her clothes. Countless animals, mostly grizzly bears, approach from the other side, trying to reach the mainland. The Girl inadvertently vexes one of the bears, and might have gotten killed if the bear weren't driven by some strange instinct towards the shore. The Girl, however, is utterly unaware of the danger. She reaches the sandy peninsula, naked, and starts running madly across the desert. The dunes are becoming more and more varied. Ephemeral caves appear, hollowed out by the wind, and vanish, buried by the shifting sand. There is one that remains in the landscape suddenly become firm. The cavity is the size of an old hollow oak: two people could easily stand in it. Someone comes and hangs a jar from the ceiling. The glass seems to have been blackened by smoke and the receptacle gives a rather sinister impression. The Girl approaches it with curiosity. At that moment I can see her eyes, but not her whole figure. Inside the jar, asleep, there hangs a small bat. It is visibly growing and its wings are able to extend outside the glass through two narrow slits, previously imperceptible. Yet the animal remains trapped, and I wonder whether it has enough air to breathe, and whether someone will come to its rescue.
In front of the cave, there are dead bodies of a few other bats, still trapped in their jars. I realize that this is some sort of a cruel experiment which intends to test whether a bat is able to learn the human tongue, and which, from the very start, was doomed to fail: that is why there is never anyone to record the results.
The bat awakes. It becomes aware of its prison. Moving with mysterious determination, it perfoms an incredible maneuver: by agitating the jar from within, it manages to roll it along the vertical wall of the cave, and then let it swing back and break against the frame of the cave's entrance.
Outside, there is a tree. In its shade and as if formed of the shadow, the bat, standing erect, much larger now, speaks. Clearly articulated syllables can be heard, there is no doubt about it, for the very first time. It's a new language: beautiful, untamed...

Ładny dzień (A Nice Day) by Jan Jakub Kolski

How and why certain things make their way into our lives is mysterious. That they come to occupy an important place in it might not perhaps be even as marvelous as the fact that the place had not existed there before, and yet as soon as it had opened up, 'before' ceased to exist.

*

Impossible to stop watching Jan Jakub Kolski's A Nice Day. The 17-minute film is a day-long night-long poem, with an intricate syntax of simple words, image-motifs, monochrome narratives, sound particles... How to write, not on it but in its presence? how to muster enough silence so as not to speak in its stead? To write, perhaps, as one laughs, or weeps. The way one waits.

*

...the tear of love and forgiveness sweet,
And submission to death beneath his feet;
The tear shall melt the sword of steel,
And every wound it has made shall heal.

(William Blake, The Grey Monk)

[Draft. Fragments]

Within the circle of the flame, within the circle of rain, I weep, and I burn.

Your face guards the trace of every tear. My eyes caress the sacred script.

My breast swells in the wake of your plow: fragrant earthfolds.

You draw liquid darkness in your pail, and pour pearling light over my flesh.

Rye grains in your pocket rattling softly like pennies. In your hands, they turn into birds.

You braid silence into your hair. Its whisper opens my dreams.

I know by heart the furrows of your field.

Z podziękowaniami dla T. za ładny dzień

Films by Peter Hutton (Cinéma du réel, Centre Pompidou)

(1)

"The world within reach": these words, uttered by Gaston Méliès in reference to the movie camera, are carved onto a little plastic plaque attached to Peter Hutton's camera. They are synonymous with another phrase: "to inhabit the world poetically." The poetic camera is not a "window onto the world"; it doesn't open onto the foreign, the unfamiliar, onto a promise of exotic variety amidst quotidian tediousness. The world within reach is just that: what of the world is within one's reach. In French, Gaston Méliès might have said, perhaps, "le monde à la portée de la main." Yet it is not the hand that reaches. The hand grabs. The hand connects the world and the mouth.
Reaching the world, yet abandoning touch to the realm of desire, rending desire for that world within reach, the camera, always fixed, embraces a world fragment, as arbitrary as life, and records its ephemeral form.

Elect a passing thought as your abode. A small patch of sunlight traveling across the mountain slope, now swelling into an outcry of color. The bleached façade of a house risks being splintered in the blaze. A white pang. The wind patches the cloud.

(2)

The image is silent. It is not a pure or an essential image. Merely an image within reach. A world apart from words. Where words remember, the image forgets. Imagines forgetting. You who are looking at it, forget already. Forget yourself in the image.

Great distance and great proximity free objects of their contours. Forgotten, un-named, they forge the image.

Electric flickers, shards of moonlight, shivering screen of muddy water. Nothing else.

The gesture of a grey hull suspended in grey haze: a steel deck, the tip of a mast, adrift in white noise. Or yet: the dark wall of the woods, separating twilight and the river, grazed by a silver gleam: the advance of a prow without a ship.

The image is silent and nearly still. Movement reduced to slight oscillation, to a momentary intervention, or to a faint transition in mood, takes film to the limit of photography.

(3)

Peter Hutton said, half-jokingly: "Feel free to fall asleep during the screening. My films are kind of made for sleeping. I might fall asleep myself."

Contemplation of the film image puts one in a state of reverie, its intensity akin to the alertness experienced in a dream; on the verge of falling asleep, yet as if from within the dream, where slipping into unconsciousness would be to awake, unsure of the direction of the passage.

What does the image dream about?

The camera transforms the world fragment into a dream image. In that sense, it is not a document, mindful of the historical context it hopes to expose or subvert. The image possesses its own temporality that is the loss of any sense of time. Timelessness of the ephemeral.

(4)

Silent, the image ceases to be a representation of the world. It is what it imagines. Silent, the viewer becomes absorbed in the image the way one gets lost in one’s thoughts. In the darkness of the movie theater, you are turned inside out like a glove. The image of your thoughts, which are not yours, only clouds, passing, unwritten. Blank thoughts, grey thoughts, forgotten even before they are formulated. Entirely image. The cinema within. The within outside.

Cease naming things. The sky below the rugged crest, the sea above the fog, the island beneath its shadow. Passage from grey-blue to black-grey to green-white and black. Grain, rock, vapor, mist, sand. Brushed, smudged, torn. Granite tattered by the sky’s edge. Land ruffled by the wind. Clouds folded and solidified in twilight.

perhaps observing a child in a library

Aimless life. A simple statement. Even as in defiance of metaphors a red oil crayon held awkwardly and as if by accident traces discontinuous curves, lines, zigzags, elipses, indifferent to the distinction between the paper and the table, disrupting any continuity, and then breaks, tearing the paper, the tear and the break do not mean death. A concentration of saliva exacerbates the redness of the crayon. The paper is rumpled, about to be thrown away, but then comes a change of mind: the rubbing of the drop of saliva arouses curiosity. The paper is folded with meticulous care, old creases smoothed out, as much as it is possible. It is then, perhaps, that a sudden desire is felt: to taste papercrayon, red papercrayon on the tongue. It takes time. Perhaps longer than a family dinner. Impossible to compare. Papercrayon is not food. Food means eating-to-grow. An experiment. Papercrayon tastes exactly like papercrayon. The experiment might have to be repeated endlessly. Or abandoned. There are some red marks on the table and no hint of an image. It's time to go.

who dissertateth shall lose his fondest marbles

"Le matin de la pensée" (in reference to Heraclitus), "le matin de la civilisation" (commonplace). Useless mornings. Petty nostalgia sanctified by linguistic cliché for a time when a finger pointing at the sun directed the gaze toward something previously unseen.

dream

i agreed to handle a snake. the snake was deadly, poisonous, despite its age and the fact that it could move using only two vertebrae. in order to transfer it, they injected it with a paralyzing agent. it was going to wear off within 10 minutes. i held the snake at the end of a stick and transferred it into a large plastic bag. there was some soil at the bottom, with plants growing out of it. but you can't expect a snake to survive in an airtight bag. so i left an opening. the bag was in my apartment [not any i ever lived in], in a room resembling a greenhouse, most of it overgrown by bamboos, ivy, mosses. the snake climbed out of the bag and remained still in the air for a moment, straight as a bamboo stalk, and then, as if frightened by the surrounding plants, made a U-turn in the air and crept back into the bag. i dialed the number of the guy who was supposed to come and pick it up. it had all been a scam, no one was going to come. i was afraid of the snake: the tiniest drop of its venom could kill instantly. i would never sleep again. and yet, at that precise moment when it coiled back into the bag, i felt an inexplicable tenderness towards it.

for Alina O.

for Marcel Duchamp