Sunday, July 11, 2010

at five o'clock in the morning, everything is still and the streets are empty. that's what one would expect: yet there is a life that goes on: crows cross the street with their resolute step, approach the cars chosen well in advance, call out to each other their morning news, sit on rooftops and adjust tv antennas to their favorite programs. unlike humans, crows are never in a rush. they pass from garden to garden unhurriedly, enter unfamiliar kitchens and enjoy quiet breakfasts at the table, peck through the morning paper, and scrupulously balance their accounts. at five o'clock in the morning, people are entirely unnecessary.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

If one can say of breath that it is well-articulated, like a word when it is pronounced with clear diction, then what I heard in my ear, as if someone were leaning over it after I had been lying awake for quite some time, waiting for the sun to come up, was a single, well-articulated exhalation. I could almost recognize the sound of voice that seemed to reside in the breath's inaudible wake. Yet there was no word; only a fleeting presence, overheard, intimately sensed, and inexplicably absent.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Drugstore hypocrisy:
 
For sale at Boots pharmacy: DOUBLE FACED PADS.


Saturday, June 19, 2010

as long as I hold on to a poem, I am certain I won't drown

Monday, June 07, 2010

l'anniversaire d'une disparition

Monday, May 31, 2010

Encounter: sitting in a dip by a grassy path, a fawn. Not much larger than an adult rabbit. Motionless and unafraid. I sat down on the path next to him. His nose wrinkled up, the skin like a child's, bare and pruned, and dark. I reached out and petted his face. We sat there for quite some time. Then he got up, turned about a few times, as if hesitating, then disappeared in a knee-high field of nettles.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

dream

I am standing in a room, facing a wall. To my left, a large window. It's dark outside, but the windows have not turned into mirrors. Outside, it's darkness and fog. The windows seem semi-opaque. Without turning my head, I can see a large black bird approach the glass, its wings outstretched, not flapping, but merely extended, keeping it suspended in that fog. The bird's beak is so close to the window that it seems it's already passed through it, into the room. No, this must be an illusion. The windows become insubstantial, as if made of that fog, and are billowing like a dark grey, gauzy curtain. But when I turn my head and look straight at them, they are solid glass. I face the wall again, and continue seeing the windows distinctly, as if they were in front of me. The corner of my eye is a prism that alters the appearance of the world.

Without a sound, the bird's body traverses the window pane in slow motion. As soon as it's in the room, the bird becomes a real bird, making real bird-noises. I recognize it: it's a crow-eagle. Black as a crow, large as an eagle, and very gentle. I have already befriended it. It lets me plunge my fingers deep into the long soft feathers on the top of its head. I caress its beak. 

A dog rushes into the room with its slobbery canine excitement. It wants to sniff the bird, play with it, jumps up and down. I had no idea I had a dog, but now that it's here, its presence is natural and familiar. But I'm afraid that it will harm the bird, and I chase the dog away to protect it.

Now I notice a monkey who's observed the entire scene. I had no idea I had a monkey - but its presence is as natural as the dog's. The monkey is jealous of my fondness for the bird and, like a disturbed child, starts banging its head against the wall. I am heartbroken, and feel that somehow I had betrayed it. Why can't my animals live in harmony? 

The dream ends with a feeling of helplessness, and of love I feel for all these animals (combined with a profound knowledge of each of them).

Friday, May 28, 2010

they tied the knot in order not to forget.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

rêve

Ils ont fait sortir un livre de mes poèmes. J'en étais tant étonnée comme si c'était vrai. Qui a pu faire tant d'effort de retrouver tous ces poèmes dont moi-même j'avais oublié l'existence? Pourtant, la publication m'a déplût. Le papier était gris-jaune, le genre qui vieillit entre les mains. Couverture souple, grise-bleuâtre, avec un dessin assez simple représentant une fenêtre. 

*

Mais n'était-ce un autre rêve: publier sur papier éphémère, sur des feuilles d'un journal, et retrouver les poèmes abandonnés sur un banc, les voir voler avec le vent, s'abattre avec la pluie, se dissoudre dans un flac, se décomposer en d'autres poèmes, ceux du vent, de la pluie, des pas précipités des gens?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

sleep in the shoes before you wear them.

Sunday, April 04, 2010


Strong fragrance of lilies fills the space of the room. It is more tangible than my own presence. Being here makes little sense and bears no relation to where I was a year ago. Or a week ago. The radical tectonic displacement makes it difficult to sustain the idea of a single person. And what if one is not a single person?

When one travels, the speed of movement and the temporal proximity of departure and arrival that belie the distance in space, are at the source of the sensation that the journey gains upon one's own thoughts and feelings. Because one feels "the same" (Rousseau), the question arises, quite simple, perhaps a simpleton's question: "what is the difference between 'here' and 'there'?" Since "I" experience myself as the same, can anyone guarantee that my location has, indeed, changed? The question is quickly tailed by a suspicion: "if the place is different, perhaps so am I?" As soon as I manage to convince myself that the journey was real, that I traveled considerable distance, I begin to feel my way around that alterity which germinated within me, all by itself, and which, as if with a sharp blade, separates me from that other self that must have stayed behind. The other, with her feelings, and thoughts, and memories of the other place. Here, I cannot remember anything at all. I am empty. The journey has produced a doubling of the self; I no longer feel "the same":  instead, I am filled with ghost memories whose intensity and coloration remain, here, inaccessible.

When I travel to places where I once lived, my memories revive (Proust). Their re-emergence is not necessarily a source of joy because, despite their vividness to the point of repetition, the possibilities of the past moment had been sealed off.

Curiously, this experience brings to mind an image from one of those shows I watch when I'm too tired after work to do anything else: a sci-fi series Fringe. There are two parallel and nearly identical worlds which, through some portals, come from time to time in contact with each other. However, according to the laws of physics, they can never coexist in the same space and time. A 'space-quake' occurs, causing the two worlds to overlap. A catastrophe: the molecules of a building and all its contents, from one and the other world, collide and interpenetrate. All this lasts a few seconds. When the matter solidifies, the floors of the building are covered with corpses of "monsters": people with two heads and no arms, people with several limbs, etc. There is one survivor: a man impaled by a supporting pillar. Although he appears dead, he is still crying for help. The FBI agents lift up his shirt and discover another face, that of his double from the other world, calling for his wife from the other world (for in this one, he was unmarried).

This sudden coexistence of two parallel beings belonging to two separate worlds seems as impossible as co-presence of memories from two different places from both ends of a journey. One looks in the mirror and ends up resigning oneself to the commonplace conviction that, because one still looks the same, one is the same person.

Why not hold on to the reality of forgetting, to the feeling of having left a part of oneself elsewhere, with or without the possibility of returning to it? Stronger than the sameness of my person is the reality of multiple ruptures, breaks within that illusory solidity of the self.


Monday, March 08, 2010

Film-related posts will now appear on Kinematografika.


This blog will remain dedicated to random thoughts, dreams, residues. To sanity and insanity. Mental images. Forgettings.



Monday, February 22, 2010


just this: a bunch of tulips -- seven for the bedroom, one in the study (the British are odd to sell even-numbered bunches); strong mint tea in a glass teapot, kept warm by the flame of a tea candle; an orange tea-cup cradled in its orange saucer on top of an orange blanket; Wojciech Has's 'Szyfry'

Monday, February 15, 2010


devant un film, j'ai l'impression d'être devant quelque chose vivant. Est-ce seule la question du mouvement? Flux des images?

il y a une présence: il y a une vie dont dépend mon 'je', en ce moment, et qui dépend de moi, de quelque sorte.

qui sait, d'ailleurs, lequel passe?

Monday, February 08, 2010

- It's not your day...

- Then whose day is it?

Saturday, February 06, 2010

peut-être je me suis mise dans un trou, sans moyens et sans promesses, dans la privation de la beauté même, afin de me faire m'en sortir par la seule voie qui me reste accessible: la voie d'encre

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

dream


Crouching on a balcony with my father who is observing something in the distance through binoculars. I can't see that far, and am looking up in the branches of the tree right above. A bird: sky-blue, the color children paint the sky, with white and navy-blue spots on its belly; then another: with a smooth, yellow crest on top of its head; and another: with a fine, hooked beak; and then a larger one: like a hawk. The hawk eats a finch. It happens so quickly, I doubt I'd even seen the finch. Then a spotted woodpecker. I know them all by name. And then I notice a large green parrot*. I recognize him immediately as the protagonist. All other birds have taken off. Now the parrot is on the ground, as if center stage. Parched, sun-colored ground. The parrot strolls around proudly. He has large eyes, encircled by small dark petals that make them look like stars. Another bird appears. At first, I thought it was a woodpecker; it is so much smaller. But it is a female parrot. The two start a courtship dance.

A Russian dancer, dressed in bright red robes, embroidered with white, yellow, and black thread, joins the dance. The robes resemble a Japanese kimono. The sleeves are wide and square, and so stiff -- and yet the sheen betrays the softness of a fine fabric -- that the dancer can move his arms like wings. He tries to lure the male parrot. His body is parallel to the ground; his arms move barely a few inches above it. The position is impossible. Incredible concentration. The female parrot withdraws. The male parrot starts to imitate the movements of the Russian dancer. In the final figure, they both incline their heads to the ground, with their wings and arms outstretched. Sublime silence.

They do not rise for applause, nor to greet each other, nor to continue the dance. They just lie there. Now hunters come, and with long spears pick at the flesh of the bird and the dancer. I am grief-stricken: they can't be dead. I see a hunter pick a choice morsel of the flesh, as if he'd just deveined a shrimp. I shout to chase them away, to make them stop, to awaken the dancers and bring them back to life.

There is a war that goes on in the distance, and now I notice distant smoke released by freshly fired shotguns. We have been looking at a battlefield all along.



* The only part of 'daily' residue: there are small green parrots in Hampstead Heath. I photographed one a few weeks ago, and I think of them often.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

she wrote her first snow draft