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.

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).

they tied the knot in order not to forget.

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?

sleep in the shoes before you wear them.

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.

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.

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'