"When a
code enters a crisis; when already too few carry its references; when
reading it no longer yields meaning; what remains is to transform it,
from the interior of doubts, by means of renewed attention to direct
sources of nature: landscape, passing clouds, clearings, bodies,
movement, stability."
Plugging in the slide projector she says ‘lift up your shirt’. The
image of a swan projected onto my stomach. I stroke the swan. I say, ‘of
all the senses, I think touch is the most profound, the most
philosophical.’ A click, and the swan is replaced by a Giorgione
painting, the word airport, a sheet of musical notation, the Parthenon… A
friend of mine, who can hardly put two words together usually, wants to
video Dogen’s Shobogenzo - in fact a whole range of Buddhist teachings.
In the margins of the gentlest texts, some of them impossibly abstract,
I keep seeing the one word: ‘film’…
A true biography can sometimes be glimpsed in the tiniest phrase.
Which is to say your life is waiting for you everywhere. A drifting,
shining text, containing hundreds of paragraphs, thousands of sentences,
contains enough material for innumerable true biographies.
Sometimes
ambition is so low that it makes me happy just to feel that I
understand the title of a book or an essay. (We were talking about how
beautiful were the titles of a couple of essays by Barthes: ‘The Rustle
of Language’ and ‘The Grain of the Voice’.) And its not a proud
understanding - nothing particularly intellectual - just a feeling of
being able to make do with less and less, mixture of tiredness and
tenderness, and what the Japanese call, in a positive sense,
bewilderment.
"For in the end it is important to confine yourself within a
framework that will deepen your world, not impoverish it, help you to
create it, excluding all pretentiousness and efforts to be original."
Finally
there is this war, peaceful and yet so violent. And you said, ‘Right
now its more important than ever to try to have an interesting llife.
I’m not talking about going out partying every night or stuff like that,
but about something very gentle, like conversation, about taking care
over the tiniest things, paying attention to everything…’ I asked you
what would make a good conversation and you replied: ‘where two people,
freshly bathed, wearing clean clothes, in a simple room with white
walls, feeling sad but without bitterness, express what’s on their
minds…’
we used to write to each other, now we send each other
photographs. We used to agonize over the right words, now we worry about
the light.
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