Day 27

I wanted to make a movie of nothing but credits and thanks, a long list from leads, extras and grips to script consultants and set designers, but my carefully constructed life collapsed, as does anything built by us.

Years went by and I came back to the miracle of cinema. Perhaps my list of credits and thanks may begin again.

My first film was of a woman born to sand and barrenness. The intensity of her will, the insistence of her whole being upon an impossible happiness sparked in her a complete rebellion. She saw with the brightest lucidity the future she was offered, rose up to smash it with a No that echoes nearly a century later. I thought it best to evoke her, rather than depict her, and the windmills at the Altamont Pass against a blue sky, among high, rolling hills of yellow grass, with their white blades singing and humming spoke nothing if not the language of Desire.

This film here was made at the bottom of the world, and the ghosts that inhabit it are the ghosts of unborn films. I picked them up in my Chevy lowrider as a sped across the desert and mountains and listened to their stories, and they are recounted here as randomly as stones move across the dry lake beds.

What is this new elsewhere, and through what maleficent operations do our characters arise from these mountains in shreds, from this impoverished landscape? The thick mucus of Time is shed in waves of heat until nothing remains but the residue of an aberrant consciousness. Self or selves in this elsewhere, and a convict still from the prison of memory. This desert must be lived in the way it is reflected in the wanderer’s pools of amnesia, for now unstirred.

He tells himself such movement cannot be free. What memories survive the need for sustenance are those he is loathe to consume. To wander in the desert is to change space, and these spaces came at a price. For what and to whom does he owe this apparent uselessness? Words from another elsewhere tell him to maintain this ruined facade of integrity despite the difficulty of living continuously in a land where those who feel Time are destroyed by it’s promises.

It was when I was young that Bruno had told me of the shadow of ideas, and Benjamin had said that heaven was just like this, only slightly different. It was Mary who had asked of what she did not believe in, “is thy servant a dog?”

Life has fled in the face of Existence, retracted, as it were, into the objects that lent it form. Inert and motionless, it’s symbols remain trapped within so many dead things. The now melancholy strains of a child’s, song of wonder hum the half forgotten hymns. 

A space that has suffered under the tyranny of Time appears to lay wasted, it’s anatomy transfigured into a mass grave. As the temporal lacks patience, it does not trouble to disguise it’s crimes, and the formerly occupied space becomes ruins that enforce quietude and stillness. Here movement is restricted to what crawls, slithers, or is dependent on the passing winds and breezes. Such stillness is a law that keeps Time from ever returning.

At a very young age I discovered that it was a ruined object, or rather, in the ruins of them that their essence is perceived. Freed of form, the poetry of a thing bleeds, and if you are fortunate enough to know the language of the inanimate, you may hear it sigh it’s sonnets among ruins.

In a space of no geographical fact, within I find a landscape of events, where the sky is a mirror that my soul is projected upon, and the space between things is imagination itself. Written everywhere are cryptic letters or symbols that lead me to imaginings that are not my own. I can get my bearings only by deciphering this language of desire, then I find myself situated in sacred space. What is written in this language has no authors, it comes from nowhere but leads everywhere, and my footprints are swallowed by the earth with each preceding step.

Here time and I enter one another simultaneously. Two wounds, brothers, or lovers. The propulsion of time through my veins will one day consume me. Things speak to me, ghosts and the unborn ride the current of time in my veins, intermingling, thereby destroying what it is that carries them to and from my heart, and I remember that there is a geography of the marvelous, and with my map of symbols in hand I know I will be admitted into these heavens.

Time is waiting within the hour that is referred to as four a.m., but remains outside, removed, or parallel. I see it more in terms of a distance than of a time; tomorrow is east of me. Color is some sort of herald. An angel is a messenger, or the message. My grandfather brought back from a mountain a block of obsidian that must have fallen from this sky that was just as black. The message is in the fluidity of change, as the sky heats it's alchemal oven this obsidian melts into the violence of purple, a bruise, then pastels of reds, blood, and finally from a primal black stone comes gold, the daylight which invites or insists on the immolation of secrets. The ghosts of dreams evaporate from the light let in as the sleeper opens his eyes, or flee into shadow, awaiting the movement that comes from the vastness of night.