Sans soleil

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The first image he told me about

was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

He said that for him it was the image of happiness

and also that he had tried several times to link it

to other images, but it never worked.

He wrote me:
one day I'll have to put

it all alone at the beginning of a film

with a long piece of black leader;

if they don't see happiness in the picture,

at least they'll see the black.

He wrote:
I'm just back from Hokkaido,

the Northern Island.

Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane,

others take the ferry:

waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.

Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war:

night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments

of war enshrined in everyday life.

He liked the fragility of those moments

suspended in time.

Those memories whose only function it being

to leave behind nothing but memories.

He wrote:
I've been round the world several times

and now only banality still interests me.

On this trip I've tracked it with

the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.

At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

He used to write me from Africa.

He contrasted African time to European time,

and also to Asian time.

He said that in the 19th century mankind

had come to terms with space,

and that the great question of the 20th was

the coexistence of different concepts of time.

By the way, did you know that there are emus

in the le de France?

He wrote me that in the Bijags Islands

it's the young girls who choose their fiances.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo

there is a temple consecrated to cats.

I wish I could convey to you the simplicity

the lack of affectation

of this couple who had come to place

an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery

so their cat Tora would be protected.

No she wasn't dead, only run away.

But on the day of her death no one

would know how to pray for her,

how to intercede with death so that

he would call her by her right name.

So they had to come there,

both of them, under the rain,

to perform the rite that would repair

the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me:
I will have spent my life trying to

understand the function of remembering,

which is not the opposite of forgetting,

but rather its lining.

We do not remember, we rewrite memory

much as history is rewritten.

How can one remember thirst?

He didn't like to dwell on poverty,

but in everything he wanted to show

there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model.

A world full of bums, of lumpens,

of outcasts, of Koreans.

Too broke to afford drugs,

they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk.

This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes

from the glories of the center city,

a character took his revenge on society

by directing traffic at the crossroads.

Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake

that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.

I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi.

It's the kind of place that allows people

to stare at each other with equality;

the threshold below which every man is

as good as any otherand knows it.

He told me about the Jetty on Fogo,

in the Cape Verde islands.

How long have they been there waiting for the boat,

patient as pebbles but ready to jump?

They are a people of wanderers,

of navigators, of world travelers.

They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks

that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies.

A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people.

Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people

as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only

what is shown of it when it is too late

it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat.

The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival

in Bissau will be petrified again,

as soon as a new attack

has changed the savannah into a desert.

This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten,

with one exception: UN Japan.

My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts;

they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,

a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning

of the 11th century, in the Heian period.

Do we ever know where history is really made?

Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies

to fight one another.

Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents;

the emperor's court had become nothing more

than a place of intrigues and intellectual games.

But this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility

much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians,

by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort

from the contemplation of the tiniest things.

Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,'

'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.'

One day she got the idea of drawing up a list

of 'things that quicken the heart.'

Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming;

I bow to the economic miracle,

but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me:
coming back through the Chiba coast

I thought of Shonagon's list,

of all those signs one has only to name

to quicken the heart, just name.

To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant,

and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid.

Here to place adjectives would be so rude

as leaving price tags on purchases.

Japanese poetry never modifies.

There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow,

hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.

Newspapers have been filled recently

with the story of a man from Nagoya.

The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work

Japanese stylelike a madman.

It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics.

And then in the month of May he killed himself.

They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo:

like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket

immediately starts to inspect familiar places.

He ran off to see if everything was where it should be:

the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox

at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store,

which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers.

He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars;

the producers shuddered before them.

He was told that a disfigured woman

took off her mask in front of passers-by

and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful.

Everything interested him.

He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant

or about the results of the Daily Double

asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done

in the last sumo tournament.

He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, ...

of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly

on television to teach goodness to children.

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