Sans soleil Page #6

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Memories must make do with their delirium,

with their drift.

A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film

blocked before the furnace of the projector.

Madness protects, as fever does.

I envy Hayao in his 'zone,'

he plays with the signs of his memory.

He pins them down and decorates them like insects

that would have flown beyond time,

and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time:

the only eternity we have left.

I look at his machines.

I think of a world where each memory

could create its own legend.

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory

insane memory:
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering

a field ever wider as it moved away,

a cyclone whose present moment contains,

motionless, the eye.

In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage

to all the film's locations:

the florist Podesta Baldocchi,

where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak;

he the hunter, she the prey.

Or was it the other way around?

The tiles hadn't changed.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco

where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline.

It seems to be a question of trailing,

of enigma, of murder,

but in truth it's a question of power and freedom,

of melancholy and dazzlement,

so carefully coded within the spiral

that you could miss it,

and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space

in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails,

even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,

where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead,

whom she should not have known.

He followed Madelineas Scotty had doneto the Museum at the Legion of Honor,

before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known.

And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair,

the spiral of time.

The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared

had disappeared itself;

concrete had replaced it,

at the corner of Eddy and Gough.

On the other hand, the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.

On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines

that measured the age of the tree and said,

"Here I was born... and here I died."

He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted.

The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris,

and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree,

outside of time.

The painted horse at San Juan Bautista,

his eye that looked like Madeline's:

Hitchcock had invented nothing,

it was all there.

He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission

as Madeline had run towards her death.

Or was it hers?

From this fake tower

the only thing that Hitchcock had added

he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love,

finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.

Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time,

a zone that would belong only to him

and from which he could decipher

the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate

when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay,

when he had saved her from death

before casting her back to death.

Or was it the other way around?

In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film

I had seen nineteen times.

In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.

That summer I had met three children on a road

and a volcano had come out of the sea.

Encore un blablabla de senveiller.

The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon,

in this corner of Earth that resembles it.

I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction:

the landscape of another planet.

Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet

for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away.

I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,

about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.

All of a sudden he stumbles,

and the next step it's a year later.

He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border

along a sea bird sanctuary.

That's for a start.

Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories?

That's just it, he can't understand.

He hasn't come from another planet,

he comes from our future,

Four thousand and one:

the time when the human brain has reached

the era of full employment.

Everything works to perfection,

all that we allow to slumber, including memory.

Logical consequence:

total recall is memory anesthetized.

After so many stories of men who had lost their memory,

here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,

and whothrough some peculiarity of his nature

instead of drawing pride from the fact and

scorning mankind of the past and its shadows,

turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion.

In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision,

to be moved by a portrait,

to tremble at the sound of music,

can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.

He wants to understand.

He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice,

and he reacts to that injustice like Ch Guevara,

like the youth of the sixties, with indignation.

He is a Third Worlder of time.

The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past

is as unbearable to him

as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Naturally he'll fail.

The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him

as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one.

He has chosen to give up his privileges,

but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.

His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest:

a song cycle by Mussorgsky.

They are still sung in the fortieth century.

Their meaning has been lost,

but it was then that for the first time,

he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand

which had something to do with unhappiness and memory,

and towards which slowly, heavily,

he began to walk.

Of course I'll never make that film.

Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists,

putting in my favorite creatures.

I've even given it a title,

indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.

On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning,

the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment

attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.'

I suppose the Americans themselves believed

that they were conquering Japanese soil,

and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization.

Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman

spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro.

For centuries of dreamy vassalage,

time had not moved in the archipelago.

Then came the break.

Is it a property of islands to make their women

into the guardians of their memory?

I learned thatas in the Bijags

it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted.

Each community has its priestessthe noro

who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.

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