Sans soleil Page #8

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Good for them;

all you see are the girls.

The fifteenth of January is coming of age day:

an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman.

The city governments distribute small bags

filled with gifts, datebooks, advice:

how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife.

On that day every twenty-year-old girl

can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan.

Flag, home, and country:

this is the anteroom of adulthood.

The world of the takenoko and of rock singers

speeds away like a rocket.

Speakers explain what society expects of them.

How long will it take to forget the secret?

And when all the celebrations are over it

remains only to pick up all the ornaments

all the accessories of the celebration

and by burning them, make a celebration.

This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris

that have a right to immortalitylike the dolls at Ueno.

The last statebefore their disappearance

of the poignancy of things.

Darumathe one eyed spirit

reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire.

Abandonment must be a feast;

laceration must be a feast.

And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken,

used, must be ennobled by a ceremony.

It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer

who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.

The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children

striking the ground with their long poles.

I only got one explanation, a singular one

although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service

it was to chase away the moles.

And that's where my three children of Iceland

came and grafted themselves in.

I picked up the whole shot again,

adding the somewhat hazy end,

the frame trembling under the force of the wind

beating us down on the cliff:

everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said

better than all the rest what I saw in that moment,

why I held it at arms length, at zooms length,

until its last twenty-fourth of a second.

The city of Heimaey spread out below us.

And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film

he had just shot in the same place

I lacked only the name to learn that

nature performs its own dondo-yaki;

the island's volcano had awakened.

I looked at those pictures, and it was as

if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.

So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself

staged the working of time.

I saw what had been my window again.

I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies,

the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day,

down to the cliff where I had met the children.

The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate

enough to film for me naturally found its place.

And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip

the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji,

who said simply to her cat Tora,

"Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you."

And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,'

and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time,

freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence

of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

When spring came, when every crow announced

its arrival by raising his cry half a tone,

I took the green train of the Yamanote line and

got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office.

Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light

Japanese style

so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars.

Even if I was expecting no letter

I stopped at the general delivery window,

for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters,

and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.

I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West,

that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being,

what is spoken to what is left unsaid.

I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers.

I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating

from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.

Then I went down into the basement where my friend

the maniacbusies himself with his electronic graffiti.

Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us

which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls.

A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not,

or is no longer, or is not yet;

the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things

that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase.

In that moment poetry will be made by everyone,

and there will be emus in the 'zone.'

He writes me from Japan.

He writes me from Africa.

He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face

of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.

Will there be a last letter?

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