for/pq
Ingmar Bergman,
Martin Amis,
Michael Ondaatje,
Yara Rodrigues Fowler,
Lucia Berlin,
Elia Kazan,
Merritt Tierce,
Italo Calvino,
Karen Tei Yamashita
He sweeps his arm across plates and glasses on a restaurant table so she might look up somewhere else in the city hearing this cause of noise. When he is without her. He, who has never felt alone in the miles of longitude between desert towns. A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. The plant continues to nourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other.
He lies in his room surrounded by the pale maps. He is without Katharine. His hunger wishes to burn down all social rules, all courtesy.
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
In the apartment there is light only from the river and the desert beyond it. It falls upon her neck her feet the vaccination scar he loves on her right arm. She sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder. This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband’s, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this. In this room on the periphery of the river.
In the few hours they have, the room has darkened to this pitch of light. Just river and desert light. Only when there is the rare shock of rain do they go towards the window and put their arms out, stretching, to bathe as much as they can of themselves in it. Shouts towards the brief downpour fill the streets.
fuck
Gianni approached them almost by instinct, he’s a generous man. I said there’s no room, we have the children, how are we going to fit. The two got in, they were English, he graying, in his forties, she surely less than thirty. At first I was hostile, taciturn, it complicated the trip for me, I would have to work even harder to make the children behave. It was mainly my husband who talked, he liked to establish relationships, especially with foreigners. He was cordial, he asked questions without paying much heed to conventions. It came out that the two had abruptly left their jobs (I don’t remember what they did) and, along with their jobs, their families: she a young husband, he a wife and three small children. They had been traveling for several months through Europe with very little money. The man said seriously: the important thing is to be together. She agreed, and at a certain point said something to this effect: we are obliged to do so many stupid things from childhood on, thinking they’re essential; what happened to us is the only thing that has happened to me since I was born that makes sense.
[...] Q was a friend of mine who was also very well furnished in the breast department (the other woman, O, perhaps wins the prize – but I have no valid excuse to involve her breasts in this novel, at least not for the time being. Which is a shame, because they deserve a novel all to themselves). Although our friendship (my friendship with Q, that is) has been very long, our romance was fairly short, for many reasons, and fundamentally, I think, for one: because before making love she took off all her clothes except for an enormous crucifix, with Jesus on it and everything, which she left hanging around her neck; and a particularly tormented Jesus, too, all writhing and anguished-looking – for which you can’t blame him, of course, given the circumstances. If I suggested that it would all be much easier and more comfortable if she took off her crucifix as well, she’d say: ‘Isn’t He the God of love?’ – and that was that. You just try, sir – and for once, the female reader will forgive me the obligatory exclusion – you just try, sir, to maintain a good erection face to face with the image of the suffering Redeemer, however well appointed he might be between a pair of magnificent tits. Perhaps you – as a good atheist – could do it. But I could not. It was hard work, believe me. The girl was lovely, sweet, gentle, warm, fragrant – a real delight. I’d close my eyes and get lost in the moment and for a while I could forget everything, but then, crack, the crucifix would end up in my mouth, or in my eye, or give me a scratch on the cheek. Or I’d open my eyes – since you have to open them, of course, and open them wide – and there they’d all be, parading past: the Sacred History, Death and the Resurrection, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday; the three denials of Peter, the Sermon on the Mount, the wedding at Canaan, the raising of Lazarus … and the Apocalypse. The image of the Redeemer, which demands, even if you’re not exactly a saint, a kind of supernatural respect that pushes you to examine your conscience and confess your sins, set against those erect nipples wet with saliva and … anyway: I generally managed to bring things to a satisfying conclusion, but afterwards my head, spine and kidneys were a mess. I don’t think these things should mix, despite the fact that ‘He’s the God of love’, which He certainly is, and despite the intimate, profound connection there is between religion and sex. Goodbye, Q. Sometimes I worry my luminous novel will turn into a similar mixture. I want to believe it won’t. I want to believe I’ve been able to balance the two poles of what is, I think, a unique phenomenon. I’m also afraid people will consider me a cynic, a liar or a heretic. I might be a heretic, but I have a theory in my defence (it’s very simple, too: if Christianity was imposed through blood and fire and money and the Inquisition and other things like that, and now here we are, brought up with no alternative and within the cage of dogma – and, worse, of popular superstition deriving from badly digested dogma – we surely have the right to make all the adjustments we need in order to carry on believing – and, at the same time, to be free). But whether I like it or not, I seem to be arriving – via some erect nipples – at my conversion. Or ‘conversion’, since this is something I’m not very clear about either. I don’t know what my exact relationship with the Church is nowadays – and I’m also writing this, partly, in an attempt to find out. Nor do I know what my relationship with the Church will be in the future: I’m in the dark, or the half-light. But did a conversion take place? Yes, it did. And was it luminous? It was.
oh my god
Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster —a movement.
I didn’t know what was happening. Gun was four months’ pregnant. I behaved like a jealous child. She was alone, deserted. There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one’s own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.
ahhhhh
I persuaded the veteran director and actor, Victor Sjostrom, to take on the main role in Wild Strawberries. We had worked together before in To Joy without feeling any irresistible need to do so again. Victor was tired and ill, and his work had to be fenced round with various considerations. Among other things, I had to promise he would be back home with his habitual whisky punctually every day at half-past four.
Our collaboration began appallingly. Victor was nervous and I was tense. He overacted and I drew his attention to the fact that he was playing to the gallery. He at once shrouded himself in surly withdrawal, then said there was sure to be someone else who could play the part according to my wishes, and that his doctor would give him a sick note any day.
When the girls put in an appearance, the situation brightened. The old charmer delighted in the affectionate bantering attentions of the ladies, flirted with them and bought them flowers and small presents. Unnoticed and privately, I had filmed Bibi Andersson in a slightly decollete turn-of-thecentury dress sitting on a meadow bank feeding Victor with wild strawberries. He snapped at her ringers and both of them laughed, the young woman clearly flattered, the old lion obviously delighted.
lol
He was by no means in a better mood, but he did his duty. As he walked through the sunlit grass with Bibi in a long shot, he was grumbling and rejecting all friendly approaches. The close-up was rigged up and he went to one side and sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, dismissing scornfully the offer of a whisky on the spot. When everything was ready, he came staggering over, supported by a production assistant, exhausted by his bad temper. The camera ran and the clapper clacked. Suddenly his face opened, the features softening, and he became quiet and gentle, a moment of grace. And the camera was there. And it was running. And the laboratory didn’t muck it up.
Meanwhile, the administration was understaffed and over-worked. The theatre director’s secretary was also the press officer. The costume studios were disintegrating and the permanent stage designers were ill or alcoholics. Communication was an unknown concept.
lmao
[...] . The force comes from the stomach, don’t cheat with your posture. There’s no instrument, never will be, that can render the dynamism Beethoven imagined in his silent world. See, now it sounds lovely. You who have so much beauty in you, you must learn to bring it out. Let’s go on then. Here you have a premonition of what will happen to us twenty-nine bars later; you hardly notice it, but it’s important. No padding in Beethoven, he speaks persuasively, furiously, sorrowfully, cheerfully, painfully, never mumbling. You mustn’t mumble, never produce common stuff! You must know what you want even if it’s wrong. Meaning and context. Go ahead now. That doesn’t mean everything has to be emphasized; there’s a differencebetween emphasis and significance. Now let’s go on, be patient, practise patience. When you want to stop, you have to connect up to a special battery that doubles your effort. There’s nothing so awful as a guilty conscience in art. Stop there. A C. My friend Horowitz went to the piano every morning after breakfast and played a number of C-major chords. He said he was washing his ears.’
I listened to Andrea and thought about theatre, about myself and actors, our sloppiness, our ignorance, the damned common stuff we produce in exchange for payment.