Dec
31
2007
Filed Under Films, Announcements |
I just woke up from a dream which I don’t want to talk about in much detail, except that the dream began with me looking at myself as a 3rd person, but by the end - when the dream had become traumatic, sad - I’d become so ensconced in my 1st personhood that it almost felt as though I had no body to refer to, but only a reeling… Geist, or something. The dream was terrible. It probably has to do with the fact that I watched 시간 (Time) before going to bed, a film by Kim Ki-duk, who had directed an excellent film called 빈집, which was released in the States as 3-Iron. This new film was not nearly as good as 3-Iron, despite some scenes of ludic brilliance. There’s an extended sequence involving a paper mask which is as disturbing and unnervingly funny as anything I’ve seen this year. The film, despite its many flaws, is a kind of a 21st century update of the ol’ identity-switcheroo game, and the various attendant metaphysical maladies which usually accompany such a game. A kind of a heavy-handed reworking, so to speak, of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina Something like that, I guess. Although I’d have to say it’s more like a melodramatic, quasi-philosophical version of John Woo’s Face-off.
2007 has been a good year. I got to know my daughter better as she began to recognize the world and me, first of all. The year has been largely uneventful, which is more than I can ask for from life. I started this blog with no ambition in August, but met so many people, like you, who think and feel about the similar things. Thanks for reading. I’d thought that perhaps, with this pseudonymous identity that the blog affords me, I could write about crazy things, fuck-it-all But that hasn’t been the case, because I see myself better, more clearly here sometimes, than I’d otherwise be capable of seeing: the reverse of my nightmare which I just woke up from. This stanza from Eugenio Montale’s “Encounter” -
Maybe I’ll find a face again:
in the glancing light a movement leads me
to a sad bough craning from a jar
by a tavern door.
I reach for it, and feel
another life becoming mine, encumbered
with a form that was taken from me;
and it’s hair, not leaves, that winds
round my fingers like rings.
Do you do those New Year’s Resolution lists which you abide by until some drunken night(s) in February? I don’t. But I’m thinking that I’ll do a list this year. I’ll be kinder to people around me, for example. Love my darling wife better. Be a better dad. Stop procrastinating. Drink less. Exercise more… I’m tired already.
(Image, from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia)
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