“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 maniac—busies 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?”
- Sans Soleil at 01:33:42. Director: Chris Marker.
* * * * *
It takes breathtaking simplicity to reveal the west in a single stroke. It takes an experience to understand the movement.
The communal existence is an established fact. So much of the Eastern mentality is a sociological response of overcrowding, of acknowledging competition, in the most sustainable way possible. At this point in history, the natural world has simply showed its teeth to our ancestors, not the bare ribs and carcass of its previous incarnations in which it fights its retreat. Our ancestors had only each other to deal with, each other and those that never descended to the level of our years. Each other and one another that needed timeless anticipation of a balance for mutual survival, reducing the psyche’s uninterruptable space of existence by the close compact of others. When I think of my ancestors I think of the warrens in an artificial underground, sweat and sewage in the precarious balance of biotic survival skewed to minimalist procreation after survival.
So what is the result? What is left unsaid in the commune is because of the privacy lost between the relations of one another. Only living in a hive of a family, forcing the sameness of a flavour in interactivity of those members forced to live cramped quarters, allows enough contrast for objectivity, allows the luxury of having a telephone conversation with, exclusively, another. Allows privacy of a relationship between the self and only one other, to allow it to develop and grow, without noticing or guarding against the unavoidable pretensions of uninvited observers. Our irreduceable psychological space is confined, then, to striking the best balance between existence to socially approved self-determination, and…what? What else is there to understand?
