This end of this month marks the start of my 30th year in journalism (dating from when I started taking my journalism diploma). Lots of good memories. Lots of bad ones, to be honest too. And lots of memories that made me scratch my head even back in the day.
Like the evening in 1993 when I attended the local premiere of Jurassic Park, and a woman exited the film with her crying and traumatized kids because, she later complained, she was led to believe the dinosaurs were going to be like the ones featured in Barney.
Yeah, that Barney.
29 years later and I still can’t tell the damn difference, can you?
(Gifs found using Tumblr’s image search feature, with credit to the gif-makers!)
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they have escaped the weight of darkness
Lisitsa the little wolf dog with wise eyes is waiting by the door, at the bottom of the dimly lit staircase. She knows that the museum is about to close, that it is time for her walk.
As I’m leaving the museum, I hear Valuska’s voice coming from the Borzoi Kabinet Theater, the sound of Vig Mihály’s beautiful piano music, from the opening scene of Béla Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies. I peak into the curtains. The music is playing over 3D footage of a plain in Wyoming, the place my father first landed when he immigrated from Taiwan to the United States. Could not place the music at first, that song I love so dearly, what song are you? But then Valuska’s soliloquy resumes, he is talking about the eclipse of the sun, how the people watched, wondering if the sky would fall in on them.
unexpectedly … within a few minutes … the air about us cools … Can you feel it? … The sky darkens … and then … grows perfectly black! Guard dogs howl! The frightened rabbit flattens itself against the grass! Herds of deer are startled into a mad stampede! And in this terrible and incomprehensible twilight … even the birds (‘The birds!’ cried Valuska, in rapture, throwing his arms up to the sky, his ample postman’s cloak flapping open like bat’s wings) … ‘the very birds are confused and settle on their nests! And then … silence … And every living thing is still … and we too, for whole minutes, are incapable of speech … Are the hills on the march? Will heaven fall in on us? Will earth open under our feet and swallow us? We cannot tell. It is a total eclipse of the sun.
But then the sun returns—life is breathed back into the world.
But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness
Mr. Hagelmayer: That's enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!
János Valuska: But Mr. Hagelmayer. It's still not over.
A line from Cixous echoes in my head: she sees, she is once again turned toward the inaccessible sun.
I did not bring my notes about the museum to the cafe, knowing how easily I am led astray by wonder, so I must draw on my memories of the monastery reflected in the water, the rose engine, the white moths bursting out of the bottomless urn whose diminutive outer appearance conceals the impossible scale of its interior. Somewhere the night-flying white moths billow forth, they are the dead taking leave of this earth. Woolf: she is to finally let the last great moth in. Shall I consider you an entomologist of the spirit world?
I remember my dream:
Would I die?
Now in the church a sensitive pothead improvises a requiem.
Thousands of murmuring moths fly in and die on the floor.
Do you hear me?
There’s the diorama of the living room with the mirror covered with the yellow sheet. In the miniature room of the dying, it is night. Outside a storm rages. Lightning outside makes the window flicker.
WG Sebald: it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever
Sometimes when I hear a great roar, I feel the world careening toward disaster, something inside me is turning, as cold and constant as the orbit of celestial bodies, a mechanical model of the movement of the planets, observed beneath glass. I think about the ashes of my grandfather, sitting in my parents’ bathroom, which my father never brought to scatter in Taiwan, as my grandfather requested. My father never went back. This must be it, I won’t ever go back to mainland China, as I always thought I would. I feel the world careening, just as I felt it leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. My heart still breaks thinking about Ukraine. Did I, perhaps, take the equilibrium of weather and geopolitics for granted? The supply of semiconductors. Now I know: the world cannot be counted on to continue.
That’s the world of the dead, isn’t it? Says the YouTube woman. Come rejoin the world of the living, she says. We’re not boring, I promise.
There are things I cannot mourn. But sometimes the clouds appear to me in the shape of the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil’s throat waterfall of Iguazú Falls, between Brazil and Argentina. The preoccupations of my imagination are reflected everywhere in the world: the shot of Katia touching the yellow sulfur in the film Fire of Love (on the same day I had typed the note: “Flowers of sulfur: It is known as flores sulphuris by apothecaries in older scientific works”), Maurice floating on a dinghy in a lake of sulfuric acid, the way you retreat into the mysteries of nature out of disillusionment with the world of the living. I bike along The Strand, between Venice and Santa Monica Pier, listening to Gillian Welch’s I Dream a Highway. The music algorithm must know something of my preoccupations, I think, with dreams, with sunflowers. There’s a peace that descends that feels like a premonition of death. I’m calmer now. Is it peace or resignation? I remember reading Alix Cléo Roubaud’s diary over a decade ago, remembered the equanimity of her last entries, right before her untimely death from a pulmonary embolism at the age of 31. There’s a peace that eases you into acceptance of your absence. Listening to the song, watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, I am drafting my will. Give all my assets to my little brother, etch my books onto stone and metal, deposit me in the sea. Sometimes when I hear a great roar, I see the hour of my death. Every sunset I have ever seen will flash in my head. Beams of light are coming through a v-shaped opening in the clouds. River of lava, the memory of every volcano I have ever seen: hiking Mount Pelée in Martinique with Joohyun and Doc. Did I see a second of footage in Fire of Love of the sparkling black volcanic ash beach of Grand'Rivière? I remember Vesuvius, how I went as a teen and saw the petrified people of Pompeii, how I returned a decade later with a lover and came home with a lava rock shaped like an egg. We hike to the summit for a view of the mouth.
This is where the mind goes.
Who knows why some are comforted by a confrontation with nature’s magnificent forces, two lovers dying instantly in a 1800 degree cloud of roaring pyroclastic, holding each other, a watch eternally frozen at the moment of their obliteration.
Why do I cry so easily now? Claustrophobia in the crowd of tourists on the pier, the water at night, the whirling lights on the Ferris wheel. Back on the bike trail, through my music I hear the screams of the people on the rollercoaster in the distance. There’s the leaden horizon, the black syrup of the night ocean. Aim the arrow of your focus, this being-toward-death.
There are people for whom coincidence has a special status. Dreamers.
How strange, given her cleverness, that she mistakes the world seen through wound-colored glasses for meaning that is immanent in the world, as though she were the “receiver” of externally produced signs and not the producer of the “meaning” of indifferent bits of data. Perception is hallucinatory. The constellation is not a picture.
There are people for whom coincidence has a special status.
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People I'd like to know better, tagged by @glaciya :)
Last song: If I Go, I'm Goin by Gregory Alan Isakov (been deep in my hill house feelings lately 😂)
Last Watched: I just finished watching season 2 of Russian Doll!
Currently Watching: oh hm. I guess Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey. I also started Moon Knight and then I've been watching the movie Deliver Us From Evil (2014) for like 3 days... It's not good. I think I have 20 minutes left in it now. Oh I've also been making my way through the Scream series!
Currently Reading: right this instant I've been rereading The Fates' Designs (are not for our eyes) by galkyrie! I've also got a copy of Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao I gotta crack into and then I'm rereading Jurassic Park for the umpteenth time cuz it's my favourite book 😂
Tagging: @heybabybird @yasmindifference @penumbra-twist and anyone else who wants to feel free to say I tagged you :)
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