The Garden Cinema, Covent Garden, London, not a very clear picture because of the light.
At the independent Garden Cinema in London. Beautiful designs and decor, even the typography whisks me back in time with its combination of slim and slender, square chunky blocks of letters beside the slimmer uprights giving contrast but still bold. Slender bold, and fat and filled-in bold. All of a time that isn't yours but you can feel nostalgia for. And do, even emerging into the soft London not - quite - darkness, a film of your own creation, stepped into, like a dream you are living, and you have woken up in. And that realization, that remembering oh, of course! This is a play, a dream, a drama, I'm watching as well as taking part in . How could I have forgotten this? This rosy, magical, sublime perception?
And I haven't even mentioned the film we went to see. (Roter Himmel/Alight) It is raw, uneasy, painful, clever, admirable acting, directing, story. And it too blends almost completely, the perceptions of acting in (enacting, or not acting, not seeming to act though of course we act all the time, just to think is to act) and of observing, the watching perception, which paradoxically, it is when it separates itself from the immersed-in-the-play /film perception (the character, the small self, the ego) towards the end, that it connects the two in a higher octave of perceiving. Which is love.
Christian Petzold director of Roter Himmel /Alight, starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel and Enno Trebs.
*
Olga Tokarczuk’s book Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead: I was drawn into the protagonist’s voice, worldview, her commentary on said world and in particular on certain people who thoughtlessly, mindlessly or even possibly with relish, hunted down other beings, destroyed them, murdered them, set traps for them, raised them in crowded conditions for their own profit, and abused them generally, giving very little thought to how these creatures might feel.
She writes letters to the authorities our Mrs. Duszejko, but receives no replies. She has a neighbour she likes, though he is taciturn, only conversing when necessary or practical or when he is inebriated, but whose heart you suspect is in the right place. She has two good friends, one a former student (Janina Duszejko teaches English part-time) the other is young and beautiful and works at the local charity shop. She knows that most people either do not pay her any attention ‘Nobody takes any notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags’ or they treat her as a nuisance, with her letters of complaint to the council or the police, or as someone to be humoured, not quite right in the head, as she talks about the movements of the planets, likes to read people’s horoscopes, and has a theory that the animal world is revenging itself on the humans who trap and hunt them, for what they call ‘sport’.
So I was reading the last part of the book on the bus and it took a very unexpected turn, I had in fact wondered how it might end, as there were unexplained deaths, and I thought that perhaps it would simply end in an unresolved way, a continuation of the life of this fierce fighter for justice in her small community with her teaching work, her translation collaboration (of William Blake’s poems) with a former student, and her trips to the charity shop where she enjoyed the company of her friend who worked there. Obviously I won’t reveal the ending, but the curious thing is, after the bus passed the place where new buildings are going up, there is another roundabout and, looking down, I saw someone had placed a sign on the ground propped against a tree, and it said RIP and there was a lovely painting of a badger. And at the start of the path leading down towards the river, where some trees had been felled, someone had painted on the tree stump RIP.
Comments