Thursday, September 9, 2010

The Diary Of Antoine Roquetin - Sartre

'This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it's been there for a long time.'

*scene fades in with cinematic languor, done tastefully (?) in black and white and so much more grey*

Its a windswept world.

I have a window view.

The wind cradles the waste higher and higher, and in one last motion sweeps it out of sight.

*fade to black*

'This is what I thought : for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people : a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose : live or tell."

*the portal is the cafe, the camera zooms in and we veer in closer, our noses almost touching, our realities almost submerging, to an old film poster till the poster IS the frame, and with a graceful turn of the auburn haired girl, the picture becomes our reality*

She's smiling.

She knows you're looking.

She walks us down that street.

Her walk changes, its more of a glide.

The swish of her coat, the open, breezy hair.

She knows you're looking.

The smile's still there.

She gets to the end of that street, and we can't follow her when she turns the corner.

We scourge the street instead.

But really, there's no one there.

Just you, just you on the other side of the frame.

Right on the other end of the story.

*screen goes out of focus, and we think in soft blur*

'Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason an interminable, monotonous addition.'

*we move forward in time, switch to a technicolor view of things*

Sift through the frames, skip to my favorite story of how my life changed.

The story I almost never tell.

My best kept story.

Or my most shockingly delusional invention?

Did it happen..? Did it change as I did?

I think I'm half in love with the blurs.

So much more room to think.

*freeze frame; me by the window, the world inside outside my head*

'I wanted the memories of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.'

*
Enter the winding, eternal road, the semi reticent sun and that journey that takes most of the day. The classics play, and there is that...vibe. Of movement, vitality. Exhuming*

Assam.

The intriguing covered lakes, the low rooftops, the hanging vines, that slower time..

Enter the memory of a memory.

The thoughts that occupied the quiet, long and/but unomitted day.

How I thought of memories, and why we visited them and how often.

How a memory was like a room.

Every time we visited, we shifted the air in the room.

Left a picture crooked, a fold in the carpet, a wrinkle in the sheet...

And then to come back and not be able to tell that it hadn't been there all along.

It is all so uncertain.

Yet I'm more certain than ever that it happened.

*time shrugs off the rust, it moves quicker, more mechanically; the frame changes without gap or fault*

'I would like to see the truth clearly before its too late.'

*the frame is familiar. We've been on this street before. In a different time. In a severely less cacophonous time*

I am having an adventure, Sartre. Don't tell me it isn't true when I reach the end of that street.

Don't tell me, let me turn that corner.

*the frame disintegrates. A stylized (?) metaphor*

*silence*

*silence right on the other end of the story*

Let the nausea kick in.