kagablog

When he left Berlin for Slovakia he was pretty much destroyed. He felt wretched. Too much drinking, too many cigarettes. And he had barely slept in days. All he could do at this point was let go.

He found himself in a car with three others. It was a bright September day. They talked about Carravaggio, and about Ezra Pound’s incarceration by the Americans in Pisa. In the car he was forced to listen to pop music all day long. For him this world was laughable, but it was a laugh which carried with it the end of the world. There were so many different kinds of music which touched and ignited the soul and instead people chose to listen to the same pop songs endlessly.

Eventually they entered the familiar Bohemian landscape that he hadn’t experienced for at least seven years. Those hills and fairy-tale forests with their winding roads. And afterwards they drove into the misty gray-green hills of Slovakia which were descending into a deep blue dusk.
Pierre represented the motif of lostness in a world which was too well ordered and blinded by routine and which knew exactly what it wanted. But what it wanted was nothing. Pierre was lost because he knew what he wanted, but what he wanted was something.

In a world of dis-intimacy and disconnection, relationships also suffered. Since the 60s not one of his friends was able to have a long-lasting, meaningful relationship. Everything was in broken pieces. There was no longer any respect, and no longer any tolerance. Everything had taken a different course in history.

A friend once started speculating: “If I’m honest, the number of women in which I have a really meaningful connection to is about 1 in 1000. But I would have to meet that person in a real way, which makes the odds more like 1 to 50,000. And the other person would have to recognise me also, which makes it about 1 to 200,000. And of course the girl would also have to be free, I mean not in a relationship already….1 in 500,000. And she would have to live in the same city….” and he went on like that until he was in the billions. Luckily life is not only at the mercy of statistics, the impossible was still possible. But in the end Pierre had to confess that his friend’s conclusion was quite realistic, it felt like finding someone in this mess of a world seemed almost that difficult. It was obvious to Pierre that most of his friends had just given up and had taken what was available out of desperation- and not out of any real conviction.

At the highway bus stop he stood looking down on the small Slovakian village shrouded in darkness. The church tower lit, the village lights strung throughout the valley. The unbelievable din of crickets vibrating the landscape.

Too much cinema, he was thinking to himself while passing this scenery, attempts to simulate life, and in the end it is only suffocating life. It tries to recreate certain aspects or events, which always ended in a bad imitation. Pierre thought that films should either be busy creating life, like Godard did with his erratic jump cuts, or it should be an abstract reflection on life- as with Bresson or Paradjanov. Either way it was artifice, and not naturalism that struck him with significance. It was a delicate and refined relationship that was maintained and not a simple jerking of the emotions. A bridge should always be crossed in perception in order to preserve the integrity of the viewer.