Woolf: ‘I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past’.
Completion, incompletion. To write sentences trailing off in three little dots to open them in the direction of that future that will allow their meaning to become indefinite, to shimmer. So many of Bataille’s sentences end in this way as they reach for the reader who would pass them on. This is why, he said, he wrote in friendship for his unknown readers.
Friends: I learn from a biography that this is what Godard called the viewers of his films. Friendship …: why this word, today? It is a small word, a pathetic one. To want friends – and not an audience. Because the films gather each of us. A film like In Praise of Love breaks across each of us anew. Is reborn for each of us. Why, in the press kit to this film, did they supply a summary of the plot? I barely knew what it was about, it took several viewings, each one pleasurable. And why do I know? Because I read a summary somewhere on the internet, this was my impatience, my laziness.
How many times have I watched the opening scenes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror? The field. The man who crosses the field; the woman – the mother – who sits waiting on the fence. For what? For her husband? He is absent; meanwhile, her children slumber. Then – a change – the children are up, there’s a fire in a neighbouring barn. We watch it burn in the rain. We hear a poem, very beautiful. And then: the ringing of the phone. Then another scene, a man’s voice on the phone as the camera tracks round his flat. We see on the wall a poster of Andrei Rublev. We recognise the three angels of the icon and think: this is a story about Tarkovsky. Perhaps, perhaps. But he gives the film to us, Tarkovsky. It trails off in our direction like a sentence which ends not with a full stop but with ellipses …
Do you have complete emotions about the present, or do you have to wait to find them anew in conversation, in recollection, in writing? I never find completion, only a kind of infinite fall, a trailing into an open future. Somewhere, Tarkovsky writes of the day: what happened?, he asks. What emerged? Nothing … a few images stay with you; this was a day like any other; the days, similar, do not fall one upon the other like cards in a pack, but are superimposed, ghosts projected upon ghosts. A routine: I return home in the evening, as it grows dark; I watch the seven o’clock news, I eat; I make a phonecall. Days accrete, but nothing is complete, nothing completes itself. The future, what of the future? Days like these, neither happy nor unhappy. Days through which as through a window something can be seen. But what? Vagueness, formlessness …
None of these emotions can complete itself. By writing, nothing comes to completion. This is a writing which opens the sentence …
Looking for what? Friendship? But with what? The unknown, the future.
Lars Iyer's Blog 