Above all, the Dane wants a stake in the day, that's how he'd sum it up, the poet says. – 'That's why you're always writing in your notebooks'. He takes my writing as a sign of very bad taste, he says. Danish taste, he says. Danish greed, he says.
For the Dane wants the day to be his; he wants to hours to part for him like the Red Sea to the Israelites. He wants to be granted passage, and to so join the passage of this day to the passage of others, and so on through his life, letting it – so he thinks – be his, and letting him live.
Ah, but life is exactly what the Dane misses, the poet says. Better still the amnesiac who loses his memory overnight. Better the patient unable to form new memories, for whom the same day repeats itself eternally.
The Dane knows nothing of the happiness of forgetting, says the poet. The Dane cannot let go of time.
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'Above all, you have to learn to let go', the poet says. 'What happens does not do so for your benefit', he says. 'It's the greatest of lessons'.
I need to study Tarkovsky, he tells me. I need to study Mirror, and the continuity shots of Mirror.
He tells me of a scene – scarcely a scene, he tells me, and more of a gap between scenes – in which the wind passes among the things on a table, blowing them over. A bottle rolls and falls to the ground, he says. That's all! That's enough! And isn't that the miracle of Mirror, that is made up of continuity shots that are supposed to pass unnoticed in the film?
He can see I'm lost, the poet says. Continuity shots, he says, are when the camera lingers on a detail, and it has nothing to do with the story. With the ostensible story, he says. What happens then?, he asks. What fails to happen? Of course, that's precisely what I would miss, the poet says, what fails to happen.
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