For years, I've been writing on scraps and in notebooks, looking forward to those periodic, unexpected afternoons when I steadily gather up, re-read and remember past moments of the heart. I found this snippet recently, and, unusually, couldn't remember a thing about it: the why or how or when or who. After re-reading, a little came back to me, but I like it better as an unexplained fragment: a love letter stuffed in the pockets of a long-lost jacket, which talks not of love but of... what exactly?
*
A ruined man paced museum-slow through the ruined walls of a castle. 'Age cannot weary us', he thought, unflinching but unsure. The insides held boxes within boxes, artworks within artworks, a quarreling smeared picture of the avant garde. 'WAR' written in poppies, written in limericks written in day-glo written in German written in-side-out written in blood.
The camera starts on the landscape: autumn reds amidst the greens and the sky's muted grey. There may be music, but it doesn't intrude.
Slow zoom. A small, bare castle; scaffolding in places; cypress and ivy; half-ruined walls as nature imposes its shapes and rhythms on the old thoughts and plans of men. Between them, walking museum-slow, a man, dressed in muted pastel, neither distant nor absorbed. We see him pace, follow him inside, and watch, without comment, an unfolding scene of artworks inset into the castle nooks. Something doesn't satisfy, Jean, something misses. The theme is The Great War, but the rhythm is awry, a barrage of monosyllables out of step with an iambic land.
The muted man examines each, is neither in nor out, steps quickly past the soldiers' letters written in smears, written in poppies, written in code, written in Latin, written in blood.
Out, out he goes, and the camera follows him, Jean, the camera tracks him and jogs as he jogs and, Jean, and dear God Jean it bounces and rattles and I think I hear music too.
He is out, and sniffing the gentle air, breathing the wild air in all its softness, his shoulders opening and pages opening to let in the grey sky, let in the countless reds of autumn leaves, autumn and crimson and lurid and pastel and the deep, heartless reds of a world that is as open to us as a fresh cut.