Month: April 2006

Fragments

Just fragments of dreams: someone, a young person, is playing a piano, or learning to play some simple scale with just one hand. I am looking at just this hand and fingers. The person plays three notes of the scale then a person teaching knocks their fingers away and says ‘ The next three notes are for next week’s lesson’. It is a member of my family saying this, my father or my sister – though I don’t see them. I argue, ‘But it is only 2 or 3 inches for these fingers to move. It is easy to do now. Why delay?’

An even smaller fragment. I am in a plane again, landing and we are flying low, too low though it is not very frightening. I think, ‘Ah this is that low flying plane experience. It really does happen because this time it is not a dream.’

Manderlay

“Lars Von Trier’s”:http://www.geocities.com/lars_von_trier2000/ sequel to “Dogville”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dogville/about.php . Starts right from the first second carrying on the theme. A different actress laying Grace. But somehow, maybe because we have already seen how a large sound studio with some handheld cameras can do all the business of locations and lighting teams and lavish props, the idea is not as interesting. Again, is it because we already know what von Trier is interested in, that “Manderlay”:http://www.manderlaythefilm.com/ is rather predictable. The genius of Dogville was its fairy tale nature, its ‘universal’ story. One interpretation of it was specific to the US – but its power, in my view, stemmed from its mythic character. Manderlay, on the other hand started and finished as a strong critique of American approaches to the ‘other’, domineering, not understanding, destructive and eventually hateful. Impressive, moving at times, alegorical but in my view not nearly as ground-breaking or powerful or haunting as its predecesor.

The fog, the fog

It is late in the winter afternoon. I am out in the near countryside by the river. I am on a bicycle and need to get home at the end of a day’s work on the path by the river. It is getting gloomy and I have no lights with me. I judge that I can make it back before it gets too dark. I take my bike over a style down toward the river and start cycling, but soon a fog comes from nowhere and as I pass under a bridge over the river, everything is grey, completely grey. Nothing is differentiated. All I can see is grey. But I keep cycling – as if I am going with my eyes closed. Then eventually I think of stopping and wonder what to do.

Later I am working for some futuristic government agency, in a building that is at once futuristic and decayed. It is darkish again. There are a number of us – in uniforms, men and women and I think someone is lost and we are gathering to go to lunch. There is humour but there is something uneasy.

The institution and the frightening steps

I was staying in some kind of institution, it could have been a monastery, where the men in charge would just walk into my room without knocking. I was packing up and getting ready to go home for the weekend. I was meeting a woman who I didn’t know for a date in a cafe somewhere. I woke up at 10.10 and I realised it was too late and that I had stood her up. Nevertheless, I started the journey back to where I lived. First walking through narrow lanes quite high up, then I joined a group of others and we had to walk down some old fashioned black metal steps high up over a steep hill, or over or next to the roof of some large church. I was almost paralysed with fear of heights as I stepped down from one to the other. The people around rallied to encourage and support me.

I don’t remember getting to the journey’s end.