"the first image he told me about was of three children on the road in iceland, in 1965
he said that for him it was the image of happiness,
and also that he'd tried several times to link it to other images
but it never worked

he wrote me:
i will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,
which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining
we do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten
how can one remember thirst?

8:40 cambodia
in apocalypse now, brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences:
horror has a name and a face: you must make a friend of horror
to cast out the horror that has a name and a face
you must give it another name and another face

i wish i could convey to you the lack of affectation of this couple who'd come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery
so their cat Tora would be protected
no, she wasn't dead, just run away
but on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death
so he would call her by her right name
so they had to come there, under the rain, to perform the rite
that would repair the web of time where it had been broken

he spoke to me of sei shonagon
a lady-in-waiting to princess sadako at the beginning of the 11th century
shonagon had a passion for lists:
a list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing
one day she got the idea of drawing up a list
of things that quicken the heart

i'm writing you this from another world - a world of appearances
in a way the two worlds communicate with each other
history is to one what memory is to the other
an impossibility
the new bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time
that will have to reread itself constantly just to know that it existed

total recall is memory anesthetized
the idea that unhappiness had existed in the past
is as unbearable as the existence of poverty in the present

on hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire
one would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers
before drinking his last cup of sake ryoji uebara had written:
we kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say
in the plane i am a machine
a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier
but once on the ground i am a human being with feelings and passions

and i thought of all the prayers to time
the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of gotokuji
who said to her cat Tora, simply:
cat, wherever you are, peace be with you

when spring came, i took the green train of the yamanote line and got off at tokyo station, near the central post office
even if the street was empty i waited at the red light
so as to leave space for the spirits of broken cars
even if i was expecting no letter, i stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honour the spirit of torn-up letters
and at the airmail counter to salute the spirit of unsent letters

i took measure of that unbearable vanity of the west
that never ceases to privilege being over non-being
what is spoken to what is left unsaid

then i went down into the basement, where my friend - the maniac - busies himself with his electronic graffiti
finally his language touches me, because he speaks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls
a piece of chalk to outline the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet
the handwriting each one of us will use to compose their own list of things that quicken the heart
to offer or to erase

in that moment poetry will be made by everyone
and there will be emus in the zone"