The number 23 has, it could be said, an enigma attached to it. Robert Anton Wilson: “I added the Law of 23s, derived from Burroughs, on the grounds that 2 + 3 = 5, and Discordians were soon reporting 23s and 5s from everywhere in current history and the past.” This is probably the last of the cinetagmatics for the time being. I hear tell of a somber, geriatric gentleman in the state of Washington. The orderlies call him Surely Surly Jay. They say he’s all kinds of disconnected. He throws elbows on the way down the hall. It would hardly be likely to strike this elderly unfortunate that he owes me a reply. Where will any of us be in 23 + 5 years? Riddle me hwhat. You’re late. Kiss me. Jean Genet in Palestine. Tourne la page. Does the number 23 come up in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1996 masterpiece For Ever Mozart? When did you last see it? I’ve revisited it twice this ignoble though quite miraculous January of the year 2021. A somber old man, beginning voice off (with English subtitles): “This is what Juan Goytisolo told me in Madrid: Is the history of Europe in the 1900’s a simple rehearsal with slight symphonic variations of the cowardice and chaos on the 1930’s? Austria, Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia: a dreadful, unending Bolero by Ravel.” Godard’s film is on the road to anywhere and everywhere between here and Descartes, assessing the damage at the level of the faltering embodied imagination, a crumblebum system for the induction and conduction of images. You’ve got these itinerant thespians of disaster capitalism. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Sarajevo. What’s the writing on the wall? It’s Cyrillic. Inspiration is always in the air. Dread, likewise. In another film Godard has told us that the “catastrophe” is a particular strophe in any poem that happens to contain one. The itinerant thespians of disaster capitalism seem to be set on staging a caravan theatre about how we ought not fall in love in a hellscape. Whatever its airs, this is a tourism in over its head. As for the semi-dotard patriarchs, well, bless them if they behold unusual effervescences in the plain old light. This 1996 film from Godard actually has some salient business in common with Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which I originally saw first run at Ottawa’s Bytowne Cinema (whose doors recently closed permanent). Mozart and Ghost Dog. We are talking here about more than merely the sects of senescence (and its beyonds). Is there as encapsulating a sequence from the year 1999 as that in Ghost Dog which finds Forest Whitaker and Isaach De Bankolé wryly bilingually commentating-in on the oddball neighbour across the way who would appear to be building some hobbyist miniaturist Noah’s Arc on the roof? Has this man across the way been talking to Juan Goytisolo? Whoever saw September 11th, 2001 coming didn’t pinpoint it very precisely and still can’t. A game of battledore and shuttlecock, a routinized ritual of whip-back-around. The whole metric is shot to shit and anybody with a big story on the odds is selling you a peg leg. For September 11th, 2001, in the province where I’m licensed to practice, it might be customary to turn the worthy client over to Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Or, better yet, Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11. It is hardly a well kept secret that my foremost obsession since December of 2019 has almost certainly been the writing of Paul West. Let me quote at length from the West text just addressed. What can I say? Doing this at length is the only truly righteous act I have at my immediate disposal. “Unable to discern in everyday life things that had gone wrong or awry, Shrop began to pick on bizarre reports that told him, as well as many others, they were indeed living in an unusual, even unprecedented time. It was not that almost everyone reported a headache, but that a certain Beast of Cricklewood, in fact a lynx, had stalked the streets of Purchase, NY, unidentified, for months, while in New Delhi a Monkey Man—short, human body, with a monkey’s head and metal claws—had committed numerous nighttime attacks. In the Pacific area, a gigantic stick insect had been identified as a ‘walking sausage.’ Crocodiles had been found in Vienna. A minor tornado had deluged a Wiltshire golf course with goldfish and koi carp. Frogs had poured, and were pouring, from the Italian skies. Sand from the Sahara (ah, this he understood and saw as normal) was landing on the cars of Europe. It was clear to him, however, that the world was twisting about, trying to be different. Evolution, he persuaded himself, was scratching itself and trying to be flashy. Had the two topless towers not been attacked, he wondered, would all this have seemed in the least strange? One injection of the weird was enough to draw attention to all the weird stuff that had lain doggo for years, unsaluted and unappraised. It was like (he tried in his befuddled way to regain his Shakespeare) the night in Macbeth when the horses go mad in the stables and start to eat one another, just because other unnatural things are happening in the human domain (Duncan is being murdered). All things go together, he told himself: first one, then all the rest, in wholesale perversion.” West’s novel was published in 2003, the same year he would suffer a debilitating stroke. When was the last time you thought practicably about courtship? Not even hell is hell if you are left to your own devises, but a good tangle is the cat’s pyjamas. What is there to do but do? So, what has been going on since things started to go screwy with the moles? Who doesn’t recall the extraterritorial adventures the perpetrators in their gall have themselves called the forever wars? History is torrential tomfoolery. Here and now the perpetrators positively paralyze you with their gall. Let us thank our lucky stars for that recent box set from Arrow featuring three feature narrative Shohei Imamura films. The filmmaker in question spent a lot of time in his work—whether this take the form of lavish feature movies or low-budget television documentaries—making a point of the fact that the imperial Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia was in large part a vice racket. But I have good new for you, too. It is not only psychotropic herbs one can grow in one’s terrarium or what have you! Not at all, pish posh. The news is you can make your own springtime in the comfort of your own home. Replete with kimonos, should that be to your taste. May this too grow communicable, adapting itself in any number of ways. Unpredictable and you wouldn’t wanna be in the predicting game now at any rate, friend. I am still on the board and serving as the Programming committee chair for a still adequately optimistic cinematheque. I owe some copy to our Communications person because we do in fact have a series more or less ready to be set running, although there is of course no legitimately saying as to when exactly. What else? Any additional excuses? I have been in the pond with an echo. Underscore that. I submitted a piece of short fiction about the obscenity of telling stories, to The Puritan. I continue writing religiously (elsewhere) about books. I have also, finally in finality, undertaken a large and ambitious musical project, this first of all being a recording project in two parts and then whatever it is after that. The real throb of the matter is the throb of life, and you will all pardon me if I make a special case of living; I’ve witnessed the desiccation and ruin of those lost souls who fatefully scorned to heed the call. Surf the obscenity that is the obscenity of 21st century life. Did I tell you? You can surf here in Spring. Tonight I made sure to have a shower before I sat down and revisited Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1953) (in sterling 1080p from the British Film Institute). It is the zealous Man of God who reviles you with your “mortal soul” and warns you of “mortal danger.” Dryer’s first major sound film is one of more than one of his in which broken people with unbroken spirits plead for their lives, though some question does persist as to whether or not those spirits have been subject to infernal subversion. Tag Gallagher would have us take on credit that Dryer believed we the living could raise the dead. I am neither here to say this is wrong nor that we cannot raise the dead. I am not saying and cannot be expected to ever be saying either thing. I’ve got to do whatever I’ve got to do not to get loaded. And you’ll pardon me if I’ve kind of overconstructed my life for the moment. It is the poet John Ashbery who tells us in “The Lonedale Operator”: “Anything can change as fast as it wants to, and in doing so may pass through a more or less terrible phase, but the true terror is in the swiftness of changing, forward or backward, slipping always just beyond our control. The actors are like people on drugs, though they aren’t doing anything unusual—as a matter of fact, they are performing brilliantly.” When I think of Godard’s For Ever Mozart, and I do think about it often, I commonly summon to mind the moment a male voice-over speaks of the great philosophical master who when confronted by his student, the speaker, incredulous that anyone could imagine a cosmic endpoint or barrier beyond which there is nothing, fronts with the simple observation that “If it ends, beyond it is nothing.” The coup de grâce: “My master was the only philosopher who was truly sincere.” I sincerely doubt it. Or maybe that is merely a question in the form of a false positive. I am not sure there is all that much I can do other than rebop in the exact same words an earlier question, augmented: what is there to do but do, do da doo? I seem to recall reading an interview (or about an interview, maybe a press conference) with Godard in Film Comment as a teenager, this being an interview I seem to recall having taken place at Cannes, somebody asking Godard about the first two words in the title of For Ever Mozart being separated as two words instead of combined as one, and the Swiss filmmaker responding (or being reported to have responded) to the effect that there is a French sense here is which it is mandated to dream. You know, I am shitting you not when I tell you I have a couple crates in that closet behind me of Film Comments dating back to my high school years. There is neither pride nor shame in this, but I would still like to insist that I am not categorically opposed to lending either pride or shame a helping hand, rig it up or rope it down, come what may or whichever way the totoing and froing should happen to be going. You cannot break it down into something that doesn’t add up without having people come along like shitheads and set about adding it up on their own dang account. Hey, it may be Spring but I’m no chicken. Clouds of dirt on a country road. What does it matter when the dream is beautiful?
