Vagabond

 

Daphne left rehab against medical advisement or whatever and she’s been shooting speedballs in her aunt’s basement in Airdrie. Speedballs make you magnificently loopy, although I personally never understood the appeal. You mix cocaine and opiates is what you do, you cook them together in the same spoon, and basically the idea is you have the minute-long rush off the cocaine that makes you feel like you are having a heart attack and your eardrums are on the verge of rupturing, and once that is over you are blissfully high on the opiates for a good six hours or so, depending on your tolerance and duration of daily use. When I was using intravenous drugs on the weekends as a young man, I was perfectly happy to settle for the six hours of not thinking and of being suffused with supernatural warmth without the initiating  cocaine blitzkrieg, though I would do speedballs with friends who were doing them so as not to be a spoilsport. Poor wobbly and restless Daphne. I’ve extended her an offer to make use of the daybed in the basement for a few nights. She can use whatever she wants as long as she does so safely and out of my direct range of vision. I guess Daphne recently saw an episode of Black Mirror called “White Christmas” with John Hamm in it and it really rocked her in a maximally discomfiting sort of way, although she seems to get off on it the way she would a coke rush. Daphne is seized by new terrors with respect to the concept of immortality and the fact that it may be far less desirable than any of us earthlings have yet been able to properly divine. Her fundamental point: immortality does not on the face of it seem desirable at a time when the planet is a mouldering heap of trash with dimwitted humans endlessly butting heads. What would a “life savings” become in the context of the economics of immortality? Would people become trapped in tortuous ordeals, as though on a reel? Would space-time become fundamentally different, opening up like a flower? Would mass sterility somehow figure, like in the wildly overrated 2006 Alfonso Cuarón movie Children of Men? Maybe a whole other scene,  à la Freud, could be produced and demonstrated. Maybe every single human being who ever existed could come back to life in some audio-visual or fully sensory form that we could access and with which we could play and experiment. One of the characters in the recent Richard Powers novel Playground would by all accounts appear to have believed since he was a little boy that technology will someday resurrect all who lived and died in one form or another; I remembered as I read the book that as a boy I had likewise contemplated this enormous and confounding idea. How do these things get planted in us? I put the question to Daphne and Daphne said with great self-assurance that these sorts of deeply embedded unconscious ‘memes’ are information from the future bouncing back off of us. Consider, added Daphne, the movie Vagabond by Agnès Varda. I was pleased to do so, as it’s a film we screened at the Plaza on 35mm film back when that was still possible and I was still a film programmer. I remember that Daphne had been in attendance that night. We smoked a joint together outside the theatre with my girlfriend at the time. Daphne says that on the night of the screening I had said that Vagabond is above all about two things: the logic of tracking shots plus the principle that death is a process of organic transition. I didn’t remember making that second observation, but would have to concede that it certainly sounds like me. Amazingly from my standpoint, it was Daphne, high and scratching herself, who then proceeded to consider the physics of the death problem. If death is an organic transition it has cosmic implications and material ones, reaching backward and forward in time. The point of beginning her movie with a  languorous consideration of the frozen corpse of the protagonist and then setting about recreating the final weeks of this young woman’s life, like a kind of psychospiritual audio-visual detective story, is that having entered into death in space-time, the young woman’s material-organic death has implications going both backward and forward in time, but we don’t get to see the future, we see only the before-death as a quantum territory wherein the evental death actively reinscribes and reencodes the living material past. I was quite surprised to hear Daphne speak so coherently in her current state/condition, especially insofar as abstract thought will invariably become aberrant and perverse in those in active addiction. I also confess to having felt a little sheepish for never having myself had the proper sense to call Vagabond a metaphysical film outright. It is. And in exactly the way Daphne lays it out. In light of this I feel even worse about the stupid joke I made as Daphne was going downstairs for the night and I to my bedroom. I told her that if she died in my house I’d kill her.