:20:00
Or was it the other way around?
:20:19
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film
I had seen nineteen times.
:20:22
In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.
:20:26
That summer I had met three children on a road
and a volcano had come out of the sea.
:20:31
Encore un coup de... *I don't know*
:20:36
The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon,
in this corner of Earth that resembles it.
:20:40
I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction:
the landscape of another planet.
:20:43
Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet
for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away.
:20:50
I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,
about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.
:20:55
All of a sudden he stumbles,
and the next step it's a year later.
:20:59
He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border
along a sea bird sanctuary.
:21:06
That's for a start.
:21:08
Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories?
That's just it, he can't understand.
:21:13
He hasn't come from another planet,
he comes from our future,
:21:17
Four thousand and one:
:21:19
the time when the human brain has reached
the era of full employment.
:21:22
Everything works to perfection,
all that we allow to slumber, including memory.
:21:26
Logical consequence:
total recall is memory anesthetized.
:21:31
After so many stories of men who had lost their memory,
:21:34
here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,
and whothrough some peculiarity of his nature
:21:41
instead of drawing pride from the fact and
scorning mankind of the past and its shadows,
:21:45
turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion.
:21:49
In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision,
to be moved by a portrait,
:21:54
to tremble at the sound of music,
can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.
:21:58
He wants to understand.