halfway through watching Chris marker's sans soleil, I was feeling very inspired (in terms of how he cut it all together like a collage and the fictional narrative that felt more like fact/documentary) throughout that experience, but I suddenly had the urge to stop and get this floating /idea/ out of my head. that being recounting the first ever dream in my digital notes recorded - involving a train, and I was so unbelievably happy and free in that experience. everything was in golden light and I felt a warm nostalgia, but this time unlike reality it lasted forever. I was flying next to this moving train. the atmosphere was tinkling and welcoming. prompted by marker's narrative style I started writing a sort of script for a possible video idea. I could see it in my head! I wrote and wrote, the second part (sort of inevitable, really) on the somehow traumatic train experience I had, that was hard to explain in words. nothing happened to me, when you look at it on the outside, all I did was hear the trains in the dark on that bridge and off that bridge. I was crossing through while the train was crossing through me, like an intersection, a coming together (of complete opposites? I'm referring to Sarah's psychogeography workshop later in may) the closest thing is what I read about Munch's experience of The Scream. I just couldn't explain it. anyway, here's a rough beginning to what I wrote down, I can't tell if it's stupid or not, but i can see the video sequence in my head.. (some bits in brackets are editing choices not narration):
[train footage] I have had this dream before.
It was not a landscape I knew.
But I was not afraid,
No, I…I have never felt so free.
(Scene cut) I was flying, flying around this PLACE, but I had no bodily presence. a disembodied freedom of movement. A cherished disembodiment. I was gliding, I was soaring…I was basking in this golden, just slightly warm light as I flew along this railway, this moving train, I was moving with it, I was travelling with it but never arriving. I felt freer knowing we’d never arrive.
Apparently I was aware I was in a dreamscape. I allowed myself to fly under the bridge. (Throw them under the bus, flash) Then, right beside the train carriages, glimpses. Glimpses into their little windows as they flash by, people idly chatting in the out of body café.. it was so serene, so normal, yet such a rare occurrence. There seemed to be a brewing community here. To which I don’t belong.
I could have dissipated by now. There was no PLACE for me here. Yet I felt so free. Why is that? Did I find comfort in knowing we’d never arrive? Like they said, the journey is what counts, right? what counts? On what counts? What number are we on? Are we looking at the ends of plastic clock arms glued to a classroom, signifying breaks and home-time? it seems ludicrous to break up a time period of infinity. Have we arrived? Are we counting down to let go of something? January 28, 1968. Goodbye and farewell. I hope you had truly touched the face of god. Slipped the surly bonds of the earth. But on what counts?
{train 1}
I stayed. It could have been a second, or infinity. Maybe I’m still there now, I wouldn’t know because I never arrived, anywhere. Or maybe that was the destination. /laugh/Nation of destiny.
In the dream it was in a prepatory lament that I chose to stay. I was reminiscing memories that were not mine. Memories I could have had, or had, and eventually… lost. I wondered how I ended up there. I wonder now.
I didn’t recognise the cliffs, the grand nature surrounding it. I only felt its sublime warming up to the sunlight. Maybe I could fool myself into thinking I belonged there. Golden glow.
[scene cut- brutal train in wimbledon]. Night falls. (Dramatic graphics? Text) I am not in the dream anymore. (More dramatic graphics text like on poster or cartoon title electric) This is a real memory (quotation marks flash) , maybe (flash) two years ago. It is difficult to describe this moment. Every time I think of it I wonder if it was real. (Real? Flash) I think of Munch’s Scream.
It was.. the most violent confrontation I have ever experienced. (More footage clip)
there’s something terrifying about trains moving in the night. (Footage break)
Here, in the place so friendly in the day, I experienced a horror and lament so overpowering I could not explain. when the train propelled past it shot through my core - and if there were a railing I gripped it - the blast of air snapped my neck and I looked, and I looked on, and I saw the people in those carriages, invisible to the eye and I thought, they’re all going to leave me behind, I want to go there even though I don’t know where they are going. as the impossibly loud clashing of the train and the track echo all around these eardrums, there existed a, (non)sense of disembodiment. I wasn’t there, but at the same time I was completely and utterly immersed. and I cherished this immersion in the biting darkness. I wanted to cry but from what? I had no body anymore. these, /emotions/... they are gliding away in the traversing wind as we /speak/, spoke, spill, spilled. time has no boundaries and neither do I. displaced, disembodied, I carry with no weight, my remains.
I still do not know if I was left unmoving or twirling with a lightness around the edges. I cannot identify a joyful moment from a somber one. I was simply derailed in this mist. And I could not return.
Foucault said that
a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by.
And it goes by. (Footage)
And it goes.
I have had this dream before.
It was the first in my notes, my digital notes. therefore it must exist. this was the insignificant start of my memory of these dreams, an abstract archive I soak in, blend in and pretend I am living it through and through in the present. It is a gift and It doesn’t matter if they were and are remembered wrong, that’s not the purpose of dreams. It doesn’t matter if they are in pieces. Whats important is that the pieces matter. It is in their nature to be manipulated over time, a sort of (inhale).. sick equation, proving to you by science, logic, everything real (flash) again and again you are only your fickle memories and everything you know - which is, - everything you remember - could be a dream - that is to say, fiction, a figment of something distant, collaged together through rose coloured glasses, even the deeply horrific ones. You love them, don’t you, the escape when you raise your eyelids, to a world not so far away from what you had seen, unveiling shadows you never knew followed behind.
[ This dream has been had before. ] (flash?)
There was no date on .. The Notes, and I couldn’t tell you, exactly or even roughly when it had occurred. Time is.. so fluid, it completely escapes. It doesn’t.. it doesn’t even mean to, it just . was never meant to be caught. Some things are never meant to be caught. They are already confined in their own materiality. To be caught when confined would be like caging a pile of brittle bones. You can’t cage what is already broken. You shouldn’t! That’s pointless. They can’t run anywhere. But they can. That’s what’s so horrifying about the world here, they can run, and they will break others with their already shattered pieces. They’re jagged! They’re jagged! They’re jagged! And they can never fit back together. Time cannot be turned back. (confessions clock footage) Bubbles cannot be unpopped. Traumas cannot be forgotten. Those memories dig their heels deep in your dreams. They are the most real in that unreality. They anchor you when you are to be floated away. You need an anchor. You need to hold your ground even when surrounded by water, by the most fluid entity of them all - Time.
[(Think I’m being influenced by Theroux behind bars episode, that man serving 512 years and more)
"Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?"
- 1Q84]
[abstract footage/ trip footage, moving people, maybe that escalator vid in Japan looped]
This dream has been had before.
This dream had been before.
This dream before.
Before this dream.
I had already arrived.
(Get off station)
(Maybe footage of typing - I was soaring etc.^^^) (definitely footage with subtitles)
(Maybe get suitable footage from films but very zoomed?!or filmed through phone on screen. Snow piercer, galaxy express 999, Alice game footage
(Maybe actually talk about trains like in a blog post - in this way I am using my online archive/ blog as my work…!)
Link to now? Pandemic, cage, we always have been. Looking out train at nature, passing by nature, could be fake we don’t know, like that memory of in universal of those dinosaurs that snap their skin at you, or the diorama ride which Ive watched so much its become my memory its mine now. Passerby. Train carriages are like homes… temporary homes.. but an uncertain period of time not too long not too short, (sans Soleil ferry) in movies they cut, snip at the journey like in hunger games, its not significant but really it is. That is our life, we are going somewhere even if that is nowhere. Will we ever arrive - tie back into dream. If that train crashes it will resemble an earthquake natural disasters ii will hear the violent roars of the jurassic and the parks. Ill wake up and find that this moving scene outside has been a green screen all along, and it had fazed me for my long twenty two years of life. All these scenes whizzing past and I don’t, am physically incapable of, holding onto the details. Isn’t that sad? I grow more melancholic every passing ‘day’. /can talk about photographs and films but long / if I don’t finish this now, I’ll never finish it she says.
Its time, its time to go now, its always time, it always has been, you’ve been thrown on this train, to the point of no return. But you were already there at the start. ]
Alas, we have arrived. (Train still moving footage) [final destination]
[(Amusement park narration?) mind the gap]
(Narrate my memory of dream + mish-mash footage I have.
(Animate some photos) (if this is only subtitles with no voice - readers own voice?)
Some still images - collage or strange zoom in and text ? Play with colours very bright like midnight gospel as a nod to artificial digital landscape. ? // need to watch more of April 10 posts. Like found footage.
[voices not understandable? Just watched the right way fischli and Weiss. Maybe like animal crossing just sounds.,,
The online archive / blog posts IS the work.. with the images like slideshow simple… la jetee …