Michael > Recent Status Updates

I drove across Texas
for weeks.
If I was to define Texas by a single image
I’d say:
An old man with a cowboy hat.
Old cowboys
are the saddest
and most touching figures.

“For a while he sat twisting round and round a map in the form of a circular board that he had in his hands. Sure enough, it showed a railroad track running steadily down towards the south, following the left bank of the white streak that was the Milky Way.”

years earlier
I had come to New York with Bruno Ganz
for the American premiere of
“The American Friend.”
Filled with awe
we’d been sitting in the lobby
of the Algonquin Hotel,
where William Faulkner used to stay.

Ame ni mo makezu

Be not defeated by the rain. Nor let the wind prove your better.
Succumb not to the snows of winter. Nor be bested by the heat of summer.

Be strong in body. Unfettered by desire. Not enticed to anger. Cultivate a quiet joy.
Count yourself last in everything. Put others before you.
Watch well and listen closely. Hold the learned lessons dear.

…

(translation by David Sulz)

“Hajime,” she began, “the sad truth is that some things can’t go backwards. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back to the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay for ever.”

The camera therefore is an eye
capable of looking forward and backward
at the same time.
Forwards, it does in fact “shoot a picture,”
backwards, it records a vague shadow,
sort of an x-ray of the photographer’s mind,
by looking straight through his (or her) eye
to the bottom of his (or her) soul.

“Everything disappears some day. Like this bar — it won’t go on forever. People’s tastes change, and a minor fluctuation in the economy is all it would take for this to go under. I’ve seen it happen; it doesn’t take much. Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”

“Words lead one down certain regular, pre-defined pathways but they can be constricting… Without the words one may have to travel slower, with a candle in the dark instead of hi-beams on the interstate… But you move into a different place without words, a special, silent, understanding.”

“Tracks without trains passing over them have a mysterious silence all their own.”

“Water towers of assorted odd shapes hang over the landscape like beacons, and giant electric scaffoldings string miles of charged particles over the burnt lakes and summer grasses. The road is ever ahead, snaking its way thru the lives of the people here.”

“Until that reading, I hadn’t realized how little I remembered of what goes on in the book. I recognized virtually nothing — the characters, the scenes, nothing. I might as well have been reading a whole new book. How strange. I must have been deeply moved at the time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my noticing, the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away…”

“But I’m not dead. I just disappeared. I do that. I move into another world, a different world. Like boarding a train running parallel. That’s what disappearing is. Don’t you see?”

“Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you’re over the summit, it’s downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you’re still going strong, when suddenly you’ve crossed the great divide. No one can tell.”

“When I awoke the following morning, it was April. As delicately rendered as a passage from Truman Capote, fleeting, fragile, beautiful. April, made famous by T.S. Eliot and Count Basie.”

“I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel…
The Dolphin Hotel is distorted, much too narrow. It seems more like a long, covered bridge. A bridge stretching endlessly through time. And there I am, in the middle of it. Someone else is there too, crying.
The hotel envelops me. I can feel its pulse, its heat. In dreams, I am part of the hotel.”

“You know how they’ve got these cookie assortments, and you like some but you don’t like the orhers? And you eat up all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don’t like so much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. ‘Now I just have to polish these off, and everything’ll be OK.’ Life is a box of cookies.”

“Play ‘Norwegian Wood,” said Naoko.
Reini brought a porcelain beckoning cat from the kitchen. It was a coin bank, and Naoko dropped a 100-yen piece from her purse into its slot.
“What’s this all about?” I asked.
“It’s a rule,” said Naoko. “When I request ‘Norwegian Wood,’ I have to put a hundred yen into the bank. It’s my favorite, so I make a point of paying for it…”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“She said, then, that she’d come from a small town near San Diego and she’d lived here now five years. She was, of course, in that loose category, an actress. She’d come because of, more or less, the usual compulsions: ‘my face for the world to see,’ she said, quoting something I couldn’t identify.”

“At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous if they weren’t already famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy, or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were.”

“I’ve always asked for special privileges and exemptions. Some things I didn’t get just because I couldn’t find anyone to explain them to. But a deprivation that demands you choose to dismiss either your past or your future is more difficult. So I’m asking where would you begin again? As you suggest. Or how. Or more to the point, why?”

“So where does music come from?
No one knows. A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.”

“When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they werent supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fastened on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important to them to believe than to know.”

You want to know when was the last time I saw anybody. I could ask you when was the last time you didnt see anybody. When was the last time you just sat by yourself. Watched it get dark. Watched it get light. Thought about your life. Where you’d been and where you were goin. Was there a reason for any of it.

“There were 37 of her letters and although he knew them each by heart he read them over and over… He had asked her if she believed in an afterlife and she said that she did not discount such a thing… She just doubted that it could be for her. If there was a heaven, was it not founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned? Lastly she said that God was not intereseted in our theology but only in our silence.”