Once in a blue moon — and we have a blue moon in springtime. An enormous moon and the blossoming apple and peach trees in sheltered orchards look luminous by moonlight.
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Heard last night about a friend who had a horrible relapse and I felt quite weepy, mostly because of having sinusitis and flu. Usually I just accept that drinking is our default position and if people don’t really want sobriety enough to do what is necessary, they just don’t want it enough — but I do hate the waste and suffering, the awful fog and insanity into which friends disappear when the drinking is all that means anything to them.
The great avant-garde film maker Chris Marker has died at the age of 91 – I remember his Sans Soleil with a small chill of loss. Much of my 20s and some of my 30s were spent huddled in flea-ridden dark and dingy art cinemas looking at the films of Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa. Long rainy obsessive afternoons just absorbing film, getting lost in the visual,surreal images and music and shutterspeed blazing through my mind, pushing aside all other kinds of problems. A solution of sorts, it seemed then.
Anyway, Sans Soleil: you might loosely describe the film as a travelogue through time and geography, from mid-1960s Iceland to early-1980s Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Japan. But there is so much else going on, a collage of losses and dreams — the film begins with an opening shot of three Icelandic children frolicking through a summer field and ends by panning across the same town several years later, buried up to its church steeple in molten lava.
“He wrote me,” the narrator says, speaking of the imaginary documentarian who is supposed to not be Marker, “that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory… In the spiral of [its] titles, he saw Time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains, motionless, the eye.”
I’m looking out the window at the enormous blue moon also! It is gorgeous, mysterious, and spiritual.
That moon was incredible.
Our group lost a member yesterday. I think he had 19 or 20 years 2 years ago (we celebrated one of our birthdays together). Now he is dead from a drug overdose. We truly have a daily reprieve.
I too saw the blue moon. I watched it rise from behind Mt. Hood — as it was near the horizon, it appeared to rise very quickly. For just a moment, a second, maybe less, it sat on the tip of the mountain and looked as if it could roll down the rocky side and over the land. Then, of course, it continued its ascent. Once in a blue moon.
The moon will be awesome tonight from the boat. I am looking forward to the weekend–the moon and the water and the quiet.
[...] at SoberBoots.com mentioned a friend who relapsed after two years, and Louisey at LettingGo mentioned a friend relapsing as well. Both ladies are tremendously gifted writers and I highly [...]
This really left me thinking:
“Usually I just accept that drinking is our default position and if people don’t really want sobriety enough to do what is necessary, they just don’t want it enough — but I do hate the waste and suffering, the awful fog and insanity into which friends disappear when the drinking is all that means anything to them.”
I am not sure in a good way or a bad way, but I am seriously comtemplating it.
Le Jette was one of my favorite Chris Marker films. He poetically told an emotionally complex story that has stayed in my thoughts. I too would retreat into the theater world engaged in a film for days…it opened up my life
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