Eventually I could see that it apparently was not an airplane, but not until it was very near did I realize that it was a person. And what was strange was that it was not Yin Nan. The person soaring up there like some huge bird was myself.
There on the ground was the real me holding a kite string, controlling another self-same me up there in the blue…
One summer many years later, to my total surprise, I once again encountered this fleeting illusion, which had been very much like a scene from a film.
In the hottest part of the summer of 1993, when I quite by chance saw the Italian movie 8 1/2, it seemed like the gods had arranged this meeting with Federico Fellini, the film's eccentric director, who had created the same illusion.
Again, in the summer of 1994, I embraced the work of Ingmar Bergman, another male who was to infatuate me, when I saw in multitrack sound his films Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.
But all of this happened later.
They and I lived in different, mad ages, but for a fleeting moment our minds had shared the same visions.
Wild Strawberries:
… I think it was also on a bright summer day. An old man dreamed that he was walking on a quiet, deserted street in a strangely desolate city. His shadow was outlined by the sunlight, but he felt very cold nonetheless. As he strolled down the broad, tree-lined street, the sound of his footsteps echoed uneasily from the surrounding buildings.
He felt strange, but he had no idea why.
While he was passing an optometrist's shop, he noticed that there were no hands or numbers on the big clock on the store's sign. He took his watch out of his breast pocket and checked the time. But the hands of his very accurate old gold timepiece had also disappeared. His time had run out; those hands would never again indicate time for him. He held the watch next to his ear to check that it was still ticking, but all he heard was the beating of his own racing heart.
Putting his watch back in his breast pocket, he looked up at the optometrist's sign, only to see that the big pair of eyes on it had almost totally rotted away. Frightened out of his wits, he turned around and started walking in the direction of his home.
At a street corner, he at last saw another person standing with his back to him. He rushed over and bodily spun him around, only to discover that under the floppy brim of his hat there was no face, and as his body turned it collapsed as if it were nothing more than a heap of dust or wood shavings, leaving an empty suit of clothes crumpled on the ground.
Only then did he discover that everyone along that tree-lined street that connected with the city square had died. There was not a living soul… A hearse clanked by, its wheels rumbling loudly as it lurched along the rough street. Just as it reached him, the coffin fell off as three of its metal wheels rolled over, and clattered down beside him. As he was looking at the coffin, its lid sprang open. There was not a sound or a breath coming from it. Curious, he ventured slowly over to it. As he did so, an arm suddenly shot out from those splintered planks and clung to him desperately. Then the corpse slowly arose. He stared at it transfixed. The corpse standing there in the coffin in a swallowtailed coat was himself.
Death was calling…
The Seventh Seaclass="underline"
Overhead, the dull gray sky was dead as the vaulted ceiling of a tomb.
A black cloud stood motionless on the horizon as the curtain of night began to fall. A strange bird hung aloft, severing the air with its unsettling cries.
The knight Antonius was seeking the road back home through fields littered with corpses in a pestilence-ridden land.
He surveyed the scene around him.
There was a man standing behind him all dressed in black, his face an unusual ashen gray, his hands hidden in the deep folds of his cloak.
Turning to him, the knight asked, "Who are you?"
The man in black with the ashen face said, "I am Death."
The knight: "Have you come looking for me?"
Death: "I have been watching you for a very long time."
The Knight: "I have known this – it is your way."
Death: "This is my territory. Are you ready to 'set off' with me now?"
The knight: "My flesh is a bit frightened, but I myself don't give it much note."
Death spread open his black cloak to enclose the knight.
The knight: "Wait a moment."
Death: "I cannot delay your time."
The knight: "You like to play chess, don't you?"
Death: "How did you find that out?"
The knight: "I have seen it in paintings, heard it in people's songs."
Death: "You are right, of course. I am an excellent chess player."
The knight: "But you're not necessarily better than me."
As he spoke, the knight carefully laid out a chessboard on the ground and started setting up the pieces. Then he said, "The condition is this – as long as I am in the game you must let me live."
The knight extended two closed fists to Death.
Death let out a burst of wild laughter as he held up the black pawn in his hand.
The knight: "So, you will play the black?" Death: "Is it not most appropriate for me to do so?"
The knight and Death sat down rigidly, facing each other across the chessboard. Antonius hesitated for a moment, then moved a pawn. Death countermoved.
An intense heat surrounded this desolate field, which was immersed in strange mists. In the distance, crowds of people were dancing their dance with Death, and Death was dancing his fatal steps with each of them.
Death concentrated on his game with Antonius, determined to take him away. Eventually, Antonius lost, and Death carried him off…
But there is a chronological discrepancy involved in all of this. On that oppressive early summer evening when this unbroken string of strange scenes flashed through my mind, I had not yet seen these films.
That evening, as these anticipated scenes were unfolding in my mind, I was walking along that tree-lined street behind the square. It wasn't very far from the hospital where my mother was convalescing.
At that point, an ill-omened wind from above seemed to press down upon the street with an anxious disquietude. The depressing sound of my footsteps on the street, now trapped in twilight gloom, seemed to mark the respite that precedes the onslaught of a storm's main force. Their sound brought me back from the unreality of those illusionary scenes that had held my mind.
The overturned object at the corner of the street looked like a dead mare, her belly swollen with foal. Its smoldering fragments gave off a stench of burning rubber that filled that tree-lined, peaceful street with the nauseating smell of war and floated upward to clog the translucent twilight sky above the city.
The smoke floated up like curling wisps of incense above an altar toward a silent, unanswering heaven.
It was at just that moment that the stray bullet, with complete disinterest, came out of nowhere to pierce my left calf on one side and exit from the other.
19 The Birth Of Miss Nothing…
A person's ability to act in accord with her own conscience depends upon the degree to which she can go beyond the limits imposed by the society in which she lives, to become a citizen of the world. The most important quality she must possess in this is the courage to say no, the courage to refuse to obey the dictates of the powerful, to refuse to submit to the dictates of public opinion.
In the early autumn of 1990, my mother's heart condition brought on a serious heart attack, and one night, sometime after a last wrenching bout of pain, she "died" quietly in the midst of her dreams.
I put quotation marks around "died" because that was what the doctors and the others around her said.
But that was not the way I saw it.