Perfect Days, Gladness, Dignity, Darkness
A couple of nights ago, Rob and I watched Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. You can watch the trailer here, and here: a review in the Guardian by Wendy Ide.
Ide says,
“It should be the most soul-crushingly bleak film ever made – a Groundhog Day grind with added despair and urinal cakes. But Wim Wenders’s zen meditation on beauty, fulfilment and simplicity is quite the opposite: it’s an achingly lovely and unexpectedly life-affirming picture. It all depends – and this is central to the film’s gently profound message – on your way of looking at things. Hirayama looks at the world with his eyes, but sees with his heart.”
The film was originally called Komorebi, which if you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last 10 years, you’ll have seen the term somewhere.
Of course you might know of my obsession with Wings of Desire, often called Wim Wenders’s masterpiece. When I wrote Everything Affects Everyone I watched it a few times. My characters in EAE are also using the analog technology, cassette tapes, film cameras, which are in Perfect Days so beautifully. One of those nice little confluences in art, I suppose.
I had been re-reading a book of essays and conversations by Wenders prior to watching the new film, and his thoughts on cities really enhanced my viewing. For example:
“So you live with architecture differently than you do with a film, but even so, both ask the same question, ‘How should we live?’ Before you make a film and before you change a city, you ask the same question.” And then, “The less architecture asks itself at the outset, ‘How should we live?, the more it suppresses the question, the more someone will probably have to suffer for it later on.”
And then, important to Perfect Days, he says, “On old bridges you always had the feeling you were crossing over something.” And, that “I think it’s possible even today to build bridges that provide an experience…” “A bridge should be a place that makes you ponder, and feel the act of crossing!” He also talks about the new bridges being built that you can cross and you can “drive over it without even realizing it’s a bridge.”
I really felt like the city, the bridge, and the way the main character was on bicycle in his own neighbourhood and drove across the bridge for his job meant so much.
There’s a lot more to say about the music in the film, the cassettes, what the character was reading, and about the beauty of ordinary life. If you’ve read my essay in Apples on a Windowsill (sorry I guess I’m always bringing things back to me…lol), on ordinary life, you’ll know that I’ve been thinking about how ordinary life really isn’t accessible for everyone, or at least that it is and isn’t. But maybe that’s just because I have spent too long working at an inner city library.
I did love the experience of watching Perfect Days….in the end you feel like you’ve lived another life, even if only for an interval, and isn’t that a gift? I was reminded perhaps strangely of the Star Trek episode, TNG, when Picard lives a whole other life, or seemingly, when an energy beam from a probe finds him.
April is poetry month, and I’ve been reading poems as part of my morning ritual. I also dug a book out of my TBR pile about writing poetry, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, essays by Craig Morgan Teicher. The title comes from a Wordsworth poem, the lines, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Of course, it doesn’t have to end in madness. Teicher talks about how “poetry is a conversation, an extended one, occupying, perhaps, the span of an entire life.” He says, “language is humankind’s greatest technology, inexhaustible, endlessly adaptable, a mirror of a poet’s own time and, hopefully, of the endless unfolding of all time.” He quotes from the poem by Cavafy that he says gave him hope as a young writer:
“Even if you are on the first step, you ought
to be dignified and happy.
To have got this far is no small thing;
what you have done is a glorious honour.”
And I liked this, because the advice to be dignified and happy works, no matter what step you’re at, as a writer, or in whatever field you pursue. (Much like the character in Perfect Days). All of it, being here, is a glorious honour.
And the reminder to get to the simple things, to honour where one happens to be, has been timely for me, as the black dog has been walking a bit closer to my heel these days. I always find that looking at darkness, the wedge shapes of it, helps a little, so I took an old book off my shelf, John Tarrant’s The Light Inside the Dark. Tarrant says, “In even the narrowest circumstances, life is a plenitude. To welcome life instead of fighting it, to befriend the moments of night, is to respect our embodiment and fulfill its tasks.” Or you know, hello darkness my old friend.
There’s a poem titled “Suitcase” by Adam Zagajewski. In it he is travelling, and says,
“Only in Athens did I glimpse the sun, it
turned the air, the whole air,
the whole immense flotilla of the air
to trembling gold.”
He goes on,
“I’m just a tourist in the visible world,
one of a thousand shadows…”
The poems ends,
“I’m just an absentminded tourist,
but I love the light.”
So, onward, befriending night, darkness, shadows, adopting the stance of the absentminded tourist, who sees with her heart, and may or may not chance into some ordinary patch of light….
(Photos from Rome, 2023)
