Vive L'amour!

Idris Jala, amazing leader in Malaysia. Philippines could learn from him.

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One of the new trends in the music business is the idea that the purchasing of music will give way to subscription formats. For several people, this model makes a great deal of sense--the analogy given that it is much like a subscription meant that is similar to cell phones carriers, cable, television, and internet. Now the greatest problem is to get people off of the idea that music should still be paid for per-bite, per-song. The problem of getting people to convert cuts both ways. The first is that the consumer still likes the approach of getting free music illegally or buying the iTunes model of songs for 99 cents. The other problem is that the recording artists and labels haven't yet seen the viability of the subscription model, and that even worse than the 99 cent single, subscription fees will grossly diminish the worth of their product.

So what needs to be done about the music business? One, there needs to be a unifying force on the artists side to allow companies to access entire catalogues of music. Two, there needs to a change in consumers where they find that it is much easier to buy music through subscriptions rather than downloading music illegally through a torrent.

The final logic is that people are listening to more music than ever. The only problem is, the industry is that they're not getting paid for all those listens. There was somebody who mentioned that nothing that was free ever worked in the long run. Aside from Google, maybe he is right. What business models truly work are the one's that are able to motivate someone to actually spend money upfront. Free models don't work.

What is remarkable about the writing of Tioseco is that when he writes words they have something at stake within them. He writes words that are charged with the substance of meaning, of potential, and the power to enact a real political change within the environment that he moves within. The difference between a writer like Tioseco and me is the chasm of an entire politics of possibility. I myself am often at odds with those leftist American writers who continually harp at the idea of being able to change the make-up of this society, who regularly re-hash those old ghosts of the political movements of the 60s and 70s and blind themselves with a political immediacy that hardly burns as strong as before. So, then, what is so exciting about the writings of Tioseco is that when he writes, his words have a gravity. They have a meaning behind them. They are words stripped of the hypocrisy of political posturing and acting as though the word of 'cinema' could actually still generate any real feeling in America anymore.

The Philippines has been held back in that period, that portion of time and excitement that exemplified any revolutionary place, where the teetering order of society could fell and give way to a better political order at any moment. They are always nearing that grasp, but yet they are still not there. So, as I have told the people in my life over and over again, the Philippines is an island on its own and the heroism and ideals of liberty can come to their own equilibrium, it can because of people like Tioseco.

I don't go to the movies anymore, I've lost touch with reality.

We're back in Los Angeles, tired from the lack of sleep that we had on the airplane. The ride just a sequence of blurs and wakings, of looking up and seeing the flight attendant with a tray of juice cups passing down the aisle, and then once more just a second later with a bag to hold your trash. It was very sad to leave Maui, and Annie joked that the whole island was crying for us as we drove down the highway the soft sprinkling of misty rain blowing at our windshield. We were driving by a cluster of beaches and saw all the surfers barbequeing up and down the coast line in the Seattle grey weather with their swimsuits on, a lot of the local natives hitting the waves and boogie boarding on the black-grey sand.

Just driving through that volcanic landscape that seems borrowed from the high plains of Texas with the light short green shrub that heads on up towards the hills, and the cascade of the red sand rock face of the cliffs that are only held together by a cylindrical wire meshing to prevent the rock slides--it all just seems so fond and almost unchanging. It's doubtful that anything will change much when we are gone from Maui if we ever come back--and that seems to be the ultimate charm of Maui, a beautiful tourist location kept afloat by its utter beauty and the people like us who are immediately in rapture and go to photograph everything about the island, and try to seize it and make it a part of us, a simple paradise that is so slow and different and the summary of everything that we think that life should and must be like. While there are those caveats, like that celebrity art gallery dealer in Lahaina with the pony tail who had done his time in Los Angeles and laughed at my suggestion that life on Maui is easy. Easy for none, because money is hard, things are expensive, the same story told anywhere and everywhere. But it doesn't seem that Maui is too hard pressed. The cash flow is good and it sustains the island, and that is what makes it seem beautiful.

But i'll take Maui on how beautiful it was. An island getaway for lovers, keepers of fantasy,celebrations of all kinds, anniversaries of the riche elderly, of Hong Kong gangsters and their wives at buffets, the rich and beautiful, the big-bellied men with too-gorgeous hispanic girlfriends, the miscellaneous local spearfisher at Ka'anapali, the two weird bible hippies by the Banyan tree who read and then profess the word, for gasoline attendants with paper clips in their ears, for people with names that mean 'sweetheart' in Hawaiian, for all the smiles faces, for all the parents who dragged along their children who won't remember a thing about it, for the retirees who spend all their time drinking wine and visiting exotic locales, for the Swedes, the Japanese, the Chinese, and all the other people who don't speak English but come just for the view, for Mark Twain, for Lindberg, for Melville, for burned out television writers with four divorced wives, for all those people I've ever met who feel like they're experts on the studies of Maui, and most of all for me and Annie. Maui trapped in the middle of the pacific as a small inscrutable dot, and there's such an exemplary feeling in knowing that such a place, so utterly small has become for us in our hearts and our minds unimaginably bigger than life itself.

from 'Roughing It'

Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean-- not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break--not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain--some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.

While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the East. A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor- palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich coloring.



It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will remain with me always.

It is the memory of Macchu Piccu that serves you well when you look upon the crater of the earth that opens up before like an alien form, like the empty oceans of the moonscape. Haleakala looks like the black earth that one sees in Kurosawa's film Dreams where all of those strange onu welcome the strange traveler and put on their kabuki faces that twist with the mysterious noise in their heads. The traveler straightens up and begins to run away from the demons and when he twists away he begins to descend. And his motion slows, and he falls. It is funny how the greatest segments of film are about the way that gravity brings the weight of something to the earth, to watch the most natural movement of something about to come to rest. And this is the man's motion, his fright awakens him to descend and he slips down upon the black earth suspended in the slowest motion of those frames--I forget whether the speed of the wind peels away his hat or whether he holds onto the hat with his one free hand. Haleakala was this same plot of land. This black earth carved away by the thousands of years of movement, where the beauty of something as in the entire beauty of Hawaii is that it is purely one thing at one moment. The crater is pure black--but I suppose not just one shade of black, but a color of black-red with small variations of green chinese brush color painted onto a side of a hill to the far left, a train of mist the runs through the center of one's vision and rolls like wheels throughout the valley like a conveyor belt. And it is the beautiful sun, the sun of the egg that Bataille was so obsessed with, and that is the ultimate power I think.

What was sacred for the Hawaiians, when they came to the top of the mountain to enact a sacred ritual, to enter the sacred house of the sun where they could bury the placenta of their newborn babies comes out of this sacred alien land. What is beautiful about the summit is that it is where one is closest to the figure of the sun, and that is what is so important. But for me this is view is quite personal because it is the memory that is closest to the fantasy of my youth, that the sun should rise beyond a set of verdant hills, that the memory of the La Crescenta Valley with the santa ana winds pulling the clouds across the distance. I discover through the landscape that it is the youth of my memory that I have always desired, that the immensity of what we want to see in our eyes is always rooted in what one has lost and that one always wants to return to. Macchu Piccu has always been the most desired place, with the men who built their houses within the sky, and had inhabited an ancient place that was most nearly close towards heaven, and perhaps it was not necessarily the form of what they were building, but mostly the location and the placement of where a man should feel his greatest potential within a landscape. Haleakala had approximated the allure of Piccu. It was the house of the sky, the mountain is the pillar to the sun, where a man should know that he can stretch his hands at his most primitive and feel as though he at least has come as closely to the heavens as he possibly could.

Haleakala is the dream of the youth. And as the eyes close, as always, the image is almost immediately lost and the memory is routed to an abyss, but merely to that empty knowledge that I have been there. I cannot close my eyes and return to the mountain top, my complete memory of the place is left there and will hopefully be returned there one day. Traveling has shown me that it is all about the struggle to make and etch out some snapshots that will stay, and that there is certainly a poetry to traveling, and that the entirety of Haleakala will not stay with me. One needs only an economy to get to the heart and root of the precious memory that was an experience: sunrise, the yellow over the clouds, the chill morning, black sand, the rolling clouds, the sun ascends, a house and sun.

I was driving up to Lahaina from Makena, driving through those drive windy hills that resemble something out of Africa. Annie was asleep with her seat reclined back, and on the radio is the station of KIIS FM 89.9 and this really great local Hawaiian pop song comes on. All the song is i a bunch of nouns about stuff that a guy wants to eat. He talks about lau lau, talks about beef and tripe stew, etc. It's a beautiful Hawaiian love song not to any person or place but a dedication to his true love and source of inspiration, food! I suppose this is one of the troubles in Hawaii is the trouble with weight management as well, even though a lot of people I see are pretty skinny. There were all these advertisements on the radio about weight management and going to fitness centers. One bartender we even talked to was worried about his baby boy being so fat because his grandparents were spoiling him so much. Other things that I've seen are these crazy commercials here in Hawaii where the locals are smoking cigarettes and these squiggly animated and jaggged lines zip out of the cigarettes like a bolt of lightning and begin to barb wire wrap around other people. And the acting in these commercials is terrifying, because once the wiry strands of cigarette power grab around the person they have these faces that look like a python is squeezing them to death. And there's also all these commercials on the air about DUIs and programs about the effects of driving under the influence.

One more thing before we take off for snorkeling in Molokini at 5am! I've been having these weird muscle memory spasms like my body is still being pushed around in the ocean, like my arms and legs are still trying to resist the flow of the water, and my calves are still submerged and almost kicking around. It feels weird, but it is almost enjoyable too, like I'm still floating around in the water.



INTRO: C .Am .F .G7
C . . . . . . . Am . .F . . . . . . . . G7
I'VE BEEN MANY PLACES, TASTED ALL THE FLAVOR,
C . . . . . . . Am . . . . . . .F . . . . . . . . G7
ONE THING I CAN'T UNDERSTAND IS WHY I'M NEVER SATISFIED
C . . . . . . . . . . . . Am . .F . . . . . . . . G7
THERE'S NOTHING LIKE THE FEELING, WHEN YOU START CRAVING
C . . . . . . . Am . . . . . . . . F . . . . . . .G7
FLASHBACKS, REMINISING ABOUT THAT ONE VERY FIRST LUAU
. . . . .F . . . . . . . . .G7
SOON AS I START TO HEAD BACK HOME,
. . . . . F . . . . . . . . .G7
I CALL MY BRADDAHS UP ON THE PHONE
. . . . . . . F . . . . . . . . . .G7
WE'RE HEADING DOWN TO THAT SPECIAL PLACE,
. . . . . C . . . G7 . . . F .G7
WHERE YOU CAN BULK UP FOR DAYS

CHORUS:
. . . . . C . . . . . . . . .Am
I LIKE MY FISH AND POI, I'M A BIG BOY
. . .F . . . . . . . . . . . . G7
LOMI SALMON, PIPI KAULA, EXTRA LARGE LILIKOI
C . . . . . . . . . . Am
SQUID OR CHICKEN LUAU, DON'T FORGET THE LAULAU
F . . . . . . . . . . . . G7 . . . . . . C . . Am .F .G7
BEEF OR TRIPE STEW JUST TO NAME A FEW, OH YEAH

C . . . . . . . . . .Am . . . . . .F . . . . G7
NO CAN FORGET PAPA SPECIALTIES AND MAMA POI MOCHI'S
C . . . . . . . . .Am
SMOKE MEAT, SHOYU POKI THE RICE,
. . . . . .F . . . . . . . .G7
CAN MAKE A BAD DAY FEEL REAL NICE
. . . . . . . F . . . . . .G7
I'M FLASHING BACK ALL OVER AGAIN,
. . . . . .F . . . . . . . . . . .G7
I KNOW YOU FEEL WHAT I'M FEELIN WITHIN
. . . . . F . . . . . . . .G7
AND EVERY LOCAL BOY WOULD AGREE
. . . . . C . . . . . G7 . . .F .G7
THAT IT'S JUST THE HAWAIIAN IN ME
*CHORUS

Right now I'm sitting next to Annie. I'm listening to some Hawaiian slack key guitar while she's enjoying a nice sandwich that I made her. It's salami and provolone with some mustard and mayo that I swiped from the snack bar downstairs. Everything is pretty wonderful here in Maui. I woke up today at 6am to go for run along the Honopalani Highway. Running along the highway here has to be one of the best experiences I've had here in Maui because it's so relaxing, and it's so warm in the morning because of the humidity you can run with you shirt off. I love to stare at the mountains, and watch the morning develop as I run along. At every moment I look around there is always such a surprising and beautiful view--like when I'm running along the coast next to Hanako'o Park, I can look past the black rock breakers that resemble some kind of coastline in Alaska and more (dude, Annie just fed a tiny little bird a spicy hot cheetoh, and it swept in and picked it up! It's muching on the cheetoh as I write!) out in the water are all these boats sitting perched in the water. To my left side, there's that beautiful big mountain, and as I'm on the highway I feel the weather getting warmer and warmer, and I look over again at the mountains, and the sun has risen and it's all white, piercing through this layer of clouds hanging over the top peaks of the mountain. I think I'm in love with this mountain, I look at it, and for some reason it speaks to the depths of my feelings, and I feel overwhelmingly compelled to keep looking at this mountain for inspiration. I'll be glad to go to Haleakela because people talk so much about it being one of the main attractions about Maui.

Yesterday we went to a lu'au with some great drinks like this too sweet drink called the lava flow, which is just basically frozen pina colada and some strawberry puree laced around the top, and a mai tai too which had a dull bitter taste but wasn't too unappetizing. Now when I'm talking about lu'aus this is supposed to be THE luau on maui, because it bases itself on tradition, but in terms of the food I think I was more let down by authentic Hawaiian cuisine again. The poke there with the tuna was rolled in some oily salty mix and tasted more like preserved rubbery tuna than fresh poke. Why mess so much with the flavor of tuna with so much salt, it's already delicious to begin with. Then there's the poi, that goopy purple, taro mush. I don't have much against poi but I also I'm not craving another helping of it--it had this molasses soup like consistency that, and when tasted it had this very neutral flavor with this background of a very sour note after you ate it. It tasted alright when paired with the pulled pork from the pig. But the thing about the pork and the lau lau, which is the pork wrapped in tea leaves had a nice fatty flavor from the pig, but I find that there's some flavor that's just generally lacking about this Hawaiian food. I think what is particularly lacking about this traditional Hawaiian food is a carrying brightness or acid or sweetness to generally lighten up the flavors. It plays on this very low base note that's just dull--note that all Hawaiian food usually tastes better when covered with a sweet and spicy sauce.

Also yesterday, Annie and I boogie boarded all the way out around black rock, and I actually had a moment of complete panic. We boarded over to a place where the break was so powerful it would knock you over, sweep, you out, and repeat the process. I imagine I was flipped over and swept away at least twenty times. But it was the twentieth time that the ocean taught me a valuable lesson--don't underestimate its power. I was flipped over, slammed on my back, I felt my lower back fold over and I heard a giant crack. I tucked tailed and ran, but oddly enough, it was like the ocean was a trustworthy chiropracter, because for some odd reason, my back feels wonderful!

This morning I woke up early today. I woke up at 5:21 in the morning, and for some reason I was so anxious about the day ahead of us, so worried about how long it takes to get to Makena. And I just couldn't go back to sleep, and about at 6am I sat and watched the TV alarm go off, where the monitor blinks on and shows all these picturesque images of waterfalls and snow plains and tall mountains in the distance with soothing sounds that become much less soothing as the TV volume gradually gets higher and higher. I got out of bed and put on my running shorts and took off at the door, and it's really some amazing geography here in Hawaii. On one side of you is the mountain, and on the other side of you is the ocean, and everything that resides in between is thi perfectly sculpted and manicured landscapes of golf courses, tall resorts buildings, and clipped lawns that are so impossibly green. As I was running up and down these gradual hills, I felt that I was actually more interested in the mountains, and the draw they have on you. With the clouds surrounding the tops of these mountains, there is something that much more majestic about them. They captivate in their immensity, and it's something that I definitely find more fulfilling than looking at the ocean, beautiful though it might be.

Yesterday, Annie and I went out to Lahaina, which is kind of like the Catalina lackluster promenade around Maui that doubles as a less busy downtown. We went to a nice little place called Aloha Mixed Plate that had decent reviews, and we tried the crowd favorites that have usually gotten pretty good write ups like the Fried Coconut Prawn with the chutney, which Annie had admitted that her favorite thing about the meal was the sweet and sour chutney that they had offered with the prawns. When eating them, imagine a prawn wrapped up and fried in a kind of dull jacket of coconut that takes a few seconds to wake up from the dryness of the flavor. It's an alright appetizer, and it certainly looks good, but not the very best in its carry through. There was also an oily chow fun that tasted like very buttery noodles with thinned canola oil tossed throughout. Little bits of meat and sprouts mixed on the bottom. The problem with this dish is that it's more like a failed pad thai that notches its belt of authenticity by playing up its oiliness. Then there was the sweet chicken dish that had this way of cooking rice that made it into more of a sushi japanese sticky rice where the grains all link together, unable to distinguish where pieces begin and end. Better location, great price, but the food is just alright.

We're staying at the Sheraton right now with this view that's killer. A seaside view with the ocean and beach right below us. Paradise is half a stone's throw away and we can simply stroll down to the coast from our room whenever we feel like. So yesterday, Annie and I tried to go snorkeling in our gear that we had purchased, and it was a horribly embarassing situation! We stood in the shallow wake of the ocean where the waves gather and crash, so Annie and I were plowed over everytime we tried to get out into the ocean. Annie was having a great deal of trouble with her mask, so every time that she tried to go under water and breathe, water would rush straight into her nostril portion of her mask. She'd choke, spit, and rip off her mask. It was sad, because we really wanted to go snorkeling together. You see, Black Rock is a famous beach that is literally right on the beach where the Sheraton is. It's admired for the great cliff face of reddish-black rock that climbs out and juts into the sea, and also for the nice snorkeling you can do just around the area. Fortunately for me, my snorkel gear was working and I swam out a little ways next to black rock. I was swimming fast with my fins on, and my viewfinder angled down to see all the tropical fish in the semi-murky water around. A rush of bubbles appeared next to me, and I saw one of the cliff divers emerge from her dive into the water, and as I'm looking away from her, I see a sea turtle below me. Dirty, dark green, and just gliding easily through the water. It looked like it was flying.

That's it for now. It's out fifth year Anniversary today. We've got some boogie boards and a luau at the Old Lahaina. Maui rocks.

A good day in Los Angeles begins in its description, in how you move from one point to another as if some secret gravity tugs your legs across the ground. A good day in Los Angeles is feeling as though you have seen everything and knowing that there is the opposite side to everything that you have seen. A good day in Los Angeles begins with simply writing down where you had begun, and to make a list. Echo Park. Angels Flight. Bunker Hill. City Hall. Grand Central Market. Little Tokyo. Places that begin with names and end up with small notes that tack against them and fulfill their meaning entirely. It's wrong to make maps of these places, because for the most part they feel constant within you. You never seem to move through the place, the place is moved through you.

Civilization begins at the market place of trading, of a group of people huddled together and following the crowds and the demand of the things that everyone loves. It is a memory that is most stubbornly told in black and white, and yet it is that memory of those simply colors that makes it seem like those colors and world are all too real. Walk through the marketplace and it is the world of blade runner, of combinations, of Mexicans sitting at a Chinese food stall, people with their backs arched against a wall waiting for more space to clear up across the table that's already full of black pepper oil with chilis floating on top and old Mexican men who look to be too tired to eating an entire bowl of pigs guts. It's a place where a whole society lives a whole half day ahead of everyone else, where the days start at four in the morning an find a beginning of the day where fruit is stacked in great pyramids, at the secret of Simenon's little boy saint who would walk around the market and feel the memories carried with him, as he understood that secret rule of marketing is that the illusion of plenty is the promise of quality.

The city is a place that cannot see the world as its own obstacle and that all the things that stand in one's way are cut down to size like great trees chopped in half, or otherwise with huge holes burrowed into the grounds, great tubular tunnels curving through the earth and revealing an entrance and an exit, an outside and inside of places of which to enter the city. One can only see of the Angels Flight an example of this burrowing, or at least through the leveling of Bunker Hill where one geography is etched out and surrounded by an even greater and more magnificent geography. A city is a place where height does not understand limitations and greets the other figures around it, like very tall men greeting each other's company. The city is a place of ambitions and desires, and black suits without wrinkles and the busy men who drive around in cars that are stacked end to end in parking lots that are always full and that lie in the cool shadows of buildings whose own impoverished windows and brick and painted over in white so that the entire face of a wall is indistinguishable. This is LA. I cannot understand LA myself because I would need to be the millions of people who live in it. I cannot understand LA because there is that great gulf of difference between the man who runs to park the car and the man who runs to the law firm, the distance between the chinese man who serves noodles to the mexican man who eats the noodles, one is the customer and the other is the client. Can it ever be that the dream, like Godard is apt to quote, that the dream of the man is to be two? To be the chef and the diner.

There is a cliche of cities and the love for the cities that you can kind the heart of a city in its people and its murals and its history and its culture. This love is an over-rated kind. It is the stuff of drama and only the story books and the tourist affiliations will tell you that is the truth of what makes the city itself. But what makes the city beautiful is that you simply look at it. The city in itself is not beautiful, it is all the wandering eyes that make it beautiful. This beauty, which did not exist before with its hand made nostalgic, sewer ponds caught in the middle of Los Angeles, is a beauty that came to be because there were eyes to look upon it and wonder. It is because the whole world looks upon Los Angeles that the city is beautiful. You only look at the things we desire.

Do you want to hear the story of the man who had come to the end of the world? It is the story of a man who leaves his home and travels the world across the expanse of an ocean, across the wildness of jungles, and across deserts. And in his travels he would leave behind him his footsteps and pieces of himself in abandonment. In exchange for new memories, as if at each new place for every new memory he would lose his older memories, like the waves awash behind him as he moved forward in his life. His life was like the boat that threshes water and leaves only the foam to turn and suddenly return to its placid shape simply after a moment. There was simply this world of travel and the exotic before him. He would love women and he would be friends amongst men. He would share dinners and pass bread and share tobacco amongst communities. He would smile with people and mimic unfamiliar songs. He would kneel in prayers in front of strange statues that he did not know. And finally, he took his ship, he was riding through a storm and felt within himself as though he were riding through the heart of the world, as if he were plunging into the unfamiliar. The fringe of the world, all that was so unfamiliar to him was there at last. The man who arrives at the end of the world only makes a complete circle. The edge of the world is the feeling of abandonment that one feels when one finally returns to the world of the living. The end of the world is the moment that one stops traveling, the moment that the circle encloses itself and one finally feels like he has returned for the last moment. The end of the world is the refusal of the feet to move along the space of the earth any longer.

Two things:

One is the short film of Kiarostami where he fries eggs in a pan before our eyes, butter smeared and rolling across the metal of the pan with two eggs dropped into fry before us. Yolks like round eyes looking at the screen. This is the unavoidable consciousness of time. At the invention of film, everything is miraculous. It is simply a matter to see some movement in the thing that could never before be moved, to endure the transport of the photo, that was the true amazement of the film. With Kiarostami, one cannot help but feel that an innocence is lost, that to look upon the frying of eggs is the miracle of an effort, but not miraculous in itself. The magic has reversed over the course of the century. A film about frying eggs is exciting inasmuch as it is about seeing something like that for the first time. Much later, a film about frying eggs is because the film understands that there is other substance to frame, a world of technology, of adventure, of a world beyond, and yet the frame that one chooses is simply eggs on a stove.

Another thing. Borges and I. If one were to talk about oneself as two different people, as infinitely differently people, would they understand each other?

Harry Winston had constructed the real maltese falcon. He had made his won fantasy a reality.

The film was over and there was a brief sputter of light that hit the screen before the houselights had gone up. I was half asleep, and rubbed my eyes, and by the time I was fully awake nearly everyone had gone out of the theater except for a couple of elderly people who were slow to move. They made idle chatter as they were leaving, "I think I'd need another opinion besides yours, Bart. Frankly, I come to these movies with you, but it's very often that I just don't care what you think about these movies." I slowed ambled behind them desperate to get some air and just be out in the street. There was no more daylight, only the electric lights on the street were lit up, and there was an electronic billboard at the end of the street that played endless advertisements for movies and television shows and music. The billboard even advertised a radio program where the billboard told you what song at what time was playing at the exact moment you had driven by. So, if you had been in your car, you could've caught that song that was playing--I didn't. I'm walking home.

It was really cold for spring. For some reason the theater had been a little warmer, I felt snug in that red rubber backed chair, enough to fall asleep for the most part of the film, but it was cold out at night. I walked packed the grocery marts that were closing, and I stopped to smoke a cigarette as I watched a bunch of guys trying to load up a crate of onions back into the market. They were going to close for the weekend, and all I saw leftover was onion skin left all over the floor, that papery, red-brown leaves of onion skin blown away into traffic. I continued on my way home and it just seemed like it was getting darker and darker as I walked along the boulevard, like the distance between the lamps of light grew larger and the intervals in between seemed like dark, murky clouds. And as I was walking I heard a rustle behind me. I looked over my shoulder and there was a man following another man, one Mexican guy following another Mexican guy. One of them was wearing a Ranchero hat and screaming after the other. The other man kept his head down, his neck hid by the tall collar of his shirt. He pulled the collar higher, turned around started cursing at the man behind him with the hat. The hat flew off the man. He darted after him and started chasing the other man who now started yelling and screaming for help. The man who had been wearing a hat drew a small knife from the back of his white jeans that looked smudged by a dirty hand print, and started getting closer and closer to the man he was chasing.

I ran away real fast, and all I could hear behind me were shouts of "Bastard!" "Thief!" "DISLOYAL!" It was a strange story that was telling itself in the fewest amount of words, but I wasn't about to stay around for an ending. My heart was heavy and anxious, and I just wanted to move and get out of there. I ran all the way home, my legs just carrying me on and on. Even when I couldn't hear those men screaming at each other anymore, I was so frightened that I just kept running until I was right in front of my door. I latched the lock behind me and double-bolted the door. Out of breath, I collapsed there, tired as hell. I stood by the kitchen counter just to catch my breath. I stood there, the back of my head on fire, like I couldn't breathe. I drank some water and felt the cold water in my throat. It was strange, I stood there, and I could only remember being frightened and that I had seen a movie. To this day, I can't even remember what movie that was. I can't even remember at all. All I knew was that the cinema was over.

In the forest of paradoxes

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write–and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy–I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. Not war in the sense of a specific time of major upheaval, where historical events are experienced, such as the French campaign on the battlefield at Valmy, as recounted by Goethe on the German side and my ancestor François on the side of the armée révolutionnaire. That must have been a moment full of exaltation and pathos. No, for me war is what civilians experience, very young children first and foremost. Not once has war ever seemed to me to be an historical moment. We were hungry, we were frightened, we were cold, and that is all. I remember seeing the troops of Field Marshal Rommel pass by under my window as they headed towards the Alps, seeking a passage to the north of Italy and Austria. I do not have a particularly vivid memory of that event. I do recall, however, that during the years which followed the war we were deprived of everything, in particular books and writing materials. For want of paper and ink, I made my first drawings and wrote my first texts on the back of the ration books, using a carpenter's blue and red pencil. This left me with a certain preference for rough paper and ordinary pencils. For want of any children's books, I read my grandmother's dictionaries. They were like a marvellous gateway, through which I embarked on a discovery of the world, to wander and daydream as I looked at the illustrated plates, and the maps, and the lists of unfamiliar words. The first book I wrote, at the age of six or seven, was entitled, moreover, Le Globe à mariner. Immediately afterwards came a biography of an imaginary king named Daniel III—could he have been Swedish?—and a tale told by a seagull. It was a time of reclusion. Children were scarcely allowed outdoors to play, because in the fields and gardens near my grandmother's there were land mines. I recall that one day as I was out walking by the sea I came across an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire: on the fence was a sign in French and in German that threatened intruders with a forbidding message, and a skull to make things perfectly clear.

It is easy, in such a context, to understand the urge to escape—hence, to dream, and put those dreams in writing. My maternal grandmother, moreover, was an extraordinary storyteller, and she set aside the long afternoons for the telling of stories. They were always very imaginative, and were set in a forest—perhaps it was in Africa, or in Mauritius, the forest of Macchabée—where the main character was a monkey who had a great talent for mischief, and who always wriggled his way out of the most perilous situations. Later, I would travel to Africa and spend time there, and discover the real forest, one where there were almost no animals. But a District Officer in the village of Obudu, near the border with Cameroon, showed me how to listen for the drumming of the gorillas on a nearby hill, pounding their chests. And from that journey, and the time I spent there (in Nigeria, where my father was a bush doctor), it was not subject matter for future novels that I brought back, but a sort of second personality, a daydreamer who was fascinated with reality at the same time, and this personality has stayed with me all my life—and has constituted a contradictory dimension, a strangeness in myself that at times has been a source of suffering. Given the slowness of life, it has taken me the better part of my existence to understand the significance of this contradiction.

Books entered my life at a later period. When my father's inheritance was divided, at the time of his expulsion from the family home in Moka, in Mauritius, he managed to put together several libraries consisting of the books that remained. It was then that I understood a truth not immediately apparent to children, that books are a treasure more precious than any real property or bank account. It was in those volumes—most of them ancient, bound tomes—that I discovered the great works of world literature: Don Quijote, illustrated by Tony Johannot; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes; the Ingoldsby Legends; Gulliver's Travels; Victor Hugo's great, inspired novels Quatre-vingt-treize, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and L'Homme qui rit. Balzac's Les Contes drôlatiques, as well. But the books which had the greatest impact on me were the anthologies of travellers' tales, most of them devoted to India, Africa, and the Mascarene islands, or the great histories of exploration by Dumont d'Urville or the Abbé Rochon, as well as Bougainville, Cook, and of course The Travels of Marco Polo. In the mediocre life of a little provincial town dozing in the sun, after those years of freedom in Africa, those books gave me a taste for adventure, gave me a sense of the vastness of the real world, a means to explore it through instinct and the senses rather than through knowledge. In a way, too, those books gave me, from very early on, an awareness of the contradictory nature of a child's existence: a child will cling to a sanctuary, a place to forget violence and competitiveness, and also take pleasure in looking through the windowpane to watch the outside world go by.

Shortly before I received the—to me, astonishing—news that the Swedish Academy was awarding me this distinction, I was re-reading a little book by Stig Dagerman that I am particularly fond of: a collection of political essays entitled Essäer och texter. It was no mere chance that I was re-reading this bitter, abrasive book. I was preparing a trip to Sweden to receive the prize which the Association of the Friends of Stig Dagerman had awarded to me the previous summer, to visit the places where the writer had lived as a child. I have always been particularly receptive to Dagerman's writing, to the way in which he combines a child-like tenderness with naïveté and sarcasm. And to his idealism. To the clear-sightedness with which he judges his troubled, post-war era—that of his mature years, and of my childhood. One sentence in particular caught my attention, and seemed to be addressed to me at that very moment, for I had just published a novel entitled Ritournelle de la faim. That sentence, or that passage rather, is as follows: "How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if nothing on earth were more important than literature, and on the other fail to see that wherever one looks, people are struggling against hunger and will necessarily consider that the most important thing is what they earn at the end of the month? Because this is where he (the writer) is confronted with a new paradox: while all he wanted was to write for those who are hungry, he now discovers that it is only those who have plenty to eat who have the leisure to take notice of his existence." (The Writer and Consciousness)

This "forest of paradoxes", as Stig Dagerman calls it, is, precisely, the realm of writing, the place from which the artist must not attempt to escape: on the contrary, he or she must "camp out" there in order to examine every detail, explore every path, name every tree. It is not always a pleasant stay. He thought he had found shelter, she was confiding in her page as if it were a close, indulgent friend; but now these writers are confronted with reality, not merely as observers, but as actors. They must choose sides, establish their distance. Cicero, Rabelais, Condorcet, Rousseau, Madame de Staël, or, far more recently, Solzhenitsyn or Hwang Sok-yong, Abdelatif Laâbi, or Milan Kundera: all were obliged to follow the path of exile. For someone like myself who has always—except during that brief war-time period—enjoyed freedom of movement, the idea that one might be forbidden to live in the place one has chosen is as inadmissible as being deprived of one's freedom.

But the privilege of freedom of movement results in the paradox. Look, for a moment, at the tree with its prickly thorns that is at the very heart of the forest where the writer lives: this man, this woman, busily writing, inventing their dreams—do they not belong to a very fortunate and exclusive happy few? Let us pause and imagine an extreme, terrifying situation—like the one in which the vast majority of people on our planet find themselves. A situation which, long ago, at the time of Aristotle, or Tolstoy, was shared by those who had no status—serfs, servants, villeins in Europe in the Middle Ages, or those peoples who during the Enlightenment were plundered from the coast of Africa, sold in Gorée, or El Mina, or Zanzibar. And even today, as I am speaking to you, there are all those who do not have freedom of speech, who are on the other side of language. I am overcome by Dagerman's pessimistic thoughts, rather than by Gramsci's militancy, or Sartre's disillusioned wager. The idea that literature is the luxury of a dominant class, feeding on ideas and images that remain foreign to the vast majority: that is the source of the malaise that each of us is feeling—as I address those who read, who write. Of course one would like to spread the word to all those who have been excluded, to invite them magnanimously to the banquet of culture. Why is this so difficult? Peoples without writing, as the anthropologists like to call them, have succeeded in inventing a form of total communication, through song and myth. Why has this become impossible for our industrialized societies, in the present day? Must we reinvent culture? Must we return to an immediate, direct form of communication? It is tempting to believe that the cinema fulfils just such a role in our time, or popular music with its rhythms and rhymes, its echoes of the dance. Or jazz and, in other climes, calypso, maloya, sega.

The paradox is not a recent one. François Rabelais, the greatest writer in the French language, waged war long ago against the pedantry of the scholars at the Sorbonne by taunting them to their face with words plucked from the common tongue. Was he speaking for those who were hungry? Excess, intoxication, feasting. He put into words the extraordinary appetite of those who dined off the emaciation of peasants and workers, just long enough for a masquerade, a world turned upside down. The paradox of revolution, like the epic cavalcade of the sad-faced knight, lives within the writer's consciousness. If there is one virtue which the writer's pen must always have, it is that it must never be used to praise the powerful, even with the faintest of scribblings. And yet just because an artist observes this virtuous behaviour does not mean that he may feel purged of all suspicion. His rebellion, denial, and imprecations definitely remain to one side of the barrier, the side of the language of power. A few words, a few phrases may have escaped. But the rest? A long palimpsest, an elegant and distant time of procrastination. And there is humour, sometimes, which is not the politeness of despair, but the despairing of those who know too well their imperfections; humour is the shore where the tumultuous current of injustice has abandoned them.

Why write, then? For some time now, writers have no longer been so presumptuous as to believe that they can change the world, that they will, through their stories and novels, give birth to a better example for how life should be. Simply, they would like to bear witness. See that other tree in the forest of paradoxes. The writer would like to bear witness, when in fact, most of the time, he is nothing more than a simple voyeur.

And yet there are artists who do become witnesses: Dante in the La Divina Commedia, Shakespeare in The Tempest—and Aimé Césaire in his magnificent adaptation of that play, entitled Une Tempête, in which Caliban, sitting astride a barrel of gunpowder, threatens to blow himself up and take his despised masters with him. There are also those witnesses who are unimpeachable, such as Euclides da Cunha in Os Sertões, or Primo Levi. We see the absurdity of the world in Der Prozess (or in the films of Charlie Chaplin); its imperfection in Colette's La Naissance du jour, its phantasmagoria in the Irish ballad Joyce created in Finnegans Wake. Its beauty shines, brilliantly, irresistibly, in Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard or in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. Its wickedness in William Faulkner's Sanctuary, or in Lao She's First Snow. Its childhood fragility in Dagerman's Ormen (The Snake).

The best writer as witness is the one who is a witness in spite of himself, unwillingly. The paradox is that he does not bear witness to something he has seen, or even to what he has invented. Bitterness, even despair may arise because he cannot be present at the indictment. Tolstoy may show us the suffering that Napoleon's army inflicted upon Russia, and yet nothing is changed in the course of history. Claire de Duras wrote Ourika, and Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin, but it was the enslaved peoples themselves who changed their own destiny, who rebelled and fought against injustice by creating the Maroon resistance in Brazil, in French Guiana, and in the West Indies, and the first black republic in Haiti.

To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a way that his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, will change people's minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world. And yet, at that very moment, a voice is whispering to him that it will not be possible, that words are words that are taken away on the winds of society, and dreams are mere illusions. What right has he to wish he were better? Is it really up to the writer to try to find solutions? Is he not in the position of the gamekeeper in the play Knock ou Le Triomphe de la médecine, who would like to prevent an earthquake? How can the writer act, when all he knows is how to remember?

Solitude will be his lot in life. It always has been. As a child, he was a fragile, anxious, excessively receptive boy, or the girl described by Colette, who cannot help but watch as her parents tear each other apart, her big black eyes enlarged with a sort of painful attentiveness. Solitude is affectionate to writers, and it is in the company of solitude that they find the essence of happiness. It is a contradictory happiness, a mixture of pain and delight, an illusory triumph, a muted, omnipresent torment, not unlike a haunting little tune. The writer, better than anyone, knows how to cultivate the vital, poisonous plant, the one that grows only in the soil of his own powerlessness. The writer wanted to speak for everyone, and for every era: there he is, there she is, each alone in a room, facing the too-white mirror of the blank page, beneath the lampshade distilling its secret light. Or sitting at the too-bright screen of the computer, listening to the sound of one's fingers clicking over the keys. This, then, is the writer's forest. And each writer knows every path in that forest all too well. If, now and again, something escapes, like a bird flushed by a dog at dawn, then the writer looks on, amazed—this happened merely by chance, in spite of oneself.

It is not my wish, however, to revel in negativity. Literature—and this is what I have been driving at—is not some archaic relic that ought, logically, to be replaced by the audiovisual arts, the cinema in particular. Literature is a complex, difficult path, but I hold it to be even more vital today than in the time of Byron or Victor Hugo.

There are two reasons why literature is necessary:
First of all, because literature is made up of language. The primary sense of the word: letters, that which is written. In French, the word roman refers to those texts in prose which for the first time after the Middle Ages used the new language spoken by the people, a Romance language. And the word for short story, nouvelle, also derives from this notion of novelty. At roughly the same time, in France, the word rimeur (from rime, or rhyme) fell out of use for designating poetry and poets—the new words come from the Greek verb poiein, to create. The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language, it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them. Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything, and which makes it possible to share everything. Without language there would be no science, no technology, no law, no art, no love. But without another person with whom to interact, the invention becomes virtual. It may atrophy, diminish, disappear. Writers, to a certain degree, are the guardians of language. When they write their novels, their poetry, their plays, they keep language alive. They are not merely using words—on the contrary, they are at the service of language. They celebrate it, hone it, transform it, because language lives through them and because of them, and it accompanies all the social and economic transformations of their era.

When, in the last century, racist theories were expressed, there was talk of fundamental differences between cultures. In a sort of absurd hierarchy, a correlation was drawn between the economic success of the colonial powers and their purported cultural superiority. Such theories, like a feverish, unhealthy urge, tend to resurface here and there, now and again, to justify neo-colonialism or imperialism. There are, we are told, certain nations that lag behind, who have not acquired their rights and privileges where language is concerned, because they are economically backward or technologically outdated. But have those who prone their cultural superiority realized that all peoples, the world over, whatever their degree of development, use language? And that each of these languages has, identically, a set of logical, complex, structured, analytical features that enable it to express the world, that enable it to speak of science, or invent myths?

Now that I have defended the existence of that ambiguous and somewhat passé creature we call a writer, I would like to turn to the second reason for the necessity of literature, for this has more to do with the fine profession of publishing.

There is a great deal of talk about globalization these days. People forget that in fact the phenomenon began in Europe during the Renaissance, with the beginnings of the colonial era. Globalization is not a bad thing in and of itself. Communication has accelerated progress in medicine and in science. Perhaps the generalization of information will help to forestall conflicts. Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded—ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day.

We live in the era of the Internet and virtual communication. This is a good thing, but what would these astonishing inventions be worth, were it not for the teachings of written language and books? To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian. Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a new line to divide the world between those who have access to communication and knowledge, and those who are left out? Great nations, great civilizations have vanished because they failed to realize that this could happen. To be sure, there are great cultures, considered to be in a minority, who have been able to resist until this day, thanks to the oral transmission of knowledge and myths. It is indispensable, and beneficial, to acknowledge the contribution of these cultures. But whether we like it or not, even if we have not yet attained the age of reality, we are no longer living in the age of myths. It is not possible to provide a foundation for equality and the respect of others unless each child receives the benefits of writing.

And now, in this era following decolonization, literature has become a way for the men and women in our time to express their identity, to claim their right to speak, and to be heard in all their diversity. Without their voices, their call, we would live in a world of silence.

Culture on a global scale concerns us all. But it is above all the responsibility of readers—of publishers, in other words. True, it is unjust that an Indian from the far north of Canada, if he wishes to be heard, must write in the language of the conquerors—in French, or in English. True, it is an illusion to expect that the Creole language of Mauritius or the West Indies might be heard as easily around the world as the five or six languages that reign today as absolute monarchs over the media. But if, through translation, their voices can be heard, then something new is happening, a cause for optimism. Culture, as I have said, belongs to us all, to all humankind. But in order for this to be true, everyone must be given equal access to culture. The book, however old-fashioned it may be, is the ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate. Its only flaw—and this is where I would like to address publishers in particular—is that in a great number of countries it is still very difficult to gain access to books. In Mauritius the price of a novel or a collection of poetry is equivalent to a sizeable portion of the family budget. In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury. And yet remedies to this situation do exist. Joint publication with the developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and bookmobiles, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages—which are often clearly in the majority—would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations.

I think I would like to say a few more words about the forest. It is no doubt for this reason that Stig Dagerman's little sentence is still echoing in my memory, and for this reason that I want to read it and re-read it, to fill myself with it. There is a note of despair in his words, and something triumphant at the same time, because it is in bitterness that we can find the grain of truth that each of us seeks. As a child, I dreamt of that forest. It frightened me and fascinated me at the same time—I suppose that Tom Thumb and Hansel must have felt that way, when they were deep in the forest, surrounded by all its dangers and its wonders. The forest is a world without landmarks. You can get lost in the thickness of trees and the impenetrable darkness. The same could be said of the desert, or the open ocean, where every dune, every hill gives way to yet another identical hill, every wave to yet another perfectly identical wave. I remember the first time I experienced just what literature could be—in Jack London's The Call of the Wild, to be exact, where one of the characters, lost in the snow, felt the cold gaining on him just as the circle of wolves was closing round him. He looked at his hand, which was already numb, and tried to move each finger one after the other. There was something magical in this discovery for me, as a child. It was called self-awareness.

To the forest I owe one of the greatest literary emotions of my adult life. This was about thirty years ago, in a region of Central America known as El Tapón del Darién, the Darién Gap, because that is where, in those days (and I believe the situation has not changed in the meantime), there was an interruption in the Pan-American Highway that was meant to join the two Americas from Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. In this region of the isthmus of Panama the rainforest is extremely dense, and the only means of travelling there is to go upriver by pirogue. In the forest there lives an indigenous population, divided into two groups, the Emberá and the Wounaans, both belonging to the Ge-Pano-Carib linguistic family. I had landed there by chance, and was so fascinated by this people that I stayed there several times for fairly lengthy periods, over roughly three years. During the entire time I did nothing other than wander aimlessly from one house to the next—for at the time the population refused to live in villages—and learn to live according to a rhythm that was completely different from anything I had known up to that point. Like all true forests, this forest was particularly hostile. I had to draw up a list of all the potential dangers, and of all the corresponding means of survival. I have to say that on the whole the Emberá were very patient with me. They were amused by my awkwardness, and I think that to a certain degree, I was able to repay them in entertainment what they shared with me in wisdom. I did not write a great deal. The rain forest is not really an ideal setting. Your paper gets soaked with the humidity, the heat dries out all your ball point pens. Nothing that has to work off electricity lasts for very long. I had arrived there with the conviction that writing was a privilege, and that I would always be able to resort to it in order to resolve all my existential problems. A protection, in a way; a sort of virtual window that I could roll up as I needed to shelter from the storm.

Once I had assimilated the system of primitive communism practised by the Amerindians, as well as their profound disgust for authority and their tendency towards natural anarchy, I came to see that art, as a form of individual expression, did not have any role to play in the forest. Besides, these people had nothing that resembled what we call art in our consumer society. Instead of hanging paintings on a wall, the men and women painted their bodies, and in general were loath to create anything lasting. And then I gained access to their myths. When we talk of myths, in our world of written books, it seems as if we are referring to something that is very far away, either in time, or in space. I too believed in that distance. And now suddenly the myths were there for me to hear, regularly, almost every night. Near the wood fire that people built in their houses on a hearth of three stones, amidst the dance of mosquitoes and moths, the voice of the storytellers—men and women alike—would set in motion stories, legends, tales, as if they were speaking of a daily reality. The storyteller sang in a shrill voice, striking his breast; his face would mime the expressions and passions and fears of the characters. It might have been something from a novel, not a myth. But one night, a young woman came. Her name was Elvira. She was known throughout the entire forest of the Emberá for her storytelling skills. She was an adventuress, and lived without a man, without children—people said that she was a bit of a drunkard, a bit of a whore, but I don't believe it for a minute—and she would go from house to house to sing, in exchange for a meal or a bottle of alcohol or sometimes a few coins. Although I had no access to her tales other than through translation—the Emberá language has a literary variant that is far more complex than the everyday form—I quickly realized that she was a great artist, in the best sense of the term. The timbre of her voice, the rhythm of her hands tapping against her chest, against her heavy necklaces of silver coins, and above all the air of possession which illuminated her face and her gaze, a sort of measured, rhythmic trance, exerted a power over all those who were present. To the simple framework of her myths—the invention of tobacco, the first primeval twins, stories about gods and humans from the dawn of time—she added her own story, her life of wandering, her loves, the betrayals and suffering, the intense joy of carnal love, the sting of jealousy, her fear of growing old, of dying. She was poetry in action, ancient theatre, and the most contemporary of novels all at the same time. She was all those things with fire, with violence, she invented, in the blackness of the forest, amidst the surrounding chorus of insects and toads and the whirlwind of bats, a sensation which cannot be called anything other than beauty. As if in her song she carried the true power of nature, and this was surely the greatest paradox: that this isolated place, this forest, as far away as could be imagined from the sophistication of literature, was the place where art had found its strongest, most authentic expression.

Then I left that region, and I never saw Elvira again, or any of the storytellers of the forest of Darién. But I was left with far more than nostalgia—with the certainty that literature could exist, even when it was worn away by convention and compromise, even if writers were incapable of changing the world. Something great and powerful, which surpassed them, which on occasion could enliven and transfigure them, and restore the sense of harmony with nature. Something new and very ancient at the same time, impalpable as the wind, ethereal as the clouds, infinite as the sea. It is this something which vibrates in the poetry of Jalal ad-Din Rumi, for example, or in the visionary architecture of Emanuel Swedenborg. The shiver one feels on reading the most beautiful texts of humankind, such as the speech that Chief Stealth gave in the mid-19th century to the President of the United States upon conceding his land: "We may be brothers after all..."

Something simple, and true, which exists in language alone. A charm, sometimes a ruse, a grating dance, or long spells of silence. The language of mockery, of interjections, of curses, and then, immediately afterwards, the language of paradise.

It is to her, to Elvira, that I address this tribute—and to her that I dedicate the Prize which the Swedish Academy is awarding me. To her and to all those writers with whom—or sometimes against whom—I have lived. To the Africans: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, Mongo Beti, to Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, to Thomas Mofolo's Chaka. To the great Mauritian author Malcolm de Chazal, who wrote, among other things, Judas. To the Hindi-language Mauritian novelist Abhimanyu Unnuth, for Lal passina (Sweating Blood) to the Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder for her epic novel Ag ka Darya (River of Fire). To the defiant Danyèl Waro of La Réunion, for his maloya songs; to the Kanak poetess Déwé Gorodey, who defied the colonial powers all the way to prison; to the rebellious Abdourahman Waberi. To Juan Rulfo and Pedro Paramo, and his short stories El llano en llamas, and the simple and tragic photographs he took of rural Mexico. To John Reed for Insurgent Mexico; to Jean Meyer who was the spokesman for Aurelio Acevedo and the Cristeros insurgents of central Mexico. To Luis González, author of Pueblo en vilo. To John Nichols, who wrote about the bitter land of The Milagro Beanfield War; to Henry Roth, my neighbour on New York Street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Call it Sleep. To Jean-Paul Sartre, for the tears contained in his play Morts sans sépulture. To Wilfred Owen, the poet who died on the banks of the Marne in 1914. To J.D. Salinger, because he succeeded in putting us in the shoes of a young fourteen-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. To the writers of the first nations in America – Sherman Alexie the Sioux, Scott Momaday the Navajo for The Names. To Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet from Mingan, Quebec, who lends her voice to trees and animals. To José Maria Arguedas, Octavio Paz, Miguel Angel Asturias. To the poets of the oases of Oualata and Chinguetti. For their great imagination, to Alphonse Allais and Raymond Queneau. To Georges Perec for Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? To the West Indian authors Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, to René Depestre from Haiti, to André Schwartz-Bart for Le Dernier des justes. To the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis who allows us to imagine the life of a leatherback turtle, and who evokes the rivers flowing orange with Monarch butterflies along the streets of his village, Contepec. To Vénus Koury Ghata who speaks of Lebanon as of a tragic, invincible lover. To Khalil Gibran. To Rimbaud. To Emile Nelligan. To Réjean Ducharme, for life.

To the unknown child I met one day, on the banks of the river Tuira, in the forest of Darién. At night, sitting on the floor in a shop, lit by the flame of a kerosene lamp, he is reading a book and writing, hunched forward, not paying the slightest attention to anything around him, oblivious of the discomfort or noise or promiscuity of the harsh, violent life there just next to him. That child sitting cross-legged on the floor of that shop, in the heart of the forest, reading all alone in the lamplight, is not there by chance. He resembles like a brother that other child I spoke about at the beginning of these pages, who was trying to write with a carpenter's pencil on the back of ration books, in the dark years immediately after the war. The child reminds us of the two great urgent tasks of human history, tasks we are far, alas, from having fulfilled. The eradication of hunger, and the elimination of illiteracy.

For all his pessimism, Stig Dagerman's phrase about the fundamental paradox of the writer, unsatisfied because he cannot communicate with those who are hungry—whether for nourishment or for knowledge—touches on the greatest truth. Literacy and the struggle against hunger are connected, closely interdependent. One cannot succeed without the other. Both of them require, indeed urge, us to act. So that in this third millennium, which has only just begun, no child on our shared planet, regardless of gender or language or religion, shall be abandoned to hunger or ignorance, or turned away from the feast. This child carries within him the future of our human race. In the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a very long time ago, the kingdom belongs to a child.

J.M.G. Le Clézio, Brittany, 4 November 2008

Ok. He could write very fast, very big, very poetical stuff, but Agee was never cut out for the work and world of Hollywood because as he would try to fashion out a story he would endlessly belabor the description of a scene until it was just like looking at an image of something like a photograph. Maybe Agee was better cut out to be a cinematographer than a writer, because all he would put out was a reimagining of Walker Evans memories onto the page. Writer need to have words to make things advance. Writers walk through cities, and move forward. Photography does not move you through a city. Photography is the chain that condemns you to stop. Cinema is movement of photographs, or no longer pictures--but writing in images.

Ride Lonesome. In the end it was a film about a tree, about a stage prop that was only revealed at the end of the film. It was an entire film about vengeance that always had the blood maintained beneath its surface with never an expression to give away a psychology that was never there. The face is a landscape of Bresson, that in exchange for an absence of expressions, is an absence of emotions in Boetticher. It never pretends there is anything below the face, there is mystery of the face, just the look.

With Ride Lonesome, one sees an element and everything is divided from the other thing, all into neat slots and compartments as to be unmixed and always clear. Boetticher is the panel of the Japanese painting, or the Renaissance painting with the present, past, and future of time all painted into one frame, but they never collapse. Clarity and clarity before all else.

But what I like best about this film is that the film, like the Tall T, appreciates the writing of interlocking, that a film occurs as a chain of interlocking, of throwing a connection between a gap just so that there is music in between parts, in the same way that music overwhelms the soundtrack in a Laurel and Hardy film so that everything seems all the more quick. Move faster. That's what Boetticher does. He moves constantly. The film is written just before the camera starts to shutter, but it still coheres within itself. Not totally coalesced, but just enough to grease the seams shut so the film slides to next action, the next line of dialogue, and the next scene well enough.

On paper, no doubt, the idea of launching this year's Cannes Film Festival by showing DW Griffith's 66 year old film "Intolerance" was a good one.

But, alas, "Intolerance" proved a disastrous choice. Fifteen minutes into the 2 3/4 hour film, members of the black-tiedand expensively gowned audience were walking out in droves. By the time 82-year-old Stanley Kilburn, who provided piano accompaniment, had finished his playing, his audience was largely gone.

Billy Wilder, who with other veteran directors, had been honored earler with a special trophy, agreed. "Theydidn't want to see "Intolerance, he said. "They wanted to see Pia Zadora."


About the reaction of a re-release of Cannes' audience reaction to Intolerance.

"Intolerance is unquestionably the greatest movie ever made. The Cannes cretins are not film lovers--they are tinsel lovers."