''Somewhere at the end of Atlantic Avenue, somewhere there, they used
to have their picnics. I used to watch them, the old immigrants, and
the new ones. And they looked to me like some sad dying animals, in a
place they didn't exactly belong to, in a place they didn't
recognize. They were there, on Atlantic Avenue, but they were
completely somewhere else.''
What Jonas Mekas
describes in his Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
(1972) as the post-World War II displacement of immigrants, looks to
me as the basic existential homelessness we all suffer from.
A group of youths
standing in a circle on the dusty main square of a small town. One of them is telling a joke; another one, listening, droops his head, tries to dig a piece of gravel with his foot and smiles to himself.
In that smile not only who he is but who we all
are is revealed.
This smile used to be for
me a perfect symbol of our permanent solitude, an illustration of the
fact that one can never put one coffin to two places, that even
though we live with each other, we live alone.
Somewhere else but where?
I see a woman in an
early-1970s-style dress with a child on a curvy road that leads to a
lonely lumber truck. The book with photos of Ahja
that I used to browse when I was bored at home. One of these overview
books that every town or village had back then. To illustrate the
economic development of the happy Soviet state. Collective farms.
Tractors. Combines. Women milking. The thirty-year-old slides shown
in our geography class. The heavy industrialisation of Siberia of the
1960s, the shrinking of the Aral Sea, Syr Darya and Amu Darya. Soviet
explorers no-one has heard of these days. Photo albums, the childhood
and the youth of my parents...
We are all a bit older
than our physical age.
''On our way back home, to Vienna, from far away, we saw fire. Vienna
was burning. The fruit market was on fire. Peter said it was a pity,
it was his market. He said it was the most beautiful market in
Vienna. He said the city probably set it on fire, just to get rid of
it. They want a modern market now.''
Will we see grannies in scarves in our old age?
The
In Search of Lost Time of experimental cinema.
