:26:01
and give the goddess of fertility the small offering
that always accompanies her displays.
:26:06
Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems
of the television incomprehensible,
:26:10
if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible
only on condition of being severed from a body.
:26:28
One would like to believe in a world before the fall:
:26:30
inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism
whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation.
:26:34
Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain,
:26:38
the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,
share in the same cosmic innocence.
:26:44
The second part of the museumwith its couples of stuffed animals
would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.
:26:49
Not so sure...
:26:51
animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship,
:26:54
but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation.
:26:57
And even without original sin
this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.
:27:05
In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai
I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,
:27:10
the rift that separates men from women.
:27:12
In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:
:27:16
violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy
resembling Sei Shonagon's
:27:20
which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word.
:27:24
So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts
against which the fathers of the church invade
:27:29
becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things,
:27:31
to a melancholy whose color I can give you
by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:
:27:39
"Who said that time heals all wounds?
:27:42
It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.
:27:47
With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.
:27:50
With time, the desired body will soon disappear,
:27:54
and if the desiring body has already ceased
to exist for the other,
:27:58
then what remains is a wound... disembodied."