:35:03
a prayer
which slips into life without interrupting it.
:35:38
Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal
in the company of my prancing dogs
:35:42
I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather
I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.
:35:48
They have substituted themselves for my memory.
:35:51
They are my memory.
:35:53
I wonder how people remember things
who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape.
:35:58
How has mankind managed to remember?
:36:01
I know: it wrote the Bible.
:36:03
The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time
that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
:36:11
As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall,
:36:15
that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes
at new year may offer us:
:36:21
a little more power over that memory
that runs from camp to camplike Joan of Arc.
:36:26
That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio
picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo,
:36:31
and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces
back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
:36:49
At the end of memory's path,
:36:51
the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic
than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year.
:36:57
It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element
to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies