Dear mailbuddy, I’m writing to you as the clock ticks 00:01. It’s officially June now.
If I were to make an experimental film, Volume 2 after City as Self Portrait, I would have liked to make one about the month of May. So much can happen within the space of a single month. Why this month exactly, or what would I call it? I honestly don’t know. Anything goes.
This film would have been a sort of wanna-be, wanna-do kind of project, I suppose. A mix of memoir, travelogue, and metafilm… No, no, no. I would have filmed myself sitting on that crooked tree in the playground at Neustift am Walde, reading my own letters, especially the one I wrote to myself on my birthday, or perhaps all the letters I wrote to myself in May. Even though this letter won’t find you anytime soon, the purpose is the act of writing it to you. That way, I can see things better. Then, suddenly, we are in Ibiza. Not the Ibiza people know, but the Ibiza I know from the solo trip I took for my birthday last month. I would show you my version of it. And then, from there, we melt into the 32 movies I watched throughout the month.
I remember you telling me the story of that small seabird, or perhaps it was a pigeon, that you held in your hand during your first acid trip. I still have that image in my mind: your hand holding a white bird, with a little bit of blood tucked under the feathers. It’s strange how the image of that bird keeps resurfacing, ever since that Greek summer night when we met by the bonfire. You had just turned eighteen, and we were so excited to see real human beings again in that era right after the pandemic. The circle of people joining the bonfire grew larger, and I remember how amazing it felt to just hang out with strangers, with real people, again. I don’t know what I’m talking about, but have you ever had the feeling that your emotions are pouring out of you? As Bergman once said so gorgeously, a quote I have obsessed over and repeated often:
“Here in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity. It oozes out of me like a broken tube of toothpaste; it doesn’t want to stay within the confines of my body. A strange feeling of weight and volume. Soul volume perhaps, which rises like clouds of smoke and envelops my body.”
You find yourself in this profound emotional state and you want to talk about it with someone, probably someone you will never see. You want to tell them everything without struggling for words to paint the whole picture. Do you ever feel this way?
How is May in Stockholm?