“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” Agnes Varda
In my antihistaminated dream nights before, I was out on a road cutting through a forest as if on an expedition and at some point I must have grown tired and hitchhiked, so that I found myself in a family landscape. I didn’t know, and didn’t care, where we were driving to, but I was wondering what this father and daughter had been talking about right before they picked me up, wondering what the mood was like and what the conversation had been, because whatever it was before my arrival, it wasn’t ever the same and I wouldn’t have known. I became a weird sort of linchpin, totally third-wheeling on a father-and-daughter trip, and I remember that they never talked directly to each other, talking only through me, as if their whole dynamic depended on the right kind of stranger falling directly into the passenger seat.
From the passenger seat, I developed a dual fantasy for them, where toward the daughter, I was outwardly and expressively fond of her, but deeply and internally captivated by him. When I woke up from that dream, all carnal, with literal goosebumps all over my body and my face still in a kind of sleepy dew, I couldn’t shake off the sensation, or rather, the aftertaste of it, feeling like being sandwiched between my own halves of anima and animus. I’m saying that because the main thread running through my mind recently has been who is ‘me’, transitioning from a year completely away from social life and being engrossed in completing my first novel to now literally ending a season and re-figuring out who I have become. I don’t have a reference point in my own life where I have done something so big that swept me away from a lot of things to commit to one that I obsessively loved doing, to relate to its most poignant after-moments and feelings.
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On Thursday night, I picked up the best wiener schnitzel ever from s’Pfiff for dinner with my brother, and that is simply my idea of being at home in Vienna; a simple, idle late afternoon in the middle of June, spooning Lingonberry marmalade on my potato salad with open windows, hearing the neighbor play the guitar on his terrace while dodging bees. Yes, even after ten years of living here, I still think the best Austrian invention was this taste of schnitzel and Preiselbeeren marmalade.
To dial up this romance of the mundane, I sprawled on the floor to watch Agnès Varda’s Kung Fu Master.
And precisely what I found seducing in Agnès at this point was the idea of playing the fictional role of oneself, making me wonder how many landscapes one would have found if they opened themselves up. I like the impossibility of saying what “it is” and what “it isn’t”, where characters don’t disappear into their roles but become co-creators of its multitudes. And the passion of a 15-year-old boy playing his video game at an arcade with wide, jaded eyes is seductive too, because we are seduced by the very persona we cannot become or attain.
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