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Mendel Kaelen - 0178

17:22, 2011, Video Art
 
Clouds... Today I’m conscious of the sky, but there are days when I just feel it and don’t look at it, when I just live in the city and not in the world of nature that includes it. Clouds... Today they are the main reality, worrying me as if an overcast sky were one of the imminent dangers of my destiny. Clouds... They pass from the sea to the Castle, from west to east, in a scattered and naked tumult: white when they raggedly proceed at the forefront of who knows what; half-black when they linger, waiting for the purring wind to blow them away; and black with a dirty whiteness when - as if wishing to stay - they darken with their arrival more than with their shadow the illusory space opened up by the streets between the impassable rows of buildings. Clouds... I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing. Clouds... Such disquiet when I feel, such discomfort when I think, such futility when I desire! Clouds... They’re still passing, some of them so huge it seems they’ll fill the whole sky (though the buildings prevent us from seeing if they’re really as large as they appear), while others are of indefinite size, being perhaps two together or one that’s going to split in two, meaningless in the heights of the exhausted sky, and still others are small, as if they were playthings of powerful beings, odd-shaped balls of some absurd game and now placed to one side of the sky, in cold isolation. Clouds... I question myself and don’t know me. Nothing I’ve done has been useful, and nothing I do will be any different. I’ve wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine. I’m objectively and subjectively sick of myself. I’m sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. Clouds... They’re everything: disintegrated fragments of atmosphere, the only real things today between the worthless earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable tatters of the tedium I ascribe to them, mist condensed into colourless threats, dirty wads of cotton from a hospital without walls. Clouds... They’re like me, a ravaged passage between sky and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, thundering or not thundering, whitely giving joy or blackly spreading gloom, stray fictions in the gap, far from the earth’s noise but without the sky’s peace. Clouds... They continue to pass, passing always, they will always continue, in a discontinuous rolling of dull-coloured skeins, in a scattered prolongation of false, broken sky.
Fernando Pessoa, ‘The Book of Disquiet’
DirectorMendel KaelenCameraJesus OlmoEditorJesus OlmoComposerMendel Kaelen
 

CountryNetherlandsEdition2011
 

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