Christian H. Salicath

So I go and find one of barrels, filled to the brim with ice and Heineken, grabbing one and glancing at the grey empty dance floor where only a girl and a guy are sort of moving to the beat, but not really. I head back out, I want a smoke, but when I squeeze past the big guy, I find that the two people I know are gone, so I just stand there for a while, drinking a bit, smoking casually, trying to look cool, and that’s when I rediscover the fact that the most beautiful girl I have ever seen is standing right over there, talking to another girl that might have been the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, if only I had been born in the fifties. Anyway, this girl, it seems as if she’s got everything; gorgeous dark hair, the eyes that whisper desire, the lips that seem to be made for kissing, the nose that implies intelligence and caprice at the same time…

  Well, I might be sounding slightly obsessive here, and anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I seem to run into the most beautiful girl I have ever seen at least once a week, but the point is that this girl fulfils pretty much every idea of what I consider the most attractive in a woman. So I’m standing there, drinking my beer, smoking my cigarette, trying to look cool, now for a very specific purpose, trying to catch a look, but she’s completely enveloped in a conversation I can’t hear a word of, so the whole look into each other’s eyes and fall in love instantly thing isn’t happening. Damn. Would have been too easy, I suppose, or just plain unreal. Fictional. That never happened to anybody, I think.

  A little while later, I get to talking with a friend of a friend who happens to be an architect, and then we talk for a while until the topic of building regulations (which I find quite dull) turns into a discussion about the ego, creative ambition, and the fact that both can be your worst enemy at times. Interesting conversation after all. So at this point I’m in a good mood, we’re back inside with all the music beating back and forth around us, and I rejoin some of my other friends who introduce me to their friends, smiling and putting their hands on my arm with that surprisingly personal touch, as if we’ve been friends for a while (they were all women, I would like to add), so when some of them go dancing, I don’t say “No, I don’t dance,” or whatever, first of all because I do dance, and secondly because I was genuinely thinking dancing would be a pretty fun thing to do right about now. So we go when the next song comes on, and while it’s not exactly my thing, it’s close enough, and we have fun for a while with that, and I don’t think about anything else, really, just dancing, enjoying the motions, but then she turns up all of a sudden, only wearing a tight pair of jeans and a white t-shirt that’s just a little bit too small, and then suddenly we’re dancing in the same circle, and all sorts of terrible ideas are swimming through my head while I’m just trying to keep cool, make eye contact, that sort of thing, but that only happens with the other girl, the one from the fifties, so after a while of dancing she goes outside, and I’m thinking “This is it, last chance, go talk to her,” and so on, so I go outside too, and she’s getting her coat, and right before I’m about to strut over and make a feeble but courageous attempt at conversation, all the wonderful little shouts of support start crowding up my mind’s ear.

“She’s way out of your league.”

“You’re not attractive enough for her.”

“But other girls have called me handsome before?

“Yeah, but they were other girls, so it doesn’t count.”

“She obviously prefers real men, with beards, and impressive résumés.”

“You’re not wearing your best clothes tonight.”

“Maybe you had too much to drink, you’ll seem stupid to her.”

“She probably not that great when you get to know her, why ruin the perfect image of her now?”

“All good things end in pain, remember?”

I listened to the conversations you had with the Italian officers about 'realizing the war' and what that meant, discussing life near the brink of war and death, I sat with you at the dinner tables drinking capri and eating good food in the village, and then you met Catherine. An English nurse, Miss Barkley seemed to be as much your dream woman as she is mine, and the tête-à-tête between Henry and Catherine was just astounding.

She looked at me, "And you do love me?" "Yes." "You did say you loved me, didn't you?" "Yes," I lied. "I love you." I had not said it before.

(…)

"You're a nice boy, and you play it as well as you know how. But it's a rotten game." "Do you always know what people think?" "Not always. But I do with you. You don't have to pretend you love me. That's over for the evening. It's there anything you'd like to talk about?"

Then the war took its toll on Henry, and I felt like I was there, when the mortars hit, even though your language throughout is (in)famously sparse, but maybe I felt there in such a strong sense because I had to put my imagination to good use to read it right. Sometimes I would forget to be there, to tell the story and describe the scenery, the food and the short burst of violence along with you, but then Henry was wounded, in the leg, and much like Henry's relationship with Catherine, the story took a different turn than I had expected. While Henry was bedridden, he fell in love with Catherine.

"You're such a silly boy." She kissed me. "That's all right for your chart. Your temperature is always normal. You've such a lovely temperature." "You've got a lovely everything." "Oh no. You have the lovely temperature. I'm awfully proud of your temperature." "Maybe all our children will have lovely temperatures." "Our children will probably have beastly temperatures."

But then, in the same chapter even, I was thrust into a love scene that repelled me completely, a moment that I came to consider the greatest difference between you and I.

"I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?" She looked at me very happily. "I'll do what you want and say what you want and then I'll be a great success, won't I?" "Yes." "What would you like to do now that you're all ready?" "Come to the bed again." "All right. I'll come." "Oh, darling, darling, darling," I said. "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." "You're so lovely." "I'm afraid I'm not very good at it yet." "You're lovely." "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want." "You sweet." "I'm good. Aren't I good? You don't want any other girls, do you?" "No." "You see? I'm good. I do what you want."

Having basically read the fantasy of every young man that ever lived, I was surprised to think just how unbecoming it seemed, and this was by far the moment in the book where it felt the most written, the most made up. Since when was submissive behaviour attractive? The only time a girl said that to me, it was anything but romantic. And this was the point where I began to lose faith in you, as a writer. My friends would ask me how the book was so far, and I would say that I was probably more fascinated by your persona as a human being than your prose as a writer. In the following chapter there were few highlights, and I was starting to lose interest if it wasn't for the few gems you wrote in there every once in a while.

"Nothing ever happens to the brave." "They die of course." "But only once." "I don't know. Who said that?" "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?" "Of course. Who said it?" "I don't know." "He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."

Then Henry had to leave Catherine for a time, and their love story seemed to work better in between the lines of war, and depression, and duty. Then came an event that my old English teacher would undoubtedly call a point of no return. It was a death, in a sense, and a rebirth, in another. Henry lost everything, except for Catherine, so she was all he had, which proved to be more than he had before. I was warming up to their romance, bit by bit, and there was one passage, Ernest, that almost made me feel proud on your behalf for expressing something in such a sensitive and succinct manner.

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.

Then they fled to Switzerland, to freedom, and it was a hard trip in the rowboat at night, and their relationship felt stronger and truer than it did before they crossed the border, and then they were free to live the life they wanted, without worry and war. Their relationship seemed so genuine that even I felt in love at times.

"I'm grand now. You say grand so sweetly. Say grand." "Grand." "Oh, you're sweet. And I'm not crazy now, I'm just very, very happy." "Go on to sleep," I said. "All right. Let's go to sleep at exactly the same moment." "All right." But we did not. I was awake for quite a long time thinking about things and watching Catherine sleeping, the moonlight on her face. Then I went to sleep, too.

Reading this passage, I thought of the moment in a story my old English teacher would call a foreshadowing. And you did it again in the next chapter, too. Catherine was pregnant, Henry grew a beard, which made me a little jealous, and the winter was coming. Then came the day, after much happiness, and then you broke me completely.

I could see nothing but the dark and the rain falling across the light from the window. So that was it. The baby was dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way they did in the room with him? They supposed he would come around and start breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized. But what if he never breathed at all. He hadn't. He had never been alive. Except in Catherine. I'd felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn't for a week. Maybe he was choked all that time. Poor little kid. I wished the I'd been choked like that. No I didn't. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

And I felt the desperation, and the begging, and I couldn't breathe normally, and my vision got a little blurred, but I read on, and I wanted her to live as much as Henry did, and I was terrified, just as he was, and she died, and you ended it all with a brutality I just could not believe.

He went down the hall. I went to the door of the room. "You can't come in now," one of the nurses said. "Yes I can," I said. "You can't come in yet." "You get out," I said. "The other one too." But after I got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

I call it the empathy wave (or –rush, depending on the moment), the feeling that comes when one truly connects with the story, the mood and emotion, when the perfect music fades in as the images express another person at his or her most earnest, and human. That is when I subconsciously lean forward in my chair, when my mouth opens ever so slightly, and my eyes expand with wonder and complete, vulnerable compassion.

It comes like a wave of warmth, slowly, and I suddenly feel this ephemeral bliss and melancholy at the same time, like my own sense of self is melting together with the human being on-screen. Now I know, just for a moment, what it really means to be someone other than myself, and in that moment, knowing how much we all share, I feel less alone.

I had this experience watching Her, and while I could go on to praise the intimate, natural acting, the fantastic script, or the beautiful cinematography working wonderfully in tune with the music, costumes and art design, I know have already given the best compliment I am able to give a film. 

You could go to McLeod’s Antique Book Shop and see if you can find your creative döppelganger. Maybe you’ll accidentally leaf through the pages of a 16th century painter’s career and realise that his work digs so deep into the crevices of your soul that you’re convinced you were him in a former lifetime. Your whole life could be changed forever. You could take the skytrain back and forth and look at all the people, all their bodies and their faces and the expressions on them. Depending on the time of day, your immediate impression of the world might be very sad, or very bored, or fantastically enthused. That last feeling is rare to find on trains, but it’s a kick to find for yourself every once in a while. You could compare the faces to the ones you see back home. If one were to ask you if there’s a difference between Canadian and Danish faces, you would probably say yes, even though you wouldn’t be able to give a clear explanation as to why. You could go talk to that girl at JJ Bean that gave you and Jordan free cookies and played Toro y Moi on the coffeeshop stereo the other day. You like Toro y Moi. Carpe Diem is a harsh expression, in a sense. Carpe Diem means ‘Seize The Day’. ‘Seize’ means take. The expression isn’t ‘Diem Recipiere’. You don’t get to ‘Recieve The Day’. If you don’t talk to the girl at JJ Bean, she won’t even remember you exist.

You could go to Robson Square and sit by the stairs that have another set of stairs on them. Look at the buildings, the people. You like sitting there not because of the comfort, but because of the view, and the things the view makes you think about. Certain thoughts are only available in certain places. I suppose that’s why people like to travel. The space of the square makes your thoughts seem bigger, makes you feel like a main character. It’s selfish thinking, you know, but it feels good. And the thoughts take you back to good places. Isn’t it wonderful how your mind can amplify your experience? How, if a streetlamp looks like the one you saw on the day of your first kiss, your mind takes you back in time to have that kiss again? “Remember that good thing that happened to you? It’s still there.” When everything seems lost, when every decision you’ve ever made has led to this day of frustration and shock and sadness, and you feel like you’ve made all the wrong choices along the way, thought all the wrong thoughts to reach this place, your mind will simply stop, and say: “You were in love once.” You stop crying. “There was the windowsill, and the moonlight, and in that moment, your whole life was whispers and kisses.” You finished reading Fight Club the other day, and of all the grotesque, engrossing words of power, anarchy and freedom, Tyler Durden said one thing that stuck with you. “A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.” After that night in the moonlight, you remember getting up early to attend a funeral. It’s a strange sensation to carry a coffin when you’re lovestruck at the same time.

Maybe you should get some coffee after all? Your head is wandering faster than your feet. Come back, be here, be now. Look at the pavement, it’s been raining for half an hour, and you hadn’t even noticed. The red neon Vogue sign on Granville is reflecting all over the street along with the greens and yellows and ‘open’ signs, the pointing arrows, the smiles and prices. A bus drives by with a smiling woman on the side. Big capital letters announce “You like us, you really like us!” You are not even making this up. If only you had a hovercar and an android girlfriend, you’d be in Blade Runner. You go to JJ Bean to get some coffee and maybe talk to the girl that’s already taken on a magical quality in your mind, because you’re silly like that sometimes, but when you enter, the woman at the counter gives you a strange look, the whole place empty. The girl is walking around in the back, and when you ask “Are you closed?” and the woman by the counter says “Yeah, sorry,” you really ought to say “Oh, that’s too bad! I was hoping to have a cup of coffee and tell your co-worker how beautiful I think she is and ask her out, show her a good time,” but you don’t say that, because you’re nervous about that kind of thing, even though you know it makes you happy whenever you do jump out of that shell, like you did that one time last year, but instead you say “Alright, thanks,” and leave. Diem Recipiere, indeed.

Oftentimes the surprise is complete and poetic, like a flash of lightning and all that, but this time it’s looming somewhere, and I can hear it whispering, teasing me. I don’t know if it will be a work of tremendous importance in my life (like the one I wrote a while ago that only two other people know about), or if it’s just a little story that suits my present state of mind, a story that is specifically tailored to my current mood, my current line of thought, my current method of linking things together.

It changes all the time, but now I can feel this one thing hanging in the air, and I want to release it, get it out so I can deal with it and make it happen, I don’t know what it’s waiting for. Is it a specific coincidence, a special combination of words? Do the clouds have to form a revelatory pattern or should I run into some surprise that unlocks the thing that won’t get out of my head?

Stuck in the no man’s land between the sentient mind and the subconscious mystery, I don’t know how to act, what to do, how to think. Writing about it doesn’t seem to help. Forcing it won’t work, it never does.

Maybe I should do something else with my time. It’s New Year’s Eve in a few hours. Maybe go for a walk in the rain? Reminisce about the events of soon-to-be yesteryear? That sounds good. Not to be happy or sad, but just to acknowledge what’s happened so far.

Coincidences are more likely to happen outside than in here, that’s for sure. Going outside would be an efficient way to curate good coincidences, even if nothing extraordinary happens. I’ll see a host of different faces and cars and clothes and ways of walking no matter what I do. Maybe that’s enough to cough up that thing that just won’t come out, the idea that won’t show it’s face and say “Hi.”

That’s what I’ll do.

Richard Linklater opens the movie in a bus himself, looking out the window with a daydreaming expression as the Texas landscape rolls by, and from there he explores a variety of subjects through the eyes of a host of slackers, wanderers, musicians and weirdos in Austin, Texas. The lack of story, the glimpse of each person's life in the context of all the other strangers' stories becomes the crux of the whole film, following one person and his thoughts and moving on to the next, each and every one with their own worldviews and idiosyncrasies, pretentions and frustrations, and while I mourned the fact of being just one individual at first, one person with only one brain and a pair of eyes, I eventually noticed each person's need of expression for its own sake, and oftentimes without a need or desire to hear the other side of whatever argument or discussion was at hand. Everyone wanted to convince or convert someone else to their cause, their belief or their depression, and while the writing was certainly amusing and thought-provoking at times, I feel that Linklater's point in showing all these different individuals in the midst of their own stories was not only to showcase the variety and boredom and excitement of life, but ultimately to expose the inherent self-interest of most people, the inability to think beyond their own brain and its contents. This might sound depressing, and it is at times, but it is also funny and surprising in its own right.

Several actors in 'Slacker' later appeared in Linklater's later work, and it's obvious how he went from making this film to enhancing and personalising his style of storytelling in 'Waking Life', for example. Here one can see and feel him carving out his stories from the mundane, refusing to look at a mass of people and only see a jumbled mess of faces and situations, but to examine them all separately, if only for a moment. In 'Waking Life' the same variety and surprise of 'Slacker' can be found, but it is felt to spring from his own mind and sensibility in a different way than in this film, where the stories are somewhat wrestled from reality with an insistence he seemed to outgrow later on.

In any case, I genuinely enjoyed watching this film, even though it was slow at times or without much focus. What made it interesting was the feeling that this all seemed deliberate. At the end of the credits, there's a disclaimer that says:

"This story was based on fact. Any similarity with fictional events or characters is entirely coincidental."