#immemory

The following text is the English translation of Chris Marker’s 1982 photobook “Le Dépays”. The translation is transcribed from the 1997 “Immemory” CD-Rom with minor correction. Here’s the second part “You called that one...”

The Disorient

by Chris Marker

1. Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn… 2. You called that one… 3. It’s not just…

2. You called that one la Derelitto. Despite the stubborn legend, the Tokyo trains are not always packed, they don’t always need the white-gloved people-pushers that the films never spare us. One can spend entire days navigating from train to metro, underground to sky-rail, without being jostled any more than in Paris or New York (and more courteously in any case, even if they don’t fool around when it comes to grabbing seats). Plus there are plenty of long empty stretches allowing one to choose a strategic angle or a face-to-face position. Then begins the hunt for the sleepers. They fascinate you. You take the tube to see them, you forget your appointments, you neglect to change trains, just to remain a few more minutes before the absolute short, the ideal close-up of a sleeper’s face. Their slumber frees up a range of expressions that social standing and a concern for appearances hold back in the waking state, and on their dozing faces you can read entire life histories, smiles and stress, nodding and ecstasy. How many scenarios did you invent in those moments — that woman, for example, between Kobe and Osaka, for an hour you tracked all her seasons, the sudden jumps, confusing like the airport departure board where the name of each city scrambles into the next. For an hour you scrutinized her metamorphoses with (almost) as much demanding attention as you would watch the upsurge of pleasure on a loved one’s face. Don’t look for her, she isn’t in these pages. There are a hundred pictures of her, but publishing them would be a betrayal.

You’re returning from Hong Kong, oyster of hundred thousand pearls, and from the very first train (the ones that takes you straight from Narita airport to your beloved Yamanote Line, short-circuiting the interminable trip by road) your heart is stolen by Japanese kindness. Who will find the proper note to sing the praises of xenophobic hospitality? It’s because there is something really tragic, an irremediable flaw in the misfortune of not being born Japanese, that one must show all possible consideration for the foreigners (as for the Cat). You mount the staircase to the train station, and suddenly your bag hangs less heavily from your arm. A robust country-dweller has taken hold of the other strap, and will accompany you like that to the platform, where you will exchange thanks and little bows. A man circles around you: you recognize him, he’s the one you asked, in gibberish, for the number of the platform. It’s not his train, he has nothing to do here, he’ll leave in an instant after this new exchange of formalities: he has simply come to make sure you understood correctly, that you don’t risk ending up in Yamagata, in Aomori, cursing him. In the train, you inquire as to the number of stations before you must change (you could look on the map, but it’s so much more amusing to play Passepartout). A young guy starts counting on his fingers, like a nursery rhyme. Obviously he got lost somewhere, because the girls in his group start laughing, their mouths half-hidden by a cupped hand, as Japanese girls do (the surest way to flush out the cross-dressers is to trick them into laughing). Another one steps in, gets confused as well, and now the whole carriage is cracking up. The sketch continues all the way to the right stop, where naturally you’ll be guided by a confident hand. You crossed Japan that way from Hokkaido to Okinawa, with almost no linguistic baggage except the indispensable excuses and thank-yous, along with various combinations of the word neko, and from each stop you’ve kept the memory of the merchant who left his shop to lead you to the foot of the building you were looking for, the guardian of the cat cemetery (neko dera) in Osaka who escorted you for twenty minutes, absolutely undeterred by the limited nature of your vocabulary, plying you with all kinds of intimate observations to leave you on a major street traversed by buses (which also means of course that you, stupid foreigner, would never have been able to find it all alone — but since courteous condescension is so much more pleasant that hostile equality…). This kind of interchange also takes far stranger forms. In one of those charming little trains in Hokkaido, all dark wood and green velvet (Larbaud would have loved them), you keep sneaking glances at the magazine being read by your neighbor, as you’ve seen an illustrated article on takenoko(竹の子族), the little Sunday dancers in Yoyogi park, and you think you recognize one of the young girls you also photographed. Without having expressed your intention in the slightest sign, you mentally form the project of politely borrowing her magazine when she finishes reading. At which point, still reading, she slips off to sleep. I’ll wait till she awakens, you think. A few minutes later she does, and immediately she hands you the magazine. Clear enough. Harmony has struck again.

You’re always afraid of seeming to tell more than you know, so you’ll refrain from any babble about hyoshi (the “integration of tempos” — Kenji Tokitsu 時津賢児). But what your head isn’t sure it can put into words, you’ve felt with your skin several times. When one speaks about harmony with respect to Japan, people immediately think of the famous social consensus, and the Right swoons, the Left goes into convulsions. You think of something else, of the fuzzy network of rites, signs, and offerings that everyone claims not to believe in, or just a little, but that so often unseats the arrogance of pragmatism and efficiency, and that so graciously fills the void remaining between human enterprise and the vast abyss of nature. As though on the horizon of every event, of every action, there were not a beyond — that would be too metaphysical — but rather an in-between, which might not be so far from Jankélévitch’s je-ne-sais-quoi. As though, when the hymn to the machine has been heartily sung, and the social screws locked tight (God knows they are), a space still remained to be filled, a surplus value of the spirit. No one knows exactly what to do with this in-between, this twilight zone, this nameless realm shared between the eight hundred and eight gods who watch over the flock of dreams, no one knows how to address it, but at least one can be polite. Hence the politeness toward ancestors, hence the politeness toward animals (those innumerable festivals of reconciliation with the birds, when the Awa Odori (阿波踊り) dancers of Koenji (高円寺) call them politely by their names, and with the fish, when the men of Morosaki (師崎) south of Nagoya beg them to let themselves be politely fished), hence, in the heart of this society which is as pitiless as any, a respect for others that can peacefully coexist with the rat-race. The materialistic civilization of Japan may ultimately be obsessed by the spirit in the same way Christian civilization was by the flesh. Through its ancestors, its gods, its animals, its multiplicity of spirits (the back side of the decor, so perfectly arranged that one inevitably ends up wondering what’s in back of this back side), it may finally be spirit itself, that spiritualist abomination so justly denounced by all of modern thought, that is really present and that grounds everything. One Japan can hide another. In the legendary age of Maozedong thought, a devotee formulated a proposition whose pataphysical depth has never ceased to amaze you: it was about the famous struggle between the two lines, where one “had the characteristic of always passing itself off for the other.” (Reread it if you’re not sure you’ve misunderstood.) Should we ask which Japan passes itself off for the other? Whatever you do, don’t ask a Japanese that. Nothing exacerbates and horrifies him so much as such clear-cut Western questions: yes, no, one, the other, the excluded middle, Aristotle and Humpty-Dumpty. Don’t tender him the reptile of certainty: his entire being is revolted by the idea of touching it. Leave him to his tranquil schizophrenia, his own way of seeing in everything its contrary, and the more vibrantly the thing is felt, the more imperatively he convokes its contrary, which rushes to meet him like the shadow of King Kong on the asphalt of Manhattan. Look at him instead when he is disguised as his ancestor, when he plays a bit-part for Shohei Imamura in the film Eijanaika, a meticulous reconstruction of the Edo period, pushing all the way to a full-fledged reconstruction of the famous curving bridge of Ryogoku (両国), the one on the wood-block prints. Banish the façade of modernity, peel of the thin film of Americanization whereby he protects himself by imitating his environment, just as certain animal species do, and before you stands a Japanese of the Middle Ages, unchanged and perhaps unchangeable. Except that the younger generation…Yes, perhaps the younger generation. That’s what the fathers of today’s fathers said, when the younger generation was them. You don’t believe in it, in the American Japan, you think that the Japanese is a warrior who has made a shield with a mirror. And that the “real Japan,” as the magazines say, appears only inadvertently, in the in-between once again, when a woman being interviewed on TV answers the question “What do you wish?” with this answer that leaves far behind all the Stoic phrases heaped on our youth: “That my death should disturb as little as possible.”

The following text is the English translation of Chris Marker’s 1982 photobook “Le Dépays”. The translation is transcribed from the 1997 “Immemory” CD-Rom with minor correction. Here’s the first part “Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn.”

The Disorient

by Chris Marker

1. Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn… 2. You called that one… 3. It’s not just…

1. Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn. The voices of the message-bearing crows at every gate begin to dissipate into the noise of the city. At the terminal stations the colored trains start rolling — Yamanote green, Tozai blue, Marunouchi lacquer-red, color and name forever joined. They will gradually fill the morning with their bowling-alley-din, dominated by the imperial foghorn of the Shinkansen. The static of the still-flickering TV is soon to fade behind the first target card, but at this moment it resembles nothing so much as one of those square white lanterns you see on the televised tales of ghosts and samurais, like a tube within a tube. The Lady of the Morning News appears on the screen, or the first commercial, or Doraemon the cat-robot. So, you say, another day has passed. As though it were only upon walking and looking back that one could take the true measure of this day lived outside time, in a zone of silence amid sound, in the taste of eternity that we’ll call Japan, as Aragon used to say Holland. Here time is a river the flows only at night.

Inventing Japan is just another way of getting to know it. Once you’ve gotten beyond the clichés, once you’ve outwitted the cliché of cutting through clichés, then the chances are mathematically the same for all, and consider the time you’ve saved! Trust appearances, consciously confuse the decor with the drama, never worry about understanding, just be there — dasein — and everything will come your way. Well, something, at least.

“We Japanese have a very special relationship with cats.” Toru Takemitsu told me that last night, in a little bar in Shinjuku. Coming from one of the greatest living musicians, it was a precious confidence. Behind him, the regular customers’ whisky bottles stood side by side, round and smooth like turtles. And the association in your head of those two words, cat and whisky, gave rise as though neuralgically to the gaze of a cat whose name was Whisky — rather unlikely in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris, but that’s how it was. Without even raising your voice, you could just call from the second floor: “Whisky!” and the gaze — yes, an unforgettable gaze — rose to meet you… A few microseconds later and there he was, on the balcony, by one of those wrinkles in space-time that only cats can slip through, along with a few Tibetan ascetics. The cat Whisky died under the wheels of a truck and you raise your glass to his memory, to the memory of your other Russian-blue cat friend — Tozai blue — and to the memory of the frightened owl who died one day in your hand, choked by the meatball she had swallowed with a hunter’s haste. You sometimes wondered how those animals saw humans. For the cats, it was not sure that their human represented a single person: rather a kind of flock or herd, toward which they always came curiously to verify if it still appeared the same way, vertical or horizontal, here the feet, there the head. For the owl, perhaps we were great fuzzy shadows, not hostile, but enigmatic. While she fought to regain her breath, while the dizziness of death entered her head for the first time, her eyes said “Shadow, you are killing me, shadow, you are abandoning me”; and her sharp claws, fatal to rodents, clenched around your finger in a final convulsion. Your finger remained blue for weeks, blue like the Russian cat, blue like the Tozai Line, and you bore that sign a long time, slow to fade, like remorse.

Others this evening may drink to the death of kings, to the death of empires. In Shinjuku we drink to the death of cats and owls. What could be more natural? A quarter hour’s walk away, without leaving Shinjuku, we would come to the temple of Ji Cho In(自性院), in Nishi Ochial(西落合), where they pray for all the cats of the world. A superb maneki neko watches over the door of the sanctuary: the greeting cat, the mascot of knowing merchants and attentive prostitutes. For some slight offering the monk will unveil the statues of cats — the one donated in the sixteenth century by a warlord whose path had been crossed by a black cat (and who, rather than fearing an ill omen like an ignorant Westerner, followed the cat to a strategic position that brought victory) — the one donated in the seventeenth century by a merchant whose cat attracted clients by his sole presence, and made his master’s fortune — the one donated in the eighteenth century by a Beautiful Lady of whom you remain unsure even today whether she had a cat, was a cat, or what exactly she had to do with the story. But you learned not to ask. What the tale tells is true, for the tale tells that what the tale tells is true, as would be told by the Damsel at the crossroads of your travels.

When you returned for the first time to Europe with your cat stories, your friends saw proof that a maniac always finds fodder for his mania. You had to show them image of Ji Cho In, of the feline cemetery at Go To Ku Ji(豪德寺), with its dozens of tiered maneki neko, you had to prove that the children of 1-16-1 block in Ginza Chuo-ku had drawn a hopscotch game for cats, and that a real kitten came to take its siesta there, you had to swear that a cat had left its initials in the concrete of Shimbashi. But only when you opened the book published in 1980 by Keibunsha(恵文社), and showed them the methodical inventory, complete with maps, of all the places in Tokyo connected to the Cat, did you finally feel them getting a little shaken up. To see printed on glossy paper, with a geographer’s precautions, the surest way to find the Iriya(入谷) restaurant where one can dine among free-stalking tabbies, that makes an impression. Then you had more leeway to tell of your other adventures, the one of the twins in the train bringing you precisely to Go To Ku Ji (it was raining, just like in Rashomon, you didn’t yet know where the temple was, you stopped the passers-by saying “neko” and joining your hands in the gesture of Buddhist prayer. They all understood, but they didn’t all know, it took you an hour and a number of versions, just like in Rashomon, until you finally found yourself in front of those rows of cats greeting you, thanking you for having come all this way just for them beneath such a rain…. You worried about it later: for all over Asia, the cat is dogged by a lousy reputation. Wasn’t it the only animal to arrive late for Buddha’s death? Exactly, they replied. One must be even more compassionate because cats bear this stain. And the Japanese way of siding with the weakest, with the undercat, alongside the well-established — and justified — reputation of Japanese cruelty, opened a new window for you). Still in Shinjuku (you seem to spend your life there), on the roof of the little shops at the edge of southern exit of the pedestrian tunnel, a cat saluted you with its two ears. Since then, you’ve never been able to take that passageway without remembering him. The same morning, you had photographed one of the vice-presidents of the rich and powerful Reiyukai Shakaden(霊友会) sect at the instant when he vitrified a watchman by his simple entry — and that cat’s smile seemed to you the incarnation of all the counter-powers in the world. Another day your Japanese friends, intrigued by your folly, brought you to a secular temple to cats, Nekomaya, the store where one finds all the objects, all the images, all the books, and even food for cats — the first stone in an International that has spread to San Francisco, with Wholly Cats, and to Paris, with Au Chat Dormant, rue du Cherche-Midi, on the same sidewalk as the florist. In between times you learned not only to pronounce neko but also to write it.

「猫」

One long stroke and two little ones puffing out, for the tail: an animal. A rectangle consolidated by a cross: a rice field. Two little vertical strokes crossed with a raging, fleeting horizontal bar: a race. In Japan, the cat is the animal that races through a rice field.

Formerly a CD-ROM, Immemory by Chris Marker was ported to a public Flash website on Gorgomancy.net . Due to the phasing out of Flash, the incompatibility of the CD-ROM with many modern devices with updated operating systems, it’s quite difficult to experience it in 2021 without using an old machine or emulator like SheepShaver.

I used an older machine to save the swf files and began playing them in an old version of Adobe Flash Player which also gave me readouts of errors and missing files. I pieced together the flash site and tried to find all the files and create an archive. I used Warcit to package the site and uploaded it to Conifer / Rhizome . If it were to be ported again for modern devices, I think it would be better to transpose it from the CD rom and Hyperstudio files given the compressed nature of the Flash files. This might best be done using HTML5 and Javascript. Some of the transitions and effects may simply not be translatable. But who knows how long Javascript and html5 might be around? Perhaps the WARC format by the Internet Archive is a good option, at least for now.

I also explored the Hyperstudio versions but had some difficulty...the original cursors aren’t available...I also had trouble with the Poetry page, similar to the flash site, it seems like a dead end. Yet I see the stacks and swf files...I believe the links just need to be examined. It would be nice to have a high quality, accessible version with all of the sounds and links operational.