Video Scenes
THE FIRST EXPLORATIONS
The movie will be organized around a series of explorations, each with a guide. Here's a version of the first series of explorations, loaded today, July 8. Young John meets Enoja here. This is still a rough draft, and a new version will appear in a while, but this will show you what I've been working on for the last few weeks....
SOME EXPERIMENTS
"Would you like to live in a nightmare?" An experiment with voice synchronization.
The Wraiths
John arrives at the cages
EARLIER VIDEOS
Hotel del Tiempo: an earlier video that combined live with virtual actors.
Text Excerpts
from CHAPTER TWO: NEMESIS
...The corrugated metal shack was flimsy. It had been erected hastily, with minimal framing, by his employer, an East Indian. It was a single room. The toilet was outside: an even tinier tin shack done Asian style, that is, a cement floor with a hole in the middle of it and “footprints” at each side: one squatted over it to defecate. Turds plopped as they fell from him. Perhaps there was water below. He did not investigate. He shaved at the kitchen sink next to the propane stove. A small mirror was bolted to the wall. It showed him his face: thin, almost gaunt, pale blue eyes, unruly hair. What can one say about that face? We shall say nothing. He showered in a corner of the room. The water flowed outside, down to a stream which emptied into a larger stream which emptied into the ocean nearby. Thus the effluvium from his body drifted worldwide, from shore to shore, not just his grime and sweat but flakes of skin, hair, occasionally urine, sometimes semen and sperm. He thus became a part of the world, just as he becomes a part of this novel: there are traces of him everywhere, microscopic perhaps but pervasive, mixed with hair follicles from the orang-utan and the gibbon, the caduceus leaves of the Absolmsia Kuntze, bits of the calyx lobes of the carnivorous Utricularia punctata and the Nepenthes whose leaves form cups from which monkeys drink, as well as the usual molecular assortment from trees, bushes, and grasses which are abundent on that grand island. It was here that he first had sex with his wife, the Bajao-Kadazan woman whose name he understood as Nemes, or perhaps Nemesis, which made him laugh: You are my Nemesis, he told her, using his English language of which she understood not a word. He met her when he gave a ride to some of his workers: the Bajaos lived in a group of shacks arranged in a semicircle around a well, at the site of the stone crushers whose operation he supervised, gravel-makers, lorries dumping loads of limestone which fed the machines which smashed the rock into smaller bits which, combined with sand and cement, formed the wharfs and bridges and buildings of the small town of Kudat at the northern tip of Borneo. His work was primarily organizational: making sure the trucks brought enough of the limestone to keep the machines busy and hauled away enough of the gravel so there was room for more. He drove a little Austin motorcar. On his way one day to the quarry he picked up his Philippino foreman, two Bajao boys who worked at the crushers, and the girl Nemes. The girl was thin and wore a sarong skirt and a white bra. When he let them out, at their little village, she turned to him. Her lips were colored red from the betel they all chewed. She stared at him as though waiting for him to speak. At last he did. Come and see me, he said. He spoke in English but the Philippino foreman translated, grinning. She stared a moment longer. Her eyes were the color of bronze, they were metalic, they held no expression. At last she turned away. John felt sweat on his face, not from the humid weather but from some interior confusion. He did not understand why he spoke as he had. He had noticed her before, standing apart from the other women at the well in the center of the cluster of houses, he could see them when he stood on the upper platform of the stone-crushers, the women drew water from the well in buckets, sometimes they washed themselves there, tipping the buckets over each other’s head, their wet sarongs clung to their flesh, their bras—most of them wore white bras, a few had bandeaus tied over their breasts—became transparent, one could see their dark nipples, they chatted amongst themselves, never in a hurry, but Nemes always stood to one side, a little thinner perhaps than the others, quieter: while the other women chatted, she said not a word. As they moved to and fro in clusters, she moved singly. She was a singularity, he thought, in the scientific sense, an anomoly, an event without precedent. This—though he did not entirely understand this—was the source of his sudden blurted invitation: John was a singularity too. This was apparent in his dreams, in which, for instance, his single-room shack became a kind of ramshackle palace, with rooms stacked upon rooms, corridors meandering off into the forest, dipping into streams, doors that opened onto other passages or onto balconies which overlooked more rooms, all of them of rusted corrugated metal, against which loitered creatures, some humanoid, female, others animal, fierce dogs, slinking panthers, crocodiles glimpsed through screened windows—a labrynthine edifice in which he was alternately lost or imprisoned, seeking tickets, passports, guides, sometimes attacked, assaulted, etc., etc., his dreams as endless as the endless buildings. It was here, in fact, that he first saw Nemes, his Nemesis, although the memories of these encounters vanished as soon as he awakened. Later we may describe these encounters. His life, we shall note, is bifurcated, diurnal and nocturnal, quotidian and ornately mysterious. Meanwhile, in his tin shack, as the night thickens around him, he goes through his end-of-day rituals, washing dishes, washing himself, making notes in his daily book, reading a few more pages of Joyce or perhaps Camus, finally stripping off his clothing and sliding under his mosquito net where he flails his way into an uncertain sleep. It is late, very late, that Nemes comes to him, soundlessly through his unlocked tin door, and takes him in his bed. The mechanics of this taking are simple: he is without clothing, after all, thus vulnerable, she slips off her sarong, unhooks her brassiere, throws aside the netting, handles briefly the penis she encounters—a few strokes, no more than necessary to awaken it—and then straddles him, the penis sliding into her damp orifice, she dances on it, grunts a few times, a brief cry, he spasms, she holds still a moment, silent except for the breath rasping in her throat, and then withdraws, picks up her clothes, and shuts the tin door behind her as she leaves.
____________
from CHAPTER ONE: THE INSUBSTANTIAL WRAITHS OF THE LOST CITY
1.
John arrives at the empty city in the evening, everything is dark, he parks his car so its headlights shine onto the buildings, the engine rattles and dies, we hear a door slam, he ventures forward, his shadow precedes him, etc., etc., we point this out to alleviate any doubts as to his intentions, we intend to be transparent in our clarity, the city is empty but it is populated by wraiths, or what we shall call wraiths, they lean against walls, loiter at windows, walk across open spaces, most of them female, rounded buttocks, the usual erotic accouterments, longish legs encased in hose, sleekness, yes, silkiness, a delicious smoothness created by the nylon sheathing, encorsetted waists, shoes with heels of an improbable height, their shadows with the sweep of headlights stretching and compacting along walls and passageways, John's arrival noted and then dismissed, clearly he will be of little interest to them, we cannot say just what they are doing here or what significance they will have in the story which follows, in any case John is a young man beset with the distractions of youth and rather innocent, although he will remain neither young nor innocent, like all of us he will become decrepit, he will creak and groan, joints will become stiff, skin brittle, internal organs erratic, we ourselves speak from this pinnacle of achievement: we are ancient, primeval, as eroded as prehistory, archeological, fossilized, a reliquary of abandoned tombs and ossified bones: flesh, what flesh we have, lies haggard: blood, thickened, pushes through ropes of veins: in the context of this story our ages will be a constant counterpoint, there is a kind of harmony to this, a metronomic ticking. But enough: we speak of John: a young man of the usual carnality, a certain height, slimness, not ugly, not stupid, not many things, embryonic, a restless man with a fixity of purpose, we shall get to this fixity later, he stands in the headlights of his now quiet car, the empty city before him, caverns of streets, concrete, marble, lintels, windows, doorways, dark recesses, alleys, a city bereft of life, this is a dream of course, a nightscape of impulses firing electrically in his brain, we don’t wish to be deceptive here, he is dreaming, he will awaken and forget all of it—he will forget, we shall not—and resume his quotidian life beyond our purview and indeed beyond our interest. Who John is, and why he is here, will meanwhile provide the nexus of our exploration in the pages which follow: each page shall be written in the same way, in black ink in a notebook as we sit over our daily coffee watching the passing traffic of German automobiles, Armenian transients, flower girls and cigarette girls, old women struggling with aluminum walkers, small dogs who pant in the heat, an occasional strutting crow, the usual assemblage of crooks and matrons and insipid poets. My wife—today she has a black rose in her hair—refers to this parade as the charnel house. They are all dead, she said once, they are walking corpses, troglodytes, cadavers, she waved her red-tipped fingers which held an ivory tube from which extended a cigarette perfumed with clove, it was a special tobacco, densely packed, like a Russian cigarette, so it burned slowly, crackling occasionally, imported at great expense from Darjeeling or Dar-es-Salaam or Dhanishkodi, I could never remember which. She never inhaled. The smoke caressed her face, she said, which made her smile. Her small white teeth lay behind her lips like a glimpse of pearl in an oyster. Her tongue—it is possible for me to remember that tongue, fleshy, pointed, as it maneuvered across lips and into my mouth, a memory I treasure when we sit, on days that are warm, at a small table outside the café, birds fluttering from the trees and pecking at the crumbs we scatter from our plates.
Want to read the whole first chapter?
Click here to download the pdf file.
A novel or movie may bo through a dozen revisions before I am finished with it. These video and textual excerpts, therefore, may or may not survive into the final version of Evidence. Putting them here is part of my process: of discovering and exploring.
