Just watched the new movie from Almodovar. While it fell sharply below my expectation, there's one line came across my mind and stayed there. When the blind writer described (the motive of) his writing of play, he said "one life is not enough".
I was listening to a beautiful French song before I fell in sleep last night, I could barely understand anything she was singing but for the title "Tous ces combats", yet the melody was leading me in and I felt there's only a single veil, thin and even transparent, between me and the things in the song. If I reach out, it would be like running my fingers on the thin, translucent veil, which even yields under the tiny pressure of my fingers with a light curve…. and the French existence of this song, could be clearly seen across the veil. I could almost touch it. It sits just opposite me, across the thin, clear veil.
Many people think artists are great because they make life real before you, so that you could echo with it and think "yes that's life", or "yes, that's what I feel about life", yet perhaps artists are greater coz they make other lives real before you, so that instead of living the life yourself, which you can't because of the constraint of time and space, and the limited choices or years of life you're permitted.
Great artists can do that, and they can do that with seemingly simple touches. They could tell a life in a movie, in a song, and even with a photo.
"We'd go down to the river, into the river we'd dive, oh down to the river we'd ride" When I listened to Bruce Springsteen, I felt the disappointment of a low life, it felt so real like it couldn't be realer, if I were that small town American man.
And a photograph could do that much too. I went to a photo show of Wim Wenders, actually I ran into it, before that, I didn't even know Wim Wenders did such great photograph. It was a series of empty scenes without people, yet you could feel the marks of people, or the once existence of people, so strong in the air, it's even stronger than if there were actually people in the scene. I remember quite a many scenes from that series, one of them a deserted salon in a small fallen town of the once great American West: there's a pair of old leather sofa, sitting across each other, dosing in dusty silence, above them, an oil painting of a Western highway running through the desert. Gazing at the photo, I was transcended to another world, the scene became familiar and carried a specific meaning for me, as if I were an old man who once lived there, but now I have lost all of my memories because of old age, and all know is the familiar scene and the smell, the feel of faceless memories in the air.
For the small race of people of powerful imagination like myself, all the dead poets' melancholies are mine, all the singers' cry, all the lovers' sign, the pilgrims' prayer.
And I could almost make it real, take for example, the French song. It takes only a eleven-hour international flight, plus a hundred hour of French class for me to touch it. With that much, I could feel the thin warmth of sunshine at a winter dawn under the white dome of the Sacred Heart. Yes it would be relatively easy to feel the Parisian sunshine on my skin, but in order to wear a French skin, it takes a lot, and a lot more time, it would take years, and these years would be the opportunity cost of wearing a Spanish skin, a German skin, or an American skin.
So one life is not enough, and we've got to live our other lives in the movies, the songs, the traveling, and our dreams.
