(Chronicle 2 years ago, in Montreal)
Memory is our way to rescue something from the stream of weeks and months. All our days and nights are moving fast, filled with information we forget, and we lose entire blocks of time forever. Sometimes our memory saves pieces of time unconsciously and sometimes we stop and look carefully and touch the outline of a moment because we don’t want our brain to forget it. It’s a decision like the decision of taking a photo: out of the haze of all that is ordinary, an instant acquires distinct contours, and we save it. The problem with my life is that it’s ordinary every day, every month of the year. I find comfort, however, in the angels imagined by Wim Wenders. In the movie "Wings of Desire", a pair of angels tour Berlin (in black and white) and meet at the end of each day to compare notes in their personal logs (they carry tiny notebooks). Being angels, they can look at all of humanity, all the great dramas and tragedies, all the conquests, inventions, triumphs and wars, all the love stories, all the losses, all the art and all the science, and they choose instead to record small events in their notebooks, such as: "a woman closed her umbrella in the rain."
So I, just a regular office worker, go out into the world and walk on the streets and under the sky and find salvation in notes for a log I invent for myself. And when I do, I imagine I’m the distant cousin of those angels and my tiny regular life manages however to touch the outline of something that deserves to be written down in a notebook and saved, somehow.
These are my notes for today’s log:
I walked in the forest among copper trees against a gray sky. I saw an older man approach a tree, carefully open a ziploc bag, and slowly place on the ground nuts for the squirrels in a tidy line. I didn’t know if they were gifts for any squirrel and all squirrels, or for a specific squirrel the man visits regularly, always at the foot of the same tree, on the same spot of the road. I saw a toddler in a blue snow suit walk clumsily and pick up a maple leaf, marveled. He immediately gifted it to his mother, who thanked him. I saw a man and a woman embrace for a long time in complete stillness and silence, and I couldn't guess if that was just love or if it was also sadness. I saw a man close his eyes with pleasure inside a hair salon, while a woman washed his hair. I saw from the street, through a window, a young clerk in a grocery store, his mouth and nose were covered by a mask, but his eyes laughed, amused, looking at something or listening to something hidden from me, beyond the contours of the window, and his young face was illuminated and full of beauty.
Lastly: a cat approached me on the street and let me pet it.
