Lost in Translation

during this weekend's bout of respiratory infirmity, i found myself bed-bound for 23 out of 24 hours on Saturday. it was a beautiful day, and rather than spending it on the beach with my yin, i was forced to convalesce in a small bedroom, alternately robing, disrobing, and rerobing my day away. but this is beside the point.

the point is that there was an upside to this experience, namely i was able to catch up on my film viewing, making up for the lost years when my spectatorship was so abysmal as to go beyond passive into the realm of impassive. but this is still not the point.

the point is that i was able to rewatch Lost in Translation, which i last (and first) saw on 27 August 2004. at that time, for various reasons, i wrote to a former lover whose family immigrated from Kyoto. we had met junior year at college and, in spite of a malignant break-up of my own making five years earlier, we had reconnected via email. below is a portion of that email, punctuation unchanged as a testimonial to my state of mind:

"... also i was gonig to write you this morning anyway because i've been having really bad insomnia for the past four or five months and so last night i finally watched lost in translation (i bought a tivo a week ago and record movies and the like while i'm at work). i had tried once before but had failed to finish it because it was paced just too darn deliberately. the pace hadn't changed and this time i was ready for it, and i thought it wsas pretty good. still not up to her first movie (virgin suicides) or the reviews it garnered, but pretty good. anyway the reason i was going to write you about it was that it's set in tokyo (and a a train station in kyoto) and i was wondering what the deal was with those little backpack-type things that the women in the kimonos (traditional?) have. every woman in that attire had them be her waitress or bride or anonymous woman on the street. is there a function to those things or are they purely fashion?"

in the intervening years another figure crept into my subconscious mind, and two nights ago i dreamed of Mardou. the dream felt like this:

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson

this morning, feeling better, i wrote Mardou an email, just like the Japanese girl all those years before:

"dream of you, undertaken in a sickened condition on the Saturday night of time change: we're in an elevator after some manner of unknown, transgressive encounter. your hair is dyed past blond into whiteness, approaching the outer fringes of blue. there is an awkwardness between us. when i get off at my floor, you tell me you didn't think it would be like this, implying that my goodbye is cold and thoughtless. upon waking, i realize it is the elevator scene from Lost in Translation, which i had watched before bed. you were in it, i suppose, because you are somehow tied to my idealized Tokyo. weird."

a forensic typing expert might (or might not) be able to ascertain something about the author of the emails by examining them side by side. for the purposes of my own self-query, however, i ask only:

how is that we account for these cycles in our lives?

the substitution of one thing for another, the sublimation of desire, and the coincidental nature of our existence. Donald Barthelme once asked:

"Do you encounter your own life as gratuitous?"

(if) the answer is "no",

are the things that appear again, and again,
again, and again, again and, again...

are these things nothing more
than a matter of punctuation?

or are they really not the same;
the meaning merely