Saturday
Coincidentlaly to the ongoing discussion... Few hours ago a tv programme
with Ben Okri going to Arcadia on a train. It caught me by surprise. I
don't watch tv from one month to the next now, but I turned the tv on as
part of a plant-sitting. It is actually my television in someone else's
place but that's another story.
Zapping, I heard the word poet - early evening Saturday - and thought I was
hallucinating and found I wasn't... basis as I got it, because I missed the
very beginning, was everyone everywhere has a sense that we have lost
something, Vergil says we have lost something, Vergil was good, he wrote
about Arcadia, so I have sold this idea of a train journey to look for it
to the BBC
Some oddities, unless my ears etc - Vergil 4th century BC and Goethe's
Faust 150 years old
Shots of Okri on his three week jaunt from Waterloo to Southern Greece
compressed into an hour - sojourns in France and Venice etc forced into the
theme, badly
Shots of the Eurostar, other trains, a ferry, and a remarkably fast Greek
train
Shots of the countryside around the train line
Voice over and face to camera of Okri saying little in many words + himself
in Esther Rantzen mode, asking people on the train what they think of the
idea of Arcadia
the problematic images upon which he did not comment but which were in his
film, including the doomed reemergent wildwood in thin strips beside rail
lines, the shots of Greek islands - green and brown with little white
blocks, terribly but indefinitely evocative for me at any rate - were
central to what he was supposedly examining but they were not examined...
and all we finally got was a photo of a book of Vergil translations one
place and a couple of translated Cavafy lines told in reported speech, all
reduced to something like "life is a journey on which we may learn
something"
much promised but nothing delivered - today's kfc calling itself a
restaurant
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