it occured to me then : how can you tell what’s focused from what’s unfocused if all you see is a perpetual slight blur? just like in the movie i’d watched earlier tonight. sharpness makes blur even more beautiful. blur makes sharpness even more meaningful.
i threw my daily contacts away, it felt good and normal, except i couln’t see anymore what the old man far across the roofs and courtyards was doing in his livingroom around his table at 5.25 am.
i got up and went to the window to finish my cigarette. the night was incredibly clear, the rain clouds were vanishing in white curls far above the city, i thought that it might be a pretty morning tomorrow. only one room except mine was lit all around me, it felt like being the only humans alive in the world. from my window, i can see a lot of roofs, there’s a school and its courtyard and a large building with too many windows to count behind it. i looked at the other room lit: for the first time since a long while, i could see in it, the table in the livingroom and a old man looking at something on the table. he paused and arranged something then turned slowly around it. he sat down, got up and paused again. my cigarette was finished. i thought that maybe, i ought to buy myself pretty glasses soon. i left the window to take my daily contacts off.
i turned my computer off and quickly glanced at my window. i needed some fresh air. a text i wrote some weeks ago came back to my mind, i had been writing about the sharpness of things, of reality, i had thought that maybe it was a good thing that i couldn’t see properly and refused to wear glasses or contacts everyday, like to protect myself from the sharpness of things. i had been writing about possibles and impossibles, about things happening even though no one believed them possible but how you can spot an impossible from far before you can get slashed by it, with or without glasses. i’d been wondering why anyone would want to be cut again by reality when they’ve already experienced it and know for real how deep the cut can be. i’d considered that not correcting my vision was choosing what i wanted or didn’t want to see. or more precisely, preferring the word watching to the word seeing, not as a refusal of the reality, really, but more as a helpful distortion. does facing the bare reality one hundred percent of the time make it less ugly? not facing it doesn’t make it less ugly of course, but distorting it helps, i thought.
the thing is, i wasn’t all that sure about it now.
i came home slowly, looking around a lot, it all seemed strange and somehow perfect. the lights, the reflections on the pavements after the pouring rains, the compact mass of leaves, the streets and cobblestone, it all looked beautiful. then again, maybe it was only the lasting feeling of beauty of the movie i just watched.
we got out of the theater with the exhilarating sensation of having experienced pure beauty. we looked at each other with the same craving to make something as beautiful, whatever it would be. short movies, pictures, grain, tons of colours, whatever. it’s just the kind of movie that inspires deeply because it reaches so deep. with crisp images, strong warm colours and a lot of blur.
i got out of the subway under a pouring rain, i ran to the theater as fast as i could, it had been a long while since i last ran like that. i felt light, jumping across the large puddles, stopping a couple of time to escape the rain for a few seconds, then running again. i wasn’t even catching my breath when i reached the theater, how odd.
i put my contacts on just before leaving home, then i headed to the subway. the world was so sharp it felt eerie, the wet pavements were covered by a thick layer of leaves and they glittered under the street lights, i made a couple of pictures, focus on infinite.