7 PM
.........................................................................................................................................
Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me.
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black and I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crennelated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass


We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

(c) 1972 Adrienne Rich

John Michael Hayes (11 de Maio de 1919- 19 de Novembro de 2008), Argumentista de Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, e The Man Who Knew Too Much.


“The four films that John Michael Hayes wrote for Hitchcock, were made during the richest and most complex period in the director's career. As Steven DeRosa writes (DeRosa, Steven (2001). Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes), Hitchcock was most comfortable working with younger, untried writers to whom he could be a mentor; the films he made with Hayes are ample testimony to the success of that strategy. DeRosa describes the relationship in meticulous detail, providing fascinating evidence of the extreme care with which Hitchcock chose and worked with his writers.”
The New York Times Book Review / review by George Robinson

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Maison à Bordeaux, Rem Koolhaas, 1998

What happens after a house that has been plastered all over the glossy magazines?

'The peculiarity of the movie is that it presents this icon of contemporary architecture through the eyes of Guadalupe Acedo, the cleaning lady, and the other people who look after the building.' WeMakeMoneyNotArt

THE HOUSE WITTGENSTEIN AND ROITHAMER’ S CONE. Fragments of an Investigation By Adelaide Deleite

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