Parapluies

-There's something on the water.

-Where?

-Something black, floating towards us.

-What's an umbrella doing here?

-It must have belonged to one of the

missionaries that the Jivaros killed.

-Strange.

-Seems to be a last warning. The bare-asses love flowery gestures.

Fitzcarraldo

‘ “J’ai oublié mon parapluie”
“J’ai oublié mon parapluie”.
Parme les fragments inédits de Nietzsche, on a trouve ces mots, tout seuls, entre guillemets.
Peut-être une citacion.
Peut-être a-t-elle été prelevee quelque part.
Peut-être a-t-elle été entendue ici ou la.’

In this way Derrida (“Spurs, Les Styles de Nietzsche”) speaks about what Nietzsche wanted or not to say about this forgotten umbrella. The same, almost the same phrase, is used by the train guard in Falsche Bewegung, a 1975 Wim Wenders’ movie: "Something terrible happend today, I forgot my umbrella, and up to that I’m wearing non-matching socks." The train guard, we will learn later, was a Nazi soldier in the war. The Nazi forgot his umbrella in his house, and mixed the socks. Did Nietzsche in someway watch the movie, long before it was made? Or was Derrida the one that watched the movie, some days after been reading Nietzsche in Germany -for those famous vacations of 1976? The same umbrella, or maybe another one, appears in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, in the middle of the amazonas while Carusso is singing, and Klaus Kinski (father of Natasia, the girl that is in the train with Willem when the Nazi appears) is becoming crazy. A last warning from the bare-asses someone says.

An intriguing text. I understand intriguing here in the second meaning of the word: Make secret plans to do something illicit or detrimental to someone. That is the kind of fascination that Derrida’s text wake up on me. What does he mean? Where does he want to go?

Let’s be plain and simple, naïve even: this is a search for meaning.

The world, that in the first place makes always sense -- is the world for a living being -- seems not to make any sense at all. And I look for it. I tried to understand science, and in some way I managed to, but I realized that no answer can be drawn from there. For example, particles interact with themselves in time and space: the past of the particle affects its future in the same way its future affects is past; if there are two holes, the particle pass through both of them. This is fine with me, but I cannot use it to make sense of life (I can use it to make sense of this computer and understand how it works though). Therefore, I don’t care about what science says. I will keep falling in love even if NP=P*.

Then the question is: what is this meaning you are looking for? I know what is not. Is not a truth grounded in facts. Is not an answer from a book or a master. Is something like an umbrella. A meaning that I can leave at home when I don’t need it, but which covers me from the ruins falling from a heaven that has been always falling apart. What falling apart? In my case, poverty, torture, violence. Lives wasted in the hell of a job, a family and bags of paper with 300 euros shirts in them. The last scene of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

*P.S.: Which by the way, it seems not to be the case.

Photo by Marcel Germain