.
Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy
Batty is expiring, and talks
about how everything
he’s seen will die with him --
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
sea-beams glittering before
the Tannhauser Gates.
Memory is like molten gold
burning its way through the skin.
It stops there. There is no transfer.
Nothing I have seen
will be remembered
beyond me.
That merciful cleaning
of the windows of creation
will be an excellent thing
my interests notwithstanding.
But then again I’ve never been
near Orion, or the Tannhauser Gates,
I’ve only been here.
Batty is expiring, and talks
about how everything
he’s seen will die with him --
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
sea-beams glittering before
the Tannhauser Gates.
Memory is like molten gold
burning its way through the skin.
It stops there. There is no transfer.
Nothing I have seen
will be remembered
beyond me.
That merciful cleaning
of the windows of creation
will be an excellent thing
my interests notwithstanding.
But then again I’ve never been
near Orion, or the Tannhauser Gates,
I’ve only been here.
Hong Kong Skyline: panoramic view: photo by Diliff, 2007
Ginza neon night rain: photo by Move Lachine, 2008
3 comments:
"But then again I’ve never been
near Orion, or the Tannhauser Gates,
I’ve only been here."
Dear Tom —
you sure?
B.
Bob,
Actually, when I am working with images, where I am is always THERE. So when I am virtually in Hong Kong or Tokyo at night, I am, however briefly, THERE. This is why I trawl through images, my form of travel.
The Tannhauser Gates, of course, never really existed ANYWHERE -- outside, that is, the brilliant febrile imagination of Philip K. Dick (who, as it happens, dreamed up that fiction about a mile from where I am typing this).
These images, by the way, remind me quite a bit of the work of the painter Yvonne Jacquette.
For example, the lower image here makes me think of Tokyo Billboard II, 1985.
Commenting on filming Night Fantasies with Rudy Burckhardt in the Far East in 1990, Yvonne Jacquette said:
"When you film at night you don't get light into the camera; you only see the brightest things. I always saw the brilliance of the neon signs while everything else was dark around it. Things are not solid, they are floating. They could be sideways, the sense of the background is mostly pretty dim...The floating of the signs was sort of like these deities around this space."
I thought so, Tom.
And then some.
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