-Where was I?

– Where was I?¹

The question holds several others. Where have you been? Where are you now? Where were you going?

On 12.04.2023 you made your desk on the rooftop of the house. It’s a sunny April day with a temperature that allows you to sit in the shade wearing only a shirt and a sweater hanging over your shoulders. You open google maps to plan a walk you’ve been wanting to take. It would take you about 12 minutes. You scroll along the route, before clicking the compass-like arrow that guides you back to where you are. For some reason the various possible destinations around you are gone and you find yourself in calm virtual space, the equivalent of the empty space before you. You wander around a bit in one, while recording yourself in the other. You save it to a folder with other sporadic fragments, and wonder what to do with it.

You promised to make a film, an essay film to be precise. The essay film seemed like a promising form to help you think. Or rather: help you give form to your thoughts; to give you a form to think in. Later today you will be filming a walk. Yesterday your thinking kept getting in the way of filming.

On 11.04.2023 you took line B, the blue line, into the city center. Your plan was to spend the next three days in libraries to work on your project, in full focus. In the metro you thought about documenting the journey to Collosseo, where you would get out and walk to Biblioteca Casanatense, a library close to the Pantheon. You didn’t feel convinced to start filming, conflicted in your lack of clear objective. Would you point the camera directly in front of you and catch anything or anyone entering the frame or direct the lens to specific details and specific people? The metro filled up as it moved from the end of the line towards the heart of Rome, and you felt increasingly uneasy about the idea of bothering anyone with your camera. Once again you would rather write about your reluctance to shoot anything than simply start rolling.

12.04.2023
“Nothing like making a film forces you to observe things. The writer’s gaze on a landscape, be it rural or urban, can omit a great quantity of things, and only pick out of the entire scene those elements which communicate an emotion, or which are useful. The director’s gaze on that same landscape cannot avoid becoming aware of everything that is in it. In fact, while for a writer things are destined to become words, that is symbols, in the director’s expression things remain things: ‘the signs’ of the verbal system are therefore symbolic and conventional, while the signs of the cinematographic system are indeed the things themselves, in their materiality and in their reality.”²

11.04.2023
As you try to make your way out of the metro station your path is blocked by three people in hiking gear, each with a camera strapped around the neck. “Well, he he, there it is!” you hear them say in your language. “It” being the Colosseum right across the exit. You smile and pass them, maneuvering past hordes of other tourists capturing the colossal amphitheatre through tiny screens. You wonder if they crop out the scaffolding and flashy fence banners where renovations are being done.

On 17.04.2023 you find an old note about Susan Sontag writing how tourists use the camera as “a defense against anxiety” and the overall guilt of taking time off of work. You can’t find the exact source, but it may have originally come from her book On Photography, which you haven’t read yet:

“Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. [...] Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

On 11.04.2023 you are not on holiday; you are on your way to work on your project, you tell yourself. You are not one of these tourists; if you were to take a picture or film something now, it might even become part of your work, you tell yourself. Still as soon as you take out your camera, you don’t feel any different from them.

You arrive at the library and enter an extensive process of bag-searching, identifying yourself and clarifying that you are not a registered student, but just here for a few days and wanting to get some work done. “Is not for workers,” they say. “Well, it’s not really work, but you know, research… basically studying,” you reply. They let you in. You walk into a room that looks like it has stayed the same for centuries and take a seat on a long dark brown wooden desk where around seven others are reading and writing. Everyone is so quiet you barely dare to tap the keys of your laptop. The cursor blinks patiently.

You start typing about your journey to the library. In your own language so nobody can read over your shoulder. Not that they would. But you feel exposed, perhaps slightly embarrassed that this “work” you’re doing looks so much like mere diary-writing. You still need to shake off the idea that the diaristic does not have a worthy place in the realm of work. The cursor blinks again.

“Diaries are fragmentary, never-finished texts in progress, whose ‘shapes derive from their existence in time passing’. [...] The diary has frequently been dismissed as ‘a practice caught in the banality of everyday existence.’; or extolled for the same reason: ‘The interest of the diary is its insignificance’.”³

On 25.03.2022 you searched for “off time”:

1. Time when one is not working
2. Not in time or in rhythm; out of time, badly timed. Unsatisfactory, inappropriate, out of place.

You were supposed to make an essay film that documents your time spent researching off time, time that is free from the pressures of work – particularly a space where one can be with their thoughts, explore them in a leisurely manner. You wanted to do this not as a distant observer, a journalist of sorts, but as an essayist that lives the process and ‘lays open their self’, in search of their own complicity in the matter. You’ve been writing, like you would in a diary. You are equally fascinated and frustrated by your inclination towards this form, this recurring activity. Fascinated by the potential of its open nature as a type of writing that is exempt from all rules, one that “adapts and surrenders to the unpredictable and variable rhythm imposed by the everyday”.⁴ Frustrated because you remain fragmented, unable to pull everything together into a solid and coherent piece. This is where the paradox lies; you still feel the pressure to create a work based on this process. Besides, when your work is about off time, is there ever a time when you are truly not working? You may fall into a trap of your own making.

It seems you have fallen, fallen into the second category of off time. Your time feels off, out of balance, out of sync. You feel disoriented and this need for space and time to reflect seems to consume itself like a serpent eating its own tail. A millennial indulging in themselves.

Already back on 11.10.2021 and 13.10.2021 you wrote about your fear of a scenario like that of Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, in which protagonist Caden receives a prestigious grant giving him the financial means to pursue his artistic interests. He is set on making a theater piece that portrays the brutal truth of the everyday, and pours all of himself and his personal crises into a neverending recursive process that goes on for decades, until it finally ends with his death. You like Kaufman’s writing, how he manages to insert his painful process into the thing he creates, and how this display of possibility in the face of writer’s block feels soothing. But you fear ending up like Caden.

“Ostensibly private, written in solitude, self-addressed and monological, to the extent of attracting accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence, all diaries – it is frequently claimed – are in fact implicitly written for an audience; and diarists secretly wish for their diaries to be read and published. Besides, an ‘other’, an implied reader, is always projected into the text; such other is ‘the possible reader of whom the diarist, even if he has no intention of publishing the diary, remains always more or less uncomfortably conscious’.”⁵

On 10.05.2023, as on many other days, you mention how tired you are of writing about yourself. You would like to become another person, to transform yourself through writing. To overwrite yourself.

Find “I”. Replace all by “you”. Nothing really changed, but somehow it feels liberating.

You decide to overwrite your diary entries into an essay, while still complying with the one rule that the diary needs to adhere to, which you forgot to mention before: always respect the calendar. The timestamps are containers that hold whatever chaos you put inside, that can make a seemingly disordered process systematic again. It is your defense against anxiety.

You write yourself back to the library in Rome on 11.04.2023, where you needed a change of scenery and decided to leave the building after an hour and a half, feeling suffocated by the stillness. You hand in your temporary membership card. The person behind the desk looks surprised and tells you that they can keep your spot reserved for when you come back. You reply that you prefer to walk today.

As you wander through the city you wonder how you ended up drifting further away from saving your relationship with time. You wanted to be a comrade of time, to work with time, to make work that helps time when it has problems, as Boris Groys puts it nicely in that essay⁶ you have revisited so often. Time has problems when it is at risk to be neglected or forgotten for being perceived as unproductive or meaningless. When it cannot be accumulated or invested into something, like a project; something – or someone – that progresses, that develops. You want time to be able to rest in itself.

You get a coffee at that place that makes it so creamy. You drink it at the counter, surrounded by what seem like local men having their two minutes of bliss before getting back to work. You quietly stand next to each other with nothing to do except savoring those couple of sips, while facing the well orchestrated chaos of swiftly moving baristas pouring coffee after coffee on the other side of the counter.

You continue your way past the Pantheon with its endless queue and head towards the Tiber. You cross one of the bridges, Ponte Umberto, to take the stairs down to walk along Lungotevere, the boulevard along the riverbank. In how it’s situated significantly lower than street level, the sound of cars and buskers dissipates to a soft background noise. You take out your sound recorder to document your walk, as you had planned back in Rotterdam on 30.03.2023.

On 30.03.2023 you needed a reset and walked out of the door. You had grabbed your recorder on the way out, thinking you might as well return to an old idea of making soundscapes from recorded walks. Around ten minutes in you googled the length of a 12 inch record. Fifteen to twenty-two minutes of walk on Side A, that same walk as a base layered with synths and sampler on Side B? A soundscape that can hold an essay. You wish for your work to work with time in this way, but it often feels easy and not enough. Today it does seem like enough. But something is missing. Why this walk? Why today? You decide to save the idea for your upcoming trip.

On 11.04.2023 you are strolling along Lungotevere, questioning your earlier intuition. You still long for a reason to start in a specific place, but there is none. It is an ordinary walk without any meaningful beginning or end, apart from it taking place in the Eternal City. You press record in a random moment, somewhat ambivalently. You wonder if you would distinguish the sound of Rome from that of Rotterdam. As you walk up the stairs the mechanic sounds of the city heighten again. On the other side of the bridge you stop to take a photo. The analog camera’s clicking and buzzing enter the recording; now you know the moment of capturing to be 16:29:01. You like knowing this. Stop recording.

On 12.04.2023 you started recording quite abruptly. You now wish you had done it differently, filmed more carefully. At least now the path feels more meaningful to you; you are walking through the neighbourhood of your significant other. For some years it was also the neighbourhood of another significant person. Their paths never crossed in time, but in space they must have. She pointed out his house two years ago in a quick passing on your way home. Back then you had heard of the name Pasolini, but you were embarrassed to admit that your knowledge ended there. Today you were reading about him and the notebook film, the film that cannot be made. You underlined a sentence. It offered you relief.⁷ You are trying to hold onto entire paragraphs with markings that could resemble tiny hands, framing the corners of the ideas that you want to imprint in your mind. About the screenplay as a structure which wishes to be another structure. About the ‘unmade’ or ‘to be made’ film, which embraces the characteristics of the unfinished art piece, not for mere aesthetic reasons but as a refusal to polish the literary work into an object of consumption. About how “the key to an understanding of the confusion of all notebook films is that they testify to the director’s search for a film not to be made, but that cannot be made.”⁸

– now where were you?

You were running out of time. Time is running off because it cannot find an end or conclusion.⁹ You drifted off in theory too much. You thought about putting the sentences and paragraphs from the book you were reading on top of the video you were shooting, but maybe you are ready to write your own.

On 11.04.2023 you were peeling a load of fava beans for dinner. It seemed like an endless job. After a while you give into the flow and you kind of start to enjoy the process. Finally when you finish, you look at your small stack of beans next to the big pile of remains you peeled away. You feel content.