James Pate - The Fassbinder Diaries

The film critic wears a red scarf. Her husband tells her it looks like her throat has been slashed. She wears a blue scarf and her sister says her head appears to levitate in air.

The sound of the film continues in the next room. There’s always a film in the next room, the film critic thinks. The voices could be rain that falls without hitting either foreground or background. The voices are not talking to her but through her and she is trying to listen but not hear them.

The figure without arms licks the figure without a tongue and the figure with hands but no fingers caresses the back of the figure with no head. The lemon air around them is haunted by crimson voices. The breeze around them has poured through a century of painterly silence.

The figure with no head is only good for breathing. So the director had decided.

The figure without hair probes part of its thinner shoots into the soft patches of the figure without brains and the figure with only a few branches of meat curls around the figure that consists of pink mist.

There will be crimson voices to reconsider. There might have been at least one century without tongues or hair or brain. The lemon figure might be called water and the crimson figure could well be sand.

They are on a beach. The breezier figures pour through the upper branches of air. It is a dark night, a silent night, a contracting night, a weathered night, an airy night, a night haunted by the general figure of night. So the director had decided. So will the figures lick and be licked. So will the silence pour. So will the meat crimson.

The lovers among us sleep like thighs.

The comatose eat sleep like cloud.

And the ghosts that searched our collars and straps.

Their cold feet in the naked closet.

Their roads in the storm closet.

Their grins in the salt closet.

Their tongues in the thorn closet.

Their throats in the iron closet.

Their shoulders in the arson closet.

Their windows in the burnt closet.

Their choirs in the velvet closet.

No one brought the mouth among the flowers. No one dragged the torsos nearer. No one could count the number of teeth that had bitten through.

We had been planning a film based on the bonier gods, with their skeleton grins and winter gazes. Withered flowers in different aspects of hair.

Heavens tinted. A multitude of years absent from the scene.

A shaking quaking started behind the emerald door. The more frantic shadows thought of themselves as afterimages from nights bright as milk.

Their Stroking Glove remained inert on the plate, though some of its fingers had been chewed. Their Examination Glove smelled like the newer types of saliva.

The gods with sinew among the flowers. The gods with their torsos exhaling.

The biting and sucking near the outermost shrub lasted seven centuries and thirteen seconds. The coughing spell wandered from cave to cave growing colder and more robust. The shadows slept from their skin down. They smelled between their legs. They smelled between repercussions. They smelled excrement in the grass. They smelled shit along the walls that led inside. They smelled fire where their brains used to rest. They smelled hair in distant places. They smelled hot blood and then cooler blood. They smelled burning fat. They smelled mud in the war zone. They had bewildered holidays. They were tremors in the listening gowns. They held wolves open. They slept like mist in the night. They fastened. They fastened tighter. They made the Face of the Melancholy Dog. They maintained an Egyptian doubt. They thought about the dark messages. They thought about the light messages.

I.

The trees are blue and the air red and a terrible beard of thorns grows from your softest lung.

II.

The only thing moving within seventy acres of desert is a forked tongue.

III.

The tree breathes like lungs. The thorns in this film are painted red. The weather will continue to be tinted blue.

IV.

The later parts of the film dealt with the life story of Mick Jagger’s tongue.

V.

The crucifixion of Mick Jagger’s tongue in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1980s version of Our Lady of the Flowers.

The season kept its hands scurrying behind the sad house, the unkempt house, the ninth and eleventh house, the gaunt house, the gutted house, the mangled house, the house with no roof or wall or obligatory history, the house with little else, the house with a single color, the house with a single shadow inside, the house with a single strip of light glowing under its door, the house on the white beach that will never recover, that will never remember, that will never return, the fish flopping on the sand, the swimmers in wet gowns barking at the wind.

Imperial Tangos #1

If you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away.

— Andy Warhol

They have arranged it so that the scene takes place in a ballroom. There are countless chandeliers, though only a few are on. There are countless mirrors along the wall, though most are hidden in shadow. And the ones not in shadow are freckled with bird shit.

The dancing couples shift their leaden figures to the leaden orchestration. The purpose is to dance until someone not themselves is either born or laid to rest. The ballroom is lit by a grainy light. The theme of the dance is Extraction. The thinking by the dancers in the ballroom tends toward sockets of grainy light. Others stand near the edge of the scene waiting for the light to flicker out.

One dancer who had once been laid to rest or possibly born is writing in the hotel bed this ugly ugly, this red red, this leaden leaden, this mirror mirror. Her dress wilts in the hot uneven room. Her idea is starting to ache. Yet the ache is not unpleasant. It makes her skin feel like streams of warm milk: milk that drips from the bed and through the floorboards into the room below, where it continues to drip through the floorboards, and so on, until it reaches the sewers.

They have arranged it so that the heads of many of the couples have been hallowed out by extractions. The have arranged it so that the heads of many of the couples have grainy and countless notions pouring from their faces.

Imperial Tangos #2

The endless boulevards extend among endless extractions.

Imperial Tangos #3

The dance is based on the Fassbinder film that has long been laid to rest, its head stuffed with roses. They have found a pink hotel by the cellophane lake, with many pink sugary swans in the distance. They have arranged it so that the dancing takes place from the knees down.

One of the ballroom dancers reads his diary while his lover fucks another dancer in the hotel elevator. They are like a pair of hips almost but not quite born.

The diary consists of scenes in which figures covered with bird shit and gold glitter and clothed by tattered silk stand like statues in a meadow that is really a stage in an abandoned factory. But they soon arrange it so that night falls on the meadow. They dim the factory lights one by one. The lovers in the elevator dry. The clothes in the elevator remain like sunlight.

Another film could have taken place. And maybe it will. Or maybe the film that could have taken place will only consist of a few scenes, and the rest will remain written in diaries and on the backs of napkins and one or two postcards.