MONOTONY / SEEKING

I sometimes get a very strange feeling that makes me feel unmistakably alive. It’s un-monotony … a kind of super-enthusiasm where everything seems precious and vital. It has more feeling about it than seems real, actually. There are three films I can think of which make me feel like this, but only really the scenes filmed in parks. Cleo de 5 à 7 by Agnes Varda, What Time is it There?by Tsai Ming-liang, and Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s something to do with the odd sense of urbanity when you get inside a city park. Animals live there. People don’t (apart from the people looking after the park). You play there or do nothing productive you could stick a value on. Anywhere else in a city you’ll find people somehow working but every park is an oasis.

This makes me think of Daniel Stern’s work on vitality..