There is a copy of Band of Outsiders that I checked out from a local record store
and lost
having been imbued with the memory
of falling in love
with the world that I had projected upon her
awake at 4 A.M.
and watching a video that someone had created
for The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “The Devil May Care (Mom and Dad Don’t)”
for the seventh time
and discovering the emerald green glow on the horizon
in the cool tranquility before dawn

I had once thought that the sun cast
bright golden carmine
across the snow covered plains
in the waking hours of a day gone by
in an old house that I’ve never been to
where you were cast in a film about snipers
and I had forgotten to
make the coffee for the crew
and scout the next location

They say that it is quite common for people to remember events that never took place.
As if even memory was mediated by images within what Guy Debord called “The Spectacle”.
Jean Luc Godard, whom the Situationist International neither disavowed or claimed as one of their own, is famous for having allegedly stated that “Cinema is truth twenty-four frames per second”.
As it appears in The Little Soldier, his meditation upon The Algerian War of Independence, the quote actually reads “Photography is truth and cinema is truth 24 times a second.”
A photograph is a historical record that serves as a synecdoche for an event that occurs as a totality.
Their existence emphatically proves, once and for all, that subjectivity can only be transcended through the cultivation of collective memory.
I had once imagined that I had been told a story about a newspaper article on the riots against the Serbian population that occurred following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
He told me that, in spite of that the image of the destroyed carriage was a painful reminder of the intransigent ethnic strife that had incited the war, he left article up, nailed to his wall, for years later.
He said that he had done so because he identified with one the people who had been captured by the photographer.
He, then, moved his finger across the scene so as to accentuate the damage, and said,
“I guess that I left that article up for all of these years because I thought that that was what had become of this world...”
He, then, pointed to a man in the background of the image and said,
“…and that’s me running away.”
Regardless as to what is actually written in that article, my relationship to that event is mediated by an encounter that I only imagined during an odd repose from a fit of mania that I had experienced while compulsively accumulating information from Wikipedia.
History is not a scientific record.
It is also comprised of the evanescent respite from the analysis of information that inspires the creation of works of art.
There is, perhaps, something all too Vitalist, even solipsistic, or, dare I say, “Fascist”, to that sentiment, though.
It’s not that I think that Jean Luc Godard was mistaken, photography is truth and cinema, at its most basic level, is a succession of photographs; it’s just that I think that he, perhaps, had not considered the implications of that truth can be created as a mediator for a person’s subjective relationship to collective memory.
Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet is “truth”, Ivan’s Childhood is “truth”, Maya Deren’s At Land is “truth”, the archival footage utilized in documentaries on the Holocaust is “truth”, and The Triumph of the Will is “truth”.
Jean Baudrillad is famous for having cited Ecclesiastes as stating that, “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
Cinema is as much of a simulation of an event as it is a record of an event in its own right.
When people create a film, they actually attempt to participate in the creation of memory,
and fail, I might add,
as, like any work of art,
what there is left upon the reel never quite appears as its author had imagined
and what a person feels when they see the film projected always somehow differs from every other person in the theater.

I bring all of this up because
I now wonder
what it will be like
for a person to discover
an unreturned copy of Band of Outsiders
perhaps, for the first time
there as a record
of the love I’ve never known
or the life they’ve just begun