Playroom (10): Jissoji's Buddhist Trilogy

This Transient Life

A house presents itself before the people who believe they own it. Pillars speak to the floor and the floor carries their speech into the rooms without hurry. Paper doors breathe with the weather and draw narrow rectangles of light upon tatami that remember every footstep and forget nothing. A garden of sand has been arranged to persuade the eye that the sea can be made calm by attention. Stone sits with a patience that embarrasses talk. The film enters as if to apologise to these things for the time it will spend among human wishes. A brother returns to a home that has trained itself to receive him without surprise. A sister waits with the courtesy that old wood demands. Their father walks through corridors as if each corner were a footnote to an inheritance he is not sure he understands. The air carries the temperature of obligations that have been postponed until they changed shape. The camera keeps near to beams and thresholds until human faces must either accept the order of the house or be shown as undecided.The first courtesy the film pays to the world is to allow it to be seen as a set of relations rather than as scenery. A gate frames a road that is itself a promise of leaving and of return. A corridor composes a person by forcing a choice between length and crosswise. Steps require the body to confess its rhythm. Rooms allocate light as if it were a form of governance. The lens does not flatter this governance and does not resist it. It reports the way a clerk reports what a document contains. When a hand touches a post the post is not reduced to a symbol. It remains a post and it also becomes the measure by which the hand can be judged. In such a climate words either learn humility or they cease to be useful.

A boy and a girl share a childhood and the house keeps that knowledge in its quiet arithmetic. The boy, now returned, brings into the rooms a restlessness that was bred inside the rooms themselves. The girl, who has never left, holds in her own geometries a discipline that makes restlessness look like a clumsy guest. Their father administers wealth with the resigned cheerfulness of someone who knows that wealth is only a calendar that arranges funerals more politely. He considers monasteries and marriages in the same tone because both are forms of shelter offered to children by a society that prefers quiet houses. The mother is an absence that the house will not comment upon. It has learned that grief is a kind of rain that should not be discussed while it is falling.

The brother finds his way to a temple and discovers that a god is a room with better manners. Bells count a time that does not care for inheritance. Scrolls rustle like soft wind in a season that refuses to hurry. A monk speaks with a voice trained to be heavier than any visitor’s opinion. The boy kneels and notices that the floor has not been polished for him. The monk invites him to learn how to see without collecting. The boy smiles in the way that boys smile when told the world is not theirs. Then he returns to the house where everything, from the angle of a beam to the colour of a tray, seems to have waited for his hand to complete a sentence that began before he was born.

The scandal starts as an adjustment of breath. The camera permits a room to hold two bodies until a room must admit that it is complicit in what it has enabled. There is no music that announces transgression. The silence knows more about law than any chorus. The brother discovers that a home can be an instrument for the disappearance of limits, and that disappearance can be tender before it is injurious. The sister discovers that obedience has a secret chamber. The film refuses to make them performances of evil or sermons upon innocence. It insists instead upon the exactness of the room. The design of a house that keeps people near in order to civilise them has also made possible a kind of nearness that cannot be discussed. The family does not yet know what has been decided in its name. The garden knows that a single stone moved by a hand not meant to move it can set a new geometry in motion.

The monk returns in another light. He looks at the boy as one looks at a person who has learned the taste of a forbidden fruit and has come to ask whether the tree can be persuaded to grow into an argument. He speaks of practice and of renunciation without scolding because scolding is a kind of vanity. He brings the boy to a sculptor and there the film is given its clearest analogy. A block of wood contains a figure and the figure is released by cutting away what does not belong to it. The sculptor’s hand is precise because it has grown humble in the presence of error. The boy touches tools and pretends not to be moved. He is moved. He sees that beauty is not a cleaning of surfaces but a set of acts that removes everything that is not necessary to the figure’s breath. He returns to the house and touches a screen with this new knowledge. Screens and sisters are not blocks of wood. The camera understands this better than the boy.

The father organises a marriage because that is what fathers do when walls begin to speak all too clearly. He chooses a husband whose seriousness has the weight of a well balanced ledger. The ceremony is precise. Vows are spoken with the intelligence that repetition confers. The wife leaves the house with grace and the house receives the grace and learns to be a little poorer in silence. The brother watches and does not understand that rites are not machines for the prevention of desire. They are the only instruments by which desire can be made responsible to time. He follows the carriage with his eyes and then follows his eyes with his feet and discovers that moving through a town that knows your name is another form of confession.The newly married woman sits in a new room and studies the grammar of another house. Tatami are still tatami. Beams still govern light. Yet the temperature has changed. The corridor expects footsteps she has not yet learned to supply. A husband watches her the way a careful man watches a tool he has not used before. He is not cruel and he is not kind. He is the civil servant of a custom and he does his work. The wife discovers how quickly a room can become a vocabulary for endurance. To speak in that vocabulary she must refuse to say certain words. The words are the ones she has only just learned to say inside herself.

The monk has warned the boy that the path of refusal is a path if and only if it is walked with the same care one would use in tending a lamp. The boy does not yet hear. He has discovered that transgression gives a human face the clarity that religion promises. He believes clarity is a right once tasted. With this belief he is dangerous not because he is strong but because he knows how to turn every prohibition into an invitation to purity. He pursues the wife within her new rooms with an obsession that allows him to believe he is more honest than those who have arranged the world. The camera neither endorses nor condemns. It notes the slow injury to carpentry and to sense. It is meticulous about the objects that are forced to witness this lesson. A screen catches a hand where it should have caught light. A lacquered table records a breath it should never have been asked to carry.

A child is imagined and then becomes a fact. The film does not offer the child as a moral. It offers the child as a timepiece. With the child present the measure of all acts becomes the measure of a life that has not chosen any of them. The patterns of secrecy now travel farther than the rooms that made them possible. The monk does not say I told you so. He watches the boy fold and unfold ideas until ideas begin to look like the toys of a clever child. The sculptor continues to carve. The figure’s eyes appear as the result of chisels that stopped at the right instant. Nothing is more terrifying than a right instant in the wrong room.

Money is always nearby in these houses. The father calculates rescue, and rescue is as expensive as shame. Friends whisper that departure makes distance and distance makes sense. Others whisper that only confession creates a future. The wife learns that every solution available to her is an arrangement of permissions issued by people who are not asked to pay for the permission they distribute. She makes decisions one at a time because that is how decisions must be made when the corridor is narrow. She keeps her face unreadable in public because reading has become a power she will not grant to strangers. The camera grants her the dignity of not being simplified.

The boy speaks of freedom and the monk points to weather. The lecture is small and... devastating. Freedom that requires harm in order to prove itself is another form of attachment. A vow taken to perfect a self can be a more dangerous vanity than lust because the injury can be made to look like a philosophy. The boy hears this and for a moment looks like a man. He sits in the temple and breathes with the room. He returns to the house and breathes with the wrong room again. The film lets us feel both minutes equally. It does not reimburse the one with the interest of the other.

Deaths arrive like corrections that the world has been waiting to write. A father is removed because heredity has done all it can for the story. A lover is taken away because desire requires an end in order not to become theatrical. A stranger places a body in the wrong place and thereby shows that the map was never real. A funeral is arranged with the tact that fire teaches those who use it properly. The monk recites and the words behave like rain instructed to appreciate wood. The boy looks at ash and mistakes it for a canvas awaiting a doctrine. The film keeps the ash safe from doctrine by keeping the wind busy.

The sculptor finishes a figure that cannot be finished. The eyes hold a softness that wood should not be able to hold. The lips refuse to be clever. The hand gestures in a grammar that does not exist in prose. The boy watches and for a minute forgets about himself. Then he remembers and tries to own the lesson. Ownership insults craft. The sculptor smiles the smile of a man who has been insulted by better men and worse. He goes on working because work is the only apology that carries interest into the next day.

Bodies carry the consequences of minutes that were permitted to occur without witness. The wife becomes precise in the way that only grief makes possible. She does not accuse. Accusation would reduce what has happened to a speech that another person could answer. She acts, and the act ends a line of argument that had pretended to continue forever. The boy is free in the only way a selfish person can be free. Freedom needs another name when it is born of a loss for which no one asked permission. The monk presides over what remains without claiming victory. He knows that victories are the most corruptible of currencies.

A scene at the sea where the horizon denies everyone equally. Sand irritates the dignity of robes and of suits and of bare legs. A child laughs because the grammar of foam is the first language every body understands. The boy tries to read the sea as if it were a text and discovers that the sea refuses literacy. The wife stands with a patience that makes the water look foolish. The monk watches the tide execute the only sermon worth keeping. Come and go and come and go and do not believe that coming or going is the whole truth.

Returning to the temple a corridor is longer than a sentence. A bell is older than a plan. The boy kneels again and for a moment his posture and his intention are one. The monk does not congratulate him. The sculptor brings wood in and takes shavings out. The world continues to accept and to shed itself. This is not cruelty and it is not comfort. It is the natural law that films try to imitate when they lengthen a shot to the point where ambition dissolves.

The father’s estate becomes a ledger that refuses to balance. A cousin arrives to help and discovers that help is the most dangerous of queries. The monk advises without taking sides because taking sides would make religion another property to be divided. The wife is asked to give a statement and she gives the smallest statement possible. Silence carries the rest. The boy starts a fire in a place that cannot afford fires. He calls it a test of truth. The house calls it another form of weather. The flames do their work and the walls count the losses as calmly as numbers count.

The city where hotels organise desire into corridors that can be cleaned by people paid not to witness. The boy experiments with this efficiency and finds that an anonymous room is the least effective partner for transgression. The wife enters a modern lobby and becomes more ancient than the pillars of her father’s estate. The monk moves through a crowd that has forgotten the usefulness of moving slowly. The sculptor carries wood past neon and the wood continues to smell like a forest. This is the only victory the film concedes to the old world.

Language breaks where it must. The boy tries to confess and discovers he can only perform. The wife says nothing and becomes legible to those who have learned how to read by listening. The monk quotes a text and finds that the text is not a weapon but a path through a narrow pass. The sculptor tells a joke and thereby rescues a day from zeal. A policeman fills in a form and proves that the state can be both competent and irrelevant. A neighbour tilts her head and the tilt remembers every tilt that has ever inspected a scandal in another family.

By now the house has learned that it will not survive as a house. It begins to translate itself into other forms. A beam is sold and becomes dignity - always a corrupting force -  in a smaller dwelling. A screen travels to a shop and becomes an object that strangers admire without being able to name what they admire. A garden stone is placed near a station and for a week it is the only place where a person can feel the day make sense. The monk does not protest. He blesses the dispersal with the careful movements of a man who has spent his life not confusing blessing with possession. The boy calls this defeat. The wife calls it the end of a sentence. The sculptor calls it wood continuing its career as element.

A final return offers the camera a chance to indulge in clarity. It declines. It chooses instead to hold on to faces long enough for the faces to stop being instruments of meaning and to become what they were before the story used them. The wife looks at a wall and the wall returns the look. The boy looks at a bell and the bell remains a bell. The monk looks at a body and sees that it is subject to the same rule as a pillar. The sculptor looks at his hands and laughs because laughter is the only defence against hands that begin to believe they are sufficient.

The child becomes the person who will remain in the rooms that survive. The camera does not turn the child into a prophecy. It treats the child as another body that will learn to breathe in a space and to call that practice a life. A kite on a beach, a bowl of rice, a sleeve wiped across a cheek, a name spoken too loudly, a step taken too fast on a polished plank, a whisper louder than a confession. These are the scenes the film leaves to those who insist upon hope. Hope is permitted to live only if it can live quietly.

There is a temptation to call the story an argument about sin and law. The film refuses to carry the argument. It prefers to show that sin is a word we use for a failure to accept the time of things, and that law is a word we use for the arrangement by which a community protects its rooms from our failures. The monk appears to stand for law, yet his law is only attention. The boy appears to stand for freedom, yet his freedom is only hunger. The wife appears to stand for sacrifice, yet her sacrifice is only the completion of acts that others interrupted. The sculptor appears to stand for art, yet his art is only the competence to do one thing well in front of witnesses who may not deserve it. The camera keeps these figures in motion until the categories grow tired and go to sleep.

The sea returns in the sound of wind over a cemetery. Names carved in stone are the most honest gates, for they open to nothing that can be visited and they close on nothing that can be kept out. The monk reads again and the pages turn because the day supplies air. The boy lowers his head because the one talent pride possesses is a knowledge of when it must pretend humility. The wife bows because the body knows how to be correct even when the mind wants to argue. The sculptor places a flower and remembers to push the stem deeper because otherwise the wind will have the last word. The wind has the last word anyway. It is kind enough to pretend it has not.

When the film ends the day outside is not improved and is not worse. It is as exact as it was when the monk first tapped his bell. We have been given a method and not a verdict. The method refuses to save anyone and therefore it can be used in any house. It asks for three courtesies only. Let space instruct. Let time complete. Let desire learn to speak without destroying the rooms that keep it alive.

We walk and discover that corridors everywhere are longer than our reasons. We sit and discover that sitting is what bodies do when arguments have forgotten their manners. We speak and discover that many sentences can be made shorter if we remember the measure of breath. A film is called a story and this story has given us back a way of being with other people in rooms. That is more than doctrine and less than absolution. It is enough for now.

If anyone asks what to call the meaning start with what is given. Remove what does not belong. Stop before the figure becomes clever. Leave the shavings on the floor long enough to remember that all clarity is the product of dust. Offer the figure to a room. Step back. If the room breathes more easily, you have done enough. If the room is bigged up, begin again. The house knows this. The monk knows this. The wife knows this. The boy can still learn it because films continue after the credits in the rooms where our habits live.

So the title is accepted as an exact report. Life is transient. The rooms in which life imagines itself are transient. The feelings that call themselves permanent are transient. What remains are acts done with care. A bowl set down without noise. A bell struck with a thoughtful wrist. A foot placed with respect upon a step polished by other feet. A name spoken once without pleading. A door closed without resentment. A screen left a little open so that light can perform its small daily rescue. These will last as long as they last and then they will teach someone else the same method. The film has agreed to be a teacher in this modest school. We graduate by remembering to be gentle with the time of things.

Poem

Another house declares itself before any person has the chance. Walls speak in the grammar of joints and pillars. Floors keep the memory of knees and steps without choosing among them. A gate rehearses its right to open and then changes its mind. The film begins as an apology to such objects for the long neglect of attention. A man moves through this estate as one moves through a book that has been inherited rather than chosen. He knows where the beams have been sanded smooth by hands centuries older than his. He knows the spot where rain always insists and where oil must be reminded to be generous. He is not an owner and does not behave like a tenant. He is the servant who has married himself to the house without witnesses. His labour is not a posture against the world. It is the only method by which he can remain equal to himself.

The camera keeps faith with the building. It lingers at intersections of shoji and lintel until a body must either sharpen itself to match the lines or be revealed as the soft thing it is. Rails, thresholds, pillars, tatami edges, all form a system of measure before which speech loses its authority. Windows admit light in a discipline stricter than doctrine. Rooms are not containers for psychology. They are the instruments every life here must learn to play. The film’s gaze is not simply architectural. It is tender with the severity that only care can afford, the way an old temple’s sweeper knows which leaf to guide and which to leave in place because the wind has designed something better.

The family who inhabit this inheritance are not strong enough to deserve it and not weak enough to relinquish it. An old name clings to a ledger. A poet holds himself a little slant to the day so that the day appears to drop from his shoulders like an unused coat. Women drift among eaves with the exactness of people who know their movements are watched, not by other people but by a house that has standards of posture and standards of voice. Money arrives in rumours and leaves as soon as numbers are requested. The world outside sends contractors and clerks who carry instruments for measuring value that cannot be measured here. They speak of repairs and of replacement as if both were forgiveness.

The servant accepts nothing of this language. His religion is maintenance. He comes upon a hinge with oil as a monk comes upon a bell with a mallet. He keeps the grass’s argument with the stone path within a courteous limit. He bows to a pillar because it has carried more than any person could ever be asked to carry. When someone drops a cigarette he is there with a look that refuses the insult of turning rebuke into words. Love for him does not flow toward persons. It flows toward surfaces and joints, places where touch has the power to become time. He is not a fetishist. He is the one figure who has learned how to be faithful without converting fidelity into a social ornament.

The poet who belongs to the house belongs to nothing else. He has made of the estate a theatre for his detachment and of detachment an alibi for not choosing. He recites to himself in rooms that were built for speech larger than his. He watches the servant the way a sick man watches a healthy man, with a faint contempt he cannot sustain. He toys with modern arrangements the way boys toy with fuses, curious to hear the sound of explosion and trusting that the roof will settle where it should. He is neither villain nor victim. He is a talent for delay that has found a favourable climate.

A woman enters this arrangement as women often enter such arrangements, through a door that already knew she was coming. She brings a tone that the house has heard before and learned to translate into its own dialect. She knows enough to be graceful and not enough to be safe. If love is to occur here it will first have to learn the art of not striking at the furniture. She is tempted to pity the servant and to mock him. She is tempted to achieve with her body the effect that money and poetry have not achieved. She will discover that desire here is like water falling on stone. It will leave a record, but not immediately and not where anyone expects.The film refuses to tidy these relations into triangles. It keeps returning to the house as the fourth term in every sentence. A corridor does not simply connect rooms. It teaches the body a way of moving through decision. A stair is not merely vertical transport. It governs conversation because it forces two people to face or not face. A sliding door can make intimacy or can make an accusation of nearness by opening the wrong way. The camera’s wide angles and patient tilts are moral instruments in this sense. They make evident the law that has replaced argument here. If a person fits within the framing grid, the scene can proceed. If not, the scene will be compelled to deform until the house forgives or refuses to.

The outside presses its case with the certainty that accompanies concrete. Roads can be widened. Lots can be mapped. Timber can be priced. A developer believes he can make of history a set of angles on a brochure. He is not a monster. He is the most modern species of innocent, the man who trusts instruments and thinks that trust is a virtue. He has a schedule, which is a calendar rearmed as a weapon. He brings contractors whose competence would be admirable if competence were the relevant virtue. Their footsteps broadcast a future of right angles and utilities. In their presence the poet grows brave in talk and the servant grows silent because talk wastes oil.

The house answers. The air inside remains at a temperature time has negotiated with wood. Sunlight enters according to an agreement made by carpenters who understood the need to tame it. Rain knows which plank to ask for, and that plank has learned to oblige. To outsiders this seems like superstition. To the servant it is simply the fact that design becomes climate when it has endured long enough. He does not use the word sacred. He shows how the word was invented by being first of all meticulous.

A scene in which the servant eats is the film’s most precise argument. He sits where servants sit and places the bowl on a mat that has absorbed the heat of a thousand bowls. He raises the rice with a rhythm that avoids both haste and display. He looks not at the food but at the space between bowl and mouth as if that were the narrow bridge upon which the house must cross eternity. No music instructs us. The geometry holds him. After, he cleans the bowl with water that has seen many mornings and returns it to a shelf with the certainty of a ritual enacted without vow. His appetite is not for the past. It is for the only present available here, the present measured in acts that keep other acts possible.

The poet makes his own ritual of refusal. He sits in a posture too elegant for the chair and recites at a pace that successfully keeps meaning from overtaking the cadence. He sleeps where he should not and wakes with phrases that will not repair anything. He is sweet to those he can be sweet to and mild with those who cannot be persuaded to leave. He touches the woman with a courtesy that makes honesty difficult for both. His poems are concerned with beauty at the level of the visible and also with the ugliness of his obligation to be more than visible. He is the kind of man who will never break a chair and never fix one. He is necessary to the house because it needs a witness to its failure as well as to its grace.

The woman’s appetite is shaped by the way glass divides an afternoon. She moves her hands through shafts of light that make dust articulate. She learns the codes by which servants confess and owners pretend not to hear. She learns that the house possesses her as soon as she performs any act in it twice. She does not become a victim of the house. She becomes a reader of it, which is a different fate. Her imagination of escape is trained by screens that do not cooperate. The men ask of her the ancient set of tasks, to warm an hour, to soften a sentence, to make a plan seem less ridiculous. She gives these as long as she can do so without harming the things she has begun to love, such as the corner where two walls meet with a humility so exact she cannot bear to look at it for more than a minute.

Desire presses in from a direction that carpentry cannot forbid. The servant watches the poet and the woman. He has no use for jealousy as a vocabulary. He believes in maintenance and sees that certain forms of touch destroy joints more quickly than moisture. He cannot prevent what must happen but he can reduce the harm. He places a cloth under a vase before the poet puts it down so that the table will not remember any one person too vividly. He adjusts a curtain so that a bed will not become a stage. He practises a kind of chastity that has nothing to do with abstinence and everything to do with preventing the past from becoming untrue.

The modern city sends more emissaries. A surveyor’s chalk discovers that the garden is a number. A clerk produces a stamp that can override the merit of timber. Meetings occur with tea and with patience. The house is praised as a cultural asset and then presented with a schedule of dismantling which will preserve that asset somewhere else for the benefit of those who do not need it. The poet discovers in himself a passion for negation which requires him to speak in defence of the very qualities he has chronically neglected. He becomes eloquent with the speed of a convert and therefore is not trusted. The servant does not speak. He brings a bucket where a leak has begun and by doing so denies the meeting its triumph.

The film refuses theatrics even as it approaches catastrophe. We do not see long arguments ripped to shreds by insults. We see arrangements loosen thread by thread. A beam that has always been steady creaks. A screen sticks where it always slid. A step across a threshold produces a sound the house has never made before. The servant hears it and his face admits a pain that could not be shown if it belonged only to him. The camera is mercilessly calm. It trusts that anyone who has ever kept a delicate thing alive will recognise what is being told.

Sex arrives as weather rather than event. It does not provoke but declares that provocation is unnecessary. Bodies fit badly into a geometry designed to tame light for meditation. Kimonos lose the argument with urgency. Hands find that the house knows their sequence before they can invent it. The servant is there to fold what has been unfolded and to restore the sequence without cursing it. The woman refuses the sentimental advantage of being wronged by a room. She allows the room to remain indifferent. She finds this indifference to be the kindest treatment available to her. The poet writes nothing that will survive the hour. The camera gives them a minute and is wise enough to remove no more time than that.

If a doctrine exists it is Buddhist in the way wood learns Buddhism. Impermanence is not a thought. It is what dust does to lacquer and what hands do to rails and what want does to promises. The film practices recognition rather than instruction. The servant bows to an eave because it has outlived pity. The poet bleeds anger until only posture remains. The woman accepts that continuity and release cannot be argued into compatibility. None of them confess this in speeches. They demonstrate it by failing to preserve what could not be preserved and by preserving what survives failure, which is the competence by which an act is completed for its own sake.

In one sequence the house is emptied for maintenance or for sale. The camera follows the removal of mats and screens and lanterns until a skeleton remains. This is not a symbolic stripping. It is the practical result of labour that calls itself preservation while making preservation impossible. The skeleton is beautiful. It is also cold. The servant moves between skeleton and inventory and puts numbers where names used to be. He counts with the precision of a man who knows that each digit is an injury he refuses to make drama. The poet is absent or present with a useless incense of words. The woman helps in the way only a person without rights can help. She attends. She touches cleanly. She does not drop anything.The film understands that modernity’s cruelty is often the politest thing about it. Polite notices are delivered. Polite explanations of policy are offered. Polite deadlines are extended or withdrawn. The house is asked to consent to its own reduction and to sign. The servant is asked for a signature he does not possess the authority to provide. The poet is asked to deliver a letter to a future he has not earned. The woman is asked to accept the wisdom of strangers. Everyone smiles. The smiles make the catastrophe feel like weather rather than policy. The only impolite thing left is the sound of wood piled in a truck.

At the moment when another film would declare itself, this one returns to the ordinary. A scuffed line on a pillar is rubbed with a compound the colour of patience. A latch is tested. A corridor is swept. A bowl is set on a shelf and then moved half the width of a thumbnail because a hand recalled how this shelf has wished to be treated for years. The servant does not perform grief. He performs expertise. The camera consecrates this by refusing to call it sacred. No choir. No summary. The precision is the summary.The poet experiences a crisis that is less personal than mechanical. He discovers that words refuse to be the kind of time that the house needs. He leaves, or he threatens to leave, or he decides to remain in a manner that mimics leaving. He is capable of love for the house but the house requires a love that can fix things. He cannot fix things. He writes. The film does not mock this. It knows that writing is the only way some men can be equal. It also knows that there are moments when women and old timber cannot wait for literature to keep its promises.

The woman finds a way to remain herself. She is not saved by marriage and not doomed by independence. She is not reformed by suffering because the film does not sell reform. She keeps the minute she can keep, which is the minute during which she behaves as if her body were her own. Then she releases that minute because release has been forced upon her nature by the way doors behave. The house has taught her an expertise that will be useful anywhere. She has learned the distance at which kindness stops being theft. This education will not be understood by anyone who asks what happened to her as if a ledger could answer.

There may be a death. If there is, it happens without ceremony and without the theft of giving the dying man a good line. The servant might make the mistake of violence in the name of preservation. He might not. The poet might decide that a single act can justify all the delays. He might not. The woman might be made into an instrument and then thrown away. She might not. The film’s greatness lies in its refusal to let our appetite for plot devour the knowledge that has been patiently transmitted. Even if blood is spilled the house remains the central fact. It does not change colour. It changes use.

Sound behaves as counsel. Wind writes thin music into paper screens. Footsteps on wood declare who understands and who does not. A bell from a temple elsewhere reminds the estate that its law predates every marriage conducted under its roof. Radios carry the news with the bland candour of machines paid to tell the hour. There is no score tasked with rescuing us. The film trusts that the ears are old enough to hear the difference between reverence and quiet.

Light is governed with an intelligence that never shows off. Sun enters rooms as if carpenters had decided to tame it a little more on this particular day. Night knows when to be thick and when to be blue. The camera accepts both as conditions rather than as moods. Faces have their own climate and the house adjusts in order to keep them. At no moment are we invited to stare at beauty as though it were the subject. Beauty is the side effect of integrity.

The ending is not an ending. The house continues, even if elsewhere, even if in memory, even if as lumber performing humbler tasks. The servant continues because the world will always need a person to study hinges. The poet continues because speech will not stop demanding sons even from those unwilling to labour. The woman continues because the earth carries the knowledge she has learned and will present it again when thresholds need to be taught how to be thresholds. Trucks leave. Seasons work. A palm of light moves along a wall and decides not to reach the corner today. The camera allows the palm to withdraw without loss.

What remains is the lesson the film has been whispering across its severe surfaces. The only politics that outlast the week are the policies of care. A state can declare hierarchies and can demolish in the name of tomorrow. A market can invoice air and import dignity as décor. These will pass through any house in a generation. What stays are the acts by which a thing is allowed to fulfil its design. To wipe a rail with a cloth is not nostalgia. It is fulfilment. To adjust a curtain so that light does not harm a table is not sentimental. It is a complex agreement between planets and fibres. To refuse to let desire damage a floor is not puritan. It is gratitude.

This is why the servant is the only figure here who is never ridiculous. He may be tragic, he may be severe, he may be too slow for the world that speaks with dynamic trucks. He is never a joke. His love is the least negotiable thing in the film because it does not ask to be returned. It asks to be shared. The poet does not understand this until too late or never. The woman understands it as soon as she has learned how the house listens. We understand it the moment the camera gives us a minute beside a pillar and our breath changes to match the pace of its grain.

The poem promised by the title is not printed on paper and not declaimed in a courtyard. It is the arrangement of measures by which intervals become habitable. It is written in the relation of rice to bowl, of foot to step, of light to lacquer, of body to frame, of hand to cloth. It is written in the agreement that lets rain extend a sentence begun centuries earlier. It is written too in the disagreement that lets a woman keep herself even when geography and custom collaborate to erase her inner map. The poem is legible if one has the patience to read slowly. The film teaches that patience without a chalkboard and without concession.

Outside the estate the city continues to reward speed, novelty, demolition that calls itself progress. The film neither condemns nor blesses this. It acknowledges the world and then takes up the rag and the oil can again because an acknowledgement is not an act. Inside the estate a hinge has begun to squeal. Someone must listen and must decide whether to apply oil now or to wait until evening when the temperature changes and the habit of wood returns to its easier humour. The servant decides well. The camera keeps him company so that we can learn what a good decision looks like in a world that has forgotten.

After, a bowl is placed where it belongs and a screen is closed and an old inscribed beam accepts another winter. The poet writes or does not write. The woman walks beyond the gate and the gate accepts that it may not be needed today. None of this proves anything except that the time of things can be a form of justice. The film makes this justice visible and audible. It does not sentimentalise it into therapy and does not weaponise it into ideology. It leaves it on screen like a mat left in sunlight because light is the correct food and because no person could eat it and live.

If the house is preserved, the poem remains because poems die only when they are converted into slogans or exhibits. The servant will die and the poet will be forgotten and the woman will be guessed at by those who love deduction. The house will be lived in by those who do not know themselves to be living in a poem. This is the best outcome for any art. It disappears into competence.

So when the camera stops looking we continue. The last image lingers the way a scent lingers in wood. It is not a metaphor. It is a fact of fibre and time. The light in that image will belong to no hour we can name but to several at once. The floor in that image will have accepted footprints and will forget them exactly as it should. We have been taught a way to enter a room and to leave it. We have been taught a way to love a thing without the ugliness of possession. We have been taught that to refuse destruction is not always to refuse change, that to keep a house sometimes means to allow it to become another kindness elsewhere. This is nothing less than a doctrine, and the film has smuggled it into us under the oldest disguise, the attention paid to a single hinge.

Mandala

Look, a shore where the land behaves like a proposition and the sea like its counterexample. Sand is scored by tyres and bare feet and a rake someone has used to tidy a patch no one owns. Concrete drifts inland the way a rumour becomes law. The film takes the measure of this border and keeps it, as if the argument between water and structure were the only honest court in which people might be judged. Young bodies arrive with the impatience of those who have decided that history can be replaced by an hour organised according to appetite. Older bodies arrive with plans disguised as warnings. A doctrine speaks through mouths that are learning to love their own sound. The air is bright and severe. The world looks on and refuses to choose sides.

Architecture remains the first character. Drains, culverts, bridge supports, temple lintels, the waist of a road as it squeezes between warehouse and sea wall. The lens crouches and then widens until the human figure is obliged to confess its scale. Faces gain a decision when set beneath poured stone. Flesh turns provisional when framed against sky. Rooms have been designed by people who believed in order, even if the order was only a wish. That wish still holds a climate and the film keeps faith with climates. When a laugh arrives the wall does not laugh, yet the wall remains present in the laugh as a correction.

A group forms according to the rule by which all groups pretend they have not been formed. Someone proposes a different life. Another proposes that the proposal requires a map. A third suspects that the map can be made from rituals that declare their innocence by being ancient and their novelty by being photographed. The leader does not lead from above. He directs from the middle where a person can touch and be touched, and can therefore persuade the minute to declare itself equal to a vision. He speaks of liberation with the voice of a man who has not yet learned the labour of care. He has memorised a catechism of refusal and would like refusal to be a profession.

Bodies are conscripted before minds are. The beach becomes a studio in which gestures are rehearsed until they resemble law. What begins as play becomes a rite when repetition gives it weight and the camera refuses wit. The sound of a wave gives permission. The whistle of a lorry on the road above gives permission. A gull writes a line across sky and that too is taken for permission. The film is mercilessly exact about this drift in which consent and spectacle learn each other’s grammar. The rite is not judged. It is timed. We are made to witness how quickly the word freedom becomes choreography and how eagerly choreography calls itself a revelation.

The city sends emissaries. A professor who believes that truth can be tender if correctly cited. A policeman who keeps his hat on even when hats are ridiculous. A functionary whose brief requires him to speak of land use as if the land were a blank surface awaiting ink. Their speech is careful. Their sentences understand that people now use words as fences and as doors both. They have brought rules and requests and warnings. They do not presume to be fathers. They presume to be neighbours who own a ledger. The group listens and thanks them for the opportunity to refuse. A plan to escape plans always requires a fortnight of meetings.

Two young women learn the taste of the project in their mouths. They are asked to be present as witnesses and as evidence and as guarantors that the new order will not resemble the old. The camera keeps their faces clear for longer than comfort permits. One practises loyalty because loyalty is a method for not being alone. The other practises inwardness because inwardness is the only possession that has not yet been taxed. The men around them are quiet for minutes at a time. Then words arrive with a swagger that confuses generosity with command. The film does not mock either posture. It keeps the minutes in which both are visible and refuses to sell us a verdict.

A temple offers its shade and its bell as if to test whether noise and devotion can continue their ancient duel. Pillars are kind even when people are not. The priest understands that ritual is a way of slowing time until appetite learns to listen. He does not advertise disagreement with the group by insults. He watches, and the watching exposes that the apprentices of refusal have mistaken speed for clarity. The bell speaks with a gravity that no person can borrow and so the group moves on to a concrete underpass where echoes are cheap.

A camera at sand level shows how anatomy turns into geometry when the horizon is honest. The same camera raised to the height of a footbridge shows how geometry returns to the petty crisis of faces. This adjustment of sight teaches the only doctrine the film will endorse. Scale is a morality. To refuse scale is to court cruelty, whether by optimism or by despair. The leader is dangerous not because he is wicked, but because he is tone deaf to distance. He wants the beach to be a room and the room to be a world and the world to be a version of his own lungs. He baptises others in his breath. It feels like deliverance until oxygen runs short.

A family elsewhere in the city practises the older ritual of dinner. Bowls, a low table, the quiet of a father who has discovered that advice is cheaper than rice and is therefore not to be given without need. The son who visits brings the smell of salt and smoke and the brag that comes from sleeping in daylight. He says words that have learned to distrust furniture. He does not sit well. He does not lift a bowl correctly. The mother corrects and forgives. The father observes the humiliations by which a house protects its own peace and recognises in the son’s zeal a hunger for authority that calls itself revolt because it has not yet earned the right to speak softly.

The film moves again to a meeting filed under the name instruction. A blackboard and chalk, a series of names that must be renounced, a series of desires that must be purified by attention. Those who listen are asked to learn a posture that looks like courage and is in fact the slowness all real courage demands. Those who lead cannot bear slowness. They lurch toward epiphany and require witnesses to certify it. The camera is loyal to the people who are bored. Boredom is the first defence against charismatics.

At night the beach begins its other work. The group arranges pairs as if the sea had invented the idea of community. A bonfire stages intimacy as a public event. The camera refuses to blink. The bodies are neither punished nor protected by the frame. The faces learn a new grammar in which looking and being looked at are the same verb. The film does not rescue anyone with music. It leaves the small sounds to keep their size. Breath, the shift of sand under a knee, the dry crackle of driftwood. Speech shrinks until it reveals the machinery behind it. Names are asked for. Ownership of names becomes the last contract the new order cannot decide how to honour.

A teacher of another kind appears and speaks about land as if land were a poem that could survive a poor reading. He talks of custom and of loss and of the courtesy by which farms and villages learned to be citizens of one another. The young respond with the cleanliness of abstract pity. They would prefer tragedy to be an operation rather than a weather. The teacher sees that their appetite for speed will ruin what they claim to love, and he sees also that the ruin may be necessary so that new hands can learn how to handle slowness without arrogance. He declines to be offended. He declines to bless.

The cult of refusal needs an enemy and when the city refuses to be sufficiently wicked it invents one. Police become a symbol rather than officers, fathers become a category rather than men, priests become a code rather than people who sweep floors before they preach. Symbols are easily beaten because they cannot bleed. The film will not let us forget that bodies are present. When a baton descends it enters a frame that has given us time to learn the names of the bones under the skin. This knowledge does not produce emotion. It produces an obligation to continue looking.

At intervals the narrative loosens its ties and wanders. The wandering is not an escape. It is the truth claiming a right to be seen between episodes of command. A truck reverses into the wrong road and must be guided by voices that quarrel. A fisherman mends a net by repeating a gesture taught by his father without lecture. A woman on a bus counts stops by the colour of light in side streets. None of these acts are commentary. They are the life that will outlive manifestos and headlines. The film is careful with such minutes. It is the kind of care that refuses admiration.

Inside the group the rhetoric of purity turns into accounting. Who has failed to show up to the morning swim. Who has slept where the rules forbade. Who has heard the voice of fear and pretended it was the voice of freedom. Lists are kept. The person keeping the list begins to enjoy the rhythm of erasure. The leader discovers that to expel is to taste the authority of the old world in a form he can claim as his own. The expelled discover that exile from an island built yesterday is a humiliation sharper than any the city can deliver. The film puts both tastes on the tongue and does not ask us which is bitterer.

Bodies tire. Even zeal breathes less convincingly by the third day. The shore remembers this and lowers its voice. A long take lets the sky become visible in the water that has failed to receive it all. A figure walks from frame to frame with no plan except to keep balance. The new order is no longer new. It is only a place where fatigue is named as a rite so that shame can be postponed. The camera begins to leave people earlier than it did before, as if it has learned that privacy is necessary even for those who refuse the idea.

A scene in a tunnel presses the film toward declaration. Lamps are regular and indifferent. The procession has to choose whether to keep to the right or to refuse all sides in the name of a freedom that hates lanes. The choice looks small. It is decisive. They choose the middle and discover that the world is built to punish the middle more neatly than either side. A driver lowers a window and speaks without anger because anger is expensive this late at night. The leader answers with a tone that belongs to boys who have successfully borrowed menace. The tunnel announces that speech echoes and eats itself.

Elsewhere an old house waits for what all old houses wait for. A caretaker in blue overalls knows each hinge by sound. He records the newest worm path in a beam with a pencil because knowledge in a building wants a pencil more than it wants a theory. Two of the group spend a night here to prove that sanctity can be seized by posture. The caretaker allows them to perform. In the morning he cleans the room in the order the carpenters required. The film lets the broom possess more authority than the manifesto.

A love begins because love is the name we give to a decision to remain when leaving is cheaper. It is not the love advertised by the group nor the love defended by the city as its jewel. It is smaller and therefore dangerous. The pair refuse to tell the leader because leaders, old or new, always reduce private justice to public currency. The camera stays close without participating. It prevents us from converting their minutes into an argument we might later use. The shore receives them and does not present itself as witness.

The city replies with its only honest voice. Paper. A notice. A summons. A plan. The destructiveness of such things is measured by the neatness with which they lie on a table. The group answers by tearing and burning and shouting the names of those who first invented paper. The film stands between. It keeps the sound of tearing and the sound of a stamp and the sound of a hand on a tabletop in one register so that hierarchy cannot assemble itself on our behalf.

Violence arrives in confusion, accident, pride that chooses not to step aside when stepping aside would be correct, a hand that thinks it is a sentence. The shoreline that has invited so many rehearsals accepts the rehearsal that refuses to declare itself a rehearsal. The camera does not flinch. A body falls according to the old physics and the old ethics. The group does not know whether to claim the death as martyrdom or to hide it as error. The city does not know whether to prosecute or to forget. The film decides to remember without selecting a category. It is the hardest form of memory because it produces no advantage.

After this, speech is more careful. Even the leader learns to keep a few syllables back. Meetings are shorter because stamina is a measure of belief and belief is low when the sea is flat. The women speak to each other without the sarcasm they had practiced as a shield. They take an inventory of what has been damaged inside that cannot be repaired by any doctrine and which therefore will not be asked about. The camera gives them shadow within which sentences can end without needing to be replaced by better sentences.

A retreat to the hills is organised. Trees are asked to certify that the group is still strong. The path is steep. The view is wide. A waterfall demonstrates how to behave with force and with courtesy both. A prayer is attempted by people who have not learned how to be silent together. The priest who led the earlier rite at the temple could teach them, but he is not invited. Ritual invented yesterday always imagines itself superior to the past. The film is generous enough to grant them a minute of almost stillness. The next minute is less kind.

The city now appears as weather in its own right. An expressway murmurs the language of money. Signs promise access and then deliver queues. Hotels are the new monasteries. An office installs filing cabinets like ribs in a chest and calls the sound of drawers opening the lifeblood of the age. The leader enters such rooms with the confidence of a man who has finally met an equal. He mistakes bureaucracy for a parent and performs rebellion as a way of being loved. The clerk makes tea. The clerk is the only adult.

A refusal hardens into theatre. Masks are painted and pressed onto skin that had hoped for air. The film knows that theatre can be a friend to truth when truth is timid, and an enemy when courage is abundant. It lets the show play and keeps the audience in the frame so that we can count the blink that proves boredom has returned. The drummer repeats a rhythm that was old when the first spear was sharpened on the first rock. The sea repeats its rhythm. The two do not resolve.What remains are small acts that never learn to call themselves ideology. Someone learns how to anchor a tent against a wind shift. Someone learns the merit of washing a bowl as soon as it is empty. Someone returns a book to a shelf in the house he has not visited since he declared houses corrupt. Someone wraps a wound with a cloth that will be expensive to replace and does not announce the cost. The film keeps these small acts where we can see them and then looks away so that we cannot steal them for our arguments.The project contracts. Those who came for warmth early and profit later depart first. Those who came for punishment remain. The leader is left with the kind of loyalty that cannot help him, the loyalty that prefers defeat to compromise and confession to repair. He speaks to the last few as if they were a thousand. They listen as if listening were a cure. The camera counts the bodies and refuses to pretend. The beach has space for all and desire for none.

The two women choose different exiles. One returns to a street where routine will not ask her to narrate herself each day. Her steps rediscover the value of being unremarked. She learns again the timetable by which light moves across a familiar room. The other walks further and finds a job that treats hands as hands and not as declarations. She does not forgive and she does not enlist in revenge. She continues. The film is careful to make this continuation visible. It resists the melodrama by which continuation is made to look like defeat.

A last confrontation with the priest would be tidy. The film offers instead a glance, a greeting, the exchange of news about weather and fish prices. Their words do not circle back to doctrine. They remain small and therefore honest. The priest is still sweeping. His broom makes the same sound. He speaks a blessing almost under his breath and almost to the broom. The leader pretends not to hear because hearing would require him to reconsider the scale of his life. He leaves and the camera does not follow. It attends to the sweep that continues without him.

Night chooses to explain nothing. A car’s headlights trace walls already seen in daylight. A window is open in a house where a television helps strangers forget their names. The sea is an erased chalk line. The cult is an erased chalk line. The city is a ledger that does not care what has been erased so long as the total aligns. The film sits in this balance until the balance loses interest in us. It is an unusual kindness.

The film keeps faith with the trilogy that surrounds it without repeating a sermon. One work measured the household as a place where desire meets structure and learns humility or disaster. Another honoured maintenance as a vocation that outlives all programmes. Here the same gaze asks what occurs when structure is despised and maintenance postponed in the name of a purity that mistakes speed for light. The answer is not punishment. The answer is nothing. Nothing happens to the world. It stays and we leave. The wave that closes our footprints closes the footprints of those who came before with the same handwriting.

Two women proved that the smallest continuations outlast grand collapses. And the camera kept the time of these things until time itself accepted us as company.

There is a final image that refuses to be final. It is a rectangle of water seen between concrete and rail. The surface holds the sky badly and then improves. A gust writes and erases. A gull arrives and leaves. The frame remains available to anyone who will keep it. The film ends because films end. The minute continues because minutes do not care what we name them. We carry a broom in our eye and a bell in our ear and a small suspicion of men who say today will abolish yesterday. The suspicion is a courtesy. The courtesy is the only revolution that continues to work.