Ari Aster
Midsommar

3 PM
I'm heading down to the lake to wash my clothes and my skin from that annoying epidermal-muscular urge I feel: to hit the director of Midsommar really hard. I know well that we should stay indoors, yet I am driven by a higher urge these days when the sky threatens thunder and the air draws its cold strings on our wrists. Instead of dissolving into a storm, the clouds seem to compact into a huge black platform that floats suspended above us; a gigantic industrial slab, like a clod floating on the sea but flipped in the vaporous gas mixture that towers above us and gives us breath.

4 PM
The wind is a roaring engine.

4:30 PM
I've just parked the car, I'm descending the uncertain path that cuts through the forest, it's cold and time feels like a noose, but I know well what my mission is.

6 PM
I immerse myself in the mellifluous and cold limbs of the lake waters. I become part of the all-encompassing whole that nature composes at every moment from its entropy; I enter the bucolic eternity that lives in every blink, in every flick of a tail, in every leaf that surrenders to the ground. Am I perhaps wrong to consider myself part of the folkloric tale that turns the wheel of our living, our togetherness? All I can tell you is that I see harpies crying and pine needles raining down, my amniotic visions materializing. I join in nature's lament, rhythmically, until my moans overlap with those of the creature I hold within, itself in cardiac harmony with the creature inside itself, and so on, even in centrifugal thrust, in emotional connection with the wide and circular embrace of grass, particles, and sensations that traverse and surround us every day in this enormous choral dance that is the art of walking and breathing the Earth.

9 PM
The twilight blue becomes fizzy, sizzling in the deep darkness of the night.