Luis Bunuel
L'angelo sterminatore

Today it poured rain. If someone had asked us about the air temperature, we could only reply like this: indefinable. It's the worst weather for us city kids. I mean, while you’re sketching one of those linear thoughts that outline the straight line of the day, while you’re reorganizing into schemes the scraps of the universe that you diligently gather on the street, in short, while you're thinking something you’re forced to stop because the air in front of you suddenly gets wet and becomes a slightly slanted wall. It's not true that thought is immaterial; on the contrary, it has its own density, or if we will, a certain coefficient of penetration. And this weather doesn't favor that calmness of mind that many usually call happiness.

A thin drizzle was falling when I decided to take shelter in that atrium. I wanted to wait for it to stop, that's why I stopped. Or maybe I wanted to see the sky fall. The downpour caught me suddenly and angrily, sealing me in that room of bars and bricks, who knows for how long.

Anyone who has taken the trouble to watch "The Exterminating Angel" by Luis Bunuel knows well how the rain, excited by the wind, can be an impenetrable wall. Slanted, perhaps, but still impenetrable. Thought passes through mountains and valleys, glides over the calmest seas, but through the rain, it falls with it.

Bunuel: cinema as confinement. I wonder if anyone has ever written an essay on that. Or I wonder if it’s just my obsession. Goodness, the end of "Un Chien Andalou"..

I had strange thoughts in that dripping lead cage. I thought that bells are monotonous and monotone cages of solid lead that imprison the soul that dangles, and there’s little to celebrate. I watched the great global brain of my generation close itself in a cushioned brothel and confuse morphine with joy. I saw it, merrily, surgically uproot its very own freedom in the name of the Good way of living. I recalled those moving chains of neurons that would like to create new sparks, if only a little more than ephemeral, but the verb to want doesn't conjugate well in the conditional tense. I was staggered by the thought that millions of lives unfold on the threshold, maybe even mine. I fervently believed, for a moment, that love equals death, and it's the only way to survive the tragedy.

And I deemed it appropriate to rewatch "The Exterminating Angel" by Luis Bunuel (1962), and review it. However, I was careful not to judge it, I’m not sure why.

2:17 in the night, still downpours, at this point evidently mocking. This day is an eternity and I don't think I can bear it any longer. I’d better leave this page. But thinking about it, why rush, I will leave last, after you.