Say you'll mercy your corroborative pluck
at least one of the filmscripts for
PYROBIBLIOS
"Every burned book enlightens the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch
Menschen."
Heinrich Heine
SCENE 1; OUTSIDE - DESERT; LATE IN THE AFTERNOON:
A book burning in the bowels of a shrine was an idea in the nomad's iron brainmind, but she became disaffected. There was too much fire in the flesh and glass to bring fire into the book just yet. There was good reasoned thought to pause, and the pile of books grew during the hiatus. A pile of books with pages blowing in a wind sand storm. it is a huge fire book, one of its names is Lotus in a Sea of Fire, or Lost Us in Ease of a Hot Pride of Lions. A kid-face watches curiously at it between legs of camel... the camel turns it head & pushes the kid. the kid take the big bowl with water & give it to drink... hide him again between the camel legs...Had Gadya. a paper piece land in the bowl on the water... it can be read on it PANTA RHEI... in the sound of the storm it can be heard a kind of demi-screams of quasi-victory... It was the handing of the superlative and/or idea from one fragile breakage to the next, and the first gives it an ambivalent blessing...The idea, the books on fire, dissolve with the outbreath and join the world of beauty and suffering that we call the Land of Hello. Meanwhile, not far from the desert, the ocean sighs loudly in its happy sleep. the scent of roasting eggplant and cumin rises from the caravan outpost. The camel nods sagely to the kid as they prepare for their last feast before the day of atonement. And they are going to hire a real goat to serve them, a miniature, to carry to them the silver platters balanced on its tiny horns.
SCENE 2; INSIDE - OLD & VERY OFFICIAL BUILDING; MORNING:
The camera pans down a very long narrow but decorative corridor. The walls are stone & oozing moisture. Tasted in a certain way, this moisture is a powerful nectar; tasted another way, it is a powerful toxin, but with a fruity bouquet. Somewhere in the middle distance, a small yellow light is waving in the wind pointing out evil, disguised as honorary members of the senate. And, do you know, just like that, in front of a whole nation of viewers, he lifted his shirt and showed everyone his operation scar? It looked just like the map of the country he had given orders to destroy. Then, he had the nerve to say: "This nation is flourishing." He insists he is the innocent victim, although, fair to say, all of his concerts have been cancelled. He masks his paranoia with optimism that everyone sees through, since it involves overt destruction. Yet, with it all, he simply wishes to secure his rightful lonely hero's place in the history of rock. The hard-rock of ages. He thought he was a rock star, but he was only a politician with his finger on the button. The honorable clock, however new and devastatingly blatant, this once seemed marches on.
Time and time again, tide wait for no man iffen unless he is an island, entire into Omself, operation scar or no operation scar. The cat was hiding in the computer bag and saw the whole thing –the lies, the misled people ... the stoning of the pregnant woman, but the cat could only communicate in whimpers, grunting meows and yowls. the oozing walls, of course, also know the whole story, but they can't communicate at all, except in the nature of their excrescence which, as mentioned above, is toxic to some and salvific to others.
SCENE 3; OUTSIDE - ON THE TOP OF THE HILL; AFTERNOON:
A man, slightly bent, but still a fine upstanding citizen on a cliff far away in the picture. His mouth is open but no words are coming out. Only strange and beautiful sounds: the screech of chalk against a blackboard jungle. One by one he ignites books of his friends & tosses them over a very high & sheer cliff. This gesture represents his love & dedication to the writings of his friends. But nobody can change what they created all those years ago. He grinned his boyish grin, salaciously. And winked. At nothing at all. he was sufficient unto himself, the angels and all within and certainly without a doubt. He knew how to fake it. And took the idea to fruition, on his way back from Patagonia, because the others weren't ready, although the invitations did say: come as you are, at eight. His pronouns were showing, though, and so there was some discussion about his being allowed to enter the jungle of burning books that he himself had helped to set in carnage motion. The jury's still out carousing: be careful you don't douse yourselves with flammable brandy and become burning books yourselves! Eh, Isabella, un flambeau an' all!
Each person is a burning book.
SCENE 4; OUTSIDE - ON THE RIVER; EVENING:
At the bottom of the cliff, on the Bad Axe River, in a very quiet & wild & so peaceful river place, a man & a woman try to paddle the wrecked canoe to which they clung so virtuously, as they rode out the singular symbolic (sounds like, rhymes with) between few highly polished semi-precious stones... the river is quite agitated, in a calm and virtually serene sort of way... the woman sees a book fixed into two rocks... she pick up... it is a very old book... with no title & too wet to be opened & to read it... "you have to wait until the book will be dry" said the man... " ahh i'm so curious ...but neither yellow, nor blue. what kind of book it can be?" the woman said...It must be made of rayon, or spandex. A Wash & Wear book. I wore that book to my wedding, when I married the hereafter and the therebefore. Hard to set on fire, because already a lantern burning within the sodden book...paradoxical, but nonetheless perfectly obvious to close readers and practitioners alike. The challenge of reading a burning book is the challenge embedded in "I AM THAT I AM, AM I NOT?" Idea-thefts entail holy compensation, to be paid in food and wine: bread and figs, grilled trout, fresh chard, cool flames of curly endive, and the sweetest and driest of ruby reds, all to be fed to each other with bare hands and juicy fingers. They broke their fast with rejoicery and erotic table manners of the most elegant nature. The burning book became the hermit's beacon, a wisdom plow on the glassy surface of natural pages. The ashy pages were like dried roses, crumbling and blowing away, aromatic, a diaspora of wisdom tracery. By the peaceful shoreline hung rugosa rosehips, goldenrod and wild concord grapes hidden under the wide vineleaves, the leaves of books concealing the nectar of passion and the fire of intelligence. There was no ripple on the river's face, but somehow a breeze made the flora-riot nod, signaling a hidden inner sizzle.
references:
Li Ssu was minister or puppeteer to the first Ch'in (Pinyin: Qin) dynasty monarch in the 220s BC and had a reputation for ruthlessness in his support of "Legalism" against softer-hearted Confucian traditions. This report of a memorial he wrote to his king comes from a little over a hundred years later, in the Shih chi or Records of the Grand Historian of China:
"Your servant suggests that all books in the imperial archives, save the memoirs of Ch'in, be burned. All persons in the empire, except members of the Academy of Learned Scholars, in possession of the Book of Odes, the Book of History, and discourses of the hundred philosophers should take them to the local governors and have them indiscriminately burned. Those who dare to talk to each other about the Book of Odes and the Book of History should be executed and their bodies exposed in the market place. Anyone referring to the past to criticize the present should, together with all members of his family, be put to death. Officials who fail to report cases that have come under their attention are equally guilty. After thirty days from the time of issuing the decree, those who have not destroyed their books are to be branded and sent to build the Great Wall. Books not to be destroyed will be those on medicine and pharmacy, divination by the tortoise and the milfoil, and agricultre and arboriculture. People wishing to pursue learning should take the officials as their teachers."
BIBLIOCIDE
The largest single act of book burning in modern history took place in 1992 when, on August 25, Serb nationalist forces began a three-day incendiary assault on the National and University Library of Bosnia. Despite sniper fire, the people of Sarajevo risked their lives to form a human chain and pass books from the flames. "We managed to save just a few very special books. Everything else burnt down," one citizen reported. "And a lot of our heritage, our national heritage, lay down there in ashes." Nearly 1.5 million books-including 155,000 rare books and manuscripts-the state archives, and all the Bosnian periodical literature published since the mid-1800s were lost.
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/issues/nd96/right.biblio.html
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