After All This Time, We Should Be Used to the Fact That All Images, Real and Imagined, Circulate

The same vortex carries them through the centuries, knotted many times more intricately than the Möbius strip of a school lesson. Trotting after images, we constantly find ourselves on the other side, somewhere other than where we wanted to be. Sometimes this circulation becomes as effective and efficient as a bone mill; at other times it turns so slowly that we cease to notice the change. We do so with relief, because aimless spinning spoils the spirited tale of well-directed progress accelerating along a straight line.  

Every few revolutions, a sequence of images appears that reminds us directly where our strenuous progressive labour is leading. We look at it as though it were a fairy tale. We rejoice at recognising the same little animals. We stand on our heads, prick up our ears and kick out, anything to avoid noticing the heart of the matter, which determines the course of events like an axis.

It is worth deciding for oneself from which circle the episodes filmed by Jerzy Skolimowski originate.

‘Do not sigh—even as you look upon this 

multitude of fields, forests, seas and rivers 

dividing us, and those crowds 

(whom you do not see) of human zeros, 

with you at their head. 

Does the heart of it lie in your pride, 

or in my blindness?’ 

Joseph Brodsky, Song Without Words, Polish translation by Katarzyna Krzyżewska

Graphic: a woodcut from Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff, 1494. The rest is supposedly drawn from life.