Feb. 11, 2003

A posting from Feb. 11, 2003. The time of entry is 9:06 p.m. The music is Respiration by Black Star.

Flipping through issue 52 of Colors -- The issue is devoted to a Rolando Trujillo, a 43 year old Chilean woodcutter who lives on an "an outlandishly cold and bitter island", 812km from Antartica. He lives alone with a few farm animals to keep him company. I'm flipping around more haphazardly now:

"When you dream of the color white,
he tells us later, it means black;
someone in your family will die"

"Once I dreamed that I put my hand on my heart,
I mean on my actual heart, under the skin and in my chest.
When I awoke, I was in the fields entirely naked. It
was -15 that night. I steadied myself, returned to my
hut and put some red wine on the stove. For the rest
of the night, I couldn't get rid of the
smell of my parent's home in Chile."

This magazine is fantastic. I'm looking closely at all the pictures in an effort to guage his loneliness.

"Shh...listen. if I keep still, I can hear
anyone who moves within 20km in this forest. sometimes
I hide if i hear anyone coming."

This quote is under a series of 24 cracker sized sequential images of him looking around. Here, I find the only picture of him smiling. he's missing three of his front teeth. flip, flip, then I read:

"He has not eaten fruit in 18 years"

"For 26 years he didn't see his mother."
Rolando Alfredo Trujillo Guerrero is a living embodiment of a sad korean drama. The only non-asian movie I've seen that could rival a korean drama in terms of sadness was Dancer in the Dark. Get me a korean director and some uppers. There's a story here that needs to be filmed.