Rohmer and I

Another peripheral fixture of my life gone.
Eric Rohmer.

I didn't even know it, until today, when I visited one of my - our - favourite film sites (no, not IMDB - not even in the same neighbourhood as pitiful IMDB) and saw a blog entry about his passing, on the 11th of January.

It's funny, my relationship with Rohmer...
I seldom "agreed" with him - nor was I expected to - and he infuriated me much too often for comfort.
And yet, he won me over every time.
Long before I learnt anything substantial about him as a person I already felt towards him the sort of warm - non-reverential but profound - respect and genuine fondness one would feel towards a village philosopher that had been something of a rake in his younger days.
(N.B. Rohmer was neither, as far as I know, and this observation tells more about me than about him - of course.)
Or, much more accurately, the kind of friendly respect and fondness that I feel towards an impossibly intelligent and educated Jesuit priest of my acquaintance, who knows more about Life and humanity than most rakes could ever hope to.

But there is more.

I suspect that much of the fuzzy pleasure (seemingly incongruous with his verbosely intellectual contemplation of life) that I always felt while watching Rohmer's films - and even before I watched them, simply anticipating them - is the reflected glow of a summer long ago, when I was only beginning to live life as I thought it should be lived. (I was wrong, BTW.)

Eric Rohmer's films - a retrospective - happened to be there as a backdrop.
Not "luscious" - just close enough to life, to my life, to lend it, my own life, the sort of cinematic quality that was the reflection of my own gaze.

I bet you have no idea what I am babbling about...
I do, if that's of any consolation. But when people and situations on which I relied to derive comfort from disappear - black out - from my life, I feel forlorn and I cannot write well.
I am not sure I even want to write "well". I am not sure I even know what to write.
I only know I have to put it in writing:

Eric Rohmer was a part of my life - a very inconspicuous but constant one - and now he is gone.

And I am still here.

Where am I?

The landscape around me has changed so much I can't recognise it anymore.
I don't want to recognise it anymore.

But I know - and Rohmer would probably disagree with me, violently! - there is, there must be, a silent secret soft spot in this landscape, among all these seemingly static forms and long-trodden paths, where a light unseen can penetrate the world and reveal it for the mirage it is.
And then, I can take the other road.
Exchange one mirage for another.

Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur Rohmer.
This wasn't supposed to be about me.
But of course, as always - it is.

Don't know what this is?