Herzog Dreams
Transcript
Welcome to Dream Auguries. Tonight, we’ll spend some time in The Twilight World of filmmaker, Werner Herzog.
The Twilight World is the title of the novel Herzog wrote during the pandemic and published in June of this year.
In 1997, Herzog was in Japan, directing an opera.
He was asked by his hosts if he would like to meet with the Emperor.
To their shock, and his wife’s, he demurred. He said he had no idea what he might talk about with the Emperor.
Who would you like to meet? They asked.
The filmmaker answered: Hiroo Onoda.
Hiroo Onada was the soldier, famous for continuing to carry out orders to defend Lubang Island – for almost 30 years after the end of World War II. He had been officially declared dead in 1959.
Herzog’s hosts honored his request. And when he met the aging veteran, the director says they “straightaway struck up a relationship. We found much common ground in our conversations because I had worked under difficult conditions in the jungle myself and could ask him questions that no one else asked him.”
Having ventured into the jungle to film Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: Wrath of God, Werner Herzog felt a kinship with this soldier who had survived for decades, cut off from what we would call civilization.
His novel, The Twilight World, is about that world of the jungle – and of dreams. In this passage, Herzog channels Onoda as he is about to RE-encounter the world outside the jungle.
Close your eyes and you may hear images that open up your own dreams tonight. Or take you into the dense, wild places.
At this point, incidentally, a new phenomenon begins, a sort of constant, unobtrusive companionship, a natural dream sibling equipped with all the unquestioning certainty of dreams: a shapeless time of noctambulism, even though things carry on as before, immediate, palpable, ghastly, undeniable in their imperiousness – the jungle; the swamp; the leeches; the mosquitoes; the screams of the birds; thirst; the bumpy, itching skin. The dream has its own time frame, it races forward and back, it sticks, stops dead, holds its breath, jumps ahead like a frightened deer. A night bird shrieks and a year passes. A fat drop of water on the waxy leaf of a banana plant glistens briefly in the sun and another year is gone. A column of millions and millions of ants arrives overnight and marches through the trees with no beginning or end; the column marches for days and days and then on day is mysteriously and suddenly, gone, and that is another year. Then one single watch under withering enemy fire, and the night seems to go on forever and ever. Only the abrupt flares of tracer bullets while day refuses to break even though you look at your watch and see the hands moving and see the whole of the night sky wheeling around the North Star. Day will not and will not and will not arrive. Time outside their lives seems to have the quality of a spasm, even though it can’t shake the imperturbable universe. Onoda’s war is of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war. Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream, but Onoda’s war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.]
Werner Herzog The Twilight World, pp. 59-59
Dream Auguries is a weekly reflection series for insomniacs, lucid dreamers, oracles and soothsayers, magicians and conjurers of all kinds. It’s bonus content for the film, Dreaming Grand Avenue, written and directed by Hugh Schulze.
Our theme music was composed and performed by Tony Scott-Green with sound design by Sarah MacDonald.
Good night.