I'm reading "Herzog on Herzog"

While waiting for my flight I just kind of opened up the book and noticed this toward the back:

The Minnesota Declaration

Truth and fact in documentary cinema

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

by Werner Herzog

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. he resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. 'For me,' he says, 'there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.' Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows on ly stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: 'You can't legislate stupidity.'

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walder Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 30, 1999)

a glance behind

One year ago I had just received 30,000 baht for teaching four overcrowded classrooms and two less-crowded ones, and was nearly on my way out to visit other wonders of Thailand. At that time I think the only thing I was afraid of was my neighbor and fellow teacher, Mike, the one who looked like a week and a half old cadaver despite his being only a few years older than myself and who was constantly having fairly intense arguments with his own self. There was no doubt in my mind that he could try to kill me one night and send me to heaven. And just to be honest, I was also a little afraid of Greg even though all he ever did was talk incessantly about loving the apostle Paul, earthquakes, pot, and his search for love online, the latter being the result of his unsatisfaction with his pregnant girlfriend, whom he left just as teaching finished up. So that was the sum of my fears a year ago - two strange men I interacted with as little as possible and will hopefully never see again. The fact that I didn't have tons of money and very limited language skills didn't seem to bother me considering the fact that I had extensive plans to get rid of the money and put my self in situations of even greater linguistic diversity. I had the Unknown right where I wanted him. Sometimes he won sometimes I won, and it all turned out nice enough.

This year I'm off again. Tomorrow I head out to Italy for a month to be with someone that I don't want to be without, and the adventures seem ever more challenging and intriguing. This time around I have to like pretty much everyone I meet. While meeting people is easy, liking them all and wanting to spent time with them often creates some challenges. The language barriers that were ever present last year will no longer be around, and the lack of people to rely on in time of need will no longer be a factor this trip, but still the presence of the Unknown comes seeping into my dry skin like an unwanted but, oh, so effective lotion. I imagine that, much like last year, sometimes I'll win and sometimes he'll win - either way, it should be interesting.