The guests drifted like somnabulists from the court where the stage was, and mingled with the histrionic statues that lined the room. I imagine them as if they were captured on a still photograph, people, statues, palmate trees, silent, still. They stand statuesque, motionless with a vacant gaze among the emptily chatting guests and the theatrical decorations. Then in a moment the scene is different. In an opulent hotel with vast gardens, guests gossip languidly about a scandal. Last year in Marienbad the weather was impossibly cold, icy. They had an affair. Was it then? She cannot remember. He wants to convince her that last year, perhaps in Marienbad, they had met, become lovers, and even planned to leave together.

Walls, corridors, doors. Always walls, always corridors, always doors. And, having passed through, still more corridors. I was walking desolate corridors between these walls covered with rococo carvings, fine art in elaborate frames, expensive curtains draped over carved rails. On the walls were framed prints of the immense formal park outside with its exceedingly regular late seventeenth century French formal layout. All the paintings in the hotel were of the resort itself and its gardens. I never heard anyone raise a voice in this hotel. No one. The conversations developed in a void, as if the sentences meant nothing, were intended to mean nothing, in any case. And a sentence, once begun, suddenly remained in suspension, as though frozen by the frost, starting over afterwards, no doubt, at the same point, or somewhere else. It did not matter. The same conversations always recurred, the same absent, low, monotonous voices. Everywhere there were signs, Silence! Quiet! The servants were mute. The games were played in silence. And when you joined in their conversations, you spoke with a vivacity that seemed out of place. Here, exuberance, especially in a woman, seems subversive. Its characters dress as though they are from the early thirties, and comport themselves with the demure etiquette of an epoch long gone. The weather was cool that year. The rooms seemed icy cold. A drama was being performed at the hotel as entertainment. Its plot was a love triangle presented in a stilted and melodramatic style. The stage actors were posturing rather than acting like ordinary people.

Inner experience. like emerging and disappearing memories, is subjective. We experience what is in our minds. Can we truly remember anything? I can never properly remember the bedroom, or what you were wearing. The scent. Was it rose geranium? The flowers. Were they Madonna lilies? The details do not matter. It is what happened. What I wanted to happen. Behind us, the silhouette of the castle grew menacingly larger against the dark night sky as we fled. The grounds of this palace were a kind of park à la francaise without any trees or flowers, without any foliage. A conceptually simple design with no organic shapes, geometric, angular. Gravel, stone, marble and straight lines marked out rigid spaces, surfaces with little mystery by day. It seemed, at first glance, impossible to get lost here. Straight paths extend into the distance, between lines of fantastic statues with frozen gestures casting grotesque shadows from their granite slabs… on, along, across, down, intersection after intersection… you are lost. There had to be a way, a strategy to solve the endless enigma… Already lost yet the shadow of the house still envelopes you, lost forever, in a moonlit icily cold night, alone with me… until next year… in Marienbad. In a rendezvous together in the stone avenues of the park, we discussed the sculptures there in the garden, impassively, abstractedly, emotionlessly, almost as if we were sculptures too. You asked me, What is your name? It does not matter. We have known each other since last year. You ask, Where would we have met? You seem to pretend we have never met. But we have. It was Frederiksbad. I have never been there, you protest. Well, then it was somewhere else. It was Karlstadt. No? It was Marienbad. No? You giggle. It was Baden-Salsa. No! Then is was here, in this salon.

What keeps the world working smoothly? What regulates the cosmic clockwork? Is the cosmos really so smooth, or is it all an illusion? Do we fail if our duty is to keep it so? Questions, always questions and problems surge through my mind. The answers will come. Odd… Can I explain? … the labyrinthine palace, a luxury hotel for those with endless time on their hands, a country paradise for its elegant clientele. Its baroque palatial design was geometric, perpetually orthogonal, though punctuated with classical looking pictures and statues, and decorated with elaborate ornamentation. I should have known… this trompe l’oeil style… A world where memory has begun to disappear. Let’s get one thing straight, memory is like myth, and myth is the basis of ritual. We ritualize things, and must then do them continually. Myth is like thoughts, it stands for what is continuous. Good and evil are always in conflict. Michael did not fight the dragon, he is always fighting it. Unceasingly. Myth tells us why, but represents actions that never cease. Dare we let them cease? If they were to cease, would life then cease too? Perhaps our habits are necessary. The wolf habitually howls to its god, the moon. Must he do it? But let us get one thing straight, here, questions have no meaning?