The melted screen

“Po-lin, Silvers of Memory”, by Jolanta Dylewska

This documentary (Po-lin in Hebrew - “You will rest here”, “A place of safe refuge”, “Poland”) consists mostly of home movies taken during the 30s by American Jews visiting their home villages and towns in Poland. Something happened during its screening:

The melted screen

The screen has melted

the borders between the past and the now have disappeared

and the space have became one.

You wake up and for a while

do not know what’s more real:

the events in this very moment

or those that have been so real just seconds ago,

and are still lingering in your mind,

afterimages of the soul, hints of the real, keys to the mystery

disappearing with your every conscious blink,

every move, every breath.

Who are you?

the dreamer or the dreamed?

The remembered or the rememberer?

An image on the screen of your mind

or your mind that watches it?

Do you live now

or perhaps in a shtetl

somewhere in Poland of 1932

and have been catapulted into the future

by a wise rabbi

or some strange person with

an even stranger machine

(cinematograph it is called)

to skip the horrors,

to see that the healing

can be achieved after all,

that dead and living

can coexist in the present?

United and peaceful.

Afterwards you

(returned to the now or just visiting from the past)

find yourself sitting still,

enveloped in wonder.

Rested and safe?

In Po-lin?