The way they touched: in memorium Ingmar Bergman

We…as men, as boys…loved your faces, yearned to touch your skins, ruffle your hair and we looked at you long, with our sight, with our eyes. We…as men, as boys…loved your voice, yearned to feel your sounds and we heard you long, with our minds, with our brains, heard your ‘oui’s, heard your ‘nay’s, heard your ’sorry’s, your ‘love you’s and ‘thank you’s, the way we liked them to be. We heard your meanings, not your music, we saw your skin, not those ripples of feelings fleeting away; we matched your words and your looks with our lexicon, and it was just obvious, we seldom understood what you mean or what you are be-ing.

Probably the reason why we all got a high when you meant nothing, you moaned and groaned, as bodies that we own. As boys, as men…we freezed you in frames. Canvases and plates, brush-strokes and light-rays: we loved your sights, we loved your sounds. We bought your faces, we displayed you to friends, they said: your woman is looking beautiful tonight as she was today, we bowed it’s my pleasure, proud that you’re mine, we were in a high.

But touching your skins, the skins of your face, were we able to mean, able to express? So cliched it was, the places to touch, each time the same and you expected none to change the game; as boys, as men…your landscapes were just those few tourist-spots, which in photos were displayed, which the prints described and brochures prescribed: a moonlit land were limited to those erogenous zones where neons glowed, where high billboards…

Then we wondered long: how to understand you, through your words or your faces? Through which do you mean, through which do you express? And we forgot the touch, as we longed for the grapple or for the grove; we forgot what it was: the language of touch…

And then we saw you girls and all you women, knew how to touch your faces, how the touch expresses tenderness and care. How a girl quivers when a girl strokes her face, when she holds her hands. And we have forgot that faces like to be touched, hands like to be held, voices are music, feelings precede meanings. You women remembered and did not teach us men what the mother did to me, how did she expressed before language that love is the glee of a touch in the skin. Bamboozled, bemused…women in love…became numbers to us, doubling the bill, doubling the skins. And we disavowed that you two can do what we desired to be, but never achieved: the language of touch, voices without meanings, words of feelings… And we were left just to stare, recalling the lost: the language of touch, of which no manuals exist, its beyond linguists.

Left in the lurch, we touch your images: the here and the gone, the now and the none…

All images from films authored by Ingmar Berman (1918 July 14 – 2007 July 30)

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