But what was written on the note that Linnea found in her trouser pocket after Göran had left? Strangely enough, not a fitting quote from some ancient Greek poem, but a poem by the American writer Richard Brautigan, which we will not include in order to avoid permission issues (but which can otherwise be found in the not-so-critically-acclaimed [yet beautiful] collection June 30th, June 30th, about Brautigan’s lonely trip to Japan), where he, in this poem we won’t quote in its entirety, compares dreams to wind: “Dreams are like the [the] / wind. They blow by.”
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The obvious reason for Göran giving her this poem is that he wanted to say that they were like the dreams, which blow by, like the breezes and wind. Like air in movement. And it wasn’t until much later that Linnea discovered that the strange thing about this poem, namely the double “the [the] wind,” could in one sense also mean hands in the air, because “te” is the Japanese word for hand, hands, and if you think, as Linnea did, that h is the human sound that most closely resembles air in movement (try saying hhhhhhhhhhhh), and then add the sound h to the word “te,” you get the English word “the,” here used to make “wind” definite. Thus, thought Linnea, the two words “hands” and “wind” met and became one word: “the.” Linnea had to hold the note to her bosom when she discovered this, because that was what was so terrible and so lovely: that they were like hands of air reaching out to each other, but unable to get a hold. And that was what made their meeting so beautiful, the air hands reaching out from their bodies, that when they stood next to each other, there were air hands touching the other, air hands stroking the other’s hair, air hands around the other as they walked side by side, and when they parted: that they were air hands reaching out to each other.
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And that feeling was what Linnea wanted to capture in her film!