when dawn comes
After Blue (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2018)
What is it about the two that makes time feel no longer chaste? Christian theologians call the
time when God enters history, kairos. To live in kairotic time is to live always-already, as
if the Messiah has already come, and will continue to come. Time is no longer chronological,
immanent or revealed, but within and inside. To think of God as entering history then, is to think of a rupture: the eternal enters the historical, the divine enters the human.
What I mean by chaste is time simple, known, measurable. I spend my time chastely when time is not something I throw myself against, but the substance I wake up in. What will happen today? What will happen to me, or how will I happen to it?
What I mean by chaste is time simple, known, measurable. I spend my time chastely when time is not something I throw myself against, but the substance I wake up in. What will happen today? What will happen to me, or how will I happen to it?
Many years ago, the novelist Kenzaburō Ōe heard the voice of Hirohito on radio broadcast; it
was the first time people had heard the voice of their god. ‘The war is over,’ the voice was
saying, ‘Japan has been defeated—you must now endure your suffering and survive.’1
The people
were shocked. Who knew the emperor spoke in the voice of a man2? What did it mean in that
moment for speaker and listener to break divine silence; for the first words of god to usher
in surrender, acceptance, defeat?
That I will only know the shape of my life by its end can be terrifying or liberating: to know
my losses and my potentiality only at its close; that only then, life will no longer be time
stretched out, but what has remained. In Zoroastrianism, the daena is an angel that
accompanies you in life, the silent observer shaped by your good and your bad, shaped so
irrevocably that in the moment of death, you are met with the shape of your life. Only then,
will you find out if your daena has been ‘transfigured by the soul’s conduct into either a
more beautiful creature or a horrendous demon’3. This is my life’s work. What has remained of
my long-abandoned projects, the friends I no longer speak to, the conversations I forget? I discard old obsessions to inhabit new ones; I idealise, live through, break down. God speaks, my daena watches, and everything is renounced.
There is a photo of the Emperor Hirohito visiting Disneyland. In the photo, the Emperor wears a suit. Mickey Mouse is behind him. He is just a man, balding, elegant, but frail. In his lifetime, he has gone from god, to voice, to flesh. He has watched himself die.
There was a friend who found it disturbing to say goodnight to her husband after a day of talking: something awful in how simple it was to roll over, away from someone you love, fall silent, and fall asleep. Another avoided sleepovers as a child because he knew: come sleep-time, when talk would peter off, when everyone else would sink into their dreams and private worlds, only he would remain. Exile was more porous, more painful, in the presence of others; that his friends could trust the body unconscious, the body alone, but he could not.
The two, I think, were disturbed by the same thing. Language can suddenly fail to curb silence, just as language fails to curb time. Both are facts of loneliness.
Language both separates and tames. In speaking, I direct your attention with a sleight of hand, and if I am skilled enough, you will remain oblivious to what truly possesses my mind, but you and I will still feel close to me, close to some project that we call us.
All of life’s speech feels embarrassing at the point of death. This non-possession of language, this inability to simply cling on.
Death ironicises what language tries to make eternal.
To remain illegible to yourself or to someone else without knowing, to preserve something of your desire through language’s duplicity makes me wonder: what lies at the end of all this talking? What will happen when I say, finally, goodnight?
In the film, a woman tries to sleep.7 But something is burning. Time unfurls and catches flame,
she turns to lie on her side, her back, her eyes close, flutter, open again. She dreams of a
nation with rolling hills, blue skies, lakes. Is it past or future? Does the nation exist in history or in utopia? What exists now is her.
Rise and fall of body. Dog barking. Wind.
How will I spend this time that remains between time and its end,8 this time of now and soon, here, and elsewhere? That is what I imagine her thinking.
What the divine coming would bring has meant different things to different people. Would it signal the end of power, occupation, and death; a no longer divided self—one that replies to texts on time, unthinks mean thoughts, indulges no fantasy but the present—or no self at all? That language will get out of the way, or exist no more? God enters: but what happens to today, yesterday, tomorrow, what happens to later, or next week, or soon? My friend asks, what new products will the rapture bring? Not the end of history or capital after all, but newly improved financial propositions, only here, only now, EOFY!
In the film, the woman catches flame. Her bed is her funeral pyre; her sleep, her grave. She lies perfectly entombed, ready to be remembered. She lies exactly like how I do, half conscious, willing herself to surrender.
Cusk called insomnia the secret lawless world of night.9 It has felt, at times,
like a secret knowledge that no one wants knowledge into, a secret entry into time. Time is
both here and not, both too much and too little. I have lived for years in one night, lived
through the fall of civilisation, the Great Oxygenation Event, Pontius Pilate asking, ‘what
is truth?’ and the sun set and never rose again. Lawlessness prowls the mind, behind your eyes
, reason, temperance, day has left. All has abandoned you.
Sometimes watching film makes me feel like I’m dying. Like time is entering me and I am rotting, digging a grave out of my eyes. Why did I watch that? Why the slow cinema? I’m watching paint dry in slow motion, I’m witnessing time hurt me with strangers. Badiou called cinema the most impure artform,10 which is what makes it akin to philosophy, and perhaps it is this impurity that hurts, this feeling that I’ve forgotten something: sound, or image, or text.
When this feeling possesses me, I feel the need to speak, to stake a claim on life by speech , as if to say, I am here.
Sometimes though, I’ll let the film escape me, remain nothing, without category, outside of. These films will come to replace my dreams: in one, I tell my mother I will never forgive her for telling me the time—‘it is one promise I am willing to make,’ I say—in another, I am wading through hell.
Sometimes watching film makes me feel like I’m dying. Like time is entering me and I am rotting, digging a grave out of my eyes. Why did I watch that? Why the slow cinema? I’m watching paint dry in slow motion, I’m witnessing time hurt me with strangers. Badiou called cinema the most impure artform,10 which is what makes it akin to philosophy, and perhaps it is this impurity that hurts, this feeling that I’ve forgotten something: sound, or image, or text.
When this feeling possesses me, I feel the need to speak, to stake a claim on life by speech , as if to say, I am here.
- What do you think it means
- I liked
- I didn’t like
Sometimes though, I’ll let the film escape me, remain nothing, without category, outside of. These films will come to replace my dreams: in one, I tell my mother I will never forgive her for telling me the time—‘it is one promise I am willing to make,’ I say—in another, I am wading through hell.
The best cinema is inside us when we sleep, Apichatpong Weerasethakul said.11
Jean-Luc Nancy wrote, ‘By falling asleep, I fall inside myself. I myself become the abyss and
the plunge, the density of deep water and the descent of the drowned body sinking backward.’12
My friends were right to feel disturbed. To want to defend themselves against sleep’s gravity, to refuse their origin and their fate. We die every day in our private cinemas, we resurface, more animal; dazed, stumbling, strange. For if sleep is a kind of pleasure-death I fall into, insomnia is vigilant, puritanical life. Insomnia is clenched knuckles, hungry fist; punishing myself for the life I live, and the life I will never get to live, la dolce vita, insomnia is a reminder that I am alive, please, let me stay alive.
When I die, my father tells me, I’d like to imagine that instead of reading out a list of sins, God will sit down with me, that he will say, ‘I’m sorry I put you through that.’
It is a nice thought, but I am still afraid. It is not judgement I fear but the dependent clause: ‘when I die.’ ‘When I die’ opens up within it time before life ends and death begins, or when life begins and death ends. Please let me stay alive, or please, I don’t want to be alone, that the lesson of dying seems like a lesson in loneliness; sitting through, letting pass what I do not know, cannot know, what I cannot do with anyone but myself. I turn my back on the one I love, I fall silent, I fall asleep; this is what death demands of us. For my friend, the fear of death is that we will keep on living, that she will wake up after having died and that it will be the same thing again: this never-ending loop of passion then apathy, war then liberation, freedom then struggle. What next? Before he was hanged, Bonhoeffer said, ‘This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.’13 Before he was beheaded, Thomas More wrote, ‘I have not been a man of such holy living, as I might be bold to offer myself to death … Howbeit, if God draw me to it himself, then trust I in His great mercy’.14 Their projects in life were very different, but both believed in where they were going.
My friends were right to feel disturbed. To want to defend themselves against sleep’s gravity, to refuse their origin and their fate. We die every day in our private cinemas, we resurface, more animal; dazed, stumbling, strange. For if sleep is a kind of pleasure-death I fall into, insomnia is vigilant, puritanical life. Insomnia is clenched knuckles, hungry fist; punishing myself for the life I live, and the life I will never get to live, la dolce vita, insomnia is a reminder that I am alive, please, let me stay alive.
When I die, my father tells me, I’d like to imagine that instead of reading out a list of sins, God will sit down with me, that he will say, ‘I’m sorry I put you through that.’
It is a nice thought, but I am still afraid. It is not judgement I fear but the dependent clause: ‘when I die.’ ‘When I die’ opens up within it time before life ends and death begins, or when life begins and death ends. Please let me stay alive, or please, I don’t want to be alone, that the lesson of dying seems like a lesson in loneliness; sitting through, letting pass what I do not know, cannot know, what I cannot do with anyone but myself. I turn my back on the one I love, I fall silent, I fall asleep; this is what death demands of us. For my friend, the fear of death is that we will keep on living, that she will wake up after having died and that it will be the same thing again: this never-ending loop of passion then apathy, war then liberation, freedom then struggle. What next? Before he was hanged, Bonhoeffer said, ‘This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.’13 Before he was beheaded, Thomas More wrote, ‘I have not been a man of such holy living, as I might be bold to offer myself to death … Howbeit, if God draw me to it himself, then trust I in His great mercy’.14 Their projects in life were very different, but both believed in where they were going.
When sleep comes, when God enters, when time stills, when we wake. I wonder what the bed of two people who can’t sleep looks like, if the sheets are clean, creased, twisted or bunched, if sleep for one makes sleep for the other feel alone, or not alone enough, if the two face each other when dawn comes.
What is there has been there all along: call it night, call it God, call it kairos. In the film, the woman slips into deep fire, her body is burning, she falls asleep.
What is there has been there all along: call it night, call it God, call it kairos. In the film, the woman slips into deep fire, her body is burning, she falls asleep.
Wen-Juenn Lee writes poetry on unceded Wurundjeri land. In her writing, she is interested in gaps, leaks and spillage. She was the Hyphenated Projects x Liminal Fellow, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow, and was awarded the Tina Kane Emergent Writer Award. Her writing has been published in HEAT, Meanjin, Cordite and Going Down Swinging, among others.
Sources:
1. Kenzaburō Ōe, ‘The Day the Emperor Spoke in a Human Voice’, New York Times, May 7 1995, accessed 30 March 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Zone Books, 2007), 17.
4. Plato, Phaedo trans. David Gallop (Oxford University Press, 2009), 79.
5. ‘Newsflash: The Prime Minister is Missing’, The National Film and Sound Archive Australia, accessed 18 March 2026.
6. John 19:30 (NRSV)
7. Blue, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2018).
8. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford University Press, 2005), 62.
9. Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work (Picador, 2003), 177.
10. Alain Badiou, ‘Art’, in Philosophy and the Event (Polity Press, 2013), 83.
11. Duncan Caillard, ‘Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sleep Cinema: Intimacy, Inattention, Surrealism’, Currents, 2021, accessed 5 March 2026.
12. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep (Fordham University Press, 2009), 5.
13. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography trans. Eric Mosbacher et al (Fortress Press, 1970), 927.
14. William Roper, The Mirrour of Vertue in Wordly Greatness or The Life of Sir Thomas More (De La More Press, 1903), 173.