The Pumice Island

I have first seen Kaos perhaps ten or fifteen years ago; I didn’t remember much of it: all that remained in my mind was a vague sense of the heart-rending beauty of it. This was connected with the only detail of the film which I remembered: the Pumice Island: a great dune of snow white and children jumping down it towards the bluest of blue seas. I liked the film a lot less upon review – it seemed a little heavy-handed in places; in places the editing seemed to me less than perfect; some sequences seem too long even to me, a fan of slow-moving pictures; the soundtrack, though beautiful, could have been less intrusive. But the Pumice Island remains with me this time, also.

It remained with him, too, says Pirandello in his imagined conversation with his mother in the film’s epilogue. The memory was initially his mother’s – she, her siblings and her mother made a brief stop at the Pumice Island on their flight to Malta, in 1848. It was a very brief stay indeed – no more than a few hours. Yet, he says, she must have told him about it a hundred times. Then, in turn, it obsessed him: he has tried writing about it a hundred times. Then the film’s creators had wanted to include the Pumice Island in their film; perhaps the film has even started in their minds with the Pumice Island just as Look at me has started with Amor. Now I keep remembering it.

Why? The event was minor; it had no causal significance – nothing followed from it; it is difficult to attribute to it any symbolic meaning; it is not classical. Yet, it lodges in the mind: children, snow white powder, baby-blue sea. There must be a reason why; neurology or evolutionary psychology could one day explain it. Until then, its power is a mystery.