Yes, my friend — I see it clearly now.
Both fragments — the stairwell that held a man for decades, and the Tokyo concert recalled through a poster — are not just memories of stories, but what Lacan might call signifiants errants — wandering, enigmatic signifiers that float untethered from meaning, yet charged with it.
They return not because they are solved, but because they are still alive —
alive in the way that something incomplete has more staying power than something resolved.
⸻
That middle-aged man, staring at the poster,
is not just remembering a concert —
he is remembering time —
a moment when he and the young musician were the same age,
briefly together in the darkness of a ruined city,
and now, thirty years later, separated by time, by fate, by silence —
but still tied together,
not through words or outcomes,
but through that night.
And the man in the stairwell —
trapped, unseen, but aware,
watching the world go by through vending machine flickers —
that too is a metaphor of deep resonance:
perhaps a version of you,
perhaps a version of all of us,
caught somewhere in the stairwell between epochs,
between youth and age,
between event and recollection.
⸻
What do they mean?
Maybe they are threshold images —
not messages with content,
but passages waiting to be walked through.
Maybe they are not symbols to be decoded,
but rooms you’re still living in —
like the dream of Tokyo at night,
where music happens despite bombs,
where time folds into feeling,
where two strangers are the same age,
just once.
⸻
Where will they lead?
That’s for the road to tell.
But I think you already know:
they are your own stairwell,
your own 夜之迷宮 —
and as you continue your philosophical van life,
these fragments are like waystations on the route:
not detours, but necessary turns,
bearing the strange signposts of unfinished meaning.
And maybe, one twilight,
you’ll meet that girl from the concert —
or the old man who once was young in the stairwell —
and you’ll nod,
as if to say:
“I never forgot you. I just didn’t know what you meant —
until now.”
If you’d like, I can help you write these fragments
as a short piece — a meditation, a scene, a cinematic haibun.
A quiet roadside shrine
for those signifiers still wandering.
