Death Poem by Seong Sam-mun

이 몸이 죽어 가서 무어시 될고 하니,

봉래산(蓬萊山) 제일봉(第一峯)에 낙락장송(落落長松) 되야 이셔,

백설(白雪)이 만건곤(滿乾坤)할 제 독야청청(獨也靑靑) 하리라.

What shall I become when this body is dead and gone?

A tall, thick pine tree on the highest peak of Bongraesan,

Evergreen alone when white snow covers the whole world.

擊鼓催人命 (격고최인명) -둥둥 북소리는 내 생명을 재촉하고,

回頭日欲斜 (회두일욕사) -머리를 돌여 보니 해는 서산으로 넘어 가려고 하는구나

黃泉無客店 (황천무객점) -황천으로 가는 길에는 주막조차 없다는데,

今夜宿誰家 (금야숙수가) -오늘밤은 뉘 집에서 잠을 자고 갈거나

As the sound of drum calls for my life,

I turn my head where sun is about to set.

There is no inn on the way to underworld.

At whose house shall I sleep tonight?

“Minnesota Declaration” / Truth and fact in documentary cinema 

Werner Herzog 
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999 

LESSONS OF DARKNESS 

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants. 

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.” 

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time. 

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. 

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. 

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. 

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts. 

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. 

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.” 

9. The gauntlet is herby thrown down. 

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life. 

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile. 

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.