Trompe-l'œil

I had this thought, one day, quite recently, and it would not go away: a photograph is like the desired object you receive only on condition of it being broken.

What does it mean? Brushing my hair with a flat, heavy palm, I thought about it, for a while. It means that you wish you could write to some office, somewhere, and ask them to replace this non-functional thing, this sad and shattered thing, with one that works. That does what it's supposed to do. What is a photograph supposed to do? That didn't make sense.

I sat down, and sighed, lightly and almost silent. The tea was hot, in the cup, on my hand, against my lip, it felt good. I didn't think about anything, except maybe that heat and the smell, and the taste that was waiting for me, but it was just a little too hot. I put it down on the table. And then I picked it back up and put it on a coaster, put it in its right place.

What was the right place for the photograph? In a frame, of course, everyone knows that. I looked at the mantelpiece, where the frames are. I mean, where the photographs are, as they should be. In pride of place, as they say. Is this pride, that I am feeling? I don't think so. I have known pride, I am sure of it. But it was just one little portion amongst all the other feelings that have crowded in and tussled around and poured out of me in the long time that I have known feelings; I cannot fully account for it, this little bit, this pride. It has been a long time, or no time at all, I can't decide. But this is not pride, to look at the mantlepiece, quietly, with tea.

And you, you are not a feeling; and you are not the photograph, but it is a photograph of you. Does this mean that you are the broken thing, which I would have replaced, which I would sit and write a letter of complaint over, or just a plaintive, humble request, to get a new one, a working one? Except that this cannot happen, of course. This is what it means to say: 'on condition of.' It means you don't get a choice in the matter. There is nothing to be done, and why cry over things like that? Nobody knows.

This does not sound quite correct, in any case. You are not a photograph, this or any other, and you were not a broken thing. Of that I am quite sure; as sure as one can be on such matters, at any rate.

Sipping, standing, I walk over to you, to the photograph, to the mantelpiece, I mean, and think a little harder; though none more clearly, I must say. For a thing to be broken, it cannot do that which you wish it would do. It does not live up to that desire you had for it. When you say 'this is broken, I want a new one,' you are saying or trying to say that you had something you wanted, and you hoped the thing would fulfil that want, or help you fulfil it; but it didn't. It let you down. Does a photograph let you down, or not? I am not sure.

I am looking at you and thinking that, it was a cold day, I didn't have something so nice as this warm tea to drink and make me feel more cosy. What did I have, except you of course, but you cannot drink a person so that they will make you feel nourished and warm, even if you would like to do that. You had a coat, long and made of like felt, in green, and you held it around yourself quite closely. I wonder if it worked for you, or if it was another thing that was broken, like a lot of things, it seems to me, now that I think of it. It is best not to think of it, though.

And on that day you said this: 'Let's sit inside, by the window.' And I said, 'Yes.' So we did, we sat inside, and read, and had something to eat, and watched the outside world and all the things that happen out there, if you watch for them, or just anyway, even if nobody at all is watching. The grey sky wasn't saying anything, no matter how closely I looked, then, or now. I am looking quite closely, but there is nothing.

You are on the left, right at the edge, the cutting edge of the frame that I am glad did not cut you, because I can only imagine that it would hurt somehow. The window shows the sky, and a path, and an old man with a bicycle, and a river, big cold grey river, it is quite forlorn. But you are well-lit and smiling. Thank goodness.

And what else could I want? Is this not my desired object? Small and rectangular, compact, not at all heavy, ideal in many ways, so it seems. I pick it up, not hot like the tea, I can hold it quite comfortably in my hand. I can put it down without a coaster, it will not make a mark. That is some kind of happiness, I think, obscurely: not to leave a mark.

Perhaps it is a broken thing because I cannot understand why it is or is not broken. Perhaps it is nothing at all, just a picture, like in a picture book, it's not a big deal, why worry about it. Looking at it, again, once more, I think that now is just now, with this picture, and then was nothing at all, like when a child asks 'what was there before the big bang?' and I say 'oh, well, I don't know...'

Because of course, this isn't you, it is not you I am looking at now, not really. I don't know where you are, but it is not here, in the living room, drinking tea with me. Sitting down, I think that I have to remember to send my uncle a birthday card, and that the clocks go back again soon, isn't that strange, and autumn is such a lovely season. And thinking is like a thing which is always ahead of you, and you can hear it moving but you cannot see it or touch it, like a game, a children's game in the dark. And then I wonder what that means, but I don't think too long about it, as my tea is going cold, and I do not like cold tea.

Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu

Oh I was a germ culture. Nothing but propagation against form, against the organism, out of bounds. Pathogenetic, a fucking mess. And I asked, Give me just one clear line, just that one rectilinear movement which would not make and remake me again, anew. Preserve me, as I fall forward, going forward good and gentle, from the unforeseen contact, the swerve and dodge... Don't let me be taken away from here again.

'For my taste for death, which was bankruptcy of the will, I will substitute a death-wish which will be the apotheosis of the will...'

And I said it, what I wanted to say, my demand: To have done with the judgement of God, to have done with it, to have done. Sighing. Who could exculpate me? Leaning back, ask again: Who would be capable, on what authority? To levy no more against me the cosmic interest on an infinite debt... There is nothing so useless as the demand of utility. And no, since you ask, I have not slept well. Every night, the dream of my transubstantiation (but only a dream), metempsychosis, body-to-become-vapour-to-become-body... And then; sitting straight, wider eyes. If I could get out of this place, this narrow band of frequencies, rhythm of exhalation-inhalation. I could get away. But then what is a dream (aggregate of signs) if not the possibility of being other? Oh I don't know. Will there be a last breath? Leaning back...

For you can tie me up if you wish,

but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

Being alive, I would say, is something like a roach pressed against the wall of a blast chamber, like an energy transfer oscillating at the threshold and spitting out radiation. You didn't ask, I understand. And when they come to tell me my request cannot be fulfilled, I don't say: I won't hold up here another night, I heard my blood rattling in my ears, last night, when the dream came, or just before, as I reached the limit, crossing over... And then I'm what, an orchid, a wasp? An acephalous block, wandering vector, the clinamen taking me... I feel the fear lay hard upon me, at my neck my throat burning drawing sharp ragged breath. Am I going? I think this is the moment, coming fast. Choking choking and my fingers at my face who will take down my last report? Oh teach us to care and not to care...

I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different

Retrospectively, that is to say, looking back, things might have been otherwise. I could have expressed myself somewhat more clearly. If I said this (could I say it): nature only ever produces bastards, its only work is the fucked up mutation of a phenotype. There are only so many ways you can bend the bones in your back. But perhaps they wouldn't ever have understood, even this one perfect axiom: no beautiful thing ever occurred without a sublime moment of deviation. And so, we will do no beautiful things. The sun is still the sun, still the sun, above us, and will we burn off like the contaminant we are? I dream, I dream, vapour and ashes, a residue. Or, to put it differently, a life. A life.

A Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table

'I dream of writing a book made up only of quotations.'

- Walter Benjamin

Since you ask, the making of a thing occurs precisely in the holding together of some relatively disparate elements. Shaking and creaking, the thing will endure for a brief period, perhaps communicating something of its form as it describes a strange and wandering vector. Perhaps somebody will spot it, approach with a squint, furtively or boldly, and select a component to steal away. Hopefully they enter it into their own minor composition, replete with all sorts of curious dissonances. This part may be some form of idealism, I'm not too sure of the terminology. When it comes to stealing, I do not speak pejoratively - we bricoleurs do not hold to personal property. You should take what you need and leave the rest, I think. Don't cite me. I'm content to disappear, or rather, get a little more imperceptible. Recognised by a trace or an inflection, what is sometimes called style... No, I'm not entirely sure either. But that's the game of it, I imagine. That ludic principle, what happened to it?

'Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.'
- Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont)

And where are we heading? The question is the same at each camp, and I'm tired of their evasive half-responses. It is late now, we've been gone a long time and following each night the day is slower in coming. Every time we rest it gets a little harder to start again, to rouse oneself. Packing bags by a creeping dawn light so thin I could not say what it is we are carrying any longer. I can hear the camels rustling, I don't know what, at night, and it wakes me. Please excuse my tiredness. If we might sit here for a while, see the land fading in a good twilight, not too long, just a minor indulgence for an old friend..? Carrying all these things is a great burden to me, you see; my back is sore and I don't move as well as I used to. I too wish to look on that unimagined foreign shore we spoke of in the early days, but I no longer expect promises. There was no contract, we didn't have time. We were young and had long, quick strides. Nevertheless we ought still to cherish some faint and outmoded hopes. Could I hope that we might come back below the snow line, hear those water mills maybe still beating in the darkness? What I'm trying to say (and old age is such a time for speaking clearly) is can we still believe in a destination? Not a homecoming of course, but I...

'...And now, if store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale...
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
'Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.'
- Lucretius

When falling in space, things may collide. Their trajectories interact in some way, I don't understand, but one can see, plotting the points that... There's something here, anyway. A set of compossibilities, a little world in an encounter (I think I read this somewhere but the citation is smudged). Two plummeting objects, the ground rearing up at them - they won't avoid it of course, but they still push one another, enter into some mutual resonance, an exchange of energy. It seems futile, I suppose, but one shouldn't judge from the perspective of the embedding space, see? Or so I'm inclined to think anyway. What I mean is that (and here my colleagues tend to sigh, or place a long finger against an imperious nose), just because from the perspective of a coordinate system one can see that this pattern of mutual interference will inevitably dissipate, that's not to say that it doesn't have some obscure significance to it or that it doesn't escape the impact... When I say 'obscure' they say I mean 'arcane' and an argument ensues. I won't abide it much longer; still, we will see, I think there's something here... I once read a word I liked in an old book left out on the campus lawn. The rain had wet the pages and I admit it was difficult to understand, but it sounded quite beautiful: καιρός. When they ask me for the manuscript perhaps I will throw it in the grate. I would love to see their faces...

'In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, in such an age aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.'
- Hugo Ball

The first time I saw it, naturally I found it repugnant. I tried to find the conductor, make my dissatisfaction heard in the sharpest of terms. But I was told he'd been missing for some time, or at least nobody had seen him, so I returned to my seat. I began to compose increasingly vitriolic apostrophes to this absent figure, sometimes imagining a physical reprimand I would subject him to. Perhaps I dozed, and I think we had entered a tunnel; the lights in the carriage came up, and now it was even more excessively visible, impinging upon my ocular field in the most egregious manner. I felt an urge to vomit, and coughed a little phlegm into my handkerchief. The air is not so good in here... I wonder when we'll be on the other side, what skies... Of course the more I avoided responding to its gaze the more intense a fascination it obtained. I writhed a little at first, clasped my hands this way and that. My fellow passengers were somewhat alarmed, but we haven't spoken for some time. I imagine they tolerate my infelicities. Nevertheless they seem to get fewer, or is it farther away? And then when I closed my eyes it was dancing there behind the lids, with me even in my own private darkness. I cannot imagine how it got there. And though I must now confess to having acquired some form of love for the blasted thing, I still resent its stealing into me so... Time passes, and it feels more a part of me with every strike of the clock, each failing to bring us back into a light I only remember as it were in a fable, or a dream...

'And I, who felt my head surrounded by horrors,
Said: 'Master, what then is it that I am hearing?
And what people are these, so crushed by pain?

He answered: 'That is the manner of existence
Endured by the sad souls of those who lived
Without occasion for infamy or praise.'
- Dante Alighieri

When I woke up at first I thought I'd gone blind but it was just the bandages on my eyes. I tore at them, and two hands came forth to restrain me. They were gentle, I did not persist. I can't imagine a thing I wanted to see. There was a soothing voice attached to the hands somehow (or so I imagine) but I was already sinking back to wherever it is that I go and I didn't catch the words. Sometime later I came to and I was back in the cubicle. Nobody commented upon my absence, so naturally neither did I. I felt angry and went at my tasks with even greater disinterest than usual. I return smiles with not-quite-improper hint of resentment at each corner. Through the window to my right is some kind of a tree and then the face of the building opposite, and quite a bland face I must say. Down below is the street, somewhere. I can't really hear it often, the extractor fan makes this awful skreeskreeskreeskree sound at all hours, even the unsociable ones. It is easy to imagine it is not there at all, that it's buildings all the way down, as they say. Once I heard a voice, projected through a megaphone. There were colours in my eyes, as when you have a migraine. I went for a lie down. Was this then or now?

'BOREDOM IS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY'
- May '68 graffito

I threw, you catch. Or drop it, turn away, take a drink, issue a thorough repudiation. But that's the game of it, isn't it?