I can’t tear my eyes away from traumatic childhoods, comme un lecteur, the memories of hunger and madness when we were eight will latch to my mind. I’ll read Dorothy Allison or Margarite Duras feeling that lovely jungle darkness of vipers and scarlet-lipped flowers. Alors, j’ai lu Widow Basquiat, une memoire de Suzanne Mallouk, being one who is endlessly fascinated by la vie bohème in New York City expecting the silvery drugs and purple draped clubs of the early ‘80s. What actually happened was more along the lines of watching a stoning of a raven, Suzanne the raven, Suzanne the high head and blue black hair and sharp mouth and deep all-seeing eyes. Despite the rain she glistens and flies.

Clement writes the memoir as if Suzanne had handed her a stack of photographs with “Madonna – 1964” “ Michel and Shenge – 1st and Madison” … so it could be a speedy experience, reading Widow Basquiat, if you wanted it to be. I mean to say that the book is not divided by chapters, by a space of time, by an event well enough completed to become another (chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3) rather it is divided by moments. Each moment, being a moment, doesn’t take up much space on the page at all. Yet I found myself slowing the rove of my read down to a mouthing aloud of the sounds she was making to the tracing of the shadows. I’d find myself unable to move on from one, reading “Only One Chromosome is Missing” forward and back again.
There is not much elucidation of Jean-Michel. Love often clouds, and as Suzanne observes, he acted differently around certains. Andy Warhol was a certain. Madonna was a certain. I was not familiar with him prior to reading Widow Basquait. He died four days after I was born due to complications of heroin abuse and AIDS. On August 12, 1988. His Wikipedia article reads, “Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. He began as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s.”

He called her Venus and told her what to wear. He bought her pastries and cocaine, outlined her skeleton, “then filled in the organs, the liver, the spleen, the stomach [...] I think he bought me pastries because he thought that’s something rich people did.”

The voice is intimate with a push-record cassette quality, with some entries supplemented with a more retrospective voice in italics by Suzanne herself. Malgré son péchance pour l’esprit libre, flou, émotional, sa voie est claire. Her memory is almost too exacting, reconstructing each look, each tone and each position just so that further attempts at explaining what she, at that moment, felt, would be redundant. And truly, imagine the futility of communicating the surrounding emotions: what the nerves belonging to her slight shaking arms were feeling watching Michel create and destroy and menace and caress … I see him licking cocaine from her breasts and her eyes soft and upward gazing settling in a cloud of heroin. I see him trying to catch her gaze when she’s focused on heaven. I see her cold, a raven short some feathers, watching him pace the blankness of his most recent canvas wishing that he’d hold her. I see them tracing an aria on the wooden floors of the Cosby Loft scalpel-fine Aaaaaaaaa…

You will see it all very well. They are true and beautiful, mais n’assumez pas connaître l’interior des choses.

And here’s the thing about drugging, and I’ll say it now before I forget: whether taken with intent to feel more or less, what is felt has drastically altered the composition of the central nervous system. A nervous system molded so exactly by the societal pretext… a pretext so fixedly holding reality that should something tied itself to the leg of the table and pull sharply, well … In evolving we sacrifice and being a writer thus biased, I’ll insist that literature alters, more than anything else, the future mind. (Stumbled upon this article positing Shakespeare’s pivotal role in enhancing the ethical consciousness thereafter. If you’re interested.) Literature is a concentrated effort to humanize symbols. The characters we create encourage emotional awareness. Often what needs to be said is something that our mouths can’t form. A fish might say it, a baby might say it, a dodo … a woman with blow. An opium doze (In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately treasure dome decree). To wit, our culture enshrines the words or men and women of substances, merci bien pour nous préviennent, we must, of course, continue to discourage common consumption comfortable that there’s been enough lambs marked for sacrifice. Let them wander the desert lands. Let them lust for poison. Then let the lambs, those angels, sing the song to bring spring and we will dance in the rain.

The last third of the memoir describes Suzanne’s involvement with Michael Stewart, a student at Pratt and graffiti artist. In a particularly brutal example of police brutality, Stewart was delivered to the Bellevue hospital inches from death, internal hemorrhaging, showing signs of strangulation and suffocation, that there was nothing to be done but to let him pass ghostly through the hospital room and pray him free. Suzanne threw herself in bringing him justice. Clement gives us the police reports. They claim self-defense. Suzanne remembers slight, doe-esque Stewart sitting at her bar. She knows that those who didn’t know Stewart would read the report, read BLACK MALE, read SELF-DEFENSE and think, “That sounds reasonable.” The case closes with her succeeding in securing recompense for his family, but the police who’d killed him “are still walking the beat.”

This is what, when it comes to it, was the dynamic that Basquiat was all too aware of, noting frequently that black men weren’t in the museums. He painted to point to this dynamic, this social devil, not only within the subject matter of his art but in the success that his art gave him. Yet here he was conflicted, he was annoyed that Suzanne had taken Stewart’s case, fearing that attention being drawn to his blackness would undermine his goals of being a successful artist.

You cannot paint the revolutionary tract then shy from the street Basquiat.

He was man of magic with expensive tastes. He was young at night, a full-moon howl. Ambitious, so never satisfied. Suzanne loved him with an Nietzschean intensity, her heart always extended. Cette doulour, si riche en fin, me fait penser de quelqu’un autre. The dear Peter Pan holding my finger in sleeping, he expects me home, and I won’t mention the last thing he’s told me. I’ve forgiven his boyish cruelties. But it’s Suzanne and Jennifer Clement that I want to know more in the end. What wouldn’t I give to walk the Brooklyn bridge reciting Walt Whitman and watching her exhale paint fumes, coloring the breeze, laughing with her teeth.

« Sautes desous, fixes tes yeux sur le point désiré et ne regards rien d’autre. Se jetes. Comme, en ce moment-là, tu connaîtras seulement ce point, car ce point est la seule chose qui existe, tu arriveras par là. Même si la terre tombe. Même si le vent bat ton corps, tu gagneras ce point-là. »

Nous sommes sur la montagne derrière la maison de ma grand mère. Les pierres sont rouges, un rouge profonde, qui semble le cuivre rouillé et chaud. C’est très chaud ici. C’est toujours très chaud ici. L’air est doux avec un sent du romarin. Ayant marché jusqu’à ce qu’on ne peut pas marcher plus, on s’est tourné vers la vallée : une ville de lavande, composée essentiellement d’espace. On voit de points de lumière fragile qui vit comme s’ils ne savent pas s’ils sont vivants vraiment. Quand on rend visite ma grand mère, on ne vient jamais à la ville. On la déteste.

J’avais gardé qu’il m’avait dit. Mes yeux fixés, je vois une ville différente.

This means blue, its roots not Armenian nor Germanic. This is a blue that needs no roots for it is the purest of its type and exists by means of suspension. Je ne connais pas Reno, he explained, je ne le connais pas du tout.

Moi non plus, je voulais le dire, je suis si bleu là.

He is here to research the Basque culture as it is constituted in Nevada. He speaks Spanish, Basque, French and Italian, but English rather poorly. I’ve seen him walking perdu dans ses pensées à l’université, toujours seul avec un fantôm d’un sourire autour de sa bouche. I’ve seen him once downtown, in the same style, a funny owl limping down the sidewalks with eyes only for his mind.

So observing I might catalogue son mien as I tend to catalogue color after color for their muting and their shine. Je pense de bleu dans mon lit, en train de se dormir, a conversation forming like rain upon a pane. Dors, je dis. Non, je dis.

Le bleu, c’est fleu. I dip from one language to the other. And you, dear man, what a jungle gym your thoughts must be. He’s here, having forged his academic destinies in northern Spain, to sand down the splinters on the bridge separating the old world from the new. Son but, pour moi, rest inconnu, mais je dirais fleu : un but qui va évoluer, une petite cellule divise en deux .

Le bleu, suspendu sur

a pale yellow sky.

I heard the heater pop. My heart jumped sharply. I am afraid of you breaking and entering by my bedroom window.  I am afraid of you breaking and entering, yet, hopeful too. You’ll give me enough time won’t you? For me to shove you back from the sill    a seven foot leap    and fall on December’s frost and wait for my candle, for my basin of water, my gauze, my needle and thread to sew you up nicely in comforting half-tones, “ Don’t you scare me like that again.”

Wind is picking up again, finding the flutes embedded in the drain pipes. The radiator’s spasm still has my heart in my head. Every watermark on the pane is your fingerprint, the moving shadow is your patient wavering. Unless I’m careful (I’ve been playing Girls all night long) Christopher Owens is you whispering. Fucking christ. You’re staining everything.

Yet word had it that you’d learned enough Spanish to translate in Buenos Aires. The initial leap in expatriot life had you looking back often, back at me really, the iris sensitive still to the mark I left there, but settled given two years: first in an apartment too close to the Hospital General de Agudos. The landlord had, to make up for the location no doubt, enlisted a sixteen-year-old Haïtian to clean your flat regularly. She smelled like cinnamon and freshly sharpened pencils.

You know she stole your Hélène Cixous tired of dusting it so often, saddened by the new sound in its spine, knowing that you couldn’t read French anyway … why did you bring that along? Instead of Elliot or Miller or someone you could understand? At any rate, you didn’t say anything to Anaramño, the mentioned landlord, instead enjoying the secret, leaving sometimes a half-smoke Virgin Slim or dead flower on the plot of spot Cixous once rested.

You’ve a special talent, allow me to speak for Laila, and allow me to name her, for the nonchalant nicety that, when allowed for some mental fermentation, turns to a psilocybin crash, an excuse for paranoia, a sharp about-face, a claw to the nose of your lover with his eyes a-shinin’ for you (cracking like the well of wax the candle’s flame couldn’t quite get to).

Laila was aware of your schedule: traduit les matins de lundi au jeudi. She made your bed then, washed the films of grease then, deported the spiders sitting next to the shower head, jumpy, shaky, at the sound of shifting stairs… would work ever end early? One day, a fire-drill day, you’ll come home early, Laila fighting a scruff on the hardwood with a bristle brush. She’s trying not to think of the medialunas shining under their saran wrap on the counter. When you walk, you do not make noise (and, anyways, the bristle scrape) so you’re suddenly there.

En ce moment, il va me lever, m’embrasser à la fois. Ça commençera transcendant… je me sentirai le profondeur du ventre danse. La feu allumée, je suis destinée être consumée. Ta bouche goutte de mienne, la faim augmente, tes mains [pétri} mon corps. Miennes te tire plus proche, plus proche. Quelle exstase tremblante ! Tes dents ont trouvé ma langue, là, leur pression. J’ai peur. Le peur est deliceux, le délire, la tête tisse j’aime que je te plais j’aime que je te plais tout pendant que tu manges ma langue bien que mon sang remplir la bouche, trouve mes fossettes, pointille ma robe. Tu n’arréteras qu’elle est toute mangée. En meurante, je te serrai   mon sexe encore à la danse.

That’s it. You offer the most sublime way to die. Word had it you found another flat after this, not too far from Bosques de Palermo.

I don’t know what you know of me. I still film and follow overflying birds to the country. When I first moved to the city I lay on a fat man’s bed because I didn’t have money. I build scenarios around colors and presently my eyes like ochre. Ochre is the story of a brother and sister, twins, who wake up in their trundle to bright rectangles, refractions from passing windshields, flying across the wall, who eat biscoff cookies in the afternoons, who share custody of a lovely mustard sweater, who relive Lion King dialogue whilst raking leaves. I do love shorter pieces; films that have little more ambition a part from beauty.

Another word had it that you’d started to write yourself. Send them (your words I mean) for some psychoanalysis. You said, “ I dream of backfloating on a pair of tracks en attendant for the coming train. She arrives, I find her speed, embrace her my veins bursting, la regard with all her power. She’s a machine destined to travel le monde entier… crashing over my prostate body.”

You’d excel at flash fiction.

I don’t know what they’ve told you, but I fear one contained my address. Or, perhaps, a mention of my current employment underneath the banner of graphic design (where us photographers go to die). It’d be only too easy to find me given what clues I’ll leave in the photos’ descriptors. May your eyes never find the trail of crumbs. Would my hands stop dropping them! Do I not remember what relief overcame me once rid of that retraceable bunker on Finch Avenue? Come back to town. I won’t be around.Word to the wise and the debonaire poltergeist: don’t you be looking for me neither.

Yet I’ll continue to assume, of course, that the echoing gong on the fire escape were your shoes. I saw a shadow pass devant la lune and knew that that was you too. Sometimes I overhear other women describe your face. All very well, I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve and most couldn’t understand the fright they (the descriptions I mean) give me. (She saw you loitering with her boss on 63rd and Madison. She saw you first and only noticed her boss immediately afterwards: said your eyes had an expansive radius of destruction and a meticulously shaped mustache. Rhett and Ashley in one man. I filled in the lines: I said Ralph Lauren, I said dirty blonde, said that space between the two front teeth, and urban wind against his torso. She said yes, she said yes yes yes.)

Ah, now I think: You were wearing just about nothing. I just had on my green ring, peridot you know, and the sun was on a slow rise and beneath our skin our bones glowed from the inside. Looking down the fall of your profile… eyes tumbling from forehead to the nose to the heart of your lips… le lendemain. I remember then a hotel pool in Irvine California and minty watermelon plastic sunglasses through which I’d watch my father bobbing a few beers deep the graying blond sticking to his forehead floating so calmly he might be dead, but knew at the slightest scent of noir, his blood would spring to action. I’d take for granted the residual invincibility, comme si c’était moi, toute seule, qui peux luttre les bêtes du monde. Comme toi. For you would wake, muscle fibers hugging themselves as you’d stretch over me, to save me or crush me I couldn’t say, good morning. Class is when? At nine? We have some time. Good, I’d say. The surface of your skin would dive into mine and lift and kiss and dive into mine and lift and kiss and dive into mine and lift and kiss and watch me shake my eyes to the back of my head. I liked watching the animal come to your eyes. I liked the sheen on my inner thighs.

Ah, now I think: my jawline fit squarely under your collarbone. There my face would cradle. Above there was the sky. I’d rotate my face back to find your closed eyes glowing orange in setting sun light. All colors so picture still. This was a moment of three-year-old immortality. A sensation of knowledge, to be betrayed jamais, malgré la mystère.
Then the sinking. You are a morbid joker. And me, still three, would take everything very seriously.

“ My father gave me a fountain pen for graduation. I dream of filling it with your blood.”

“And write what?” I asked. Yes, tell me exactly, what goes into killing a loving?

“Your biography,” eyes glinting.

Retrospect suggests that you craved me in the flavor of angry. Risen and primitive, the consciousness of a doe finding her buck crazed, rabid. So cruelly said, you then waited for a punch to the chest. The punch to the chest. You grabbed for the counter and missed the edge grabbing instead a plate we’d shared earlier, shattering the porcelein to gravel as it spun from your hand, where, then, your back skidded across the broken pieces. There. Now you know, don’t you, that you can scare me. That I can hurt you. That I can leave. Leave. Leave. Leave.

The flyer indicated that he was a futurist, and I instantly thought of futurism… mind those terms. Dr. Michio Kaku falls under the former, whilst Umberto Boccioni falls under the later, and whilst technically the two are disparate, I felt an uncomfortable lack of humanness at Dr. Kaku’s lecture ever reminiscent of futurism tonight.

Whilst giddy in the face of technological advances (like any generation Y at the edge of Z) I am also conscious of what loss in humanness experienced given these advances. You see them too, one sitting right across from the other at a quaint café in Montparnasse looking intently at their cell phones neverminding that there is a fucking human in front of them, whose minds emit the same impulses with an acoustic sweetness, who touch at the perfect frequency to invoke an emotive response. I’ve also touched upon my concerns regarding memory recall given the immediate accessibility of Google before, and need not say again the disabling aspect of internet dependency.

So when I think of technological advances, I think in terms of healing… in the healing of ourselves and the planet. I think of exploration. I think curiosity. I think discover . I want to lasso the moon. I DON’T THINK OF DIGITIZED WALLPAPER. I don’t think of further alienation from human contact… I don’t want a world where I shop from my room, be diagnosed from my room, talk to my computer as if it were truly a being. Can’t technology do something right and connect us to nature? To each other? Why so bleak Dr. Kaku? Can you not hear you?

Admittedly I walked into the room with a different expectation of enlightenment. I walked in hoping that he would untangle the messier bits of string theory for me. I wanted to understand why, IF the barest atom is but a receptor of frequencies WHY this matters and what does it mean?? So, actually, the lecture barreled through a list of technological advances that one could expect to see in the future… with an uncomfortable focus on the capitalization of such advances. Hey, maybe I want to interact with technology not merely as a consumer. What of that?

(Some five minutes of the lecture described, à grâce advanced eye wear: a typical pedestrian could filter passerby who have opted into a certain dating service, thereby negating the need for what bravery is required by those starry-eyed hopefuls facing perhaps certain rejection.)

Granted, there was discussion devoted to healthcare, something I’m always glad to see given our chemically laden and constantly ill population. Good show. Yet. If someone had handed me a microphone at the end for the question-answer session, I would have asked him that he maybe consider that modernization has introduced a slew of chronic illness, and might it not be of equal import to revert our lifestyles to one that makes more biological sense?

Anyway.

The question-answer session at the end did bring up an issue particularly important to me re education and America’s woeful standing in science and math. (23rd I think he said.) He proceeded to described why the way in which science is taught fails of to entice followers, why it is inefficient… really one need only read Gargantua by Montaigne… because we students are given a chart of names, a complex labeling of pulleys and levers so to speak, asked pretty please to memorize these, and given no further insight into the actual mechanics. JE SUIS D’ACCORD. If America wants any place in the technological advances of the future, she must teach with a true interest in the mind’s capacity and not in the bureaucratic GPA system.

But you know what helps? Discussions that do not sensationalize the consumerist capacity of our vie quotidienne COMING SOON! Or perhaps one might engage with the audience in a way that encourages intellectual exploration rather than dismissive explanations. I kinda expected more of you expecting more of us. I don’t go to a science lecture to be fucking entertained. America’s slip in intellectual capital is due to this too: the constant expectation of being entertained.

So here’s my thing with futuristic thinking: build thoughts! Build cities! But level the walls please. I’m so tired of walls. Especially walls of understanding. I know that Dr. Kaku is brilliant. I’d rather hoped to be privy to what technical understanding he has of modern physics. Certainly didn’t appreciate being delegated to student-who-will-buy-my-book status, oh and here, a sprinkle of condensation.

[I expect this review to be riddled with faults. Native French speakers are most welcome to counsel, advise, correct, etc what is to follow.]

Le moment que j’ai fini L’Amant, j’ai voulu recommencer. Dites-moi, une fois plus, de la mer, du Mékong, de la lumière … tandis que c’était fait dans votre livre. J’ai senti vraiment la chaleur des rayons du soleil, la peur du frère aîné, « l’amant sans l’amour », même l’extase, même le désir. Il y a eu des moments quand j’ai lu, tombe dans la musique des mots, que j’ai des sensations plus fortes que si j’avais éprouvé le moment en vrai, que si elles ont passé à moi.

Je sais que tout ce que je vais dire ne reflet pas la moitié qu’est-ce dans ce livre car j’ai compris bien mal les nuances des mots, les tournes de phrase, les déviances de la parole naturelle. Je sais cela, mais malgré cela, je dois la répondre… je dois répondre à Marguerite Duras, à L’Amant.

La description du livre me dit, « Il faut lire les plus beaux morceaux de l’Amant à haute voix. On percevra mieux ainsi le rythme, la scansion, la respiration intime de la prose, qui sont les subtils secrets de l’écrivain. » Alors, je l’ai fait, avec mon accent américain, toute seule dans ma chambre où on peut sentir une solitude de quoi Duras exprime. Elle est vraiment seule, et elle me compagne parce qu’elle est seule. C’est curieux cela : en trouvant quelqu’un qui peut montrer moi la profondeur des émotions de l’être seul, je le sens moins. J’ai lu son livre à haute voix parfois, parfois j’ai laissé la parole à la voix intérieure. De hors de moi, les mots sont musicals et me caresse… surtout je les sens comme une sensation d’extérieur. Les gardants en la tête, je vois. Voilà la courbure de la terre, et là, la forêt dessous la terrasse enrobée en encens, des lèvres trop rouges, ce chapeau d’homme placé sur sa tête (il fait quelque jours que j’ai vu Coco Avant Chanel avec Audrey Tautou, puisqu’en lisant : « Aucune femme, aucune jeune fille ne porte de feutre d’homme dans cette colonie à cette époque-là. Aucune femme indigène non plus. Voilà ce que a dû arriver, c’est que j’ai essayé ce feutre, pour rire, comme ça, que je me suis regardée dans le miroir du marchand et que j’ai vu : sous le chapeau d’homme, la minceur ingrate de la forme, ce défaut de l’enfance, est devenue autre chose. Elle a cessé d’être une donnée brutale, fatale, de la nature. Elle est devenue, tout à l’opposé, un choix contrariant de celle-ci, un choix de l’esprit. » (19) j’ai pensé toute de suite d’elle, de Coco, tellement intéressée par le lien entre les deux femmes en cette aspect) les images dessinées avec telle de détail singulier… ça veut dire que Duras n’écrit pas des phrases mouillé de couleurs, de description intrique, de méthodes romantiques. Elle écrit, ayant trouvé le couleur clé, comme une minimaliste. C’est fait parfaitement pour dire tout ce qu’on peut dire de la scène avec un demi-mot, un demi-sourire, un clin de la lumière qui passe sur l’image telle qu’on peut imaginer l’image complète.

Ah oui, elle écrit comme elle s’habille : une chose distincte dit tout. Et bien, il y a des instances où elle prenne plus du temps décrire son panorama, mais elle ajoute ces instances dans un manier de suggère la portée de sa mémoire ici. Quand elle écrit plus de romantique qu’une minimaliste, ce n’est pas vraiment un changement du style mais plutôt comme elle le souviens. Il y a des expériences qui restent vivid… elle nous les donne vivid : « Toutes les chaises sont sur les tables, toute la maison ruisselle, le piano du petit salon a les pieds dans l’eau. L’eau descend par les perrons, envahit le préau vers les cuisines. Les petits boys sont très heureux, on est ensemble avec les petits boys, on s’asperge, et puis on savonne le sol avec du savon de Marseille. Tout le monde est pieds nus, la mère aussi. La mère rit. La mère n’a rien à dire contre rien. La maison tout entière embaume, elle a l’odeur délicieuse de la terre après l’orage, c’est une odeur qui rend fou de joie surtout quand elle est mélangée à l’autre odeur, celle du savon de Marseille, celle de la pureté, de l’honnêteté, celle du linge, celle de la blancheur, celle de notre mère, de l’immensité de la candeur de notre mère. » (74). Tous les détails expriment une histoire, oui, mais je veux dire qu’ils indiquent quelque chose en plus : d’une mémoire bien protégée dans sa tête, des couleurs qui restent complets. Des odeurs qui restent complets. Des expressions autour d’elle, sont récrées avec une force complémentaire directement à la force de sa mémoire.

Donc son style : infusée avec l’honnêteté. L’honnêteté crue. Comme elle. Pendant plusieurs histoires amoureuses sont écrites avec une tendance à la gentillesse, elle regard tout également : à quel point a-t-elle été cruelle ? Bienfaisante ? Pensez : est-ce qu’il y a les motives bienfaisante en face du passion ? En face de la jeunesse surtout? « [...] il dit qu’il sait déjà que lui je le tromperai et aussi que je tromperai tous les hommes avec qui je serai. [...] Je suis heureuse de tout ce qu’il m’annonce je le lui dis. » (52-53). Ayant lu cela, je regards la plupart des autres histoires de l’amour fou filtré. On a l’habitude de garde les choses les plus belles, laisse les malheurs sur l’autre côté de la rue. Par là je dis qu’elle est un vrai écrivain, un être qui la regard assez objectif et puis écrit qu’est qu’elle voit avec sa voix subjective. Elle écrit fraîchement de ses impressions de lui et quoi telles impressions invoque dedans son esprit: « Il sent bon la cigarette anglaise, le parfum cher, il sent le miel, à force sa peau a pris l’odeur de la soie, celle fruitée du tussor de soie, celle de l’or, il est désirable. » (52). Je demande encore du concept de l’amour : l’amour est sacré, beaux, abstrait… souvent impossible d’avoir. Est-ce que ce concept grâce à le pouvoir que nous le donnons en le comprenons mystérieux ? Remarquez qu’elle ne cache pas les raisons pour son désire. C’est simple en fait. C’est honnête. Tous les indices de la richesse lui tiennent. Duras nous dit que l’amour est toujours accessible si on accepte qu’il n’est pas sacré ou divine. L’amour est humain, comme nous.

Je veux dire que chez Duras, l’amour n’est pas beau. L’amour est beau et affreux.

Comme ses autres romans, elle parle de sa famille. La famille était folle. J’essaye comprendre grandis dan cette maison, mais je n’arrive pas. J’imagine, c’est tout. En lisent j’existe seulement dans les ombres de ses mots. J’essaye sa vie noire comme un chapeau dans le miroir, fascinée. Et voilà… même si les scènes sont les scènes étranges à moi, elle parle toujours des émotions (honnêtes, crus) que je connais bien. Elle présent son amant à sa famille. Sa famille le voir autrement, son frère aîné l’humilié. On veux qu’elle s’oppose son frère, qu’elle expie pour leur haine, que malgré leur présence, elle aime son amant chinois. Mais ici elle se trouve être parti de sa famille. Elle ne peut pas échapper l’avis de son frère. Proche à son frère, elle se sent autrement qu’ailleurs. Oui. Je vois trop pleinement. Je ne dirais pas avant, mais je l’ai fait. Le niveau d’amour que j’ai pour quelqu’un ne dépend que de moi, mais aussi sûr les autres autour de moi. Les autres nous changent profondément, plus profondément que nous comprenons. « En présence de mon frère aîné», elle écrit, « il cesse d’être mon amant. Il ne cesse pas d’exister mais il ne m’est plus rien. Il devient un endroit brûlé. Mon désir obéit à mon frère aîné, il rejette mon amant. » (64).

Comme j’ai senti après ma première roman d’Henry Miller, je veux trouver plus de ses mots toute de suite. Je ne veux pas les images, les émotions, la musique arrêter, même s’ils cassent mon cœur.

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is my introduction to Henry Miller. As he was introduced to many in the first moments of his career, I found him through Anaïs Nin. It happens that learning a new language is made infinitely more delicious when erotica is thrown in the mix (whether that be the mind or the body doing the work). So I read Henry and June immediate my depart pour la France and was consumed with a desire to meet Miller myself, voir si les mots si extasiants, quoi Nin m’avait dit, me séduira aussi. I like being seduced. So when last in Dharma books (last for all and forever, as the space is now emptied and abandoned) and found the spine of Big Sur (though searching for something of André Gide at the time) I took it at once… the time had come… and wandered up the street a ways to get some coffee with the first chapter.

That I was entrapped for the next two hours should come to little surprise to those who know me intimately. What does surprise and delight was the ease that his voice found me. That I can now, le livre bien fini, recite verbatim an army de ses phrases. It is a voice so naturally taken to the page that it sings by it and finds the mind in a state as if you’d been listening to music making what he has written a melody impossible to forget. Seals like little worms he said, fog like creeping silence and stars he said, mountains the shape of Venus on her side, of Aladdin lamps and water colors… the words complete to tumble about my head.

It is a curious thing to come upon a writer when they have reached the stage of writer-philosopher. I get the sense, during the moments of pure narration, that I’m seeing him as he’s always been: someone who takes it all in to resurrect later with a bit of ink. Then there are moments of philosophy, disguised as tangents that spin his subject (matter) at a million different angles so that we might see them more clearly. This is the matured wine, so to speak, when a story can now longer simply be a story since every element blooms demanding expansion. A perfect descriptor of his style (as realized in this text at least) can be found on page 71 as Miller introduces Gilbert Neiman, “In this condition [l'ivresse] his talk matched his walk. He literally wove his way through a subject — Leopardi, for instance, or the Tantras, or Paul Valéry — taking the most dangerous detours, hurdling impossible barriers, retracing his steps with infallible accuracy, falling, picking himself up, resorting to pantomime when out of breath or at a loss for the right words… He could come back to the exact place where he had left off- at the beginning of what was meant to be a parenthesis- an hour, two hours, later.” To wit: in eulogizing Jean Wharton, the something-of-a-mystic who would gift Miller a house: “ In performing her duties she innocently believed that she was awakening the afflicted to the nature and existence of the true source of power and health, of peace and joy. But, like all who have made the experiment, she gradually came to perceive that people are not interested in the divine power which is theirs but only in finding an intermediary who will undo that havoc they have wrought through stupidity or meanness of soul.” (136). He goes on to describe this humanity, who cannot extract themselves from their pettiness and ego, the necessary task before healing. Why we should be unhappy is a question we should pose only to ourselves. Where one might find god is but merely a search of the self. (He didn’t go so far to say that in inventing god, we’ve inventing the means by which we may live a life of paradise, I said that, but he insists throughout the book as it warrants that completeness of self extracts the poison of lonely living as the ego would leave us.) Just at the moment of forgetting Wharton, he comes back to her with an emphatic “THEREFORE” and what can be said except, “why look at that. I do know her.”

His talk of healing, thank god, little resembles the ilk of similarly-aged men. The direction he takes here in chapter 7 stays the course, and what resurgence the theme makes takes again his first argument: the body is the head or the soul is the body and you are part of us and we are part of you and Nijinsky! The sea! Un corps immense quoi… stop trying to amputate yourself from the larger body, consumed singular pains, and join the dance.

Which brings me to my favorite part of the book: Part Three Paradise Lost which is dedicated to a Conrad Moricand, an astrologer fallen from grace that Miller’d met in Paris just before the war drove him south to Greece. The unfortunate Moricand, whose agonies would manifest as a corporal sore, an anxious scratch, and the legs of a leper. Sickly, sickly, (and at this point inhabiting Miller’s studio space in Big Sur) Miller finds a doctor to give Moricand a look-over, “He was a capable all-round physician, a surgeon and a psychiatrist to boot,” (328). The examination takes place, a rather drawn out affair as the psychiatrist in him takes the reins, and then Miller escorts the doctor to his car, “ ‘There’s nothing to do,’ he said. ‘When he stops thinking about it the itch will disappear.” This passage had me nostalgic for that holistic approach to medicine that most doctors had taken, at once time, as a matter of fact. However, goodness, there was much more to Part Three than Moricand’s sickness. This was a character whose life inspired Miller’s most philosophical observations and encapsulated a negative by which Miller developed a positive. This was a character that Miller had known outside of Big Sur’s paradise. By him we saw the streets of Paris again, the social simmer before the war came to a rolling boil, the stream of French memories (memories made in French I’d like to say, a world altogether different) translatable only by a meticulous retracing de la vie quotidienne, of a walk taken before breakfast that leaves observation to the wayside and leaves us only with the stimuli.

By him Miller condenses his personal philosophy and gives us a long-winded speech, waiting years perhaps to take form so succinctly in three pages, which had, “ouai, ouai!” at my lips. One had the sense in fact, much like you’d had the sense in starting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for example, that THE SPEECH was the why and wherefore everything else had been written… that it all lead to this. (That is, I insist, where the similarities between Rand and Miller end in a way most final. I amuse myself imagining them meeting and what diagnosis Miller would wring her through.) Highlights: “Why is everything so complicated, so difficult, so obscure, so unsatisfactory? Because we have made ourselves the center of the universe, because we want everything to work out as we wish it. What we need to discover is what it wishes, call it life, mind, God, whatever you please [...] Man can eliminate war, can eliminate disease, can eliminate old age and probably death too. [...] All these conditions are within his province, within his power, to alter. But he can never alter them as long as he is concerned solely with his own individual fate.” (325; italics my own).

Though advised to begin with Tropic of Cancer or The Time of the Assassins, Big Sur fell to my hands just so and I’m not against starting near the end and retracing the others. (He makes mention at one point in the book the nature of knowledge, if I can now compare, mon connaissance de lui, contre le savoir en général … that knowledge is a wheel of cheese that begins expanding at the first bite.) Having taken that first bite, I’m at sea in brie… for he not only gave me reason to continue reading his own novels, but he name drops (Miller is a cloud. And he rains names.) in such a way as to ignite my curiosity for hundreds of other writers and painters and musicians… so calmly he mentions them as if, naturally, I’d be on familiar terms with Restif, or Lester Reardon or Cendrars. With equal reverence he will weave in unknowns, he’s retained all of their names, with whom he’s crossed paths and what an impression in that road!

For what is, after all, accomplished by Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch? Tout simplement, for there is no plot, an extended character list… what an actor my be asked to do in the quiet of his own mind given the part of so-and-so, whereby Miller fleshes out des pensées. I’d started the read assuming a more psalms-y prose of Big Sur’s natural beauty. Mais non, la nature joue un rôle naturel, une présence constante où tout ce qui se passera la scène ne peut rien dire de plus de sa beauté. Instead, the characters walk along the ridge, those meandering cliffs’ edges, disappear, perhaps to be never seen again… leaving behind their perfume only that Miller bottles with the passion of a gourmand en face la belle vie.

My bed is made of golden down
sunken head abuzz ‘cause
we’re tracing a crown     had
Stayed watching the lights of
passing headlamps like a lantern
searching for a keyhole
whose key I’ve had about my neck
since age of ten when
there was still a garden and
rusty things to uncover there
Sliding in neatly please
unlock the wall     starts to move.
And what a room Alice cried.
Oh where am I oh where am I?
How is it at once a lake
at once a shore where the sand is
dry ice holding me hot and lacing
us in frost I see an eagle cleaning
her feathers about to make for the sky.
(In the world we’d left a brawl
and thrown beer bottles are heard
as if in a glass jar) we step into the water
and swim with the lights
They are ceaselessly searching
for more rooms to hide.

I am guilty of

mistaking paint for blood

Wasn’t the correlation direct? Between what you colored her red ankles and how you feel

in the every moment existing? Your brush is an extension of your bones, n’est pas? Black a mirror pool of your own night and rose, dear smudged light-damaged red, the last ten minutes of sleeping?

Tell me please that this piece is you and not simply “Yours” because you don’t own shit. I’ve already seen it… there’s no reclaiming.

::: Roland Barthes ::: Death of the Author ::: Birth of the Reader ::: Consciousness in Seeing :::

Ugggh my mistake if this what you’ll go so far to call “art” was but a role-play. A practice of seeing the regard of others before moving your hand, crippling your own fingers under the pressure of their imagined presence… quelle damage. L’art, répétez après moi, est défini par l’origine: la vérité. AS you are ME and HIM or HER (somehow in moments and fits of wanting), think no longer of what they(we) shall see. Creer sous la submission des yeux imaginaires is too make what you’ve made, so to say, unreal.

He turned his eyes upon mine and asked a question to forever torture philosophers, “And art is … ?” I sat, imagine perhaps, an elf upon a polka-dotted mushroom cap chin-in-hands forever pondering ART’s wayward particulars and suggested,

“A relevant response to another artist, which is why,” I continued excitedly, “nous avons besoins des critiques car ils suivent les conversations artistiques… they know, we hope, if a pair of purple lips placed just so is a reference to [...]” (And goodness knows how darling the mouth in the heat of such conversation: lips to take on that metallic sheen particular of Daniel Craig just before uncoiling).

Anyway, I’d felt satisfied with my naïve response up until thinking of Merce Cunningham whose initial performances in Berlin were meet with hissing tomatoes. Reception plays its part I’m sure, critics play another… but this is but a dance around what several million sensibilities just gave birth to.

And truth keeps on finding me. Art’s, somehow, the equation in reverse. (2 + 2 = something that is true.) To define art, we must go about defining this first.

It was maroon, that paint. It lifted easily from the porcelian and washed down the drain.

L’encre sur mes mains n’est pas sorti si facilement.

I know you he said

Kissing the black stains between my fingers.

It will be resurrected again and again. Easter morning: “What constitutes intelligence?” Do we define ourselves intelligent according to what we know, or perhaps, the speed of computation, then again, application of things known in the face of the unknown? Can we claim intellectual capital upon information we store elsewhere ourselves? Can I, knowing Wikipedia exists, consider this supplementary to the information my own mind contains thereby staking a higher claim on our intellectual totem pole?

So no: intelligence is not what we know. I feel as if we’ve known this since we started to write, whose naissance, for the record, was to unburden the mind from data. This same spirit initiated the Renaissance… know that just before an incredible explosion of creativity, students memorized verbatim the Illiad and then wondered, “That known… what now?” Yes, if the brain’s got pat a scroll of verse ready-said forever and ever, Macbeth was only too correct calling out, “LIFE. C’est juste une scène qui ne signifi rien.” But do you know what’s more frightening than forgetting who directed π (for example) is forgetting like-typed names all the time, nevertheless finding imbd with a steady hand neverminding how shaky les nuerosis may be (Darren Aronofsky). Indulge me the following flashback: “Yeah,” he said, “I’d trouble remembering names too. But I can’t credit early dementia. I just think that I didn’t care much for people.” Permit, therefore, your great-aunt reel off the names of great-niece Claire’s four sons (despite not having talked to her for four years now)… wave of sound, dance of mouth, keeps the data in keeping and what data you keep (like if or not) says something intrinsic about your being.

I, for one, welcome wiki wiki existence, welcome any abstraction willing to unload my memory from unnecessaries, yet only to the extent that my capacity to store what pleases me doesn’t atrophy from disuse. Here’s the brain, after all, as physical as any other appendage, and (as any piano player will tell you) muscles remember things. L’immédiaté de savoir est sa force. Fine, Einstein, I’ve left several dates on the external drive: laisser la tête libre penser des choses de plus importe. The mad scientific wet-dream of every human being a neuron pulsing with electrical excitement at each exchange of information like little bulbs on the broadband circuit sleeps with me too. Mais attendez: my heart remembers nights around the fireside looking into her eyes and drinking mulled wine reciting a stream of dialogue from Steel Magnolias and feeling our minds running thus close, côté à côté, side by side.

Mind you, it so happens that forgetting can be a socially solidifying force as well… ahem example: hello fellow human, I need you, for you remember this sequence of colors and I have not. Please, second brain, help me restructure my elusive rainbow. But such a connection is touch and go in tangled necessity, a passing of the baton and not (cue that moment over mulled wine) a Sunday afternoon run where his footfalls catch each one of mine from mile one to mile five.

I stand by argument initial. Intelligence is the mind making easy conversation with cross-disciplinary sectors, that, given the following, all possible solutions can be expressed with some finesse. Then I started talking about firesides, after all doubting, that thinking is all the the mind has been evolved to do. The same parts of the mind that gives our subjectivity an emotional level is that that remembers the creak of the floor, the sound of his voice, whether or not she has a baby sister, the second verse…

Someone asked me what I thought of the following wiki. And as I usually am (I ricochet from black and white in a desperate attempt to keep the two side straddle-able) was torn on the subject.