1.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to ask where, when or how such a thing starts. We are so used to setting off from, that definitive place; a relevant compass point where return is also possible. When we find ourselves simply here or there with no markers, we idly question its importance, much like being on a random street having aimlessly, pleasurably, come to that location at a time which can be nothing but fate, or at least the setting aside of hours and adherence to geography which transforms an ordinary landscape into one of delightful unreality. One is as good as the other. My page was an unfamiliar street, her appearance in it that of a person whom, all these random elements combined, is delivered next to you at precisely the moment. She could have been anyone; there could have been no other. When the time is right, the world yields bodies and paper, full of ripeness and warmth in gestures and pages. You will know them by their bounty. In this city, on this page, lost in the skins of which I overlap like translucent maps, how did I recognise you?
2.
The rhythm and sound of one foot in front of the other on the pavement is an incantation, a reverie. Un rêve … I had a recollection, no doubt brought on by passing several restaurants, those olfactory and gustatory memory palaces whose elements of scent and taste offer a palette for anyone to repaint scenes of their lives, of chopping a shallot from which a milky liquid spilled. She told me that in Venice one year, the Biennale was titled Il latte dei sogni, the milk of dreams. There was a pavilion of women, artists whose works overflowed—here my mind produces the non-word overflowered, which is just as appropriate. As she told it, it was an overflowing, an overflowering of women in all forms and mediums. A garden of women from which flow dreams, and vice versa …
She described one of these pieces to me, a series of black-and-white photos, a woman’s face next to a typewriter. In one image you saw her open dark-lipsticked mouth, tongue protruding. In another, her curved tongue extends further to lick the keys. In the third, the tongue, now straightened, touches the tip of the metal … what is it called? My school days with such lessons are long behind me. Never mind. Call it the back arm, extension of the key, the shaft. So obviously phallic, and Barthes came to mind, but now cast in almost comical innocence. This was no rubbing of language against the other, soft and shy. This is a memory only known to those familiar with the machine: when one begins to type, everything is cold. Fingers, keys, ink. But as the tension grows—for the muscles of hands, mind, and desire are all exercised—everything grows warmer, even hot. Metal, blood, and thoughts all rise to fever pitch.
A declaration to lick—the dual meaning seems not unintentional—the keyboard into submission, point her strict tongue at whichever words she chose, charming them into forming sentences according to her will. It made no difference that the keys were of plastic. The intent of metal and its heat was present; I could only watch from the other side of a screen, the sudden and vivid garden of words which was her overflowering. I realise I am now conflating the artist with her. A milky liquid came forth, but instead of the white from a leaf or stem or the points between us, it was ribbon black, curling round us both.
This was how she introduced herself to me, as if we had already been speaking for weeks or months or even years, in that white page of a random street corner, one stranger quietly remarking on something to the other as their distant bodies occupy a proximity more suited to lovers. Blanchot writes of Joubert’s diary that ‘it is … with the most profound intimacy, with the search for this intimacy, for the path to reach it and the space of words with which this intimacy must in the end mingle, that his narrative is formed for us.’ Space and intimacy: the words that flower from them, spilling their milk and seeds, the words that grow, starting in black and white, then saturating the page with colour like an intense bleeding, unwilling and unable to be stemmed …
I have never known how she came upon my address or why she chose to speak to me, but I stopped wondering after the first deluge of messages which was like being caught in a sudden shower. After all, was the point of where she came from as important as her being here now?
*
(Dear ____,
… It was a hot day and it wasn’t really my intention to go to the Biennale, as I anxious of fighting crowds in that heat, my mask already making me ultra-aware of each breath pressing back against my lips once it left me. I didn’t even know the theme or what to expect, but once there, the coolness of the rooms full of women took my breath away. Coolness so often equals frigidity in that context: a denigration, a dismissal. Do you know how it’s said that a person—and maybe it is also true of animals, but we are one and the same—cannot distinguish between extreme heat and extreme cold? Both burn, leaving the mind confused as to the body’s experience. Here were rooms of everyone from Paula Rego and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami to Mirella Bentivoglio and Birgit Jürgenssen. Allegories and metaphors, blunt statements about bodies, experience, desires. Life both formal and fantasised.
I felt the sweat on my body beneath my dress, not yet evaporated. As I moved from work to work I was sweating even more, a clean but animalic release gathering between my legs, a direct reaction to what surrounded me. Then I saw her work: the virginal-white typewriter keys, the darkness of her red tongue and lips imagined in the black and white images. Taking of control of words and communication, articulating dreams and wants which were not to be transcribed by anyone but herself. She opened and lashed out, at how we are perceived as communicators, delicate fingertips to delicate thoughts … virgins, veils, gloves … ideals and ways of preventing us from directly experiencing the world.
I suddenly remembered that anecdote about extremes; I felt as if I were burning but not necessarily from heat. How can I explain this to you? Maybe I can’t—it is by instinct. You know or you won’t, and as a result, you will know me too, or not. It was like seizing both poles, feeling them fighting somewhere inside of you. The clash made me feel alive; it was power, seeing the fruition of the infinite possibilities of women that must have also come from that familiar, contradictory fire. These were women as they were and wanted to be seen … they put forth into the world what they saw. As it is with life, I noticed the works around me contained both the entangled real and unreal, though the artist alone knows which is which. For us it should remain instinctual, an uninterpreted dream.)
*
3.
The wind picks up at this time of night. Alone bar the few of us wandering the streets like a sigh, it touches, examines everything in its reach as if to reassure itself of its purpose in the world. Leaves, papers, bottles, the hem of a coat, my hair. I looked down to see something caught against my shoe. Instead of kicking it back into the breeze, I reached for it. To my surprise it was a copy of one of those vintage advertisements they sell to tourists at the bouquinistes’ stalls alongside carefully arranged volumes, dream-souvenirs representing the elegance of a now-imaginary city. Instead of the typical images of Tournée du Chat Noir or Kina Lillet, it was a page made up of shades of blue with a simple white line drawing of a woman’s neck and head in profile; her hair seemed windblown, set against a night or stormy sky. One hand with an extended finger pointed to, touched, spiked-petal flowers in full colour surrounding a fluted perfume bottle. Guerlain Fleur de Feu, it proclaimed. Fire Flower.
In my youth, or perhaps I should say extreme youth, as I am only in that limbo which represents the midpoint between not knowing whom one is and reflecting on the person one could have known, a school friend and I were walking aimlessly around our small town one night testing both grand and indifferent thoughts with one another like a ball thrown to and fro, when she remarked that when a person was in love, the name of the beloved appeared everywhere: bar and shop signs; scraps of torn packaging blown into one’s path; the vanity plates of passing cars; a fragment drifting from another conversation.
Later on, I realised this is what Barthes meant when he spoke of signs which must be interpreted by the lover. The unconscious forcing what it deemed of intimate urgency to the forefront of the mind and the senses. Like a fire alarm, she said. You know you should run away but your curiosity is too strong. At heart, we are creatures who wish to divine which paths to take, to ritualise our encounters, imbue them with a meaning that elevates both us and the objects of our devotion. Since that otherwise unremarkable night I have thought of love and lust, adoration and obsession as smoke and fire. A warning, certainly, but equally an invitation to step closer to the flames, the gentle tendrils of grey covering my eyes like a blindfold as I go towards what I do not know, heat my only instinct.
*
Hallucination No. 1
I stood examining the image for some time; perhaps a few minutes or an hour passed. Here was something I had no relation to, no knowledge of, and despite that, the recesses of my memory released an olfactory hallucination which stopped my body in both movements and time. Glimpsing myself in the dark reflection of a shop window, I resembled a statue searching for a pedestal, its perspective lost without its eyrie. What I was experiencing could be nothing but imaginary, because as I have said, I had no possible knowledge of this scent only encountered as an image on paper, brought into my life in the way only these streets have of delivering the strangest messages.
Fire: orange, red, yellow, black.
My memory brought forth the high drifting honey-sweetness of summer pollen, the knife-like clarity of invisible oils released from peeled citrus rinds. Overpowering masses of the darkest roses tinged with a decay that make the perceiver think for the briefest of delirious moments they were being bound and gagged with desiccated velvet ropes. Flesh and fungi, the warmth of rubbed amber pieces, resin of accumulated eras melting into skin. Fall leaves burning, logs having been dormant, seasoned over a summer, ready for their destiny. Blossoms and yearnings spark radiantly from flames and ashes.
*
4.
The architecture of the Centre Pompidou makes me think of communication in all forms: its elaborate structure of scaffolding and tubes immediately recall the old Paris pneumatique, its various messages banal and romantic, criss-crossing the city to their recipients. To imagine operatic dissolutions of relationships and urgent invitations to trysts flying beneath the feet of the unknowing populace, a parallel network of emotions to the etiquette of the city’s surface, is to understand how we divide ourselves between the expected and the desired. I could happily never place a foot inside, but instead spend the rest of my life regarding the building as solely a great temple to the strange eroticism of connection; how people find and move towards one another when they glimpse themselves at the opposite ends of a line of desire.
The trajectory of connection becomes a hunt where words are quarry, the sender’s arrow seeking to pierce both meaning and a receiver. Some of the tubes transform into hunter’s horns, calling out over the landscape of the city-forest, and my breath and heart stop for a moment. What is that about hunting and transgression? ‘The taboo cannot suppress pursuits necessary to life, but it can give them the significance of a religious violation.’ But the point of communication is not a killing, at least not where an element of the sexual exists. It suggests serious play, a catch-and-perhaps-release possession of the other. There is undeniably the pleasurable tension of being lured, ensnared … a primal trajectory one also goes willingly into is part of the ritual of communication as well.
I feel her words on the back of my neck, skin responding as if touched. Even as I walk I find myself instinctively turning my head or sensing a movement out of the corner of my eye, a tightness in my throat and body, an expectation of the desired unknown, seizing me completely. This must be what philosopher meant by violation: the sensation of the divine, echoes of ceremony still aching in our bones anticipating the knife or the flame. Perhaps I was wrong. A killing with pleasure; to be the sacrifice. Has there ever been a sacrifice that was not so, without a strange moment of joy in fulfilment to come, knowing one fulfils? In the depths where one can only feel, we long for the pleasure of such ceremonies.
Reading one sleepless night, the writer waiting for a letter which never arrives, he quotes Montaigne: ‘hunting without killing is like loving without sexual pleasure’. In the sudden confusion of a momentarily blinding flush of heat, I realised that without knowing how, it is she who watches me exposed on these streets with a hunter’s patience. Actaeon has glimpsed Diana’s body through her words: they now await the dogs which may tear them apart or bring them to their mistress, whatever her will may be.
5.
It was a mistake, I was certain. When I received the first, despite my name at the beginning of the letter, the email address which could have been no one else’s, I read through with the half-shyness, half-excitement of reading something you think is meant for someone else, the privacy of the screen not unlike the voyeur’s window or keyhole. This was a conversation already in progress: it lacked the formal, slight withholding of one person initially writing to another, before the arrival of the sentence which resembles a ribbon being pulled away, inviting further unwrapping. She arrived, ribbon undone, words spilling as if she were hundreds of turned-down leaves in a book, impatient to show the reader its sentences. Her descriptions were elaborate as her mind wandered with the freedom of a person entirely at their ease. It was a form of nakedness: not exposure for the sake of it or an obvious attempt at attention, but a revelling in words the way some are naturally comfortable in their skin, a linguistic revealing that saw no shame in itself or in the thoughts of others.
While I did not think of her as vulnerable, there is no doubt the state of being naked in such a way—in any way—necessarily inhabits vulnerability, an exposure that says, I am here. There is nothing but me; it is everything I can offer you. It is all I can offer you. These words may seem the same, but all holds the precious suggestion that one gives oneself, even at the risk of having nothing of themselves afterwards. The sacrifice as gift. Are you familiar with those little whirlwinds of sand that sometimes appear out of nowhere in a desert? Content in amusing themselves with whatever lies in front of them, they play, disappearing as suddenly as they came, different to the winds of the night streets which always struck me as longing, searching for something it could never find. This is how I saw her, once I realised it was me, a stranger in her path. What is the French? Le tourbillon. But I found myself wishing with the same force that she would not go back to wherever she had emerged, beyond the page. Breton wrote that ‘life is other than what one writes’. Yet the writing which appeared and the writing that was to come became a life of its own, consuming all others.
There is a film whose name I cannot recall, made up of nothing but images from black-and-white nitrate movies in various states of decay, beginning with a Sufi dervish captured spinning, whirling seemingly into eternity. The interplay of shadows resulting from a lack of colour, the holy and the degraded become beautiful and contradictory. Weaving narratives of light from the disparate knowledge it holds, chaos is transformed into beauty for those who are able to see strange connections. It is impossible to see the film without considering it a celluloid scrying of one’s life. Each patch of degradation representing loss and change, reading into its flickerings and ruptures in an attempt to divine. What I tell you about these letters as I walk seems as fragile and random as those shifting images, yet I feel those indelible words with their silver-black flames engulfing my skin as my mind spins in ecstasy … one palm up, the other down. Towards my memories, towards her devouring luminosity.
6.
The city aches, heavy with the atmospheric pressure of a storm in approach. There is no gesture or movement one can make which does not emphasise this; both streets and its inhabitants are in thrall to the emotional weight that dictates our lives. Waiting for a release which never quite comes there is a sensitivity which affects the senses. A heightened awareness of bodies and breath; the scent of arousals and despairs; the infinitesimal changes of pitch in voices signalling the turmoil which lies under the skin; the taste in the mouth that comes with a sensation of being caught. It reminds me of the near-unbearable frisson of the dance-like movements—body entwining around body—taught to Michel, learning how to pick a pocket in Bresson’s movie: the too-close physical proximity which only teases distance, an awareness that something is happening but not knowing when the exact moment is to come…
‘Which fingers should I use?
I knew I must try harder.’
This described me, as awkward as a novice and eager to be admitted into a secret space where we danced, the hovering of fingers, the stealing and replacement of words, silent and close … but this is also what the city does. Paris is simply a map of abstractions and desires, its arrondissements territories we wander in and out of, dazed by the sensory information which captures us: light both artificial and natural; the scents of the bodies which tell the stories of affluence and poverty; the visual seductions of the goods in its windows, from patisserie to perfume; the sonic layering of voices in love and disagreement; the very feel of the city beneath your fingertips: the stem of a glass, the curve of an old street lamp, the rough bark of a tree that stands alone in a side street’s miniscule square, silently observing the ages that pass before it.
Paris, as Calvino and Baldwin have both written, is a city which everything has already been said, a city which exists through its literature, first and foremost … or perhaps it is always how it has appeared to the writer or reader. These things are both true. But like repeating a word until it loses its shape and meaning in the mouth, Paris only becomes new when it has saturated the senses in the way a dream permeates our conscious and unconscious, leaving us wondering where the separation lies, if there is one. When the glass stem becomes an extension of our fingers, the tree bark our skin, the noise of the crowds our inner voices turned out, the city becomes a wonder and a mystery again, just as we become a wonder to ourselves. If the city is one of images, it transforms to one of being: breathing and aching in its new awareness, a glimpse of its beauty reflected in the eyes of its river surface, windows, café glasses.
But whether in the great gardens and woods, or the concrete and stone, metal and glass structures in which we play at being animals or people, there is no beauty that does not acknowledge a melancholy of pleasure, the realisation that happiness cannot be held for very long, no pain that does not search for a consoling tongue to lick its wounds. The dirt and grey of the streets reminds one that humanity is low, but only in the sense that that lowness is the bone-deep communality of this earth without which nothing could spring forth. Low though we all are, it best places us to soak up the glorious rains which eventually arrive, making us briefly one with the city. Only in that moment will we be released and uplifted; divine.
7.
It is true that the city is lit in these hours, forever watching, but the artificial eyes are never able to cast their light onto every corner or figure. In the hinterlands of my vision the shadows of buildings and trees and the odd person remaining elongate, merging into each other; shapes ordered upon an eternal dark path. The narrator of The Blind Owl, lost in dreams and obsession, describes his fevered surroundings: ‘A wonderful sense of tranquillity pervaded my whole being … The sides of the road were lined with weird houses of individual geometrical shapes with forlorn, black windows.’ I told myself that unlike him, I was not mad. I turned the words silently on my tongue until they echoed relentlessly in my head: a bell that tolled for a church, for a city with no occupants except the ones who walked and walked, holding the reverberation in their bodies like a caged bird.
I wandered the night streets fully conscious, aware of both body and mind yet lacking the tranquil resignation of the narrator. In our separate ways, afflicted. There seemed no other way of stating it. Afflicted with curiosity, a presence that was not put off by its own absence. Maybe this was madness, as I could not untangle them to find where its sanity lay. These buildings and houses which flanked me at every step were as forlorn and blackened at this hour as his dream architecture, but only for lack of the distractions of money, noise and attention that render such establishments, often falsely, alive.
Imagine if the romance of the absent filled them with spectres instead. I turned away from the empty street towards the nearest shop. The large window was lit only by a grey moon, sparks of gold and silver blinking from within the shadows. A black arched doorway off to the left, above which in gold letters half-read: GUERLAIN. Those who look for signs will find their meaning. I looked back at the window, which I now noticed was lined with bottles, and inside, lining shelves, were more. Ordered rows not unlike the narrator’s dream; what only hinted at colour in this otherwise monochromatic time would be blinding in metallic light by day. Every bottle held a liquid which in its turn held an infinity of memories. I imagined people sliding in and out of unstoppered flacons, boneless and weightless like something out of Chagall’s blue paintings; apparitions of desire.
Loss clung to them regardless, expanding like the steady weaving of a spider obeying its instinct, beautiful webs standing as reminders that we were all creatures bound by some intuition as much as we lauded our free will. I was not mad, I told myself again. If I was not, why did she only appear in the strange and solitary spaces so akin to dreams?
8.
What are you wearing, she once asked. I took this at first for one those clumsy attempts at seduction that we have all done at some point, removed from direct sight of the other. But it was I who was clumsy. On playfully responding, her answer, though immediate and teasing, gave a sense of impatience channelled through her fingers that questioned my intelligence; perhaps even the value of her time. No, she said. What scent are you wearing. I came to know that scent was to skin not just an expression of taste but mood and even their omission in the wearer, a sort of intricate evaluation of personality I had never before known. I say personality, yet at times in her elaborate questioning of my olfactory history—of which I always felt was scant, but she showed me it was, in fact, rich—I felt as if I were being psychologically and physically examined, a peering into a psyche and body via the fragrant or not, as the experience might be. What differentiates unseen animals leaving scent markings for each other and two people, also unseen, writing? Only self-awareness, although we do not even have that at times.
You marked me with scents I know only by instinct and response. What are we doing here? We are touching each other at a distance: circling this white space, ancient animals in a new territory.
*
(Dear _____,
Amongst Louise Bourgeois’s writings, there is this from 1958. I only give you a fragment:
‘I was always conscious of a
possibility of silence falling like the
lid of a grave and engulfing me for ever and ever.
The silence invaded the room
and I was afraid to hear my heart
beat, this danger was coming from within
and that this only an incessant flow of
words could keep it at bay if not
master it.’
I don’t know why I write that, other than a distant awareness these letters are the lifting of something; if it isn’t the lid of a grave, then like the opening of a window to feel a breeze one thought forever stilled, the instinctual familiarity of a scent, a sense which awakens the memory and make me realise that what was, has hope of once again being. What do we do when we feel that after so long? We seize it, stalk it in the way animals do: the sign that the other is another like us and not a stranger. Pupils dilate and fingertips quiver, senses sharpen and take in the world again in brightness and clarity, almost too bright and too sharp; we know it might both blind and cut us, but it’s the price we’re willing to pay to recognise our own breath again. You wrote to me about Paris being like a coming storm: we know so well the mineral scent of petrichor. Apres moi, apres toi. But what is the scent of skin after such a flood as this?)
*
Hallucination No. 2
Once, in the daylight of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I walked past a shop which struck me as odd, enough that I turned back to look at its front to satisfy my curiosity. After a moment or two, I realised exactly what had disturbed me: there was no brand above or on the door, only PARFUMERIE. The shelves behind the counter were sparsely lined with medicinal-style bottles with codes, and though after looking through the window, I saw that it was indeed belonging to a specific brand, albeit quietly marked with plain typewritten cream labels noting the name and date of creation. I never went inside, but after our first conversation about scent, it came to mind in the way memory brings together pieces of information in an attempt to fit them together like a puzzle. I recalled her gentle chiding about fragrance and her admission of a love of fire and wood, the illusion of the warmth of skin and fur. An olfactory ghost appeared, draping that sense with a veil which smelled of a fire made of gathered wood fully cognizant of its being, exposed skin to its flames warming to a heat only matched by feeling. It seemed to me that I could also recognise the unmistakeable scent of the warming fur of a pet instinctually indulging its half-dormant primal nature by curling close to the logs then stretching, a gesture of safety in a place it somehow understood as home. It was tinged with both sweetness and acridity: crumbling wood turning to ash, the vanillic-animalic odours of flesh which in its totality smelled ageless and mystical. As the scented ghost lingered in its scarlet-licked imaginary, I recalled the words of Bachelard: ‘fire is within us and outside of us, invisible and dazzling, spirit and smoke’. I remembered the etymology of the word perfume has something to do with smoke as well, realised that these hallucinations too were a ritual in reading each other; a sensing of each other through this strange veil.
*
9.
There are times when the most unlikely of thoughts collide to form familiar realisations. Just now, sitting here reading about hands and their role in creativity and human connection, I shivered. It is near freezing today and I cannot seem to warm myself, one of the certain markers of age coming towards you with ungracious rapidity. A city like London has an antipathy towards any truly cold weather; normally being so temperate, it is as if the city finds it hard to believe it is subject to such an indignity as a more Northern European or Scandinavian climate. The romance there is to be had in the cold here in Paris or Berlin or Copenhagen is instead met there with the belligerence of a person who mutters irritably under their breath at seeing a publicly amorous couple.
That shiver instantly reminded me of the Aickman story ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’, about a man who falls in love sight unseen with a woman who he has only ever spoken to on the phone; not just that, but he can only speak to her when she calls, for he has no means of contacting her himself. As supernatural as the story was, it occurred to me it was no less true here, within the boundaries of our created logic. I was at her mercy, if mercy is the word I want, and I cannot think of another more appropriate. People touch without touching, in the sense the hands are not used in the typical manner. But it is still touch. I do not know how else to describe what happens when you feel someone else’s words against your skin and burrowing into your senses, every bit as electric and tactile as if you had felt the warmth of their flesh. The keyboard again: touching by proxy, the communication of emotion and intent which has its own voice while appearing voiceless.
*
Hallucination No. 3
Today, in the middle of responding to one of her letters, I froze. In my nose and on my tongue was that dark bitterness of my childhood, the ink-ribbon of the typewriter. It was so strong that I dropped my hands and shut my eyes, feeling my mouth salivate as if I had been sucking my fingers after attempting to revive the dried ribbon. I was certain I had not recalled that memory in decades, yet my mind and body behaved as if I was five again, sitting at the dining-room table covered with the white damask cloth, clothed for guests that rarely arrived. The bitter darkness of ink, almost metallic. It is a smell that fits itself more than most: I can imagine the scent of apples matching flowers or sun-warmed grain interchangeable with animal fur, but ink is simply ink. It smells dark, of the abyss, though not negatively; it is where everything is possible. A few years ago I had a strange experience when I picked up a bottle of new perfume at a shop, not expecting anything of the new offerings. More than anything, I was intrigued and amused by the name: Encre Noire by Lalique. It was a black glass cube with a brown wood top, mimicking an ink bottle or well. But on smelling it, I shivered, though no other memory attached itself to it. I simply shivered, a feeling of slight déjà vu … there was something trying to make itself known on my skin which I could not translate. Disturbed, I purchased a bottle, which for months I would apply a single spray each night before bed in some superstitious attempt at calling forth memory. But memory never came and I eventually put away the bottle. Freezing as I did in typing, what followed from the long-dormant memory of the typewriter was that familiar scent: not the ink-ribbon, but its kin, Encre Noire. Suddenly I knew the memory which had been at the edges of my consciousness when smelling the perfume had been the typewriter. It was she who brought it, full and dark with possibility, flooding through my body.
*
10.
It is a strange thing to have someone enter your life without certain markers of presence. I want to say physicality or tangibility, but they seem incorrect. I felt both those things, even if I could not grasp her. We reached out—what else would you call it? To some, perhaps many, it is not real. But no one says that the pain or love you feel after the passing of a loved one is no longer real. What was once rooted in a body is not now, or ever, negated by its lack of presence. So I argue this reverse I experience is the same. Will the body come later? I do not know. Whether it does or not, it is still here in its way to me; maybe this way is true. It does not fix the ideas of interest or attraction or curiosity to flesh, though the possibility of being made more real is always hovering in the background. It is more that you place a trust in the fact there is essentially none; on both sides, you could be anyone.
Words are changeable in meaning but at a point you make the decision to stabilise them; in doing so, shape a person. It is a form of sculpture, the hands every bit as important here as they would be with a lump of unformed clay. However, it makes no sense to me that unlike statuary, we become a single result. How could we? Our perspectives change: not only towards other people and experiences, but also ourselves.
It occurred to me that some would say that to trust and shape, at least with the intent towards an unseen other, can never end with how you imagined them. I would say this has been the case with myself so far in my own life, and do not see this changing. It is not insecurity or being unsure despite them being sometimes part of it, but more the inevitability of a life’s fluidity; even what we see as the most wretched lives are not static. I could never trust nor desire a person who did not see themselves in a constant state of change, or the possibilities that come from it. If there is the chance of pain in this, so be it; otherwise I would be nothing but a layer of dust, afraid of the movement of emotion. I admit fully there are times I am afraid. For the memory of pain, even if the specific experiences are no longer remembered, lives on in an aching reverberation in the body which can strike at the most random of times. If I say all this with her in mind, then I am equally aware that this is true in regard to me, however it is she sees me. Perhaps the best we can hope for in such circumstances is that the creation of desire is a collaboration. If it should be that the hands which touch the keyboard come together in the flesh one day, they will laugh and say what exists is for the pleasure of being mutually undone.
*
(Dear ____,
You quoted a line of Flusser’s to me which remains: ‘the beauty of the act of writing consists in realizing the words. Being a writer does not necessarily mean being a speaker’.[i] I spent a few nights thinking of it; I know you must think the way I came to you, suddenly and without preamble, I guess you could say, comes across as a forthrightness or courage which I think I have to admit I don’t know is true. I think it’s more the case that it’s easier to speak through fragility in a space like this, which is much harder outside amongst bodies and noise and the various deflections and masks we use to present ourselves in a perfect light to others. This place is in one sense not real, but at the same time it’s more real than our daily interactions with people can be … though more and more I find I trust people through their words first, because there is a nakedness here which cannot be hidden. To be naked is to be exposed, and most likely I will be hurt—that is, hurt myself, and I can’t blame anyone but myself if that is the case … ‘the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all’. When it inevitably happens I will try to bear the pain as best I can, though I know it is one which will be more intense than any others.
Sometimes I think the pain is what I want.
I also think, in that light, I use the word fragility specifically, and to me, it fits Flusser’s quote because it reminds me of the movie The American Friend: do you know it? There is a character, Jonathan, who is an ill picture framer. In one beautiful scene which has haunted me since I first watched it (and I have replayed it in my mind many times since): in silence, he takes a piece of gold leaf used for gilding his frames, and blows it onto his hand. The way the gold floats, then settles and melds with his skin is how I think of words. When the act of writing to someone takes hold and shapes itself to the other—writing without speaking, speaking without voice; a simple and sensual understanding. Do we gild each other in these letters, moving from creatures of wood to creatures of gold, bestowing a value and beauty upon each other which we did not recognise in ourselves before? The scene makes me cry with its beauty, and I can admit here that I am near tears, sometimes, when a letter moves me, when the screen disappears and all that is left is the gilding of your words on my skin. In life, we look for someone to frame us, to look upon us and read us; to be seen as precious objects, treasured words.)
*
11.
She had attached a photo of an experiment, moved by a scene in one of her favourite movies where the protagonist applies gold leaf to his skin in what she described as a quietly sensual moment. Laughingly, she explained how she had purchased a booklet of leaves and went through multiple failed attempts to recreate it:
It must have taken such intensity and patience, she said. You have to hold your body still and distant, almost stop your breathing. You must take care with your hands as if you were a doctor in surgery, making only the most precise movements. And for all that … what? Instead of golden skin, my result at the end of sheet after sheet looked like I was being devoured by what I desired, instead of being drenched in it. It looked awful and I laughed, because for all that, it felt true: there was my greed, exposed. I went through two packets of leaves, and only in the very end did I succeed. Not the photo I am sending you, that was before. I couldn’t even take the picture of the last, because I was exhausted and knew it could not have been photographed for fear of ruining it, so I can only describe what it looked and felt like. Have you ever had those rare moments where everything comes together: happiness, contentment, a sense of satiety? Then you realise having means that you also temporarily forgot something; whatever it was that was pushed aside and let you have a brief piece of time where you felt everything else stopped.
I forgot my own skin.
I forgot its bad memories and lost time, the errors of judgement and wrong decisions. All I could see was perfect gold, covering and shielding me. It made me laugh, but then I felt myself starting to cry for a minute, because I remembered what we really have in the end are those gilded patches. The rough fragments which despite everything stick to our skin: the ones you imagine you can see in the worst hours, reminding you of what you were, what you can be, who you still are. I thought of the value of the things which allow you to move and breathe and enjoy their imperfections.
I looked again at the photo. All I could see was as it should be: a glorious combination of the human and the divine, the fine perspiration gathering in her palm mingled with the ridges of uneven gold to form a map of some mythical, unreachable land. Attraction shows you its many facets in a person it rarely shows you in others; a light which invites, not rejects, its shadows.
12.
There was something which discomfited me, though it had nothing to do with her. I realised after some time it was the idea of distance and perfection; if not the geographical distance which was a constraint of our communication then the psychological one we may or may not impose on the person behind the words.
I read an essay by John Ashbery where he writes about Mapplethorpe’s flower photos, though in my mind they are portraits, as telling of personality as any face. I, like most, thought them sensual and solitary, capturing an ideal beauty. What Ashbery saw, and Mapplethorpe himself said repeatedly, stressed a dislike of his subject as banal object … the interest, attraction, even obsession within it was in his ‘fanatical concern with perfection … and his equally obsessive horror of decay and death’. An anti-memento mori, the attempt to preserve a moment destined for oblivion; denial of the inevitable. It makes looking at his sexual portraiture in particular more difficult. One could say they are a celebration, but in this light they are not, or if so, more one of ‘cruelty’, the word Ashbery uses, a reminder that unconscious observations of the world often reflect our fears, knowing we are not long in staying.
This brought to mind Marshall McLuhan’s phrase ‘the medium is the message’. What exactly do we convey in the medium, and does it speak more than the message itself? The words behind the words of these letters, never knowing if a person reads what is placed in front of them or instead looks behind, in-between, under for other meanings? A letter seems direct: a straight line between two people. The reality is more like the pneumatique tubes winding their way through Paris, or reaching for an unknown body in the darkness. The reading mind is distracted by its own wishes and fears, experiences and expectations. The message stops at each, changing infinitesimally and accordingly; hands trace paths over new maps, recalculating their destination.
*
(Dear ____,
There is an element here of looking into Narcissus’ pool, I know. And it is true that I could not have known it was your reflection which would gaze at me when I looked down. It is not beauty in the physical sense we see, because we have not seen each other. But we see nevertheless. It’s intuition, and intuition is excitement because it is the unknown. If there is ego at play here, it is because we think there is something in that unknown which we are familiar with. And so these letters which arrange themselves into words on our respective screens are just separate sides of that pool. One looks up, the other down as sentences whirl and ripple around us. Will we pull the other in or out?
In Florence, I saw Anselm Kiefer’s Fallen Angels exhibition. One room took my breath away: every inch of the walls and ceiling covered in gilded paintings. In the centre of the floor, a giant mirror which to me could only be a Narcissus-like play on what we choose to see. Did one dare to look into it but keep themselves out of the reflection? So many did not. I thought the room must be the perfect state of the mind: quiet, golden, full of the world. But at the same time, a cautionary tale. With such beauty and riches around you, would you choose to be trapped by, within the mythology of your own image for eternity instead? I went back one morning just as it opened and stood in a corner of that room, alone. Away from the mirror, I could see it without the trap, in its full glory, the floor reflecting the ceiling and so completed; perfect. I thought of my hand covered in gold, the attempt which could not be captured. The impossible desire of wanting to look into the white screen and see ourselves the same time but knowing we must look at the words instead to find each other.
People think water has no scent of its own. Maybe it does and it’s just impossible for our noses to discern. But it makes up for it by absorbing those of its environment. Sometimes I ask myself, at what point was water ever pure, completely untouched? The answer must be it never was, even though we all have different ideas of what that purity is. As with water, so it is with people. Some wish to feel another sinking into their skin and blood, others wish to penetrate and explore. To possess a body and mind so thoroughly as the ultimate expressions of intrusion and intimacy. For the haunted there must be some part of them which, while afraid of unknown presence, also takes perverse pleasure in it. The perversity of wanting to be someone wholly of your own creating and knowing you have always been made up of others.
We stand in our corners, looking up and around us; sensing ourselves in the gilded heavens. For a moment, it is enough.)
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Irruption/Aftermath
[Here is where I expose myself, flushed out from where I was hiding in between the words of others. Everything that came before was a fiction, or at least I had told myself it was that. What shame is it that causes us to hide behind the sheerest of screens, thinking no one, not even ourselves can be so clearly seen? I began to write because of something I had read, in that, I had read someone; in the end, I misread both them and myself. I saw what had been written had split me: here I was, both sides of a story I could not hope to complete; not that in its initial intent there would have been a satisfactory conclusion, only the questions that are left in the wake of events that spring suddenly from nowhere but finding themselves trailing in search of an ending.
Barthes is too of the other story to be used at this moment; he is too assured of these sorts of romantic anxieties; nevertheless, I imagine him smiling wryly at this: every person who thinks like this also thinks they are the first to experience it, a punishment whose lesson is perpetually forgotten, a particularly human trait which speaks, I suppose, to its endearing hope of happiness in a certain unreal form. Shklovsky seems fittingly brutal and so more truthful now that I am admitting I am both narrator and subject, two sides of a screen looking for a response:
‘And he who is strongest will have a good laugh.
That will be the book.’
I am not strong. I do not think I have ever been so. But this will be the book, or if not the book, then the story, however long or short its trail extends, and I can already see my footprints disappearing as I put them down. The narrator in Zoo is in love but cannot be in love; at least, he must talk around it as if it did not weight every word and thought with its presence; this is not to say what comes before this was me in love, for I was not, in the sense we have largely applied to it as a society. Nevertheless, I recognised I had opened myself wide, flung myself open and then, on realising there was no possible end—for some things are only the path and never the destination—I could not close myself, and all I felt was a wind cutting through me.
The narrator I wrote above, deliberately, was not a he. But neither were they a she, though they could be either or both. I thought of them as they, because I knew deep down it was me and I occupied both … call them sensibilities, places, countries. Frustrated by Breton, how the he-narrator, ‘André’ of Nadja treats her as strange muse, pity-interest, psychological curiosity, a flattering dream … perhaps I was looking for revenge. It is true I am always looking for revenge of a sort, but it is also true that it is mostly against myself. I am my own antagonist and always will be. When I try to be my own protagonist, things fall apart. For some of us, it is easier to envision ourselves as the enemy than it is an ideal. Like the glass half-full or empty, this is telling of what side the shadow of ego falls. So I was attempting to write myself as both; losing myself in the wind which was the Paris night but also something inside of me. Anyone can see it is untenable to be blown this way and that. Forever writing, forever waiting for an answer, forever wanting a place to rest and be read.
What struck me more than Nadja the book was Nadja the woman: Nadja the distressed, Nadja the dreamer, Nadja the mad, Nadja the forgotten. I am wary of the word ‘muse’ and there is no doubt Nadja is that, too, for a while. But to me it suggests a one-way street, where one’s attributes are taken from but never repaid. In Mark Polizzotti’s introduction I read Nadja (the real woman), experienced ‘olfactory hallucinations’, terrifying ones. He did not explain further and I desperately wanted to know what it was she smelled: was it acrid woodsmoke, overwhelming tortuous blooms like jasmine, ylang, or tuberose, or was it holy incense swinging in invisible censers? It struck me that such experience is the claustrophobic unconscious escaping to the outer world. Finding itself equally lost there, attempts to bury itself in sensory pleasures previously felt only through the filters of the body. Now the combination of the real and the distressed results in a wild and beautiful distortion; the wanton imaginary.
It was then I wanted to let Nadja, or someone like her—for we are all Nadjas when in character, at least to those who are similar Andrés, poles both attracting and repelling—to be the cause of a kind of reckoning with the self, and with that reckoning, ghostly scents. I wanted her to mesmerise and seduce, agitate and distract, to be the cause of joyous reverie and despairing self-reflection which sought who the woman was. Her intelligence and personality, the power in her ability to be a presence despite her presence being an absence. I wanted her to linger in the mind like the sillage of a perfume, to haunt through the senses, to be a consideration of the world through two people who felt like its last inhabitants.
At the same time, it seemed too, one could say on the nose, that my own perfume obsession played no small part in my own situation. One woman’s olfactory hallucinations are another’s reminders: a reminder some scents were now forever linked with certain memories and memories are what keeps experience and people alive in us. And I wondered if I did this to myself deliberately, as a way to continue to feel that unwelcome but now-familiar wind. The cut of sillage through my recollections upon opening a bottle reminding me what it was I had willingly done and where I had willingly gone. Knowing that it damned me, like the narrator, to an eternal sensory dérive.
The two halves of desire is what I think I am trying to write—there are more facets in many cases, including my own, but this was so obviously to be a (here I wanted to say ‘clean’, but such divisions are anything but) divided personality: half which tries to understand what and who attracts us, and the futility of that attraction when we pursue it. The other half? I am not sure I can fully answer, perhaps because it is a darker aspect of me. Rosset, writing about the real, says:
‘The distancing of oneself by oneself, which leads to one being confirmed forever in one’s self, can also be felt in the distancing of others, as soon as it appears that those others are both undesirable and like oneself. This is the case in particular with […] dramatic characters. Whoever on the stage appears too like the self one has decided not to be will himself be immediately split in two.’
I take the liberty of applying this instead to characters existing solely on the page. Nevertheless, this self—these selves—undesirable or not, seek something or someone to read it, puzzle over it, want to … what? I am uncertain. In my depths I think it just wants to be brought to life from reading, but does not know itself where to go beyond words, because it has not had the experience of that, at least what it defines as the experience of feeling alive for a sustained time outside of them. So really, all this has been about love yet not about love: for whatever love is is ultimately a contradiction: undefinable but defined nevertheless by those within it who draw its specific boundaries, and also whatever we recognise as a kind of opening of doors or reading of pages. It is an attempt to write a book about rewriting a book, only to realise that it is quite simply about wanting to be read, which is to be understood. One can be split and still recognise the very real longings in the unreal.
I put this down as fiction because I cannot be three people physically. But mentally, emotionally? The impossibility of the former does not preclude the latter. I would call what I am doing a possession, moving from person to person in the hope that possessed and possessor come to understand they share the same mind.
Where does this leave Nadja, and the unnamed Nadja here; where does it leave me? Though both this ‘Nadja’ and the narrator are me, I find the latter more natural in understanding their intent: the former is as much a mystery, even coming from within myself; the page which comes from my flesh can still be, at first, undecipherable. It is too easy to say write the ending you want, as if this were a viable method of manifesting the narrative one wished for. Somewhat uncomfortably, for I tend towards a rule of distance in writing anything resembling myself, I have introduced my real—and what fractions of truth constitutes the real as opposed to the fictive—self here, while admitting that the unreal characters are also me. But they are bound so tightly that not even I can begin to explain which words and thoughts come from whom. One, the other, all of us; a division which speaks through a shared mouth. Was it Shakespeare who wrote the line ‘ill met by moonlight’? The white of these pages is close enough; we cannot undo this meeting, and so we must go on as strange companions, this fractured self, into the unknown.]
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All photos by or belonging to the author.
Lenora de Barros, POEMA (POEM), 1979.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse. Trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 73.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell (California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 51.
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. Trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 74.
Quignard, Pascal. The Unsaddled. Trans. John Taylor (Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2023), 190.
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Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. Trans. D.P. Costello (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 53.
Bourgeois, Louise. “c. 1958” in The Return of the Repressed Volume II: Psychoanalytic Writings, edited by Philip Larratt-Smith (London: Violette Editions, 2012), 91.
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Flusser, Vilem. Gestures. Trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 23.
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Ashbery, John. Something Close to Music. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2022), 87.
Shklovsky, Viktor. Zoo: Or letters not about love. Trans. Richard Sheldon (Champaign, Dublin, London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), 33.
Breton, André. Nadja. Trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xviii.
Rosset, Clément. The Real and its Double, Trans. Chris Turner (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), 62.