by Jean Frémon
At the stationers on Seventh Avenue, you bought a notebook, a lined one like children use in school, and on the cover, you wrote The Spider Book. In it, you noted your observations and copied out passages from J.-H. Fabre, adding a few ideas and drawings. You could have called it The Book of My Mother, but that already existed, so this one had to be The Book of the Spider, or The Spider Book. Burying yourself in it after a long day’s work gave you the same sense of well-being that a child gets from a stamp collection.
Your parents had made you leave school as a teenager, so that you could spend more time drawing for the tapestry restorations. The business was going marvelously; this was before the crash. Father brought back more and more tapestries from his travels, and they all had to be dealt with. Mother was now too weak to weave, so Father hired seamstresses. You watched them work, explaining the drawings to them from time to time. You called them the spinning sisters. They did nothing but spin. Master’s orders.
One evening, Mother asked you to sit down on the edge of her bed and made you promise to go back to school. You must have a skill, she said; go to the Sorbonne. If you learn mathematics, you won’t have to depend on men. Meanwhile, Father was planning to marry you off to a dandy with a fancy convertible who’d taken to hanging around, the son of a business associate that he just couldn’t say enough about. Oh, please!
Beastly creature, it bit me! Under the armpit, a pustule swollen with venom. But it was only defending itself. How long has it been since you set foot in this room, Robert’s study? You sat down where he had always sat when he worked, and you moved a pile of old folders, a work in progress that his death had left in place. The spider couldn’t have chosen a better spot for raising her little family than a stack of abandoned papers, untouched for ages. How can you blame her? Why did you go and disturb her? Could there be anywhere in the world more ideal, more propitious for raising a passel of petite progeny, than an old file full of the beginnings of a general theory of civilizations according to their magical-aesthetic manifestations? What could be more comforting than the thought that a pile of slowly ripening crackpot ideas determined to finally shed light on the basis of the human soul would end up giving birth to a generation of one of the most ancient species on the planet, going back long before humanity and probably destined to exist long after. Your dermatologist probably didn’t consider that. There aren’t many spiders on the forty-second floor of a building on Park Avenue whose windows don’t open. She gave you a salve and told you it would take a month to heal. She presumed you were a witch.
Parturient spider at the bottom of the garden. You watch, fascinated, careful not to disturb her at her business. Alternating stripes of yellow, silver, and black cross a belly almost as big as a hazelnut. And around this opulent abdomen, her eight legs radiate, ringed in beige and brown. In the business of maternity, garden spiders are pros. The silky sac in which she keeps her eggs is a marvel. The pear-shaped opening is trimmed with lace that extends into lines that anchor the nest to nearby twigs. The oval body, hanging straight down, is stabilized by a few more strands. The top is hollowed out into a felted cavern, and the envelope as a whole is a thick, dense, opaque white.
You’ll give her eggs made of marble. Three of them. They’ll be clearly visible through a kind of lattice beneath her. She’ll be huge, imposing, monumental, and fragile; you’ll be able to walk between her legs, long iron pieces that narrow, ending at times in a hook. You will make a family of them. Your family.
*
Mother was always cold. Despite the most tender ministrations, she seemed to be heading straight toward death. Every day she was weaker. She never left her bed and could barely speak. The evening light, filtering through the blinds, turned her hair autumnal. The doctor ordered bleeding, and then suction cups to help her breathing, but nothing worked. The infamous Spanish flu that had knocked her flat in 1918; she’d never entirely gotten over it . . . Father dropped in for five minutes every day before dinner, joked around a bit, said that everything would be all right, that she was already getting better. Then after dinner — at which he was the only one who either ate or spoke — he’d go out. And there would reign a sepulchral silence throughout the house.
Think of the scene of Madame Grandet’s death in Balzac. Because she was so weak, she fell behind in her work — knitting the wool sleeves that she would need for the winter. For lack of sleeves, he wrote, the cold took hold of her in the middle of a fever brought on by her husband’s anger. And in a similar way, Mother was permanently cold, and nothing seemed able to heal her.
You drew a Saint Sebastienne. A rather corpulent woman striding away, almost running, with her long hair flying out behind her in the wind. Saint Sebastienne: her flesh pierced by arrows. They’re not realistic arrows, but mathematical ones, almost comical. She’s mocked; she’s a martyr. Isn’t a martyr always at least in part a hysteric? Saint Sebastian, tied to a post, with his ecstatic gaze and the sensual lips of every wound made by every arrow in his chest and abdomen.
The other day at MoMA, the Andres Serrano photo exhibition — what beauty! They’re the color photographs taken in a morgue in New York. Large-format close-ups, at least four feet wide — perfect for hanging over the bed, no? Faces, body parts, bruised, wounded, swollen. A foot, a sublime foot, with a huge red gash, a gaping buttonhole like the stigmata of a nail wrenched from the foot of a Christ just taken down from a cross. You were speechless in front of this foot, so pure; you cried from joy, all alone. And then you said to yourself: Stop it, little girl; this, it’s just not done. That’s happiness for you — it’s just not done. And yet happiness at the morgue via vicarious photographs hurts no one. And it’s a cultivated, refined, intelligent happiness, at that — with references to the history of the arts and sciences thrown in. But no, you give in for an instant and cry with joy, and then an old, puritanical voice says, Stop it, little girl.
Among Charcot’s patients at the Salpêtrière, you’d find hysterics who were reliving the persecutions of the first Christians, with the same joy, the same light flooding the mundane cages of their hysteria. The young Freud, studying with Charcot in Paris, was very struck by it; he talks about it somewhere.
And now you’ve finished your Saint Sebastienne; you’re pleased with her. In the lower right, you write the words Saint Sébastienne, and you put the drawing away in a drawer. Why did you title it Saint Sébastienne and not Sainte Sébastienne? Just because. It’s not a female saint named Sebastienne; it’s Saint Sebastien-ne. You don’t really want Jerry to see it. Not right away. He’s not going to like it — too clear, too voluble, too pathetic, even if the arrows are mathematical. You want to keep it to yourself for a while. You’re not finished with her; you might even do a few more Saint Sebastiennes. Maybe starting with the arrows. Arrows going every which way that look perfectly inoffensive without the victim — and then introduce the body. Or maybe not; maybe you’d rather have a Saint Sebastienne reduced to arrows.
You like drawing arrows. You could spend your life drawing arrows, or logarithmic spirals; it calms you down in a way that nothing else does. An arrow is only a line, but it’s a line that’s going somewhere, a line with weight. That’s what you love — the fact that the line is charged with intention. You draw short arrows, long arrows, curved arrows, arrows one after the other, thin arrows, and arrows as plump as aces of spades.
Is it an arrow that drew the wound on the side of Serrano’s Christly foot? Fontana’s all very well — and so terribly chic — a sterilized slash against a made-to-order monochrome — blue, red, yellow . . . But with Serrano, it’s flesh and blood. The sword struck home. Sooner or later, you’ve got to get to the heart of the subject. And that’s painful. Leap in. No holding back, no substitutions. A close-up on pain.
*
Note in The Spider Book:
The male wolf spider (Lycosidae) is considerably smaller than the female, and he risks getting eaten by her. So to protect himself, he captures some appropriate prey — a fly,
mosquito, or small butterfly — wraps it carefully in his silk, and presents the package to his companion with a deference visibly mitigated by fear. He then backs off and waits to see if the strategy will work. If the female succumbs to her usual gluttony, the male can finally cozy up and couple with Madame Wolf, risk-free, while she munches down her little gift. You do your thing, and I’ll do mine, she seems to say.
*
Do you know Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes? What power, what audacity; she’s at the apex of the process of cutting off her victim’s head, blood spurting everywhere. The heart of the subject. Is the gentle Artemisia — pretty much the only painter of her sex from that entire century — in the process of symbolically sawing off the head of her famous painter father, Orazio? Give me some space, Dad!
Curiously, that father had taken the name of his mother, rather than that of his father, Giovanni Battista Lomi, who was also a well-known painter. Had the father encountered the same problem, and, rather than cut his own father’s head off, albeit symbolically, instead taken his mother’s name, Gentileschi? He engendered a daughter who became a painter like him, and who today, four hundred years later, has eclipsed his fame, holding high the name of the maternal line.
Symbolic actions. The weight of destiny. The shackles of atavism. The Sphinx’s questions. The murder of the father. Big words. And for big hurts, big cures.
And you, you have three sons who have your name, not their father’s — who knows why. While you — who knows why — have kept the name of the father you hated and refused the name of the husband you adored. It must be said that this Bourgeois was more attached to his name than an aristocrat. But you didn’t have to go along with it . . . It’s just that at heart you agreed with him, at least on that point.
As for your husband, having children, that wasn’t really his thing. Pass the genes on down, OK, but pass on his name, hmmm. He thought: Why saddle them with a Jewish name when it can be avoided? The Jews are destined to suffer; why not thwart destiny when you can?
Too complicated. Or too clear. No need to shed too much light on it. A little dimness on parental relations, s’il vous plaît. Don’t you think we’re better off in the dark? Close the bedroom door, I hear your groans, your sighs of pleasure, and they chill me to the bone. You hear them still, and Mother hears them too, Father having his way with the maid. One pebble in the box. Humming, he reties his bow tie, languidly descends the stairs, and goes out to buy cigars. The cigars have gone up in smoke, but the pebbles are still there, in their shoebox, one per conquest, a ludicrous display of the spoils of the hunt.
Not only do you have Father’s family name, but you also have his first name. Naturally, Monsieur wanted a son, an heir, a little boy, and not a girl, a useless mouth that would be hard to find a home for. Mother, knowing this and hoping to mitigate his disappointment, tried to sell him on his newborn daughter — Look how much she looks like you! she’d say. She knew to appeal to your male vanity, always the weak point — look, she has your eyes — she’s your spitting image! We’ll name her after you. After that, he called you Louison; all through your childhood, you were called Louison. When you wrote to him, you signed yourself your Louison.
Louison and her slavelings. The boy’s name didn’t bother you a bit; it gave you a kind of legitimacy that you savored in silence.
*
In The Spider Book:
A canopy. A canopy spider, that’s what it’s called. Of the Linyphiidae family. When she has fully plundered a given terrain, when she feels she needs a little fresh air, or simply when the whim strikes her, she carefully weaves a small parachute from her thread, tests it a few times for strength, and then finally, well anchored to it by several symmetrically crossed strands, she waits for a breeze, and then leaps into the void, letting herself be carried off to new lands. She’s one of your favorites, never constrained — as soon as she no longer likes where she is — zip! she’s moving house, at the will of the wind; it’s simple; it’s light; it’s effective. Spider-on-fugue. You did the same thing. A male came along, and you packed your bags. Runaway girl, with her hair let down and her little short skirt, crossed the ocean and said no more about it. But my, could I tell you some things!
*
Last night you dreamed that Father no longer had a name. The dream was in no way a nightmare; you weren’t frightened, or even uneasy — you simply tried to find his name and had to accept the fact that he no longer had one. The strangest thing was this had no effect on your own identity. At no point was it called into question; the problem of your name never arose — it was he who was nameless, and he alone. Grist for Lowenfeld’s mill. Let them decipher my dreams — me, I’m fine with the mystery. No need to interpret them. Obscurity has its virtues.
You woke up with a certain satisfaction. You didn’t work, you relaxed. You looked out at the buds in the garden. You never miss the marvelous moment when the first leaves are just about to unfurl, and the buds burst from internal pressure. The twigs of the Indian chestnut, pointing straight out like fingers, and those of the ash tree whose opposing leaves unfold at the same time, symmetrically, and the fronds of fern — ah! the fern fronds are your favorite. They eat them in Asia in all sorts of ways — stewed, sautéed, pickled in vinegar — and I’m sure they’re right, they’re so beautiful that they would just have to be delicious. You remember, in Father’s library, an album of photographs by Blossfeldt. It was a German publication from the late 1920s, photos of young plants, buds, leaves, all taken in the Berlin botanical garden, seen straight on against a light gray background, without aestheticism or metaphor, just portraits of young leaves, that’s all. Small busts of plants, with no pedestal, photographed head-on. You couldn’t stop looking through it. And in it, you found models to use for masking the sexes of Mount Olympus’s satyrs. Where is it now? Don’t think it’s in any of the boxes of Father’s books. Blossfeldt was only an amateur photographer; he was principally a sculptor. He taught at the school of fine arts in Berlin, a course titled “Modeling from Living Plants.” His photographs were purely didactic. And that’s why they were beautiful. Aim for beauty, and you get the vapid; you get fashion, beribboned cliché; aim for something else — encyclopedic knowledge, systematic inventory, structural analysis, personal obsession, or just a mental itch that responds to scratching, and you end up with beauty. Beauty is only a by-product, unsought, yet available to amateurs and impenitent believers.
*
In the book:
Ambush is a favorite spider technique. Water spiders construct a covered lair with a trapdoor made of their thread and excrement. The spider waits inside the lair with the door closed. As the prey approaches, she leaps from her hiding place and makes short work of her victim. The lair itself is a tiny architectural marvel, a kind of cone, a silky funnel. You studied it for a long time through a magnifying glass, then drew a minute, meticulous floor plan. What a beautiful thing, the lair, the hidden house, the antiarchitecture, antisculpture, copied from the organic. There are paintings known as informel; you’ve done informel sculptures, lairs, nests. The form is within. Interiority is their essence. The form is the content. And it just so happens that the content is a container.
*
Creating ambushes, hunting traps, to catch a little bit of love, that’s how you spend your time. Though you couldn’t say that they’re all that successful.
*
You don’t sleep. Insomnia has always been your friend, though it’s a stormy friendship, it must be said. When the children still lived with you, you would wake them up in the middle of the night. Simply because you were the only one not sleeping. Now that you no longer have anyone to wake up, you ponder, you draw. In the morning, there are drawings everywhere, on the bed, on the rug . . . Jerry picks them up. They’re called insomnia drawings. They are cries, letters of love or of pique.
Dear X or Y, I’m writing you today to tell you how much I miss you. All I need is a word from you, and then I can exist.
That’s the kind of letter you should have written every night when you couldn’t get to sleep. But you didn’t. You found it simpler to do two or three drawings that screamed in silence as you kept your mouth shut.
*
With every intention of eating it, you peeled an apple. Then you cut it into pieces. And then the pieces into pieces, and then each piece into smaller pieces. When your plate was full of very small pieces of apple, you felt that you could no longer hold back your tears, your heart was too full, it overflowed, your arms fell to your sides, and you cried and cried and cried.
Jerry came in silently and sat down next to you. He said nothing; he let you cry. Then, very softly, he said: It’s not you on the plate, nor your father, nor your mother, nor your brother, nor your sister, Henriette, nor your cousins Jacques and Maurice, nor any of your children. You have cut no one into pieces; as a mother, you haven’t been any worse than others — all mothers are wonderful — and as a daughter, you haven’t been any worse than others. No one could reproach you on that point, and you can reproach no one on that point. These little pieces you’ve cut up are an apple, nothing but an apple in little pieces, and you’re going to eat them because that’s why you peeled it and cut it into pieces, and it doesn’t matter whether the pieces are large or small or even very small. They’re pieces for a very little girl, but today it’s a grown girl who’s going to eat them. And one after the other, he held spoonfuls of chopped apple out to you as he dried your tears. Then he hugged you, and you hugged him, and you cried again, and he cried too. A few minutes later, you were naked in a hot bath; with one hand, Jerry sponged down your body, he was kneeling, radiant, his Christ’s face under all that hair. You were calm; you said: Cleaning up the dead! It was warm, not at all aggressive, grateful. He said: We’re going to go to bed, and we’re going to sleep; it will all be much better tomorrow. He dried you with a large towel and rubbed you down with eau de cologne. Then he undressed and lay down next to you and took you in his arms and together you cried from joy.