by Jean Frémon
I’m not done yet. I’ll suspend the arcing body by a cable attached to its navel and let it turn slowly around. Appeasement. Joy in eternal gyration. Head gone. Out of control. To each their own orgasm. It will make them think, that’s for sure; they’ll be amazed. A little regard, if you please, a little regard for the statue. For the poor enstatuated thing, hung by its belly button, turning on itself, offering itself to others whose inquiring gazes unveil its secret. Regard, regards. You’ll never know if it was ecstatic. I have my own ideas on the subject. And I will continue to have them.
It can’t be known. But the question once asked, remains. Charcot has nothing to say about it. Nor does Sigmund Freud, to whom he dedicated his works: “To Dr. Freud, with best wishes from the Salpêtrière.” And Freud, returning to Vienna, to his huge, bourgeois, Jugendstil house, filed the book on the shelf reserved for “Gay Paris,” behind the Cretan statues. And yet again, I ask the question, and dump it, politely, in your lap. Find your reflection in the high polish of the headless, androgynous body of Jerry Everyone, suspended by the navel in endless rotation, and ask it yourself.
*
In The Spider Book:
Some species of the Cyclosa and Uloborus adorn their webs with a fake spider or two whipped up from their silk and the remains of their prey — the tough, stringy bits that don’t taste good, the leftovers. From this, they sculpt doubles of themselves, making them the same size and shape, and then they place them on the web where they can easily be seen so that predators will attack this bait instead of them. Ah, that’s my favorite, the spider-sculptor . . . making its own decoys. Strategies of self-defense as old as the world.
*
The survival of the fittest, said Darwin, of the best fit for a given niche. Whereas you’re interested in the survival of the unfit, in the strategies of the handicapped, in the victory of the tortoise over the hare.
In a book, you read the story of a man who played billiards by himself. Against himself. He called it a game of the able against the one-armed. The able made a normal shot, while the one who played against him used only one hand.
One day, the one-armed man won.
The man stayed drunk for three days straight and never played billiards again.
So, you have to work with it. With the lacks, the weaknesses. The fatal inabilities. Work the handicaps against their grain. Survival, it’s a matter of survival, but survival of the unfit. Prove Darwin wrong. La Fontaine had a glimmer. We must go further. Fueled by despair. The strategy of the besieged. Have confidence in weakness. From failure to failure. Fail better, said the bilingual condor, the expert in scrawn. Though he may have left the conclusion a little too late. What remains when you’ve removed everything? A bit of music. Played on a pierced bone. At the end of your lips. Happy Days. I Love You So . . .
♩♫ Que reste-t-il de nos amours
Que reste-t-il de ces beaux jours
Une photo, vieille photo
De ma jeunesse
Que reste-t-il de tout cela
Dites-le-moi ♫♩
There are artists who work off their gifts — they may use them, overdo them, or even obstruct them, but no matter what they do, they’re still gifted. Whether they accept their gifts or not makes no difference. And there are others who work off of their inabilities, their incapacities, and their ineptitudes because they have no choice, though what they produce will never have the authority, the inevitability, or the definitive stature that is the mark of the gifted when they’re great.
The ungifted tend not to like themselves very much, and they often don’t like their work either. And so they work feverishly in an unconscious attempt to flee success when they glimpse it, unwittingly protecting their work. Their power to touch viewers, to say something, stays more alive by being constantly put off until later. And it’s precisely in this later that their force resides. Later may well never arrive, but it retains a potential that right now quickly exhausts.
Which is why some among the inept — though no more than among the very gifted — can look forward to the lovely potential for revenge. It’s always possible that the one-armed man might win. And when he does, it’s both touching and troubling because it’s the victory of fallibility.
*
You look at yourself in the mirror. You find yourself faded. You had a particular tenderness for Mother’s soft belly. You recognize it — your belly is just like Mother’s, which brought you into the world. You feel so small. Little Mama. If we didn’t fiercely squelch all memory of our first three years, we would be crushed by the recognition of how small we were. This smallness will always be an integral part of us. The slightest hand held out makes us burst into tears that acknowledge this. You are not crushed; you have nipped that crushing in the bud. At times you feel drunk with smallness, and you dream of nothing but abandoning yourself to a sea strong enough to carry you away. I said sea without even thinking about it — la mer. But that’s actually what I did — Mère having abandoned me, I literally threw myself into the water, first of the Bièvre, from which I was rescued (Father, who always got the best parts, played Superman), and then into the waters of the sea. That it might toss you around, and that you might founder. And might wash up here — on the old Native American island of Manhattan, between two rivers under an inclement sky, but so vast that it seemed made to welcome all the disarrayed, all the inept who’d found, through the energy of despair, a way of surviving, and had clung to it. They only had to put down roots. And for that, you must burn your boats — even those you don’t have — brave the tides, accept the drift, take the risk that the American dream might veer into a nightmare. And only then, perhaps, might regrowth be possible. Shyly, not the first or even the second spring, but one day, a branch.
You drew this branch in red ink. It’s you. It’s ridiculous, but it grows. It says, just look how I grow! It’s an offshoot, like a child, a child on a swing or toboggan crying, Look Ma, no hands!
*
You have nothing against the phallus; it’s a shape you like. You only want to protect it; it, too, is a child. It’s a newborn, naked, alone, lost; it needs to be cosseted, caressed, rocked. It’s your baby, a baby you. With latex and resin, you modeled an object like it. No one understood. It’s suspended from a hook; there’s nothing aggressive about it — it’s protected, that’s all — out of reach, beyond all suspicion. I baptized it Fillette. No one takes you seriously when you say that it’s a self-portrait, a fetish, an amulet. You protect it; it protects you. You protect you. People never understand anything about intentions that are pure. And yet sharing pure intentions is the most beautiful thing you can do.
*
It has nothing to do with the risqué allusions with which Father was familiar. A male privilege, that big, fat, old, smug conscience, spreading ever outward.
After the war, he lived his widowhood lightly. He came to New York alone and took us, Robert and me, to cabarets where he ogled the girls without the slightest thought to our presence. Soft collar and black bow tie, he was a caricature of himself. And you — you were simply part of the scenery — as if he had had you. A girl, you were just one of his girls. To your shame, and to his swagger.
When you were young and got to the age that men started turning around to look at you, he bought you hats, high-heeled shoes, mink stoles, and fine lingerie. He wanted you to dress like a whore. And to wander the streets like a whore. Wanted people to see you as a whore. His whore. And you wanted exactly the opposite; you strove for the air of the serious student, or at least of the independent woman, professor-ish, with glasses, a bun, a gray suit . . . you’d have accepted even the air of an artist or a saint, but a tart — no way. The very thought made you sick. He’d ask you: Why don’t you wear the hat that I bought you? Try it on so we can see how it looks. So you’d try it on, modeling it before him, and he would judge, leaning back in his overstuffed chair like a client sizing up the line of girls at a brothel.
And you, more than e
ighty years old, you’re still not over it; now you’re abusing a child looking for his mother. So, you did the drawings for the Duras story; they’re going to be shown at the Recamier. Not so much for her as for her little Ernesto of Summer Rain, that heavenly angel. It was her young friend who wrote to us. And then came to visit. He looked like Jerry. They reached an agreement. Marguerite, a true force. And with a sense of tempo. You loved the way she let time thread between two words, giving them a body, a resonance. She knew her business. You saw her on Pivot’s program, which you got on cable. You’d never fail her.
The clock chimes in the silence. You set it faithfully, weights and counterweights. An image of time. You count the hours, the minutes, the seconds. Not the years! You drew a twenty-four-hour clock. Truer than going back to zero every twelve. You count the hours that separate you from him, that long-haired child that broke into your life and never left.
Ten o’clock. That’s when he arrives. The morning messiah. You wait for ten o’clock like a debutante awaiting her first ball. He reaches out his hand. You reach your hands out to him. Hands can reach out to infinity. It’s amazing, the long arm of love.
What does a woman want? Freud asked. She wants a man to want her. With a Puritan — as Freud was — it’s a little more complicated, and a little more amusing as well. To want and to desire are not the same thing, and they don’t have the same object. I want my will to oppose my desire, says the Puritan. Always place the bar a little too high; that’s what makes it work.
You liked the Puritans. You still like them, you like their defenses, their barriers. Ah . . . breaking them down is a real sport. But not too much. Though frankly, no danger there — they know nothing about “too much.” The Puritans were not the people of too much, but the people of too little. It’s their ability to retreat into themselves that you find attractive. Robert didn’t have to move a finger; you said yes to a question he never even asked. You didn’t realize that along with him, you were marrying a move to America. You married the nonfather. Who nonetheless gave you two children. Without wanting them all that much, for that matter. On the crossing, because it was a question of the crossing, I got pregnant behind his back, as they so elegantly say. I was happy to leave France on one condition — that I could bring along a crumb, this orphan that we went back to get in order to give him a family and who came to us by boat a few weeks later. The crew and the passengers had adopted him so thoroughly during the crossing that when he saw us waiting for him on the dock in New York, he was terribly disappointed.
*
Father’s fruits are quite moving. Detached from his body like a pear dangling from a branch. Suspended, subject to oscillation. With a capacity for retreat, like a frightened animal, the head of the tortoise. And so perfectly made for the hand, for the mouth. This hatching, this surging up in the middle of the parade.
While Mother’s fruits are attached to her body along their entire surfaces, constituting the body itself. You recently made a series of drawings of bodies composed entirely of breasts pressed up against each other. A swarm of breasts, each one extending toward its extremity, its nipple, in the gift of self, myriad teats, they take over the whole body, the front, the back, the top, the bottom. A colony of standing breasts, a tree of breasts. Each one wanting to be wanted. Mother’s fruits are beautiful. There are also other, more secret ones, hidden in the folds. Life in the Folds. When we lived in the rue Daguerre in the 1950s, I’d go to see Michaux. He’d stake out the back courtyard, but he wasn’t really all that fierce. He’d stopped writing and was doing big ink-blot drawings. You liked his reserve. Finally, someone who didn’t pontificate. He made an inventory of his imaginary goods. My Properties.
*
The folds. With one of Jerry’s old sweaters soaked in plaster, you made folds. Life-size figures fashioned of nothing but intimate folds, revealed and secreted, dripping. An entire tribe emerged from Jerry’s old sweater. They looked like you. A freestanding abandon, the ultimate erection.
*
You watch a penduline tit busy making its hanging nest. Built of mud and straw and spiderwebs, it hangs from a poplar or willow branch, like a sock with a small opening on the side. Provençal peasants call it Loudébassaire, the bird that knits socks.
Warblers build their nests by folding a giant hanging leaf and then sewing its edges together with plant fibers.
The weaver bird knots and weaves blades of grass around twigs, creating a nest that looks like a basket.
You’re not so different — feverishly assembling twigs. Who says that sewing is not sculpture? That weaving is not sculpture? And threading, and hollowing, and knotting, and nesting . . . To create something where nothing had been before, that’s sculpting. To transform a baggy, old sweater into a standing, albeit dripping, figure full of mysterious cavities, that’s sculpting. There is within you a small, nervous animal incessantly winding a ball of wool.
Mother Pisaura, Mother Canopy, Mother Cyclosa, Mother Uloborus, Mother Theridion, Mother Tetragnatha. Mother Louison, old spinner, I recognize you among them all, and I bless you.
*
It wasn’t Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who created the guillotine, but a certain Antoine Louis, which is why it was initially called a louisette. All Guillotin did was to convince the revolutionaries to make liberal use of it a few years after its invention, and to change its name to his. Why does this name seem to fit it so well? You wonder. A question of consonance. When the sense fits so well into the sound — that’s it, a form. The instigation of sculpture.
The guillotine is a form, no doubt about it. A form like you like them, ultimate, like a propeller or a bicycle wheel. A slicing form, a definitive form. You wonder what didn’t work about that house, the house at Choisy, which you replicated in plaster, then in bronze, basing it on the photographs you had. An exact replica. But something wasn’t right. You positioned the guillotine in front of the house, and in front of the guillotine, a gate, and that did the trick. Problem solved. No more discussion. Louisette, digging a grave for the past. What was the problem? you asked. Sliced, it had to be sliced, that’s all. Louisette took care of it.
*
How you loved to find a nest in a hedge. Your favorites were those made of earth, dried mud mixed with straw. The process was used by Native Americans to build their houses in New Mexico, as well as by the Dogons in Africa, but it was invented by birds; the humans just imitated them.
And the small miracle of finding two or three eggs inside. We backed away very carefully, putting the twigs back in place to mask it. We tried to hide all trace of our presence, afraid that it might disturb the mysterious development going on in those little white or spotted spheres.
In the fall, we looked for abandoned nests, and frequently found parts of the hatched shells still in them. You lined them up on the wall and tried to figure out the species.
Pure forms have pure intentions. The intention of an egg is to give life. It’s a simple fact. And the intention of a nest is to protect the egg.
You like eggs. Pure form. Bachelard has nothing to do with it. Ozenfant, Corbu, maybe. In your own way, you’re a purist. The purist and the Puritan — a lovely affair.
*
But what’s nonetheless extraordinary and, in a certain way, quite admirable in Bachelard is his marked taste for bad poets, the worst phrasers, the gigolos of the cheap dance halls, rolling their shoulders, caps cocked over one eye, hands on their partners’ buttocks singing Java-style.
Bachelard, the old dinosaur, fake magus, flourishing beard, face of beneficent God, the Charlemagne of philosophers. You can’t make a move these days without someone’s interpreting it in his terms. Above all, the French. They ignored you for fifty years, and when they finally noticed that you existed, they couldn’t wait to tell you what you’d been doing. Bachelard to the rescue. The body is a house and the house a body, thank you, thank you. To his credit, he knew how to talk about nests.
At least with the Americans, you didn’t have
to worry about all that. They’re ingenues. They don’t waste time getting lofty about theory. On the contrary, they’re enchanted. They see everything as if for the very first time; it’s quite refreshing.
*
As an adolescent, you developed a passion for geometry. To be mentally present at the unfurling of a curve, at the turning of a sphere, at the intersection of a plane and a figure filled you with calm. Above all, you wanted an abstract character, all affect stripped away, all passions hidden, just geometry. As well as security, with everything predictable, a code that nothing could disrupt, happiness. It’s a domain beyond authority — paternal, professorial, social . . .
The one who made the best demonstration was the one who was right. Period. No blackmail. You loved even the vocabulary of geometry: bisector, tangent, perpendicular, spiral, such lovely, refined, sculpted words.
*
At the art academy, there was always one who could do anything perfectly, impeccably, in a single stroke. Everyone drank it up. But behind his back, the jealous would say, “He may have a compass in his eye, but he’s got a ruler up his ass.”
*
The pleasure of rotundities: with a large brush full of water, first dampen the paper, then trace huge breasts on it in red gouache. The color sinks in with the water, taking unexpected routes. There are forms that disturb and forms that reassure. You work with both. The pleasure of the damp.