Blue Self-Portrait

by Noémi Lefebvre

  I’m all fired up, my sister said, I saw so many things in Berlin, I heard so much music in Berlin, I got so so many replies and also came up with so so many brand-new questions that you see me now full to bursting. I’ve such an urge to play the violin you can’t imagine. I shall jump on my violin soon as we’re at the airport, I’ll work like a nutter and my feet shan’t touch the ground, I’ve a maniac energy for music, I’ve such an urge to work I could easily get my violin out right here in the plane, straight away, it’s such torture waiting for landing. Do you think it would bother anyone if I got my violin out in here? my sister asked quite capable of doing it. My sister could play the violin in a plane, she played the recorder in front of the Bauhaus Archiv, wanted, in front of the Bauhaus Archiv entrance, to go straight into a bird-and-recorder duet and did it, played the recorder with the sole aim of holding this free public duet with bird, although without her violin but luckily with that medieval school-supply instrument shaped for collective happiness, had begun this passerine improvisation, she’d said, without sheet music or rehearsal, in front of the Bauhaus Archiv, without the least shame but with passion, moved as my sister often is, since she was little, this is how she’ll behave, absence of shame—and passion. Violin she’d certainly have played if she’d had a violin with her, the recorder was better than nothing and perfect for the bird, she plays violin sitting beside the other violinists following the score and in her row, she plays in several symphony orchestras and directed by several conductors, but also plays the violin anywhere at all and when the desire takes her and directed by no one, but in the end did not get it out in the plane. I’ll wait, my sister said, till we’ve landed because if I’m playing the violin I can’t enjoy the plane to the full. Like all pilots airline pilots are nutters, said my sister, they’ve all blown fuses in their brains, otherwise they couldn’t be airline pilots, you don’t become an airline pilot by accident, you have to be completely loopy from the start to want to be a pilot, even an airline one. You’ve got to have quite a few screws loose to do that job now I think about it, and my sister set to thinking about what it might mean to be an airline pilot, went deep into the poetry of this technical idea. I was relieved that she’d given up on pulling out her violin, I wasn’t in the mood for musical antics, I took music seriously with Adorno on one knee and Mann answering him from the other one, with the pair of them on my wobbly knees and moreover the pianist who went on making me bellow in silence, no really I wasn’t in the mood to listen to my sister playing the violin on the plane. Don’t imagine I had any problem with my sister, I’ve never had any trouble with her behavior in general or her violinist’s exploits in particular, I went through the same education as my sister and recognize the same deleterious impact on her, I’ve adopted a lenient attitude to that education, in any case towards its effects on my sister, although I don’t apply the same dose of lenience when it comes to the effects on myself. I excuse my sister everything and myself nothing, not only do I excuse without calculation but I appreciate more than anything in my sister that which I loathe more than anything in myself, I consider magnificent in my sister whatever horrifies me in myself, am unconditional with my sister and always disappointed in myself. Believed myself capable of a good hour opposite the pianist without betraying the effects of my education and succeeded only in terrorizing him with those very evident effects, to the extent that I had to leave the pianist sure that I’d put him off seeing me ever again, even by accident, instilled a lifelong revulsion in him for the kind of girl I am, the kind who talk too much and whose flaws we know well, who go on exasperating those around them down the generations, who ruin the lives of their husbands, children and lovers, never content with that understanding silence required for happiness, girls wanting so to take part in the collective happiness with their thoughtless chit-chat that they wreck every opportunity, chitting here and chatting there not stopping to count to ten, every time thinking they ought to have stopped their agile tongues and counted to ten but every time the thought comes too late. Ich habe zu viel gesprochen, I said to the pianist hoping to repair the irreparable, and for him kindly to reassure me, but no, not at all, it’s quite all right, but obviously thinking it’s quite the opposite, otherwise he’d never have taken me to the cinema in order to shut me up.

  The pianist suggested we go see a film. I went along to the cinema in the Sony Center, opposite the Kaiser Café. It’s the perfect spot for an attack, the pianist commented in the middle of the Sony Center, walking towards the cinema, they planned this place in Berlin tailor-made for terrorism, before there was nothing here but a great piece of wasteland that the terrorists didn’t even know existed and now this Sony Center exhibited here as if built to draw terrorists’ attention, this symbol of capitalism replacing the wasteland where for some years hawkers of bits of wall used to scrape a living, the more wall you sell the less wall remains to sell, the trade ran out of steam and ultimately foundered due to scarcity, supply trailing demand, everyone wanted some wall to remember the wall by, there were a few big buyers, collectors who bought the best sections and framed this brand-new artistic heritage of humanity while on the wasteland market they were still scrabbling for the most insignificant pointless pebbles, nevertheless certified genuine vintage, and exposed those hawking the very tiniest pieces, hardly more than dust, until there was hardly a crumb left only flaking plaster and dust itself to sell, until the wall-hawkers had left the place, vanishing little by little, thus in a sense clearing the way for the raising of the Sony Center, symbol of capitalism, united Germany’s homage to the similarly united States, the pianist was thinking about the fluctuating value of ruins in the marketplace of history. It’s true that it’s the perfect spot to plant a bomb, I said to the pianist with no further agenda but the sudden impression of having understood something new about the composer within my pianist, something that had so far completely escaped me, understanding the composer though too late, his inability not to be pained by this Sony Center, not to endure it in all its capitalist splendor, was probably driven to compose in resistance to the pressure of the place, to compose and oppose the pressure of the place as an individual and for all those who don’t compose but keep the world turning such as it is. This is no laughing matter, really it isn’t, if this is laughter I have to stop, I decided, I was ashamed, in the great capital’s main square, objectively the place is perfect for a bomb and there’s nothing but nothing at all that’s funny about it only this laugh would creep up on me despite the objective disaster of a bombed-out Sony Center, the drama at the objective heart of this symbol of capitalism, a bomb here, I don’t see anything to split your sides about. Laughing sometimes undermines commitment, particular laughter particular commitment, I could see from the pianist’s face that he wasn’t suppressing a single giggle, couldn’t even imagine laughing but would quell mine with the anti-capitalist determination of his rapid pace. He wanted to pay for my seat, wanted to feed us, bought popcorn, ate, I listened to him crunching the kernels one by one right to the last, he was relaxed, the pianist in mufti crunching away, sat deep in his armchair, it was the moment for relaxation without a piano stool, on chairs as on stools but in the armchair he sprawled, digging about in the paper bag and raising handfuls to his mouth through the trailers, elbow on the armrest fulfilling the elementary function of a lever between bag and mouth, one foot resting on the other leg’s thigh, he held the paper bag out to me. Here wouldn’t you like some, I didn’t want any but pretended to so as not to be the type who refuses, you have to know how to receive, you can’t just give you also have to receive, it was a key part of my education teaching me to give as well as to receive as well as to say thank you, I said thank you a lot, it’s like breathing, thanks for anything and everything, thanks for the popcorn which I didn’t want but which I was happy to accept so you’d be happy, to say I stuffed myself would be overdoing it, accepted the minimum so the pianist would not lose face, took the minimum helping required for face-saving but did not take adva
ntage of his generosity, though often I do take advantage, I mean I serve myself without restraint or consideration, I take what interests me and use it to fill my own void, my void is all I care about, I’m nothing but an empty stomach. I know because I’m personally concerned, as illustrated perfectly by my ultimately failed marriage which was intended to fill the void, a marriage I believed in for years with the sole concern of being fulfilled, that way I had of filling the marriage with all kinds of things I would bring back and cook up, my marriage was nothing but a succession of banquets of things, I told my sister in the souvenir shop, in self-interest I stocked up things and more things, I always made a meal out of whatever it was, it all tasted good and to finish off my disgust for small dishes and for plenteous banquets and the pathological slimming. My pathofogical slimming marked the end of my successful marriage, I said to my sister, to sustain a successful marriage we should have kept up a desire for cooking and a desire for cleavage, not just the resources to cook out of love but also to cook for the sake of one’s cleavage, so eat, said my sister and stop with the self-analysis, you need to be making red blood cells and processing iron, the analysis can come later, our priority is your blood, you need healthy blood with plenty of red and white cells, platelets and iron, for cleavage one needs aptitudes not given to every woman, healthy blood should suffice to keep your end up, no need for a belly or excess weight to maintain resistance. Take the great résistant Jean Moulin, he wasn’t heavy but he had a good count of platelets, blood cells and iron, that’s what made the man Jean Moulin, a varied, iron-rich diet, there is iron in strength, perhaps in popcorn too, I thought about Jean Moulin and his iron and swallowed some American cinematographic nutrition, the expression came into my head but I didn’t want to say it, managed not to get started on America again, once is enough. Thanks to my capacity to accept a minimal gift of American popcorn, a capacity not innate but acquired through a successful education in the rules of exchange, further reinforced by Jean Moulin’s blood, I played a discreet part in the pianist’s relaxation, made his relaxation possible by giving up on all discussion of popcorn. The results were before me, I could contemplate them despite the semi-darkness, truly fine results, courtesy of this food-sharing that I accepted knowing how to say thanks, he was, yes, the pianist in his civvies, was relaxing in the cinema. Not I. There was the problem with my legs, a long-standing problem that I’ve never managed to fix and which damages my social position, tarnishes my public image and makes me unfit for all cultural integration. I’d be folding my legs around, crossing and uncrossing them and hooking them onto my arms, and I’d wind up totally embarrassed by the part of myself made up of legs and this throughout the whole film, an hour and a half of leg-awkwardness, I coiled them up like venomous vipers and imagined them the limbs of a paraplegic so I’d not have to deal with them, but they wouldn’t be tamed so easily, on the contrary, the more I thought about my paraplegic legs, the more alive and kicking the legs themselves became. In the end I trapped them by wedging my feet up on the seat and wrapping the whole bundle in both arms, that’s how I finished the film, in fetal position except for my head which was watching the film and not my navel. I was floating too thinking nothing but fetal thoughts but that’s pure invention, I’ve no fetal memories and that’s fine by me, I decided once again during the film: people who have their fetal memories at their fingertips are scary, everyone who can go back upstream like salmon upriver to the spawning ground of their fetal origins terrifies me, I remembered that type, I’d never want a single fetal memory, iron-curtain out the fetal condition, that’s the way to go, I’d said to my sister, that leaves space for the fetal imagination not to return to its origins in the fetal position, having no defined origin is stimulating for the memory, the quest for primal memory amounts to nothing more than dying having done nothing other than retell your founding fetal myth and nothing could matter more, I would say to all and sundry, I’d discussed it with my sister, now in the plane I was considering this discussion about origins that I’d inflicted on my sister but I could clearly see, she didn’t get it, my sister and I understand each other on most things but not on origins, it’s not an ideological divergence, my sister and I are almost perfectly in tune ideologically, it’s a primordial and practically fundamental difference, my sister feels no drive to return to her fetal origin like salmon returning upriver because she naturally recalls her forebears and still spontaneously luxuriates in the amniotic fluid, she doesn’t share my view on the original quest because she doesn’t comprehend the first thing about this quest, being directly connected via her belly button to the first principles of life and knowing everything a fetus knows about the whole world, about its place in the universe and the point of ontology. My sister’s expression had been forbidding, as if I were refusing her right to fetal conscience, begging me not to go on because then she’d have had to explain herself and sometimes explanation isn’t possible, that’s my sister, she knows where possibility ends and doesn’t embark on endless discussions about the beginning of time, simply acknowledges the starting blocks for everything, not I, in the cinema I’d no way of recalling my pre-self in fetal state, all I wanted was to make peace with my legs, in fetal position and craning at the screen I couldn’t follow a word of this un-subtitled American film, my English isn’t good enough for me to do without subtitles and even with subtitles I wouldn’t have understood a thing for I don’t have enough German to follow German subtitles or only haltingly and frankly to infantile level, and even if I’d been perfectly able to understand the film I’d have understood nothing, I couldn’t have got myself engrossed in it being too involved with my legs and sounds of crunching popcorn, not to mention my fundamental not-caring. I did make a few attempts to understand the film, didn’t want to watch it without caring from the start, more than anything fearing this natural tendency of mine of which I’m now aware thanks to my mother-in-law that day we played our unnatural tennis match, I focused on the images applying maximum concentration in order to extract data towards a vision of the whole, did my best to appreciate the gist, envisaged the plot and intention but in the end understood nothing because of my legs and my uncaring nature which I always factor in too late. It was a spy flick with deserts and mosques, jeeps and tanks, eastern extremists and big hotels, GIs and terrorists, at the end a young man in the prime of life launched his speedboat straight at an oil tanker while praying to God, he could just as well have blown himself to smithereens in Café Einstein or the Sony Center but this was cinema. The lights went up. I was free to let go of my legs, disentangle them, to the pianist I said thanks for the film sesh, I can only see this kind of film with you, and the pianist laughed loudly, I don’t know if he was being polite or if I was funny but it was true, I’d never have seen that kind of film without the pianist, I needed him so I could see it, but the film increased the distance between the pianist and me, after the tanker’s final explosion I was floored, not because of the explosion though it was big enough to bring down any girl of my type, but because of the pianist’s laugh. That laugh marked precisely the beginning of the end, I knew at that moment that this laughter was the very most the pianist could give me and that we would go downhill from here, from the laugh onwards I would always say too much whatever I said, even if it tickled the pianist at the time, for I’d already talked a deal too much at the Einstein and the Kaiser Café and anything I might say could never overwrite everything I’d said before but would accumulate to it, much too much said indeed even before I asked the pianist to excuse my chatter, entschuldige, ich habe zu viel gesprochen, not at all, it’s quite all right the pianist had replied in French but he had nevertheless taken me to the cinema in the Sony Center.

  If I hadn’t been standing right by the Sony Center when he’d called this would have been a different story, I thought in the plane. The significance of the place came back to me thanks to Thomas Mann, who believed deeply in the power of time and place, of ambient conditions, as the pianist had pointed out, knowing
the Manns father and son like the back of his hand, in other words knowing the Mann spirit as shared by the whole Mann family, Venice and its temporal conditions can change a man, the pianist had said during the conference at the Humboldt University, the sanatorium alters you from top to bottom, the effects of the Mediterranean and the North seas are not identical, exile in America transforms you, you’re different in Davos than in Hamburg, different in Venice than in Munich, in Munich than in Zurich and in Zurich than in Pacific Palisades. Yet the pianist had not included the Sony Center in his vision, he couldn’t see himself evolving positively inside this symbol of capital writ large, I understood straight away though too late. Actually he had imagined another place and so another climate, the place determines consequent conditions, he’d talked about Brecht’s house, would indeed have felt much better in Brecht’s house than in the Sony Center’s Kaiser Café, so much better that, at the Einstein, he’d proposed our next rendezvous be at Brecht’s house, to spend an evening in that house nowhere else, we could’ve gone for a stroll round the Dorotheenstadt cemetery which is next door, the cemetery where Brecht himself is buried, he’d suggested a little stroll in the cemetery, there’s no comparison with the Sony Center, besides at no point had he thought of going for a wander in the Sony Center yet here he was against his will, nothing to do here but go to the cinema, the only place in the whole Sony Center where you can forget the Sony Center, forget both the Center and Sony the multi-national, while at Brecht’s house it would be nonsense to forget the house where Brecht lived or Brecht himself and sensible rather not to forget, everything being quite charming here, Brecht’s tables and chairs, Brecht’s unfussy decoration, Brecht’s simple garden, Helene Weigel’s homely cooking which was Brecht’s food, the ambiance of Brecht’s cellar and the warm, intimate ambiance with Brecht smoking and drinking into the small hours, reciting poems and drawing on the tablecloth. No one would ever think of planting a bomb in Brecht’s house, none of the hubris of a United States of Germany in this house. Next door you can visit the cemetery where Brecht, Helene Weigel and all their friends are buried, the pianist said, Brecht’s philosopher friends, the musician friends along with the poet friends, there’s a crowd of them in the cemetery, Brecht is decomposing in good company in the Dorotheenstadt where Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau and Arnold Zweig and Heinrich Mann are also decomposing, and a great many more great minds and earlier dead and who knows who besides, the pianist here in this particularly favorable environment for composition, a place you might think entirely conceived for composition and not for consumption, a place in every way the opposite of the Sony Center, composition and consumption fundamentally incompatible, consumption decomposing quite differently than the cemetery, everything is in the manner or in the sentence object, he knows this without ever having to be taught and before learning any grammar and before writing his first German compositions, before seeing the Dorotheenstadt cemetery for the first time and then tasting Helene Weigel’s cooking in Brecht’s house, he knows this because it’s impossible for him not to have known it since the beginning, since before his birth, he particularly appreciates the company of Eisler, Dessau and Brecht as they are here, dead and buried, has no fear of the company of this heap of corpses, appreciates advanced decomposition, well-dressed bones, shirt collars, jackets woven on Silesian looms, blue trousers made to measure in Leipzig, well-polished shoes with rusty nails, without eyes to appreciate the might of the Sony Center, without ears to suffer the ambient music of that symbol of the United States of Germany, without eyes or ears but with shoes and clothes on their bones, all six feet under, that’s a good deal better than in an ashtray, ashtrays don’t keep you company like the tomb, the pianist remarked in Dorotheenstadt cemetery where he often used to go not after anything directly helpful for composing, but each time noting the positive effects of the decomposition of Brecht, Dessau and Eisler, of those three particularly, on his compositions. He goes to engage with decomposition no plans for his own composition and each time is surprised afresh by these three, asks nothing of Brecht nor of Dessau nor Eisler, is not visiting them on the hunt for inspiration, yet each time leaves the cemetery in fine composing fettle, then goes to eat Helene Weigel’s cooking in the cellar at Brecht’s house or weather permitting in the garden at Brecht’s house, but the very moment he is offered the menu with its renowned traditional Weigel dishes he suddenly feels disguised in this house of simplicity, as a pianist and not like Eisler in shirtsleeves and braces, not at ease like Eisler in Brecht’s house but imprisoned in his pianist’s clothes, the lost simplicity of Kurt Weill and of Brecht, a statue in the house of memory, imprisoned in the cultural institute, suddenly the Pantheon-esque scene, Brecht’s decoration in the poorest of taste, Brecht’s chairs notoriously uncomfortable, the Weigel menu inedible and Weill’s music nothing but peasant tunes, the pianist could have done with the girl that day, that girl and no other in Brecht’s house, he could have seen the girl seated on one of Brecht’s simple chairs at Brecht’s simple table, crossing and uncrossing her legs beneath that simple table as if beneath any table, he’d have sat opposite and they’d have had no need to come to conclusions about Brecht before arguing over not Brecht but post-Brecht, a brand-new era opening up after the death and decomposition of Brecht, that decomposition conducive to composition, an enjoyable subject in the girl’s company, her breasts so barely there that you could see her breathing through them, he has an inkling that she maintains no interaction with the dead as dead people, never goes to cemeteries generally although the Dorotheenstadt cemetery is obviously different, has never knelt in contemplation at gravesides nor laid flowers on them, going to see the once-living now dead no this is not the girl’s cuppa and at Dorotheenstadt she doesn’t lay flowers, there’s no call for flower-laying, she goes not intending to kneel or contemplate but then what is she seeking here, seeking a reason to run away as her reason to live, explores death’s home as a means to escape, to run and live as far away as possible but then you really need a reason, bringing herself close to death was the only way the girl could approach the tombs and feed upon the dead. She had never dined on the dead with pleasure but always declined the dish, no thanks, had never donned black weeds nor wept in fear but had always felt chilled upon contact with it, come to this place to seek the source of the chill, hoped to set down here all the corpses she’d been carrying without realizing why the chill, how long had the girl been carrying corpses without knowing why so cold, when exactly had her will to heft run out and had she decided to set them down where they should be, carry them as far as Dorotheenstadt and once more sense close by that death she no longer wished to bear, here to let them go abandoning them among the others, then to get away as fast as she could, he saw the girl dart off down the path, her little frame in motion made him want to whisk her away with him. You have to turn away from the dead as corpses, leave the dead where they are for what they are the girl said stomping back up boyish her shoulders loosed, they’re non-living that’s all, not missed but well and truly gravitated into the grave, while you’re right here, he would say it to the girl whose bones articulate so charmingly as she walks rapidly, almost flying, would like to say it to her, to catch her by the humerus and in one movement grasp her radius and cubitus, we’re missing nothing without them but we can miss something without a live person, any person alive but you more than anyone, the dead have disappeared, the living do not disappear, always leave at least an absence which is not nothing but rather a gap, the gap when a live person disappears but a dead one you have to laugh, people who talk to the dead are lacking a bit of life but here in Dorotheenstadt talking is possible, the cadavers of Brecht and Eisler and Weigel and Dessau, we can talk to them. You can stay as long as you like before the tomb of a dead man he won’t say a word that hasn’t already been said, when it’s said it’s said and when you’re dead it’s too late, but not at Dorotheenstadt, dead isn’t too late, the pianist rests his hand on the girl’s topmost vertebrae, standing face-to-face with
decomposition, meditative as if for the first time, her neck under his fingers he knows she knows, doesn’t explain, Oh no never more but sees her hair flying it’s a song from after the war, the street in the locks of girls gone gathering, the wind rushing in do you remember down those ravaged streets of Berlin, Oh those post-war girls just like you, no hairpins to pull out no more needles to ply, no more babies to change, the bedraggled daughters of cadavers going to scrabble under fallen stones for firewood and sparks of life, you like those girls, the pianist thinks, his fingers on her vertebrae as though on the white keys, the girl feels the virtuoso pressure on her neck, you forget everything, tomorrow same as yesterday you’ll have forgotten him, he plants the chord across the white keys and makes her turn around, gently to me turn around look at me, he murmurs and smiles then, she sees his teeth, will think oh beautiful teeth, and the handsome mouth the girl thinks naturally his smile also very fine, a charming laugh between things said and those still potential, to speak and talk of the decomposition required for composition or for anything at all the main thing’s the mouth, look you can count the teeth inside, and he’s aware of the tongue’s invitation, knows his tongue, uses it to talk of the effects of decomposition upon composition, would like to hold it for another time because what’s the good, she already knows all about Dorotheenstadt, without experience but as if by magic she’s understood it all, I can see you know the pianist says to the girl but please look at my mouth moving, twist your hair round your finger and untwist it, now love my teeth, not only my teeth or my mouth or the totality of the whole, these black and burning eyes my rifles trained on you, how not to crumble into flames before these pistol eyes, girls love it, and down the forehead curls fall, and over temples and neck the tumbling of hair still damp from the post-war rains, she understands of course she understands but what? The rains here don’t last, says the pianist covering the girl with a section of his coat, he guides her towards Brecht’s house, come little blind girl and shelter at Madame Weigel’s, for she refuses to understand, nothing, understands nothing, in truth zero comprehension in the girl’s silence, no point talking about decomposition with her understanding none of it, he thrilled to her incomprehension and didn’t, wanted nothing to do with the girl and wanted her, the rope affects the leap, just once I’d like to break my neck. Since I was very young, here’s how he justifies it, yes very young, going back to that time, whoever hasn’t experienced benevolent understanding in their very earliest hours has been deprived, how does one grow up with such deprivation, with what damage, he tries to convince himself, understanding and benevolence brought together around the cradle unmissable, of course plenty of babies do miss out, the majority if you go with the stats, those babies have counted that out even before breathing their first, make do for the most part with the air they’re breathing, a joy for a number of babies, actually for the great majority, growing up misunderstood and neglected, never dream of a better fate, you don’t see what’s missing, you have to have known benevolent understanding in order to miss it, then we’ll always be missing it more or less acutely because there’s never enough understanding nor enough benevolence, the babies who lack for nothing are those that never had anything and yet become someone the pianist pondered watching the girl’s lungs, lungs that are easy to see because her breasts are hardly there, just enough of them to give way for breathing, just enough so you’d like to kiss them but not to nestle or shelter in them, no those breasts are not a refuge, you see the lungs take their dose of fresh air like the very first breath, no refuge here, keine Mutterbrust he tells himself in German, remembering the Mutterbrust his Mummy’s bosom but what did he do next? He hears the post-war lullaby, never thought he could sleep without the song that ruled the airwaves after the war, a whisper of exile beneath the mosquito net, a narrow escape, wonders why men and the artists among them and the children within them drift their whole lives from that nostalgia of the post-war and women’s scents identical to the one that rose sweaty from the twin cushions of the Mutterbrust, ash on honey, sweat on cheek to slumber here, from one bosom to the next always that understanding, the fall of the Third Reich was not enough to put a stop to the power of the Mutterbrust. The question once arisen the possible reply, due to this girl the question, the mother’s answer, because he’d talked to the girl about decomposition, watching the girl look at him without benevolent understanding, he’d like to have the girl but doesn’t want her, he’s dying to have this girl listen to him talk about decomposition, a single enduring smile from this girl and he would have achieved an entire fresh page of the most dazzling and genuinely original music, a page for which he would never have cause to blush. He did want but didn’t, for her to be here yes but at the same time no, that part of her be here but not all of her, though at the same time, yes all of her, but only in part. Not forever nor even for a long time, her here this moment but that an eternal moment, her eternally not forever but right now.