Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  My personal goal… is to express myself as clearly and honestly as I can – so in a sense love is just like writing.

  Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

  I’m not sure how to begin to make art out of love. That’s why it’s been hard, hard to write these first few paragraphs, so hard I’ve sometimes had to turn away from the page, so hard I’ve run words together, unable to type them so they mean something anyone else could read. Untrained in grammar, but it’s more than that. Sometimes there are no sentences for what I need to say: sometimes the object must replace the subject. Sometimes participles dangle. Sometimes there are no nouns, sometimes I haven’t been able to tell who’s speaking. No virtuoso, I’m all non-sequiturs, tautologies… or it’s not what to write, it’s what to leave unwritten, how to narrow life to the width of the page. I could write, I love you. It’s a good, straightforward sentence – subject, verb, object – but where’s the good in that? There is no good in it. So let me not be virtuosic, as I am not virtuous. Let me make things difficult; let me make difficult things. Let me not succeed (if I did I’d get to the end too quickly and I’d have to stop thinking about you). Let me fail. I have failed the practice: now let me fail the theory. To talk about love let me use only the simplest words. Let me state the facts as they occurred: they will evoke the rest.

  The simplest words become charged with an intensity that is almost intolerable.

  Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

  Love letters begin with ‘I’, but they aspire to ‘we’. Our story was slight enough, barely warranting the two-letter word, that double-you. But ‘we’ is seldom a storyteller, and any love story told is evidence of singularity, of separation, of love’s failure – or success – at any rate proof that love has moved on elsewhere. To write about love is to feel my way to its ends, to trace its limits, to push against its borders. To write about love is to gather its pieces, to kick them from under chairs and pry them from between floorboards, to sweep them onto a duster or a piece of newspaper, to purse it closed. To write about love is to wrap it up, to put a layer between me and it so that I won’t trip on it, stub my toe on it, cut myself on it. To write about love is to be sick of the sight of it lying around, to clear it up, throw it out, to put the pieces out of harm’s way. To write about love is to shrink it, to conclude it, to end it, to end up alone. All love stories end with the letter I.

  But all travel books begin with ‘I’ too, a fugitive ‘I’ that flings itself from country to country. Could this ‘I’ write a love story that goes on, with no ending up, in which uncertainty is ceaselessly renewed? To move me, a story has to move towards some kind of conclusion. Still, it mustn’t hurry, must never be too sure of the ending. There has to be a beginning – a middle, too – or there wouldn’t be a story at all. I always want everything to be over too soon: loving the story but wanting the end. Only when I’ve finished reading do I realise it was better to travel than to arrive. By the time it draws into the station, love is no more than a reported act: the train arriving at platform four is the 06.32 from… A story involves a leap of faith. It’s not in the words, it takes place in the seconds of held breath between. I give my trust freely to the writer who, I hope, will bring me safe to the end. But there is no story without the possibility of a fall.

  Does he love the girl or is she just another thing that moves him?

  Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition

  I buy a coffee and sit at the bar by a man in a grey-paunched business suit. He is reading a book: Living in the Moment. He thinks of the future, orders, ‘Un Coca-Light’. Travel’s a space for worry. Everyone here is looking for advice but no one dares to ask themselves, or the other people here. It’s so hard to be, so hard, we have to search for solutions elsewhere. If not in a book, then a window-seat on a moving train: that’s the best place to get some perspective. I flick through a magazine on the bar to the horoscopes page and read: Having refused to disclose much about yourself, you’ll soon need to be more open with certain people. Don’t enter into territory that leaves you anxious. Some facets of your life are too complex to discuss openly. You’ve a right to privacy just like everyone else. I have no idea what this means, but a lover grasps at predictions, as a traveller at signs.

  Something inside me still tells me to forget it, is trained to say, let it go, move on, as though living, loving, were somewhere else; as if nothing important could happen to me and nothing that happened to me could ever be important. Who do I think I am, anyway?

  (And to love is to ask the same question, and also the question: Who are you? What is it, about you, I find so loveable? And, if you ever loved me, what was it about me?)

  If my other half leaves, what is left of me? There are a few things. I have brought with me enough for a month. I have brought: one dress, one pair of jeans, three, T-shirts, a jacket, a scarf, a sweater. I am wearing some of these. I have brought: underwear, bikini, socks – perhaps four pairs – one washbag, one pair of boots, one pair of shoes, sandals, a very small umbrella. I have brought: one laptop, one pair of headphones, one smartphone, notebooks, pens, a few books – one copy of Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, one copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition, one copy of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, a copy of Mad Love by André Breton, and also his Nadja, which begins with the words ‘Who am I?’ (do not think I have not noticed these are all books by men). One bag. No allowance, but I’m equipped for everything. I am proud of how little I need, how little I am.

  The Sempervivum plant… tries at the cost of whatever revolting efforts to reconstruct itself according to the properties that it has.

  André Breton, Mad Love

  The boarding announcement: I cut back through the stationer’s, a last search for something in a language I understand, that will tell me nothing I need to know. The Girl’s Guide to Europe does not tell her what Europe is like, but how a girl should be when she is there. In the self-help aisle, Top Tips for Girls says:

  Don’t call him

  Write an email but don’t send it.

  Delete all his texts etc.

  Do I intend to take any of this advice? No, I think, no. I am not an advice taker. When offered advice I think carefully, not about what will do me the most good but about what I want to do. If it’s no good for me, so much the better. I won’t do things because they are good for me, or because they will make me good. If I want to email you, I will. Why? Who knows? For the split second of autonomy, for the beautiful fall.

  Is this going to be a self-help book, then? Self-help does seem to come in books, as though the self could be helped only by writing, being mostly, or even nothing more than, words. I’ve done it online, tweaking my profiles, refining sentences, but a book is a solid-state object: there it is, all at once, not a word can be altered, and nothing tells you the time quicker than a yellowed paperback. No, I’m not sure this is a self-help book. If it were I wouldn’t be thinking about myself: I’d be thinking about how – having already achieved some measure of self – I could help my reader, whereas, as things stand, I can hardly help myself. So, no, I think this will be a helpless book and, though I admit it’s not entirely selfless, it will not, I hope, be selfish. I think, therefore it is… All right. OK, OK, call it a selfish book then: self-ish, like ‘childish’ – analogous to, concerned with, but not quite self, just as blue-ish is sort-of-but-not-quite blue.

  We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body – not too little, not too much, just right.

  Turkle, ibid

  How, then, can I bamboozle the sleek self?

  The personal pursued for its own sake is no good. The ‘I’ is only useful to the point that it gets outside itself, gets larger.

  Chris Kraus, interview, Artnet

  I have decided to take a route across Europe. I have a rail pass. Though I have visited cities in Europe before I have never linked up its countries, have never traced the length, the width of the continent,
felt its distances, the jolt of crossing its borders, or how long it might take me to travel between them, to span a country. For a month, I will be a passenger, passive. I have asked friends to ask their friends if I can stay. I will zigzag from country to country, and my route will be dictated by chance, by the kindness of strangers. I will trust, yes, recklessly.

  I shall discuss these things without pre-established order, and according to the mood of the moment which lets whatever survives survive. My point of departure will be…

  André Breton, Nadja

  Spring, an unsatisfactory season in northern Europe, is the best time to leave. My timing’s right on this one. The last few weeks’ sick vertigo, waiting to go, is another era: let’s say nothing of it. I have been left. Now I am leaving. What should I call this moment?

  The station is the most machinelike place I have ever been: glass and metal, a whole history in iron ribs and dirty girders. Time’s a mist. I travel through it as I’d travel though a country. Time is distance. It’s such a long haul. I can’t go on.

  The moment I say I can’t do something is always the moment I begin to do it.

  (I will be moved. Haven’t I always been susceptible to being moved?)

  I am astounded actions can be built from words.

  I am astounded I have even got this far.

  I find my carriage. I say goodbye to my smartphone signal: it doesn’t work abroad. From now on I will be less connected.

  I’m in a tunnel between countries when the train stops, not suddenly, but rattles to a halt. The lights dim and my mind kicks over that weary exercise, the thought of death amongst strangers. I am sitting in the dark. There are people all round me: every seat is taken. There’s a window next to me, but there is nothing outside, only black with a smudge that might be reflected flesh. I turn back to the table, its plastic flaps – how conveniently! – extended for my elbows, on which I am leaning. That’s when I notice that tears are running down my face. I am crying, not noisily but silently. There seems to be nothing I can do to stop it, so I don’t. Opposite me a younger man takes out his phone. He does not speak to me. He types something then holds it up so I can see. On a backlit screen it says:

  DO NOT WORRY. GOD WILL MAKE IT OK.

  And I laugh.

  [in the tunnel]

  Let’s begin at the beginning.

  Let’s start with a line.

  Draw a line in this space, from one side of this page to the other. To make it easier, I’ve put in dots for you.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Connect them up, straight as you can. I take the shortest route between two points. OK. Now sit back and look at your work.

  It’s not much, but it is something.

  It’s a railway line on a map. If you hold it at arms’ length, if you squint, you can almost see the tiny crosshairs set at 90 degrees from the horizontal that symbolise sleepers; that make it possible to imagine a real train running on a real track; that make your line not just a design but a drawing too, waiting, perhaps, for one of those scribbled steam engines that sill look like a child’s drawing of a train, although few under sixty have seen one outside a museum.

  Put a dot on the line, wherever you like. Don’t worry, there’s no right or wrong. There it is. Thats you; that’s now.

  It’s a stop on the track. It means you can imagine what happened before you got to that stop, and what will happen afterwards, from the parting at the station to the good or bad or indifferent seat, to the delay caused by cattle on the line, to the missed connection, to the interval of boredom dispersed in the buffet car, to the hope of final arrival. The dot divides the future from the past. It makes the line into a story. Now your line is a timeline. Where did you put your dot? How far along the line are you?

  Forget it – it’s only something I told you. It’s just a line on a piece of paper. It goes from that side of the paper to this, left to right or right to left depending on your cultural expectations and which hand you used to draw. It has no direction, apart from the direction you gave it.

  So is it a railway line or isn’t it?

  You decide.

  Draw another line, here in this space below, from side to side; just the same kind. No need for dots now, you’re getting used to this.

  It’s a horizon, dividing the land from the sky.

  It’s a border: you can imagine crossing it.

  There it is.

  And if it is there, you are here, on one side of it. There it is. And here you are.

  See?

  Gestalt psychology is about recognising discrete patterns: what is the figure; which is the ground? Separating self from environment shouldn’t be hard. You have parallax vision, the gift of the binocular viewer. Stereoptic human sight is good for depth judgement. It means you can estimate your position in the landscape, relative to the horizon, to other objects, other people. Optic flow is parallax plus movement – you can see what’s coming at you: prey, predators, friends. Close one eye, close the other. You renew your position every second. It means you’ll always know exactly where you are.

  What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of Two and not One?

  Badiou, ibid

  If you know where you are, then you can move. You can get some perspective.

  Perspective makes near objects look bigger, and distant, smaller, though we both know this is an illusion. It’s what makes us think railway lines converge to a point when we stare at them in the distance, eyes shaded with one hand against the sun.

  Once you have perspective, you can decide which way to go. Though sometimes you have to move in order to know where you are (that’s parallax again). And sometimes, when you move, it will seem that the landscape is moving too. This is something called motion parallax.

  Do you see?

  See, see what you can do, with one line, with just a little ink and paper.

  2 Paris/Passing

  St Germain-en-Laye 21st April

  I’m in B’s large and gracious kitchen and I’m hungover.

  I got to Paris last night. I went to a party where I drank a lot of Aperol, an Italian drink: pale, bright orange like nothing in nature. I didn’t like it but everyone else said it was so nice that I kept trying it until I was too fragmented to speak French any more. I talked to a friend’s boyfriend – French. He said, in French, ‘Why don’t you talk in French, you can speak French, can’t you?’ The girls were dressed up but the men hadn’t bothered, or maybe they had. I went outside to share several cigarettes. There was a moon, and the streetlights refracted through raindrops. As I left with B, a man I’d just met called after me, my name.

  The units in B’s kitchen are made of dark, grained wood; the worktops, granite. There are some other things made of pale stone: a fruit bowl, a pestle and mortar, maybe. Rocks, trees. It’s a forest in here. Dull surfaces absorb the light. Nothing reflects except pools of stainless steel. There are small electricals with outsides of blurred metal and eggshell plastic. Already I have taken wrong turns, the sort of things you do in hotels: incorrect plugs, handless facades: timidity over the WiFi, over how to make coffee in B’s specific machine. Still, I have not broken anything.

  And B is doing, what? She’s out. She has gone shopping, she has gone to the hairdresser? I don’t know.

  Time moves slowly.

  When B returns, she is wearing a little black perfecto, which is a kind of leather jacket, with a floral scarf.

  B (an Englishwoman living in Paris) says, ‘I have bought a perfecto so I can be a proper Parisienne. It’s a bit too perfect so I bought a coloured scarf to make a difference, but now I just look like a conservative Frenchwoman trying to brighten up her outfit in a bourgeois way. I’m not a bourgeois Frenchwoman, but it’s nice to have the option.’

  B’s house is big. It is double fronted, each half reflected in the other – a butterfly-print,
a Rorschach blot. It was once two houses, both sub-divided into apartments. It has double the number of rooms of most houses but B has tried to make them all different.

  B says, ‘The house is so big we had to keep on making up new kinds of rooms.’ And it’s true. There are corners in B’s house where there are just bookshelves and some cushions. The ceiling slopes too low to stand upright but you can sit down and she has invented a particular thing you can do there, in that space only. There are more things to do in B’s house because there are more places in which to do them. There is a laundry room. Downstairs there is a room just for boots and coats.

  B says, ‘Marriage. We have a deal: when the children go, I get to say where we live. But, in the meantime, we do use all the space.’

  B says, ‘I have to show you the bit you can see all Paris from.’

  We go out. We walk through St Germain-en-Laye, which is a stage set of eighteenth-century Paris.

  B says, ‘It used to be the capital of Île-de-France, before Versailles. Some of these houses are handed down from generation to generation of aristocrats. You meet people here who have always been from here.’ She calls them hôtels particuliers, which means private houses, but they could be hotels: they’re clean enough, and white enough, but they’re all turned inward, their stone the colour of rubber gloves inside-out. The streets’ narrow pavements have high pale walls you can’t see over.