by Joanna Walsh
Abramović,
Rhythm 0, 1974
People love to watch pain, until they get bored and go away. Pain is hard to hold onto, but I have held onto mine because it seemed easier to grasp than anything else, or perhaps because it is easier than other things for an artist to represent, or for an audience to notice. You told me once that I should be a cutup artist, exhibiting my damage. It was one of the destinies you’d painted for me, besides suicide or whore. But, no, I am not a pain artist: I am a love artist, which is different, though no less ephemeral, no less balanced between active and passive and, like pain art, it needs an observer. One is best but, if not one, then why not many, one by one, like with the artist in the red dress, or like the reader and the writer of a book, as reading, or like love, is a folie à deux.
Despite the fact that you are an imaginary person, you are in no way a multiplicity, so there is only you and I.
Kierkegaard, ibid
One of the people who came to look at the artist in the red dress was her ex: her ex-lover, ex-collaborator. They had not seen each other for some time, and she had no warning he would appear. He sat down opposite her and looked into her eyes, and his eyes showed an infinity of regret and its inverse: acceptance, or maybe that wasn’t what it was – who can tell? In any case, for a moment art stopped and gave way to pure emotion. Then the artist’s ex went away and art, which had been present before, once more took love’s place. Love stops art because it is love’s opposite: art is already finished, while love imperfectly continues. Only one of them can be present at a time. We know it because They all lived happily ever after, which only happens when love becomes a story. Only in art do we meet our ends so soon.
The woman in red was an artist and she wanted to stay the whole length of the trip, to make a new kind of art in which the artist remained present, in which art never comes to a (happy) end, but continues in its moment of creation. What was between the artist in red and her ex, I thought could be between us, that thing that spans decades and may change but doesn’t leave, that stays, rebounding endlessly between the subjunctive’s hope and doubt. It may no longer be love but it is something, though I’m not sure what love becomes when it can’t be enacted. Sure, we’d have to insert more history between now and that future point in order to get to the same place as the artist in red, and her ex. We haven’t earned it yet but we still could. All it would take is time. And I might have to become your ex so we would be able to go beyond an end.
Only he who is really in love, only he is a human being. Only he who can give his love any sort of expression whatever, only he is an artist.
Kierkegaard, ibid
I could never tell if we came to any end because we were always ending. We went straight from all the first times to all the last times. Whenever you told me we were finished, I tried to make a lasting impression, and only a little time passed before you would ask to see me again, always dishing a word when you needed a hook. The closer were got to ending the fewer words we used, until we were shocked to find these words were no longer decoration, but that we had come to fulfil them. How horrible to discover ourselves finally at the mercy of what we meant. Still, it all led to nothing, or only to a repeat of the pattern. Our story unrolled like a carpet. Facing forward, I could see only half a foot in front; the rest was behind me. I only understood the pattern looking back at the whole thing from the end. All the time we were not-ending, I couldn’t turn to see enough to be able to predict its lines and gaps.
Even now I’m not sure of the edges, whether I’ve come to them, and if I can distinguish them from the space beyond. But I’ve never understood this anxiety to neaten up, to finish off. I’ve forgotten how most books end; I must read one sometime. Everyone remembers the beginnings, all those first lines! And, now I come to think about it, I have stopped reading so many books before the end. They seemed satisfactory just as they were, with the stories keeping going and the characters never reaching any conclusions. I was happy to exist alongside them, just as you do with people you see every day. As for my own story, I’ve been supplied with enough last lines: get over it, let it go, and, again and again, forget him. People give me these endings, and so do books and, almost before I can tell, they’ve taken the place of anything I think, so that it gets hard for me to untangle the stories they’ve told me from memory.
In the last year I’ve read everything I could find about love. What did these books tell me? All about what it is to be a lover, next to nothing about the beloved, in any case, nothing that matched your own specific oddness, or maybe I mean my own. But I have found that writing is not a tool that can be turned upon anything: I have not chosen what to write about, I have only decided whether to write about what I have. Writing is not transferrable, perhaps.
One comes to have the disease about which one reads.
Kierkegaard, ibid
All love stories end with the letter I. I told you, slyly I suppose, almost nothing about myself, but then there’s almost nothing to me. In the short time we were together I tried to make of myself a story that made sense to both of us, but the prompts were always yours, and we worked over what I was until we reached a conclusion I disliked less than some you had proposed. You were wrong about me often, but each statement prompted a question, and I always wanted to reply, until I began to persecute you with answers. Leave him alone, I’d tell myself some days, knowing that whatever my answer, it was bigger than you. If I went looking for love like a punch in the face, is it any surprise I found it? But I am still recovering from your words about me, the good ones as much as the bad ones, each of which was mended by the next kind word that always came.
Love has been declared.
Badiou, ibid
Loving and writing are so close: both involve a little violence. I undertake this effort only for you, though also, and equally, against you. When I end this book I’ll extinguish myself but you’re coming down with me, or at least my version of you is.
Could it be that to write about love, even to write humbly and responsively, is itself a device to control the topic, to trap and bind it like an animal – so, of necessity, an unloving act?
Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge
Writing, I have become willing to be cruel, and I have never been cruel before. (Oh the cruelty of books – inventing people in order to make them suffer!) Breton claimed Nadja was real, but she is untraceable, unphotographed. In his memoir, Breton published her sketches, photos of places they met, as though a space were evidence of a person, and some have read Nadja as pure fantasy, a cut-and-paste job of other lovers. Whoever Nadja was, before the end of the book she disappears. Where does she go? Her author doesn’t seem very interested. Breton didn’t have the heart to make an end of her. He left her in a limbo of disinformation (rumours of the loony-bin). Was that not an act of cruelty?
Cruelty to whom?
By leaving Nadja’s fate unexpectedly open, Breton allows her to be the first to leave. And this may have been an act of love.
The writer is the creation of the word – the word written, which is not the word spoken – which reaches across a gap of space, or time. It was Nadja who created Breton, not the other way around, and you have shown an equal generosity, giving me everything I’ve written about, which is all I have left of you. Or maybe I have given everything to myself, through the medium of writing to – about – you. It’s confusing, especially when we were both so quick to make stories. So much of you is left in me. The way I take notes now: small, neat, like you do, the pile of books you told me to read, many of which I have… Look at me now: more you than you are, your leftover. And yet, because we have moved apart in time and space, I find I am not. You peeled off like a paper tattoo. What’s left isn’t you: a blurry imprint in reverse, transferred to me, no longer your likeness. Am I coming back?
The young girl was not his beloved. She was simply the cause that awakened the poetic in him and thus transformed him into a poet.
Kierkegaard, ibid
In order to come back I have had to go away. Getting away from you, I’ve found myself in places where I bumped up against other people: in cities. Moving smoothly through these uncircumscribed spaces where there are no lovers, only strangers, the crowd has shaped me differently. There’s not enough contrast. I get fuzzy round the edges, my corners knocked off, never defined so precisely, nor from only one perspective, as in love.
When a scene has little or no apparent structure, we are likely to be confused and frustrated: the eye will roam fruitlessly seeking interest & points of connection, from one fixation to the next, without much success.
Bell, Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process
Cities are made for love, as they are made for loneliness. Because I know it better than it can ever know me, my own city is the easiest place to be lonely, but there are so many different kinds of loneliness in this city, and not all of them can be satisfied by you. I’ll bustle against these nothings every day, until I meet another man with his new kind of nothing to fill it. That man I saw across the station bar the day I left – he was ordering, what, a whisky? Looking back, I can see his features clearly, a flash in the forest. And I liked them; he was my type. Seemed like nothing, but now I remember him well. Perhaps he’d do. There is no more beautiful place to look for someone than in a city, but London’s so big, and he was leaving too. Will I ever be able to re-catch his eye?
One sticks his finger in the ground in order to judge where one is. I stick my finger in existence – it feels like nothing.
Kierkegaard, ibid
We had our cities: one, two, three, plus a ghost city we never got to. No matter: a lover is a tape-recording machine, and I have made a record of all those other cities, have provided myself with scenery to tag my thoughts, to give my mind (my heart, whatever) some landscape. I have recorded the rhythms of the streets, that are written over and under their maps. I have carried them about with me: their noises, the temperature of the air, their smells. I have let my body record them so that, meeting today, I could have told you mouth to mouth.
You have written yourself all over the map of my city until I can no longer distinguish loving you from loving the buildings, the streets. Not that I think of London as anywhere to love now, a dead-end city isolated at the end of the continent, the red and white brickwork, nothing but decoration, the poshed-up villas: nice to see, not anything anyone could ever think about, not really. Priced out of imagination, nothing could go on behind those facades. Unreal city: all swans, dragons, lions – not that they’re seen in the flesh, not often: maybe a hedgehog, a fox raiding the bins at dawn and, above, not sparrows, but seagulls. Still, I can’t disengage London from love’s dis-located headiness. I thought I had walked enough in all the cities in Europe but I find I will have to walk these particular streets again, and many more, before I lose you.
(I saw you once more, a long time after, walking down the Charing Cross Road. There was no home in you.)
I want the world! No I just wanted you and, as I can’t have you, I have found it necessary to want everything else. Love has made me greedy, and greed has made me ambitious: that’s one more favour you’ve done me. If I love you doesn’t mean I must be near you, it would be easy for me to keep moving, to continue travelling, writing, in order to defer ending.
There was nothing holding us apart, keeping us together.
Nothing but words.
Now there are no more words between us, nothing is happening.
Nothing.
Is it possible to write that?
I get out my laptop because here, like anywhere else, people will leave you alone if they see you’re connected. I open a new email, hit COMPOSE. There are ways of holding on to people, I suppose, and one of them’s to keep talking. The more words I type, the more space appears to fill the content. You’d think it’d be the other way round but hit that key – returnreturnreturn – and more page appears. Where there is a gap I put words into it, and there are gaps for stories everywhere. Expand space, and time expands too, the time it takes to write a page, to read it. I could carry on writing to keep time with space, and what I create will continue to loop my story, as though, by putting something into words, I might also make some stay. I could replay the whole thing in words over and over, because I don’t want to forget, none of it, not even this. All I want is to remember, endlessly. I know it’s not possible. Each loop layers story over experience, which escapes between and through. Writing is a mechanism not for remembering, but for forgetting.
My life is dull now without you to tell it to, and you are the one person who won’t allow me to tell it. I could tell my readers everything I could tell my lover. The difference is they can’t respond. A book is a one-way process. That’s OK. Most people like their pain at one remove and, if they have to get personal, prefer the impersonal: the problem pages, the confessional. To square the public with the private I could join a forum, blog it out, post secrets in public anonymity. Confession dispenses with pain, but the internet does not forget: its perpetual present makes stories harder to be rid of. There is so little to say, anyway. Or rather, there’s so much room online, but there are so few new stories, and mine, which is not, after all, so very unusual, mingles with the stories I have read, until I can hardly tell it from any of the others.
The lesson of so many of these stories is that you get over love. I want to learn nothing from this but, however much I try not to learn, I learn so much – every week, every day. In order to tell my story, I must know little or nothing of what I write until I write it, writing myself out of necessary ignorance, each sentence a performance of inexperience. I must keep on writing to escape knowledge, as knowledge means no more writing. I will not be wise. If I were, how would I ever fall in love again? No knowledge for me, no thank you. What do the wise talk about in the evenings? I won’t watch my feet. I’ll step in anything that’s on the pavement. Messy, yes, and I might be taken for a ride, but at least I’ll take a trip and doing so I will preserve something, even if I fall. In love to fall is not to fail (to fail is not to fail! In what, other than love, is failure allowed, expected, embedded in the process? In what, other than love, could I fail so well? Where else is failure a sign of success?).
You now begin to see how this lady is: she goes on thinking at all times. She won’t simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument: that’s how her life goes on.
Nussbaum, ibid
I am sitting here, at the station, still, because I no longer want to leave this place from which leaving is always an option. Here there are still choices to be made: the endless snack bars, the wine bars, the buffets, their menus affected neither by place nor season. I can even choose not to choose: I’ve been sitting here all afternoon without going into any of them, and it’s getting on for evening, but I can smell the twenty-four-hour coffee and it feels like morning. To stay sitting here, at the station, refusing to make an end, is no kind of wisdom, just a temporary stillness, an absence of pain.
Not that I’ve suffered all the time; I’ve even suspected myself, sometimes, of enjoying it. The act of telling has given me a thrill (I’ve robbed myself of my own suffering! So what?). And, in the meantime I’ve enjoyed all sorts of other things: eating, and getting drunk, and seeing friends, and brushing my hair until it shone, and reading, and walking through cities, and along canals at sunset, and sitting on hot stone with the wind in my ears. And apart from sometimes having a good time there were other times when I simply didn’t have any kind of time at all. I can’t mind about everything all the time. It’s exhausting. This is only a book. Go off and find some suffering of your own. Let me stay here holding on to what I’ve got, and suffer while I can. I am ashamed of my weak little pain, that cannot even endure a little space of time.
I get out my phone again. It confirms: YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF YOUR JOURNEY. I find I don’t want to, can’t think of a way to end this that won’t be with a shrug, a seeyalater, some kind of ir
onic exit into the wings, which will be revealed as no more than painted card. To leave would be to move on, and, though there has to be some kind of exit, that would not be it. You know already, reader, that I’m not really here, now. The train is long gone and I’m writing all this some time later. I’m only pretending. I’m a little pretentious, sure, but reading has made you complicit. Stay with me, reader: how can either of us get anywhere unless we pretend?
OK:
Pretend that I walk out of the station. Inside a red bus, lavender seats flower up. A woman frowns past me because I sit down on the steps by the exit, next to one of the many notices that say, CAUTION STEPS. The sun is shining, and in the teeth of the traffic a busker’s singing Every little thing gonna be alright. And though the old song’s blown through creaking lungs, so patently not all right, from one end of that moment to the other, maybe it will be.
Cheer up, darlin’, it may never happen!
Well, perhaps it never did. But, like the artist in the red dress, I will keep on sitting and, because I am not ex, nothing will come to an end, though that may mean nothing will rekindle if he ever does sit down opposite me and look into my eyes. I’m beginning to forget whether we ever saw eye-to-eye, but I do remember I tried it once. We were in his old brown car, and I was in the passenger seat. My eyes met his, but I could not look into them any further than I could into the buttons of his coat. Instead, I found myself following the frill of his iris where the blue met the grey until I could have drawn it.
The detailed character of this tale of something which nevertheless didn’t happen.
Breton, Nadja
Each time I saw you, I stroked you with my eyes until I could sculpt your outsides with my glance and, as I did, I was full of joy. I saw you look at that joy like it was something you could pick up and feel to test its qualities – as you could, because I let you: it was for you – and each time I could tell you were more than half-amused that I’d offered it, or perhaps you were more than half-amused at what I’d offered, but I was happy to have it touched by your gaze, am, oh, happy. It was you who picked it up as if it was something foreign, though it echoed like ring-doves. It was good, good. Good in itself, whatever it was you made of it.