In the evening, back at the hotel, pockets full of bits of paper and matchbooks, I continued making note of low and high sounds, the soundless sentences that lodged at the back of my throat during the night and gave me sudden urges, like when we notice the softness with which early-morning light penetrates the drawn curtain or when it pours in as a single ray onto the pages of a well-written book left lying on the sofa.
By taking all these notes I thought I could go forth into the unspeakable, make existential loops with the memory I’d retained of the beauty of the sky and the city in the month of May. Attentive and alert in my every muscle until the very end, I did everything I could to be able to stand still in time so that life would result from life. The notes I took were like brief outings that allowed me to go and rummage through my mother’s thoughts, to sweep into Simone Lambert’s arms and to run between the pages written by Carla and the books I’d read during the last thirty years. I took notes because of the sea rustling in my head and of all things beautiful. More notes still to return to the idea of a we, of continuity under the sun.
I stayed in my room, moved by a seeker’s passion no doubt inherited from my mother. While writing notes about the signs of the end, I became aware that I felt like leaving, going back outside to real life, indescribable because it seemed so minimalist yet at the same time so full of Rabelaisian curves. Curiously, this momentum drove me closer to reality, made me want to take it seriously, all the more so since I’d made a bet to enter its invisible part where, they say, life particles have no function other than to draw a curtain of illusions between us and the moment of our departure. Up, exhausted by the lack of sleep, I would think about the future of reality. Suddenly I’d see it as an exemplary science composed of laws and brainwaves that deserve to be explored every day with whys and explanations, a wealth of sighs and clandestine precautions.
Long after Mother’s and Descartes’s deaths, I kept on taking notes as if with every word I were digging a little tunnel into the word universe. That’s where I wanted to go while looking at Mother’s cheeks for the last time, Descartes’s index finger pointed against his will, or so it seemed, toward the window and the snowy setting. Basically, all of this I did to get closer to the word universe, to fondle it, weigh it, cherish it like a certitude and a wound showing signs of healing.
Until the very end, despite tiredness and sleepiness, I sought to understand what had happened but without trying to reach a conclusion. I remain vigilant in the sole hope that nothing that was has been useless. Today I stand still facing the river. A book and a notebook under my arm, a rare pill in my Thai ring, a smile on my lips, I make note of everything that could pass for a story.
SOME NOTES FOUND IN THE ROOM AT THE HOTEL CLARENDON
1
A girl with large breasts is walking by the river. A Walkman at her waist, earphones plugged in, digital camera in her right hand, she stops every three metres to look at, pick up, put back a pebble coloured bone white, café au lait or jet black, while I think of the beach at Deauville, the cold wind that swept over mixed seafood platters whose names clatter in my ears. Another girl has come to sit on a bench protected by a wooden parasol. The girl has started to write in a large notebook, head down, her beautiful black hair falling over her cheeks. Ten metres of fine sand separate us like a big powder-blue barrel for trash, banana peels and apple cores. In front of us runs the river, today emerald green.
2
Language is made in such a way that one can jump upon its exceptions with both feet, crushing them with the full weight of our love and pain. To burn is a verb that suits me.
3
Make Carla say that she sometimes ponders what she calls heavy identity, a way of existing that removes all possibility of crashing into the lightness of being, or hitting it hard. She says also that we must know how to jump high in order to learn to fall on our past. She talks about the notion of Tigersprung, straight out of a Walter Benjamin metaphor. Tonight, I know the night will be a whiteout and that the black women inside us will be attentive to freedom and to the slightest whims of desire. Tonight, what happens will become real only once it’s transcribed in the language we will have chosen. To discuss the forthcoming book and the violent energy at the utter edges of the body and its metaphors. Carla says metaphors serve to clear a path for the best intuitions slumbering inside us like living sunflowers or like those trees called flamboyants which, since she saw them in full bloom, have opened a door to ecstasy for her.
4
(Describe the stray dogs noticed yesterday morning on the Plains of Abraham. Leave the parenthesis open and flow into what follows:
as soon as night falls, Simone thinks about private life …
5
roosters dogs dust without the commas.
6
we’re always waiting for what comes next. As soon as a sentence begins, we’re waiting for …
7
sometimes she imagines herself drawing large Xs on the sea just like others who, with a single stroke, undo the landscape with a paintbrush, a machete, sink a blade into the species (save this expression for the title of a future book).
8
reality resists despite its air of innocence, its mad-cow speechlessness which, from afar, ends up looking like graffiti in the weary light of neons in the night
9
I miss Montréal. The smooth softness of the first evenings in May when you can walk in the Old Port breathing in the night with an idea of the unspeakable in your throat. The urban din, the din of desire and of its slow heat on the back of your neck, along the loins. Blending aromas of tobaccos and the river.
10
Make Axelle speak more often. Give her desiring energy. Create an effect. Make an effort of imagination. Use her desire as a lever for the future while also questioning the autonomy of desire in relation to trends, cultures and the language spoken. Look for further information on what is known as selfish DNA.
11
Fear that reality might revert back to fiction in the deepest dark of time. Fear of the opposite.
12
I think too often about pale Stockholm mornings, the palm trees of Dublin. Observing others helps me live. In the room next door, a chambermaid is singing ‘La vie en rose.’ Describe the streets of Québec and Stockholm in greater detail.
Wound: n. (bef. 12c) injury to the body (as from violence, accident or surgery) that involves laceration or breaking of a membrane (as the skin) and usu. damage to underlying tissues.
To wound ideas, decorum, modesty. Disappointment: today I find this word has a nameless blandness. But yesterday I’d imagined it red like in the paintings of Caravaggio and Carpaccio. Or as an efficient metaphor falling like some slow dust imprinting the red of pain on our shoulders as in an Ann Hamilton installation.
Always pretend to be on the side of real life. Day of lightning and violent electricity. I accumulate notes, thoughts about ruins, the past. Yesterday, another terrible storm. During my museum visit, there was a blackout. Reread The Passions of the Soul.
I imagine her putting the page back into its context. Carla’s hands are tanned, unadorned, with well-groomed nails. Calm hands which I’m unable to imagine on a computer keyboard. Hands that shape beautiful handwriting, supple, well adapted to the slowness of manuscript words. Fine skin under which the blood is fast-paced in the veins like a lively argument. Those hands make me travel through time. Carla’s hands unbutton Hiljina’s bodice. I foresee, I breathe in and I see her all over again.
Anxiety of words: animal vegetal little creature ara arab agreeable apple maple table saddle of rabbit rabid raccoon and harpoon ardent Harpagon, rage of Aragon, raccooning, cocooning, coconuts (nots) knot anew you open an ovum of colour and of cobra opera oeuvre hare snare and fare err and war jaw sigh slake the self and solo seem
Saw the stray dogs on the Plains of Abraham again. Five. Big mongrels, skinny and nervous, sniffing misery in the morning dew and the northern grass.
; Continue the research on Francis Bacon’s paintings, especially the series on screams produced in the fifties. Those screams he called too abstract. Screams which, when going through the mouth, transform the face into a terrifying gaping hole. Focus the research more specifically on the series of popes after Velázquez. Look carefully at the Velázquez painting entitled Pope Innocent X dated 1650, the year of Descartes’s death.
Though highly moral, I do feel like I’m losing my ability to judge. Yesterday I took notes while a large black dog lay dying in front of me. Night of insomnia.
Try to retrace the sound work by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Three Screaming Popes: after Francis Bacon for Large Orchestra. Sixteen minutes.
Reread the unfinished manuscript again. There are days when, completely high on language, I really want a woman.
About theatre, make Carla say, ‘People say that it’s body. I say it’s words in the present needing a tongue and muscles. Hence this curiosity I’ve developed about anatomy and the work of Mondino dei Liucci, and afterwards about the work of Descartes.’
Add: And then an image stands out from the others, outlined against the satiny ochre background of the bathroom. Alice is lying in the bathtub. Simone is kneeling on the white tile. She is scrubbing Alice’s shoulders and back with a soap from Provence that multiplies the softness of the skin and of the gestures. Soap bubbles on the surface of the water, under her breasts, around her waist. Alice’s skin is pink from the very hot water. Simone gazes into Alice’s very soul, into that place where there is no more singular destiny. Alice kisses her. Simone holds up a dressing gown. Alice continues.
Stockholm in the black and white of dawn: a man walks bent over through the middle of the black ink of a print seen on Rue du Trésor before entering the Clarendon. Hubert Aquin walks the streets of a foreign city, staggering toward his fate. I can no longer keep holding up solitudes in the grey wind that whips the river.
We got into the habit of taking a walk on Dufferin Terrace. Sometimes she takes me by the arm like European women often do. It was hot yesterday; I could feel the softness of her skin, the warmth of her hand on my forearm. Today the river is violet. To look across to Lévis you have to shade your eyes, put your hand up horizontally, index finger against the forehead.
Black. In the course of her life Simone has been down into burial chambers, mausoleums, mastabas many a time. The fear of coming face to face with civilizations, cornered between their majestic silences and the terrifying echo of the screams sent into the cosmos by young and old women doomed since the dawn of time to circulate between the sand, the hands and the quartz of the hours.
The sorrow is huge. Don’t know where it comes from, where it goes. At the movies it sometimes resurfaces when there’s a separation, a departure. Huge sorrow that wedges in the throat, in the eyes, spreads through the chest like a burn, a suffocating embrace. I can’t seem to understand the origins of this sorrow which belongs to no one in particular but circulates in our midst, contagious, exhausting and necessary like art that compels us to take care of what’s most precious and vulnerable in us.
Have another look at the photographs taken by David McMillan during his six visits to Chernobyl and Pripet. Pictures of the unimaginable, or nostalgia-based photo evidence of our violent and sadistic brief passage through the forest and the seasons. McMillan quite probably wrote the captions for his photos himself. I like this one.
David McMillan
Amusement Park, Pripet
October 1994
Chromogenic Print
Pripet had most of the usual facilities of a modern Soviet city. The amusement park even had a Ferris wheel called ‘the wheel of hell.’ The accident happened just a few days before May 1st, a peak period of activity at the park. In this photo, the pale reddish glow of a meteor burning out as it falls from the sky is the only manifestation of movement.
They say memory is ungovernable silence. So, all the better that writing makes it possible to redirect the course of things and to irrigate where the heart is dry and demanding.
It’s just a little sentence for healing.
APPENDIX
1
Original text of pages 205 to 208. Please note that the Latin was intentionally not translated into classical Latin but rather into the vernacular Latin that could have been spoken by educated Europeans of the time. Specifically, the translator maintained (using certain syntactic structures typical of that Latin) the difference between the tu (second person singular, akin to ME thou: singular, familiar) and the vous (second person plural, akin to ME you/ye: plural, respectful), unknown in classical Latin but of common usage in Medieval Latin.
DESCARTES
What a strange room! I don’t recognize it. What is that little curtain over there hiding, is it hiding the truth? Is it snowing? Helen, is it snowing? I can’t seem to make out the fir tree, the very big, very tall tree that disturbs me every time my eyes come to rest on it as if it were a landscape unto itself. Helen, stay close to me. Give me your hand. Touch my forehead. Let me imagine you one last time. Naked. I would like you to be naked, one last time in front of my already failing eyesight. I would like to write again. I would like you to be naked. I want to write and you to be as naked as the dawn.
CARDINAL
Every time, however, we must let the shadow come close to us without chasing it away. Only the shadow makes agony genuine. There can be no version of agony without a shadow suspended above the lips that have loved their contemporaries and spoken well of the soul which we cannot see but which is there, which is there. We contain angers, my friend, which darken the summer light; I know whereof I speak, angers that don’t subside as words go by, as ideas and reasoning go by.
HELEN
Oh! I know it all too well.
CARDINAL
I wasn’t talking to you.
HELEN
(as if she hadn’t heard)
Oh! I know it all too well. A fit of anger is a deep pain that one day violently lodges itself in our limbs wild with despair. Once settled in our nervous system, it can only weaken us, deceive our senses and our desires. René, you’ve no idea of my anger. I strain to conceal its source from you every single day, as well as the horrid twitching of the hands and eyelids it provokes. Today I’ve had enough. I’m speaking up.
CARDINAL
Don’t be vulgar. Keep your pain to yourself like a real woman should.
DESCARTES
Helen, I want to see my daughter. Search for my daughter wherever she may be, in France, in Holland, all the way to the colonies if need be; I order (he coughs) that Francine be brought to me. I want to instruct my daughter about the nature of light before I fade away forever. Mother always said she’d been there by my side when I stammered out a new line of reasoning. When the trees are bare, one must be surrounded by pretty women. Helen, I beg you, come a bit closer. (Helen approaches mechanically.)
HELEN
You know very well our daughter is dead.
DESCARTES
How cruel your revenge is! This is what you call your anger! This is your anger. Abandoning my daughter. It’s snowing, isn’t it? I’m hot. (talking to Helen as if she were his servant) Give me that book over there on the table. There’s a passage, Cardinal, that I want to show you. Undress, Helen, I beg you to undress so that my eyes can rest at last. Open the window. (Helen opens the window for a moment then quickly shuts it.) It’s cold. Freezing cold. (then, softly) Every time I’ve been cold in my life, I thought about that young nun I met in Tours. It was a year after Francine’s birth. I remember. There were icicles hanging from the gutters. The fields were covered with a thick sheet of ice. The nun loved words and used them like a master. All she did was dream of travelling. She had just entered the convent and already all she could think about was going far away, to another continent. Even though she was a widow, she didn’t seem at all affected by her husband’s death. She had a son whom she said she’d left in capable religious hands. We talked at length about life and
the body. Of the soul’s passions more especially, for they are the ones that lead us to our destiny. The day was dawning, Marie was going to mass. I was returning from the cemetery where I’d inquired about the number of corpses available, hoping a dissection would soon be possible so that I could finally further my knowledge about the ‘fire without light’ that sometimes pulses so loudly inside us that it heats our body, which is both animal and simple machine. I’m thirsty. Water! Water!
CARDINAL
Bring this man something to drink, quickly. (then, in a normal tone) I’m leaving for Venice and Rome soon.
DESCARTES
Oh! I beg you, don’t utter the names of those cities where I was so happy. I am a lover of long walks, you know. Taking long walks along the canals of La Serenissima was a great joy for me, though I confess not as great as what I experienced walking through Rome, looking at its joyful hills curving the horizon. Water! Water!
2
The quotation from the Homero Aridjis poem on page 171 was excerpted from ‘Ojos de otro mirar’/‘Eyes to See Otherwise,’ A White Body in the Desert, trans. George McWhirter (New York: New Directions, 2001).
Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon Page 16