I dream of this unearthy, sublimated world. Of floating gracefully, long in shape and void in eyes, past disaster, past passion. Of umbrellas and sun and water and awareness of how sweet life can still be. Now I must reconstruct my heart, brushstroke by brushstroke, and fall inlove with French scenery again.
“Absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a state of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive. I — I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense — like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you: to speak this absence is from the start to propose that the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute. It is to say: “I am loved less than I love.”
Historically, the discourse of absence os carried on by the woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). If is woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so. She weaves and she sings.
But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?
Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: You have gone, (which I lament), You are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety. Absence persists – I must endure it. Hence, I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the shape of language. (language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother’s departure and return: a paradigm is created). Absence becomes an active practice, a business (which keeps me from doing anything else); there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies). This staging of language postpones the other’s death: a very short interval, we are told, separates the time during which the child still believes his mother to be absent and the time during which he believes her to be already dead. To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment which the other might topple sharply from absence into death. “
I can always rely on Roland Barthes to show myself how sadly common I am. If only lucidity saved anyone.
“ESSENTIAL oils are wrung:
The attar from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws.
The general rose decays; 5
But this, in lady’s drawer,
Makes summer when the lady lies
In ceaseless rosemary. “
Emily Dickinson was a dark, clear-minded genius trapped inside a woman. This is so sublimely cruel – art is beauty raised to eternity by torture. I’m thinking de Sade, Durrell, Freud, Wilde. Red throbbing hearts, always rubbing the wounds lest you forget. I remember now.
