ANGELA: This is a compact book. I beg pardon and permission to pass. There’s still no explanation. But one day there will be. The music of this book is “Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra” by Debussy. Trumpets by Darius Milhaud. It’s the sexual revelation of what exists. The Wedding March from Wagner’s Lohengrin. Georges Auric “The Speech of the General.” And now — now I’ll begin:
— What is nature but the mystery that surrounds everything? Each thing has its place. What the pyramids of Egypt tell us. From the height of such incomprehension, from the top of the pyramid, how many centuries, I contemplate thee, oh ignorance. And I know the secret of the sphinx. She did not devour me because I gave the right answer to her question. But I am an enigma for the sphinx and nevertheless I did not devour her. Decipher me, I said to the sphinx. And she fell mute. The pyramids are eternal. They will always be restored. Is the human soul a thing? Is it eternal? Between the hammer blows I hear the silence.
AUTHOR: Because Angela is such novelty and unusual I get scared. I’m scared in bedazzlement and fear in the face of her impromptu talk. Am I imitating her? or is she imitating me? I don’t know: but her way of writing reminds me ferociously of mine as a child can resemble the father. The ancestral fathers. I come from afar. I’m efficient, Angela isn’t. I give her some room to move around as though she were a mechanical toy and she sets to work clatteringly. I then remove the clatter oiling her screws and coils. But she doesn’t operate under my mechanistic approach: she only acts (through words) when I let her be.
ANGELA: I can’t look at an object too much or it sets me on fire. More mysterious than the soul is matter. More enigmatic than the thought, is the “thing.” The thing that is miraculously concrete in your hands. Furthermore, the thing is great proof of the spirit. A word is also a thing — a winged thing that I pluck from the air with my mouth when I speak. I make it concrete. The thing is the materialization of aerial energy. I am an object that time and energy gathered in space. The laws of physics govern my spirit and gather in a visible block my body of flesh.
Can paralysis transform a person into a thing? No, it can’t, because that thing thinks. I am urgently needing to be born. It’s really hurting me. But if I can’t get out of this situation, I’ll suffocate. I want to scream. I want to scream to the world: I am born!!!
And so I breathe. And so I have the freedom to write about the things of the world. Because it’s obvious that the thing is urgently begging for mercy since we abuse it. But if we’re in a mechanistic age, we also give our spiritual cry.
The object — the thing — always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal. Years ago I also described an armoire. Then came the description of an age-old clock called Sveglia: an electronic clock that haunted me and would haunt any living person. Then it was the telephone’s turn. In “The Egg and the Hen” I speak of an industrial crane. It’s a timid approach of mine to subverting the living world and the threatening world of the dead.
No, life is not an operetta. It’s a tragic opera in which in a fantastic ballet are mingled eggs, clocks, telephones, ice skaters and the portrait of a stranger who died in 1920.
AUTHOR: Angela writes about objects as she would do needlework. A lacemaking woman.
ANGELA: The thing dominates me. But the dog that exists in me barks and there is an outburst of the fatal thing. There is a fatal aspect to my life. I accepted long ago the fearful destiny that is mine. Thank you. Thank you very much, my lord. I’m leaving: I’m going to what is mine. My heart is as cold as the small sound of ice in a glass of whiskey. One day I shall speak of ice. Out of nervousness I broke a glass. And the world exploded. And I broke a mirror. But I didn’t look at myself in it. I’m going to investigate things. I hope they won’t avenge themselves on me. Forgive me, thing, forgive my pitiful self. Ah what a sigh of the world.
AUTHOR: Angela fell in love with the sight of “things.” “Things” for her are an experience almost without the atmosphere of any thought or common expression. However, when she observes things, she acts with a tie that binds her to them. She’s not immune. She humanizes things. So she’s not honest in her intentions.
ANGELA: When I look, the thing comes to exist. I see the thing in the thing. Transmutation. I sculpt with my eyes anything I see. The thing itself is immaterial. What is called “thing” is the solid and visible condensation of a part of its aura. The aura of the thing is different from the aura of a person. The aura of the latter ebbs and flows, disappears and reappears, turns sweet or flies into a purple rage, explodes and implodes. While the aura of the thing is always the same as itself. The aura distinguishes things. And us too. And the animals that are given the name of a breed and a species. But my own aura trembles glittering when I see you.
AUTHOR: I wanted to write something wide and free. Not to describe Angela but to lodge myself temporarily within her way of being. Angela has but a meager thread of life. And she doesn’t insist that anything unusual should happen to her. But I want the intangible thing: the way she makes her way.
To look at the thing in the thing: its intimate meaning as shape, shadow, aura, function. From now on I shall study the profound still life of objects seen with delicate superficiality, and an intentional one, for if it were not superficial it would sink into the past or the future of the thing. I want only the present state of the thing born from nature or the things made by man. This way of feeling is so new to me that it’s a revolution. In this my way of looking I see the aura of Angela.
When I look I forget that I am I, I forget I have a face that gets excited and I transform all of myself into a single intense gaze.
Angela when she writes is actually writing about her own aura: I suddenly realized this now. It’s no use to nail her down because it’s impossible to see her. All you can do is get to the edge of her aura. Despite having a body Angela is intangible — such are the humidly sparkling mutations of her personality.
I leave you for now to contemplate a dreaming Angela innocently wondering: how will the first springtime be after my death?
ANGELA: The “thing” is properly strictly the “thing.” The thing is neither sad nor happy: it is thing. The thing has in itself a plan. The thing is exact. Things make the following noise: chpt! chpt! chpt! A thing is a mangled being. There is nothing more alone than a “thing.”
First of all there exists the unity of beings by which each thing is one with itself — it consists of itself, adheres to itself. And so we reach the common conception of the brain as a kind of computer and of human beings as simple autonomous conscious.
AUTHOR: Does Angela have the spontaneity of an initiative or is she just my echo repeated in seven caverns until she dies? Nothing like that. What is it? This: I only hear myself in the repeated echo because my voice initially gets confused with myself.
ANGELA: I entered a silent realm of what is made by the empty hand of man: I entered the domain of the thing. The aura is the sap of the thing. Fluid emanations glaringly blind my vision. I quiver trembling. I tremble quivering. There’s something squalid in the air. I breathe it in greedily. I want to fill myself with the physical properties of all that exists in matter. The aura of the thing comes from the reverse of the thing. My reverse side is a splendor of velvety light. I have telepathy with the thing. Our auras overlap. The thing is inside out and the wrong way.
AUTHOR: Angela wants to be fashionable. There’s been a lot of talk about “auras.” So she writes about it. It’s not her fault she’s a poor woman with nothing but money. Why doesn’t she write about “how can you tell if a mosquito is male or female”?
ANGELA: The spirit of the thing is the aura that surrounds the shapes of its body. It is a halo. It is a breath. It is a breathing. It is a manifestation. It is the freed movement of the thing. I love objects that vibrate in their immobility just as I am a part of the great energy of the world. I
have so much energy, that I place static things or those endowed with movement on the same level of energy. I have within me, object that I am, a bit of enigmatic sanctity. I feel it in certain empty moments and I perform miracles within myself: the miracle of the transitory sudden change, at a slight touch in me, to suddenly change feelings and thoughts, and the miracle of seeing everything hollow and clear: I see luminosity without theme, without story, without facts. I make a great effort not to have the worst of feelings: that nothing is worthwhile. And even pleasure is unimportant. So I keep myself busy with things. I’ve got a problem: it’s this: how long do things last? If I leave a sheet of paper in a closed room would it attain eternity? There is a time when things no longer end. Their auras are petrified. If well taken care of, a piece of paper will never end. Or is it transformed?
I ask you in what realm you were last night. And the answer is: I was in the realm of whatever is free, I breathed in the grand solitude of the dark and leaned over the edge of the moon. The late night made such silence. Just like the silence of an object placed upon a table: aseptic silence of “the thing.” There also exists great silence in the sound of a flute: it unwinds vast distances of hollow spaces of black silence until the end of time.
AUTHOR: I don’t want to violate the soul of Angela and break it into loose words without any intimate connection: but how do I approach her without invading her? how to make a speech out of something that’s no more than scream or sweetness or nothing or craziness or vague ideal? Could it be I have to use her in order to reveal a more inconsistent mode that I too have within me? I who besides a desire for method, want laughter or weeping like quick summer showers. One proof that I misuse Angela’s scant life is that she writes with a style that’s actually my own. The truth is that I’m going to take advantage of Angela’s kind of audacity to venture a little madness but with the guarantee of “returning.”
ANGELA: “Woman-Thing.”
I’m the unworked raw material. I’m also an object. I have all the necessary organs, like any human being. I feel my aura which on this chilly morning is red and extremely sparkly. I am a woman object and my aura is a vibrant and competent red. I am an object that sees other objects. Some are brothers to me and others are enemies. There are also objects that say nothing. I am an object that uses other objects, that enjoys or rejects them.
My face is an object so visible it’s embarrassing. I understand those beautiful Arab women who have the wisdom to hide their noses and mouths with a veil or white crêpe. Or purple. So all that is exposed are the eyes that reflect other objects. The gaze then gains such a terrible mystery that it looks like the vortex of an abyss. I use scarlet-red lipstick: that’s my provocation. I’ve got eyebrows that are always asking but don’t argue, they are delicate. This face-object has a small and rounded nose that allows the object that I am to sniff around like a hunting dog. I have some secrets: my eyes are such a dark green that they seem black. In photographs of this face of which I speak to you with a certain solemnity my eyes refuse to be green: a strange face appears in the photograph with black and slightly Oriental eyes.
One object thinks of another object and our auras get confused. And I have, I assure you, everything else that makes me a woman sometimes living, sometimes object. My essential stupidity however wants to tremble with light, to be glorified by spirit. My heaviness needs the adventure of hazarding guesses. This being who calls me to light, how I shall bless him! I shall open myself to him in my stupidity which is a granite block.
Bells of gold are ringing in me sacred bells. And my purple drapes have been ready. The color purple is abysmal and has no end. Its noble intensity. I keep looking and going deeper into the endlessness of the old clot as when I try to perforate dense matter with my eyes. Purple leaves me pensive dreaming and empty.
AUTHOR: Angela is obsessed with giving names to things. She doesn’t know how to simply feel them without thinking.
What would become of me if not for Angela? the woman enigma who makes me emerge from the nothing and head toward the word.
ANGELA: “Mother-Thing.”
I opened myself and you from me were born. One day I opened myself and you were born for you yourself. How much gold poured out. And how much rich blood was spilled. But it was all worth it: you are the pearl of my heart that is shaped like a bell of pure silver. I dissipated. And you were born. And I erased myself so you could have the freedom of a god. You are pagan but have the blessing of a mother.
And. And the mother is me.
A swollen mother. Mother sap. Mother tree. Mother who gives and asks nothing in return.
Mother organ music.
Raise the flag, son, at the hour of my holy death. And I give such a profound cry of horror and praise that things shatter at the vibration of my only voice. Collision of stars. Through the enormous monstrous telescope you see me. And I am icy and generous as the sea. I die. And I come from afar like the silent Ravel. I am a portrait watching you. But when you wish to be alone with your girlfriend-wife cover my sweet face with a dark and opaque cloth — and I shall see nothing. I am mother-thing hanging from the wall with respect and sorrow. But what deep happiness there is in being a mother. A mother is crazy. So crazy that from her children are born. I nourish myself with rich foods and you suck from me thick and phosphorescent milk. I am your talisman.
AUTHOR: Angela, control yourself so as not to write a tear-jerker about a poor boy with his mother dead.
ANGELA: “Folding Screen.”
My folding screen is made of round cylinders of jacaranda. I’d almost say that jacaranda is sterling silver. As there is a small gap between one cylinder and the next it remains open to consequences. And its fragility is dangerous. Because when it falls — and it falls at the slightest push — it smashes the plants behind it. My screen is my way of looking at the world! between-the-slats.
AUTHOR: In this talking of mine and of Angela’s, we both transcend the bourgeoisie inside us. What drives me to despair is the fact-idea that Angela is ambiguous in her existence: part of her is independent, another part is the wife selected by me like a chosen daughter.
Well, but with this book I, it seems I’m emancipating myself. Which is good and about time. This almost emancipation also leaves me standing and alone in the world. I don’t have anything to nourish me: I eat myself.
ANGELA: “State of the Thing.”
The desert is a way of being. It’s a thing-state. By day it’s torrid and devoid of pity. It’s the thing-earth. The dry thing in thousands and thousands of trillions of grains of sand. By night? So cold that sheet of air that furrows trembling with such an intense cold of an intensity almost unbearable. The color of the desert is not-a-color. The sands are not white, they are the color of dirtiness. And the dunes, which like echoes undulate feminine. By day the air sparkles. And there are mirages. You see — because you so want to see it — an oasis of humid and fertile earth, palms and water, shade, shade at last for eyes that in the mad sun become emerald-green. But when you get close — well: it simply never was. It was no more than a creation of the sun in the uncovered head. The body takes pity on the body. I am a mirage: because I so long to see myself I do.
Ah, the dunes of the desert of the Sahara seem long asleep, untransformable by the passing of days and of nights. If its sands were white or colored, they would have “facts” and “events,” which would shorten time. But with the color they are, nothing happens. And when it does, a rigid, immobile, thick, swollen, thorny, bristling, intractable cactus happens. The cactus is full of rage with fingers all twisted and it’s impossible to caress it: it hates you with each piercing spine because it also feels the pain of the spine that pierced its own thick flesh first. But you can cut it into pieces and suck its bitter sap: the milk of a stern mother. To soften this life of mine that slowly drips drop upon drop — I have the power of the mirage: I see humid oases that vanish when I approach seeking maternal shelter. A hard life is a life that seems longer. But, even so, what
surprises me is how it can already be May, if only yesterday it was February? Each minute that comes is a miracle that cannot be repeated.
AUTHOR: I don’t have a single answer. But I have more questions than any man could answer.
ANGELA: The phrase “damp garden” gives me a gentle happiness and a canticle spreading from me to me. The words “drinking-well” and “pergola” also make me wet. Ah could I but describe the delicate happiness they inspire in me, only then would I be a writer. I’d be dizzy with pleasure.
AUTHOR: Angela doesn’t write. She moans.
ANGELA: I wanted to write luxuriously. To use words that would shine wet and glistening and were pilgrims. Sometimes solemn in purple, sometimes abysmal emeralds, sometimes so light in the finest soft embroidered silk. I wanted to write random phrases, phrases that would go beyond speaking back to me: “the morning moon,” “gardens and gardens in shade,” “astringent sweetnesses of honey,” “crystals that break with a musical disastrous crash.” Or to use words that come to me from my unknown: trapilíssima avante sine qua non masioty — poor us and you. You are my lit candle. I am the Night.
AUTHOR: What I’m writing is an intense and basic work, foolish like certain experiences that don’t collaborate with the future and are therefore useless. What Angela writes is of an essential superfluousness because her life even if superfluous follows a freedom to and fro: while I Angela is always now. One now follows another now and etc. and so on.
ANGELA: “The Indescribable”
I bought a thing with which I fell absolutely in love: the price doesn’t matter, this object is worth the very air.
This thing has a solid base of metal, very concise. In this shining cylinder there is the slightest opening. In it you put delicate and slender metal stems. And atop each stem there sits in glory a tiny and round ball that looks like a jewel of sterling silver.