27/11/2018
Title for a story - Fuck Adorno.
The Tourist #4
27/11/2018
What happens to a mind after reading, consuming, the Frankfurt School? What happens after the thick tar of paranoia and conspiracy fizzles out a little? After the depression my students feel when they read it? When we talk about the consequences of the thoughts there, that not only is the world fucked but there is no way at all that any individual human agency can do the first fucking thing about it? Then what? Who knows?
When you have understood the pressing horror of capitalism, and when you have understood the pressing horror of the west, and colonialism, and toxic masculinity. When you have understood your infinite guilt and criticisability? What then?
What about when you grow, not tired, but resigned to this condition. Not when you disbelieve it, not when you discredit it like an American film scholar, but when you merely accept that it is where you are whether you like it or not and the coordinates of your everyday are not only caffeine free, nicotine free, gluten free, dairy free, carcinogen free, emission free, cruelty free, but also metaphysics free. God free. What then? You wanted it, you railed against it at times, and now you have it. How do you like it? How does it feel when there is no longer the possibility of feeling? Feeling free.
I am an eternally prejudiced tourist in a world I can’t remember having been better. There were the nineties there, britpop, but that was all a front for the war in Iraq.
Now we may suspect that we are tourists everywhere, but really we always were, after all. We were always already only tourists.
I live on the central tourist street in the city where I live.
When I used to live not on the central tourist street in the city where I live I was a tourist in a fantasy of home. Or, I was a tourist in a hyperreal projection of a societally constructed image of home.
Regardless of whatever it is, was, I was only visiting, and didn’t really know how to behave there just as I don’t really know how to behave anywhere else. I didn’t believe the pictures they showed me of the flat there, and I don’t believe the pictures of the colosseum or the Capitol hill. I don’t mind so much because I don’t believe the flat or the capitoline or the colosseum either.
The standard reaction seems to be outrage that this could be the case. I wonder why? I wonder why bother to be angry about the fact there was always a gap between the concrete reality of material existence and being a speaking human capable of abstract thought? At what point did we not think that we had a brother in the moon as much or as little as we had a brother in Alyosha?
Home is a tourist destination.
Your family is a neighbour, at best, in all its terrifying and ghastly proximity.
And philosophers really only like art so long as it illustrates something they can feel like they are enunciating that no one else has yet, so it smells like a truth that stops not being written which will get them cash for the next spurt.
That it is a truth, or not, does not make it, ever, the truth that has stopped not being “written” by the work about which they write. The work has a truth quite of its own which bears no relation at all to the machinations of the professionally literate.
Artists, of course, sometimes only decipher the works of the philosophers, increasingly so in fact. A lot of times I can only see the illustration of a concept which was better written, better as simple mathematics, as arithmetic.
Deciphering only produces if it is also always already a reciphering.
De Chiffre.
De Cifra.
Decifrare.
The Tourist #3
27/11/2018
A time has ended, the time of John Berger’s neoliberal moralist paranoiac soft assault and creepily insulting misreading of Benjamin and Adorno and the Frankfurt School Conspiracy theorists who invented fake news.
The philosopher that I met said this made him feel sad, that people thought this way about philosophy.
Sadder still would be the truth of what contemporary continental philosophy has really done?
It didn’t confuse anyone because no one read it.
And if you battled through it it was only hollow and hubristic. A department grasping for money like any other.
The Tourist #2
“Don’t let this years holiday be forgotten, take a Kodak and save your happiness. Make Kodak snapshots of every happy scene. The little pictures will keep your holiday alive - they will carry you back again and again to sunshine and freedom.”
Kodak advert quoted in Holland quoted in Urry and Larsen
P.172
Don’t let this be forgotten.
Save your happiness,
every scene.
Little pictures will keep you alive
carrying you back to freedom.
Asimov - The Last Question
“‘Cosmic AC’ said Man, ‘how may entropy be reversed?’
The Cosmic AC said, ‘THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.’
Man said ‘Collect additional data.’
The Cosmic AC said ‘I WILL DO SO. I HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A HUNDRED BILLION YEARS. MY PREDECESSORS AND I HAVE BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION MANY TIMES. ALL THE DATA I HAVE REMAINS INSUFFICIENT.’
’Will there come a time,’ said Man, ‘when data will be sufficient or is the problem insoluble in all conceivable circumstances?’
The Cosmic AC said, ‘NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES.’
Man said, ‘When will you have enough data to answer the question?’
The Cosmic AC said, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.’
’Will you keep working on it?’, asked Man.
The Cosmic AC said, ‘I WILL.”
Man said, ‘We shall wait.’”
Isaac Asimov
The Last Question.
Ask Siri on your iphone “Siri, can entropy be reversed?” and she squirts back out “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
How far we are past all irony, all authenticity, all hope of asking any question of anything meaningful.
Data will never ever reverse entropy. And it will never give a meaningful answer.
I have never really read a lot of science fiction, but it turns out that I quite like it, they are mostly just very very simplified Christian concept stories.
Pasolini - from The Divine Mimesis
“Having relished the fleeting taste of the Volgare, i sank back into the vulgarity of the ‘Language of Hate’: mine – historically mine – that of my time, of my father, my mother, my professors, my shopkeepers, my newspapers, my radio, my television, my balls! And I said: ‘Isn’t this madness?’
I no longer wanted what I had wanted (about this there is no doubt), save with the black, flayed pain of the neurotic. Who sees the end of what he has begun, and, in beginning it, already has the distressing pain of the end: the sense of a goodbye made to things before he has ever known them, a hellish nostalgia for what one barely has: a thing that cuts the throat and chest like a burning point of tears.”
…
“It wasn’t hard for me to realise that in reality al those people, along the streets of their world of clerks, professionals, workers, political parisites, petty intellectuals, were really running like madmen behind a flag. Through medieval alleys, or along great bureaucratic and liberty-style streets, or, finally, through the new residential or popular districts, they didn’t just drag themselves around – as it seemed – through the frenzy of traffic or of their duties: but ran behind that flag. It was, really, little more than a rag, which flapped and rolled obtusely in the wind. But, like all flags, it had a discoloured symbol drawn in its centre. I looked closer, and didn’t take long to notice that the symbol was nothing other than a shit.”
…
“‘Those who are condemned here, beneath these signposts’ he explained ‘were only petit bourgeois by birth, by social definition etc. They really had, as is said, the necessary tools for knowing their ‘sin’: they knew how not to be conformists, yet they still were.’
We walked along that beautiful road, high above the marsh: the white metal railings, the narrow little bridge over the slime, the cement ballast on which, below, wild grasses full of nettles pushed upward, thick and invincible.
‘In this place’ the Guide added, laconically, ‘the only punishment is being here.’”
…
Behind the barrier the road widened into an immense asphalt space, like those that spread in front of stadiums or big swimming pools, for parking thousands upon thousands of automobiles: but in the hours when there is no game; and it is twilight, and, with twilight, emptiness. Nothing but asphalt and immensity, filled with the melancholy of the retreating sun that is nearly blinding as it strikes things nearby, while those in the distance diminish in a spectral glimmer that renders them vague and limitless.”
…
“His mouth tightened in a smile at the earthly speech, my poor Master, fearless in the assumption of banality at a level of great culture and great passion. And he continued, out of pure kindness, out of disinterested love of knowledge:
‘It is a sin born with the petit bourgeoisie, after the great industrialisation, after the conquest of the colonies… At first, the little people WERE little: the didn’t WANT to be.
In summary, all these people, for fear of greatness, are instinctively lacking in religion.
Reduction, the spirit of reduction, is the lack of religion: this is the great sin of the epoch of hate. And in fact in no other part of Hell will you see such people. The masses, my friend! The masses who have chosen not having any religion as their religion – without knowing it.’”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
The Divine Mimesis
Slavoj Zizek - bit.
“…our chains in the cave today are not those of traditional ideology. Robert Pippin recently pointed out this shift:
‘the complexity of our situation has created something quite unprecedented that only {Hegel’s} philosophy, with its ability to explain the positive role of the negative, and the reality of group agency and collective subjectivity, can account for. Life in modern societies seems to have created the need for uniquely dissociated collective doxastic states, a repetition of various characters in the drama of self-deceit narrated by the Phenomenology. This is one wherein we sincerely believe ourselves to be committed to fundamental principles and maxims we are actually in no real sense committed to, given what we do… The principles can be sincerely and consciously acknowledged and avowed, but, given the principles they are, cannot be integrated into a livable, coherent form of life. The social conditions for self-deceit in this sort of context can help show that the problem is not rightly described as one where many individuals happen to fall into self-deceit. The analysis is not a moral one, not focussed on individuals. It has to be understood as a matter of historical Geist.’
The key point in this passage is Pippin’s emphasis on the ‘positive’ role of the negative, and the ‘reality of group agency and collective subjectivity’: the negative, in this case, is the dissonance, the gap between explicit ideological texture and its actual practice in the real world. Its positive role means that this dissonance does not prevent the full implementation of an ideology but makes it ‘livable’, is a condition of its actual functioning – if we take away the negative side, the ideological edifice itself falls apart. The emphasis on ‘group agency and collective subjectivity’ means that we are not merely concertned with the imperfections of individuals; in that case, the guilt would be that of each person with her or his corruption and moral depravity, and the cure would be sought in their moral improvement. What we are dealing with is a dissonance inscribed the ‘objective’ social spirit itself, into the basic structure of social customs. Such collective forms of self-deceit function as ways of objective social being, and are this in some sense ‘true’ even although they are false.”
Slavoj Zizek
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight.
Simone Weil - bits.
“Tiberius wanted to have Christ placed in the Pantheon and refused first of all to persecute Christians. Later on his attitude changed. Piso, Galba’s adopted son, probably belonged to a Christian family. How are we to explain the fact that men like Trajan and above all Marcus Aurelius should have so relentlessly persecuted the Christians? Yet Dante places Trajan in paradise… On the other hand Commodus and other villainous emperors rather favoured them. And in what circumstances did the Empire later on come to adopt Christianity as the official religion? And on what conditions? What degradation was the latter made to suffer by way of exchange? In what circumstances was accomplished that collusion between the Church of Christ and the Beast? For the Beast of the Apocalypse is, almost certainly, the Empire.
The Roman Empire was a totalitarian and grossly materialistic regime, founded upon the exclusive worship of the State, like Nazism. A thirst for spirituality was latent among the wretched ones subject to this regime. The Emperors realised from the very beginning how necessary it was to assuage it with some false mysticism, for fear that a true mysticism should arise and upset everything.”
Simone Weil
Letter to a Priest.
“Nearly everywhere – often even when dealing with purely technical problems – instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is an intellectual leprosy; it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking.
This leprosy is killing us; it is doubtful whether it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all political parties.”
Simone Weil
On the Abolition of All Political Parties.
Agamben - definitely more bits.
“That there is beauty, that the phenomena exceed science, is equivalent to saying: there is knowledge that the subject does not know but can only desire, or, rather, there is a subject of desire (a philosophos) but not a subject of wisdom (a sophos). Plato’s entire theory of Eros is precisely aimed at bridging these two divided subjects.
…
It is for this reason that Plato was able to connect the knowledge of love (sapere d’amore) to divinization. The latter presupposes a knowledge hidden in signs that cannot be known but only recognised: ‘this signifies that’.
…
Indeed, what the diviner knows is only that there is a knowledge that he does not know, from which it derives its association with mania and possession. It is this very knowledge that Socrates adapts by locating in a ‘non-knowledge’ the content of knowledge proper and placing it in a daimon – that is, in the ‘other’ par excellence – the subject of the knowledge that he professes (in the Cratylus, the word daimon is connected with daemon, ‘he who knows’). The ultimate question posed by the beautiful (and taste as ‘knowledge of the beautiful’) is, therefore, a quesstion of the subject of knowledge: who is the subject of knowledge? Who knows?”
Giorgio Agamben
Taste.
Spinoza
“God, therefore, is the immanent, not the transitive cause of all things, q.e.d”
Spinoza
Ethics
Isaac Asimov - bits.
‘R.E. turned to the north where ordinarily the mansions of the aristocracy (such aristocracy as there was in town) studded the slopes of Mellon's Hill, and found the horizon nearly flat.
Levine said, "Eventually, there'll be nothing but flatness, featurelessness, nothingness-and us."’
Isaac Asimov
The Last Trump
Arthur C Clarke - bits.
“It has taken us twenty years to crack that invisible shield and to reach the machine inside those crystal walls. What we could not understand, we broke at last with the savage might of atomic power and now I have seen the fragments of the lovely, glittering thing I found up there on the mountain. They are meaningless.”
Arthur C Clarke
The Sentinel
Jean Baudrillard - bits.
“There is no longer any ideal principle for things at a higher level, on a human scale. What remains are only concentrated effects, miniaturized and immediately available. This change from human scale to a system of nuclear matrices is visible everywhere: this body, our body, often appears simply superfluous, basically useless in its extension, in the multiplicity and complexity of its organs, its tissues and functions, since today everything is concentrated in the brain and in genetic codes, which alone sum up the definition of being. The countryside, the immense geographic countryside, seems to be a deserted body whose expanse and dimensions appear arbitrary (and which is boring to cross even if one leaves the main highways), as soon as all events are epitomized in the towns, themselves undergoing reduction to a few miniaturized highlights. And time: what can be said about this immense time we are left with, a dimension henceforth useless in its unfolding, as soon as the instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants?”
Jean Baudrillard
The Ecstasy of Communication
“We have to restore the potency and the radical meaning of illusion, which is most often reduced to the level of a chimera diverting us from what is true: what things deck themselves out in to hide what they are. When, in fact, the illusion of the world is the way things have of presenting themselves for what they are when they are not actually there at all. In appearance, things are what they give themselves out to be. They appear and disappear without letting anything at all show through. They unfurl without concern for their being, or even for their existence. They signal to us, but are not susceptible of decipherment.
...
There will be no end to this frenzied race around the Möbius strip where the surface of meaning perpetually feeds into the surface of illusion, unless the illusion of meaning were to win out once and for all, which would put an end to the world.
The whole of our history bears witness to this machinery of reaason, which is itself now coming apart. Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath the excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information – the sign and reality sharing a single shroud.
…
If the heresy of appearances is our original crime, then every rational impulse to eliminate it is the symptom of a fantastic error on the part of the will, the symptom of an aberration of desire.”
Jean Baudrillard
The Perfect Crime.
Giorgio Agamben - bits. More bits, maybe?
In every instant, the measure of forgetting and ruin, the ontological squandering that we bear within ourselves far exceeds the piety of our memories and consciousnesses. But the shapeless chaos of the forgotten is neither inert nor ineffective. To the contrary, it is at work within us with a force equal to that of the mass of conscious memories, but in a different way. Forgetting has a force and a way of operating that cannot be measured in the same terms as those of conscious memory, not can it be accumulated like knowledge and understanding. Its persistence determines the status of all knowledge and understanding. The exigency of the lost does not entail being remembered and commemorated; rather, it entails remaining in us and with us as forgotten, and in this way and only in this way, remaining unforgettable.
From this stems the inadequacy in trying to restore to memory what is forgotten by inscribing it in the archives and monuments of history, or in trying to construct another tradition and history, of the oppressed and the defeated. While their history may be written with different tools than that of the dominant classes, it will never substantially differ from it. In trying to work against this confusion, one should remember that the tradition of the unforgettable is not exactly a tradition. It is what marks traditions with either the seal of infamy or glory, sometimes both. That which makes each history historical and each tradition transmissible is the unforgettable nucleus that both bear within themselves at their core. The alternatives at this juncture are therefore not to forget or remember, to be unaware or become conscious, but rather the determining factor is the capacity to remain faithful to that which having perpetually been forgotten, must remain unforgettable. It demands to remain with us and be possible for us in some manner. To respond to this exigency is the only historical responsibility I feel capable of assuming fully. If, however, we refuse to respond, and if, on both the collective and individual level, we forgo each and every relation to the mass of the forgotten that accompanies us like a silent golem, then it will reappear within us in a destructive and perverse way, in the form Freud called the return of the repressed, that is, as the return of the impossible as such.”
Giorgio Agamben.
The Time That Remains - A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans.
Pier Paolo Pasolini - bits.
“My perspective could be that of an “artist,” namely, as the good bourgeoisie wants it, that of an insane person. But the fact that, for instance, two representatives of the old Power (though in reality they now serve, even if in an interlocutory fashion, the new Power) blackmailed one another regarding the financing for the Parties and the Montesi case (a case involving the murder of a 21 year old Roman women in which the aristocracy and Fascists were implicated), would be enough to drive someone insane; that is, discrediting a ruling class and the society before the eyes of a man with such intensity as to induce him to lose any sense of opportunity and limits, consequently throwing him into an actual state of ‘anomie’. It needs to be said that the view of the insane person is to be taken into serious consideration, unless one decides to be progressive in everything except the problem of the insane person, limiting his own effort by conveniently removing him.”
Pier Paulo Pasolini
The Power Without a Face: The True Fascism and therefore the True Antifascism.
Sigmund Freud - bits.
“Only one of the consequences of the process of repression – that of the ideational content not being allowed into consciousness – is undone with the help of negation. The result is a kind of intellectual recognition of the repressed while the essential element of the repression remains in place.”
“The other kind of decision that it is the function of judgement to make – whether or not an imagined thing exists in reality (reality-testing) – is a matter for the reality ego, into which the primal pleasure-ego ultimately evolves. Now the question is no longer whether what is perceived (a thing) should be taken into the ego or not, but whether something already present in the ego, as a mental image, can also be re-discovered in perception (reality).”
Sigmund Freud
Negation
Emmanuel Levinas - bits.
“Among the four metaphors which, in the Fifth Ennead, represent the ‘movement of the immobile’ – or the emanation of being from the One – by which according to Plotinus, the various degrees of the multiple produce themselves, the figure of light which is spread by the sun precedes that of the heat spread by fire, cold spread by snow, and perfumes spread by the fragrant object. The first multiplicity is the light of the theoretical, of vision, the duality of seeing and seen, of thinking and thought. The first exteriority – the exteriority with regard to One – is the intelligence of the One, but which, qua knowing, is not only multiple because of the distance that separates it from the One; at a distance from the One, its only dealings are with a multiplicity: with the multiplicity of (Platonic) ideas – with the multiplicity that disperses the essence of being – instead of having in act to do with the one.
‘It does indeed think this principle, but in trying to grasp it in its simplicity, it diverges from it and takes into itself other things, which multiply… It possesed a vague outline of the object of its vision, without which it would not have received it into itself, but that object, from being one, has become many; it is thus that it knows it in order to see it and has become vision in act.’
It already lacks or fails to reach the unity of the One in attaining the ideas in act. The unity of the One is fact excludes all multiplicity, even that which is already adumbrated in the distinction between thinker and thought, and even in the identity of the identical conceived in the guise of consciousness of self where, in the history of philosophy, it would one day be sought.
But the intelligence that is the intelligence of multiple ideas, which it reaches in the act, is not absolutely separated from the idea of the One because of that multiplicity itself: that multiplicity remains a nostalgia for the One, a homesickness. What might be called the movement of knowledge – seeing – or, perhaps, in today's terms, the noetic/noematic intentionality of knowing, filled, but yet dispersed – is, precisely as dispersion, a state of deprivation compared to the unity of the One; yet, as if the one were anticipated by that deprivation itself; as if knowledge, still an aspiration by the very dispersion of its seeing, went beyond what it sees and thematizes, and thus, were a transcendence because of the very deficiency of its plural rationality; as if its dispersed accession to the multiple essence were a piety – Plotinus speaks of prayer – with regard to the inaccessible One. An ambiguity or a risk run at a distance from the One in the knowledge of the intelligence whose multiplicity can keep one far from the ‘homeland’, but thus, as a deprivation, ‘hollowed out’, attached to it. Similarly, in the following degree of hypostasis, the soul, separated from intelligence and dispersing itself among the things of this world, is capable of gathering itself together, and prepares to ‘hear voices from on high’. This ‘gathering itself together’, this ‘converting into itself’, this knowledge, in the consciousness of self, is already an aspiring-higher-than-oneself, to intelligence and thus, to the One.
…
The aspiration for the return is the very breath of the Spirit, but the consummate unity of the One is better than the Spirit and philosophy.”
Emmanuel Levinas
From the One to the Other: Transcendence and Time - Entre Nous.
“Q: Would the experience of the death of the other, and in a sense, the experience of death itself, be alien to the ethical reception of one’s neighbour?
E.L: Now you are posing the problem ‘What is there in the Face?’ In my analysis, the Face is definitely not a plastic form like a portrait; the relation to the face is both the relation to the absolutely weak – to what is absolutely exposed, what is bare and destitute, the relation with bareness and consequently what is alone and can undergo the supreme isolation we call death – and there is, consequently, in the Face of the Other always the death of the other, and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme, to completely neglect the Other – and at the same time (and this is the paradoxical thing) the Face is also the ‘Thou Shalt not Kill.’ A Thou-Shalt-Not-Kill that can also be explicated much further: it is the fact that I cannot let the other die alone, it is like a calling out to me. And you see (and this seems important to me), the relationship with the other is not symmetrical. When I say Thou to an I, to a me, according to Buber I would always have that me before me as the one who says Thou to me. Consequently, there would be a reciprocal relationship. According to my analysis, on the other hand, in the relation to the Face, it is asymmetry that is affirmed: at the outset I hardly care what the other is with respect to me, that is his own business; for me, he is above all the one I am responsible for.”
Emmanuel Levinas
Philosophy, Justice and Love.
Passage á l’acte
Passage á l’acte
The phrase “passage to the act” comes from french clinical psychiatry, which uses it to designate those impulsive acts, of a violent or criminal nature, which sometimes mark the onset of an acute psychotic episode. As the phrase itself indicates, these acts are supposed to mark the point when the subject proceeds from a violent idea or intention to the corresponding act. Because these acts are attributed to the action of the psychosis, French law absolves the perpetrator of civil responsibility for them.
As psychoanalytic ideas gained wider circulation in france in the first half of the twentieth century, it became common for French analysts to use the term passage á l’acte to translate the term Agieren used by Freud; is as a synonym for ACTING OUT. However in his seminar of 62-63, Lacan establishes a distinction between these terms. While both are the last resorts against anxiety the subject who acts something out still remains in the SCENE, whereas a passage to the act involves an exit from the scene altogether. Acting out is a symbolic passage addressed to the big Other, whereas a passage to the act is a flight from the other into the dimension of the Real. The passage to the act is thus an exit from the symbolic network, a dissolution of the social bond. Although the passage to the act does not, according to Lacan, necessarily imply an underlying psychosis, it does entail a dissolution of the subject; for a moment the subject becomes pure object.
(In order to illustrate what he means, Lacan refers to the case of the young homosexual woman treated by Freud. Freud reports that the young woman was walking in the street with the woman she loved when she was spotted by her father, who cast an angry glance at her. Immediately afterwards she rushed off and threw herself over a wall down the side of a cutting onto a railway line. Lacan argues that this suicide attempt was a passage to the act; it was not a message addressed to anyone, since symbolisation had become impossible for the young woman. Confronted with her father’s desire, she was consumed with an uncontrollable anxiety and reacted in an impulsive way by identifying with the object. Thus she fell down like the object petit a, the leftover of signification.)
Dylan Evans
Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Routledge
P.136
Daphne du Maurier
“Marie went slowly to the rails and knelt down. The altar was bare of flowers and alone in the centre stood the figure of the Sainte-Vierge. Her golden crown was crooked on her head, and covered in cobwebs. Her right arm had been lost, and then the other she has the little figure of the infant Jesus, who had no fingers on His hands. Her robe had once been blue, but the colour has come off long ago, and it was now a dirty brown. Her face was round and expressionless, the face of a cheap doll. She had large blue eyes that looked vacantly before her, while her scarlet cheeks clashed with her cracked painted lips. Her mouth was set in a silly smile, and the plaster was coming off at the corners. Around her neck she wore string up on string of glass beads, the offerings of the fishermen, and someone had even hung a wreath over her baby's head. It dangled sideways and hid his face
Marie knelt by the rails and gazed at the Sainte-Vierge. The figure was the most beautiful and sacred thing in her life. She did not notice the dust and the broken plaster, the toppling crown and the silly painted smile – to Marie she was the fulfiller of all prayers, the divine mother of the fishermen. Avvs she knelt she prayed , not in words but in the thoughts that wandered at will through her mind, and her prayers were all for Jean, for his safety and his return.
‘Oh! Mother,’ she said, ‘if it is wrong for me to love him so much, then punish me as you will, but bring him safely back to me. He is young and brave, yet helpless as a child, he would not understand death. I care not if my heart breaks, nor if he should cease to love me and should ill-treat me, it is only his happiness I ask, and that he shall never know pain or hardship.’
A fly settled on the nose of the Sainte-Vierge, and brushed a scrap of coloured plaster off her cheek.
‘I have put all my trust in you,’ said Marie ‘and I know that you will watch over him when he is at sea. Though waves rise up and threaten his boat, if you protect him I shall have no fear. I will bring fresh flowers every morning and lay them at the feet of the little Jesus. When I am working in the day I will sing songs and be gay, and these will be prayers to you for his safety. Oh! Mother, if you could only show me by a sign that all will be well!’
A drip of water from the roof fell down upon the Sainte-Vierge and left a dirty streak across her left eye.
It was very dark now. Away across the fields a woman was calling to a child. A faint breeze stirred in the trees, and far in the distance the waves broke dully on the shingle beach.
Marie gazed upon the figure until she dropped from weariness, and everything was blurred and strange before her eyes. The walls of the chapel lay in shadow; even the altar sank into nothingness. All that remained was the image of the St Sainte-Vierge, her face lit up by a chance ray of Moonlight. And as Marie watched the figure it seems to her that the cracked, painted smile became a thing of beauty, and that the dolls eyes looked down upon her with tenderness and love. The tawdry crown shone in the darkness, and Marie was filled with awe and wonder.
She did not know that it shone only by the light of the moon. She lifted up her arms and said: ‘Mother of pity, show me a sign that you have heard my prayers.’ Then she closed her eyes and waited. It seemed an eternity that she knelt there, her head bowed in her hands.
Slowly she was aware of a feeling of peace and great comfort, as if the place were sanctified by the presence of something holy. She felt that if she opened her eyes she would look up on a vision. Yet she was afraid to obey her impulse, lest the thing she would see should blind her with its beauty. The longing grew stronger and stronger within her, until she was forced to give way. Unconscious of her surroundings, unconscious of what she was doing, Marie opened her eyes. The low window beside the altar was filled with the pale light of the moon, and just outside she saw the vision.
She saw Jean kneeling upon the grass, gazing at something, and there was a smile on his face, and slowly from the ground rose a figure which Marie could not see distinctly, for it was in shadow, but it was the figure of a woman. She watched her place two hands on Jean’s shoulders, as if she were blessing him, and he buried his head in the folds of her gown. Only for a moment they remained like this, and then a cloud passed over the face of the moon, and the chapel was filled with darkness.
Marie closed her eyes and sank to the ground in worship. She had seen the blessed vision of the Sainte-Vierge. She had prayed for a sign, and it had been given her, Notre Dame des Bonnes Nouvelles had appeared unto her, and with her own hands had blessed Jean, and assured him of her love and protection. There was no longer fear in Marie’s heart; she felt she would never be afraid again. She had put all her faith in the Sainte-Vierge, and her prayers had been answered.
She rose unsteadily from the ground and found her way to the door. Once more she turned, and looked for the last time at the figure on the altar. It was in shadow now, and the crown was no longer gold. Marie smiled and bowed her head; she knew that no one else would ever see what she had seen. In the chapel the Sainte-Vierge still smiled her painted smile, and the vacant blue eyes gazed into nothing. The faded wreath slipped a little over the ear of the infant Jesus.
Marie stepped out into the evening. She was very tired and could scarcely see where she was going, but her heart was at peace and she was filled with a great happiness.
In the corner of the narrow field, sheltered by the chapel window, Jean whispered his desires to the sister of Jacques the fisherman.”
The Sainte-Vierge.
From The Rendezvous and other stories
Daphne du Maurier.
Giorgio Agamben
“What quality fascinates and entrances me in the photographs I love? I believe it is this: for me, photography in some way captures The Last Judgement; it represents the world as it appears on the last day, the Day of Wrath. It is, of course, not a question of subject matter. I don't mean that the photographs I love are ones that represent something grave, serious, or even tragic. The photo can show any face, any object or any event whatever. This is the case with photographers… who practice what could be called photographic flânerie: walking without any goal and photographing everything that happens. But “everything that happens” – the faces of two women riding bicycles in Scotland, a shop window in Paris – is called forth, summoned to appear on Judgement Day.”
Profanations: Chapter 3 Judgement Day
Giorgio Agamben