After her husband’s suicide, body artist Lauren Hartke returns to
their remote house, to grieve and to prepare for the future. In the first
days back she feels her dead husband around her:
‘Now he was the smoke, Rey was, the thing
in the air, vaporous, drifting into every space sooner or later, unshaped,
but with a face that was somehow part of the presence, specific to the
prowling man.’ 6
Staying ‘specific’ the sensations of him stay in the past,
a cloud of memories contingent to the history of his life reported in
newspaper obituaries of this broken talent of a film director. Then she
starts to feel something new, not Rey but a new physical presence. And
one day she finds him:
‘He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear.
In the first seconds she thought he was inevitable. She felt her way
back in time to the earlier indications that there was someone in the
house and she arrived at this instant, unerringly, with her perceptions
all sorted and endorsed.’ 7
What kind of crowd is this man, neither ghost nor
memory, her nor anybody else? He starts to talk to her, in a broken language
without past. But he speaks of her and her dead husband. Speaking, a man,
with no question of origin or purpose locatable, or even possible, he becomes
a crowd by speaking without the strain of history and memory upon its words.
That strain is evident when speaking is at ease with itself, ready to mean
that time can keep on flowing back over us from the future. Deleuze was
wrong here: when he asked that language be made to vibrate, to stutter,
he did not make provisions for its speaking freed from the past and the
future. In ‘He Stuttered’ he writes:
‘Language trembles from head to toe. This is the principle of
a poetic comprehension of language itself: it is as if language were
stretched along an abstract and infinitely varied line…Each variable
state is like a point on a ridge line, which then bifurcates and is
continued along other lines. It is a syntactic line, syntax being constituted
by the curves, rings, bends and deviations of this dynamic line as it
passes through the points, from the viewpoint of disjunctions and connections.’
8
::
interactive :: <<back next>>
|
|
