His was the type of strength not to withstand attempts to poison and destroy him but rather to absorb them, to swallow the poison and be altered by it, so that his survival was not a story of mere resilience, but was instead a slow kind of crucifixion that eventually compelled the world to chastise itself for what it had done to him.
A sickness had taken possession of me since the attack, of body but also of mind. The boundary of possibility had been moved, and the world was now a different place. Its properties had been inverted: the self and its preoccupations were shrunken and impotent, and the exterior plane with its prospects of imminent danger and disorder greatly enlarged. I watched people move blithely through their days, unconscious of what could at any moment befall them. It was from the impulse to wake them from this trance, perhaps, that my desire to hit was being generated. For the first time in years, I thought about the violence of childbirth, when I had passed as if through a mirror into an inchoate, animal region, a place with no words.
G’s wife has a stomach-ache, a backache, a shooting pain in her hip when she gets too quickly out of a chair. Sometimes her hands shake in the mornings holding the coffee cup. She receives these complaints of the body mildly, without consternation. In her turn she commands herself to walk vigorously each day in the fields and woods near the house; she attends exercise classes and eats with care; she grants herself things that are warming and comforting, a hot bath, a rest in the afternoon. Often she and G travel to southern places, and she absorbs the brilliant sunlight and the smells and sensations of the sea until she becomes radiant. Through this combination of will and self-reward, her body passes its days. Their accumulation is a sort of secret history, a diary: unobserved, she pays a more or less continuous attention to herself that only hints at a greater lack of significance. Her children are adults now, and she looks back on her history with them in a fatigued kind of amazement, like a retired general recalling past battles. She continues to be a woman, yet that fact has lately met with some kind of constraint or opposition: instead of flowering and putting out its display, her femaleness is growing back into itself. Her body no longer represents any kind of danger.
Some days, in the city, all the children seem to be crying. They are wheeled along the streets in their chairs, wailing like sirens. Their tear-streaked faces can be seen through the windows of passing cars as they sob disconsolately in their car seats. In the park, in the supermarket, on the buses and trains, their sounds of lamentation fill the air, like those of seers who have glimpsed some unspeakable horror about to befall us. Their parents handle them with studied patience while not seeming to address the causes of their unhappiness. They bear them weeping through the streets, as though they are merely the caretakers of these beings whose sorrowful message is meant for us all.
I used to admire Mauro for criticising everything, Julia said while he paced around the pale gravel in the falling dusk. I thought it meant he was intelligent. Then I realised that while he was outraged everyone else was just having a good time. Thankfully he isn’t my husband, she said, so I am able to love him anyway.
People have asked me whether I won’t be sad to leave the world of museums and public art, especially in the light of this exhibition, which was really a victory for us and is the most significant thing we’ve done, but I’m not particularly sad. I was walking around it today, she said, as if I were an ordinary person, just looking, and it struck me how strange it is, how actually bizarre, that some people take it into their heads to create objects for the rest of us to look at. Psychologists tell us that little children are proud of their own shit, and enjoy showing it to other people, until they are informed that their shit is disgusting and should be hidden, and I suddenly wondered whether artists somehow never got this message and kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.
If she’s like most poets, Mauro said, she suspects that what she does is entirely useless, not because it’s a luxury but in the sense that a spider’s web hanging in the corner of a room is useless. Everyone ignores the spider’s web, which nonetheless required enormous persistence and patience to make and yet can be brushed away in an instant without anyone noticing. No one notices poetry, he said, but when they find it and look closely at it they see something marvellous, like the spider’s web. The spider’s web has nothing to do with history or politics or oppression, he said, it exists in a different reality from those things and is obviously much weaker and more fragile than they are. It is more linked to survival than to power or violence – it survives in spite of them. It can be brushed away and all that work wasted, but then the work starts again, in another corner of the room.
I know a lot of women who assume that the men they live with will be financially responsible for them, Julia said. It’s true that usually they have children, and most of them talk about it as a deal they made at the beginning, but the deal is always the same, that the man will earn the money while the woman allows her career and her ambitions to take second place. Sometimes I have been jealous of these women, she said, because I live without a partner and support myself and my daughter, and to be able to live your life without considering every action in the light of practical necessity seems to me an almost unacceptable privilege. At other times I see that the absence of necessity weakens their ambitions, and that they allow themselves to become unprepared to survive alone. Their lives are so gendered, she said, it is almost as if they trust gender more than anything else to tell them how to live. One of the things that interests me about G’s work, she said, is that she treats both sexes as doomed by gender, as almost interchangeable in that sense, so that a third sex emerges in which the man and the woman have merged into each other and become neutral. The couple, in other words, becomes a kind of two-headed monster with little children dangling from its sides. I know other couples of course who try to do things more equally, she said, and to preserve their separate identities, but they seem to have even more problems than the conventional ones, who at least present their family life as perfect. Some friends of mine have a small child, she said, and they agreed to share the responsibility to earn money with the responsibility to care for her. The woman spends half her time working and half her time with her daughter. But when it’s the man’s turn to care for the child, he employs a nanny to do his half. He claims that he has not reneged on their deal, which was to share the responsibility equally – the child is cared for by the nanny, who he alone pays. But it enrages the woman that he doesn’t wish to be with the child as much as she does, and that while she is working she has to worry about whether the nanny is doing things right. They argue about it all the time, even in public, Julia said. The woman is so infuriated by what she sees as an injustice, and what he presents as a logical arrangement, that she has clearly come to hate him.
The brother lived in the city now, where he was distinguishing himself in academic and philosophical circles. G went to stay with him: they went to cafes and restaurants and jazz clubs where G met his friends and associates, clever young men who played with language like indefatigable athletes. Their sport was to take a precept that had functioned eternally as a pillar of reality and demolish it: reality did not generally, as a consequence, come tumbling down, but one’s sense of its solidity and familiarity was altered.
Does it help people to be seen, even when they don’t know it? A mother is continually seen by her children, whether or not she credits them with a point of view. From the beginning they are amassing images of her, of her body in all its angles and positions and moods. Her body becomes the known point from which they broach all that is unknown. They see her mainly when she is paying them no attention; when her attention comes it is seismic, as though the actor has suddenly turned and addressed a member of the audience. They see her when she thinks she is alone, despite the fact that they are there. These witnesses that have grown out of her can startle or displease her with the independence of their observations. They are not the extensions of her own will and consciousness that she had believed them to be. In this way they inform her that she cannot control what is known about her and does not entirely know herself. They know more about her than she does about them, since they have not yet become fully themselves. Yet her power to wound them is limitless.
Some of his friends became bolder and more arrogant with success. Their voices grew louder, their opinions and convictions began to entail a kind of deafness. Watching them, G felt a curious sense of isolation, as though he alone could see and hear. In being and defending themselves, they cloaked the world in their subjectivity. He began to understand that the discipline of concealment yielded a rare power of observation. The spy sees more clearly and objectively than others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience.