Footnote #9: A Piece of Furniture – From Bartleby & Co.

Footnote #9: A Piece of Furniture – From Bartleby & Co.
(Enrique Vila-Matas New Directions: New York, 2004, pp. 27-29)

Marché aux Puces, Paris

9) If Plato thought that life was a forgetting of the idea, Clément Cadou spent his whole life forgetting that he once had the idea of wanting to be a writer.

His strange attitude – to forget about writing, he would spend his whole life considering himself a piece of furniture – has similarities to the no less strange biography of Félicien Marboeuf, a writer of the No I discovered in Artistes sans oeuvres (Artists Without Works), an ingenious book by Jean-Yves Jouannais on the subject of creators who chose not to create.

Cadou was fifteen years old when his parents invited Witold Gombrowicz to their house for dinner. It was only a few months (this was at the end of April 1963) since the Polish writer had embarked from Bueno Aires for the last time and, having paid a lightning visit to Barcelona, had come to Paris, where, among other things, he had accepted the invitation to dine with the Cadous, old friends of his from fifties in Bueno Aires.

The young Cadoud had aspirations to be a writer. In fact he had already dedicated months to preparing for it. His parents were delighted and, unlike many others, had placed every facility at his disposal so that he could be a writer. They were thrilled that their son might one day be transformed into a brilliant star of French literary firmament. The boy was not lacking in talent, he was a voracious reader of all kinds of books and he worked conscientiously to become an admired writer in the shortest time possible.

At his tender age, the young Cadou was reasonably familiar with Gombrowicz’s work, which had impressed him a great deal and which led him sometimes to recite whole paragraphs form the Polish writer’s novels in front of his parents.

And so the parents’ satisfaction at inviting Gombrowicz to dinner was twofold. They were excited at the prospect of their young son having direct contact, in the comfort of their own home, with the genius of the great Polish author.

But something very unexpected occurred. The young Cadou was so awestruck on seeing Gombrowicz within the four walls of his parents’ home that he hardly said a word all evening and ended up – something similar had befallen the young Marboeuf when he saw Flaubert in his parents’ home – feeling like a piece of furniture in the drawing room where they had dinner.

As a result of this domestic metamorphosis, the young Cadou saw how his aspirations to become a writer were permanently rescinded.

But Cadou’s case differs from that of Marbouef in the frenetic artistic activity which, from the age of seventeen, he undertook to fill the gap left in him by his irreversible decision not to write. Unlike Marboeuf, Cadou did not merely see himself as a piece of furniture all his life (he died young); but least he painted. And of course he painted furniture. It was his way of slowly forgetting that he had once wanted to write.

All his paintings centred exclusively on a piece of furniture and they all bore the seam enigmatic and repetitive title: Self-Portrait.

“The thing is, I feel like a piece of furniture, and pieces of furniture, to the best of my knowledge, don’t write,” Cadou would say in his denfence when reminded that as a boy he had wanted to be a writer.

There is an interesting study of Cadou’s case by Georges Perec (A Portrait of the Author Seen as a Piece of Furniture, Always, Paris, 1973), in which sarcastic emphasis is placed on what happened in 1972, when poor Cadou died after a long and painful illness. His relatives unwittingly buried him as if he were a piece of furniture, they got rid of him like some surplus furniture, and buried him in a niche near the Marché aux Puces in Paris, that market where so many old pieces of furniture are to be found.

Knowing that he was going to die, the young Cadou wrote a short epitaph for his tomb, which he asked his family to accept as his “complete works”. An ironic request. The epitaph reads as follows: “I tired in vain to be other pieces of furniture, but even that was denied me. So I have been a single piece of furniture my whole life, which is, after all, no mean achievement when one considers that the rest is silence.”

Mirror Street – Ernst Auer and Erich Junger (Manuscripts)

The street is about 200m.There are five shop houses on the left.There are five shop houses on the right. The first unit on the left is a café.The first unit on the right is also a café. The first unit on the left is two-storey, red roof top and three windows, with the panel of first window open to the right. The blue paint on the façade has peeled to the shape of the American continent from the top of the middle window until the southern tip of Chile touches the signboard that reads ‘OCEAN CAFE’.The first unit on the right is two-storey, red roof top and three windows, with the panel of the first window open to the left. The blue paint on the façade has peeled to the shape of the American continent from the top of the middle window until the southern tip of Argentina touches the signboard which is only readable when it is reflected.Only twins are hired in these two cafes. But not any twins. For instance,The balding waiter in the café on the left side of the street parts whatever is left of his hair to the left and holds the tray with his right hand. The balding waiter from the opposite café parts whatever is left of his hair to the right and holds the tray with his left hand. But of course they both have front button shirts. They have tea-break at the same time, although the clock hung on the wall behind the service counter of the first unit on the right moves anti-clockwise. They sit right opposite each other, have the same snacks and tea. But without smoking break, as the tobacco company that had printed the cigarette box, in reversed,was disallowed any form of publicity, since two years ago.It is time consuming and expensive to keep both of them in the job. Finding symmetrical replacements exhausts the town mayor. But this duality is what that has been sustaining this one horse town. As a tourist attraction, the street is only active at night. But this has nothing to do with the crowd or the nature of the trade. It is the problem with the sun and the shadows.

From 'Figures of Subjective Destiny: On Samuel Beckett' - Alain Badiou

"And to meet and part in my sense exceeds the power of feeling, however tender, and of bodily motions, however expert."

Beckett never reduces love to the amalgam of sentimentality and sexuality endorsed by common opinion. Love as a matter of “truth” (and not of opinion) depends upon a pure event: an encounter whose strength radically exceeds both sentimentality and sexuality.

Love offers beauty, nuance, color. It presents what one might call the other or second nocturne, not of the grey darkness of being, but that of the rustling night — the night of leaves and plants, of stars and water. Under the very strict conditions of the encounter and toil, the Two of love splits the dark into the grey darkness of being, on the one hand, and, on the other, the infinitely varied darkness of the sensible world.

This is why in Beckett’s prose one suddenly discovers poems where, under the sign of the inaugural figure of the Two, something unfolds within the night of presentation, that is to say, the unfolding of the multiple as such. Love is, above all, an authorization granted to the multiple, under the never-abolished threat of the grey darkness where the original One bears the torture of its own identification.

http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=21

The Philosopher and his Poor – Jacques Rancière, trans. Andrew Parker, (Duke University Press: Durham & London, 2003, pp. 144- 145)

Even before worked matter enters the scene, the philosopher has protected himself against this colloid. He has built a wall in the décor of rustic and peasant happiness: ‘From my window I can see a road paver on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge at all of each other’s presence.” [Sartre]

The broken glass and the bourgeois property are there for ambiance. The décor itself has another purpose. Sartre wants to show that in their separation and mutual ignorance there always exists between two workers relations of interiority; but also and above all, that these relation of a third. Thus, in the perception where the man at the window is figured as object, the two men outside become the “hemorrhagic center” of the object, each of them united with the other at the point of gaze: “The mere fact, for each of them, of seeing what the Other does not see, of exposing the object through a special kind of work, establishes a relation of reciprocity in my perceptual field which transcend my perception itself: each of them constitutes the ignorance of the Other…. They are ignorant of one another through me to the precise extent that I become what I am through them.”

Clearly the philosopher at his window, too, feels someone’s gaze on him: the ironic gaze of his privileged opponent. And he also insists that no one is going to get him to say that he is a transcendental subject constituting others in his own perception. He is not the philosopher-master; he is not the Leibnizian God of action at a distance. He is merely an intellectual on vacation, a petty bourgeois who does not know how to weed flower beds, how to crush pebbles, and against whom is already exercised the mute complicity of these workers who are ignorant of each other.

But this modesty is useless, or misleading. The philosopher’s act was not the dissolution of the stone wall in order to “interiorize” the workers. It was the erection of the wall to put them in the true element of the dialectic: not the colloid of reciprocal relations but the steel and concrete of worked matter that seals meaning in consigning backward workers to their solitudes, their turnings in place, or their aphasic dialogues. Much more than The German Ideology’s laboriously demonstrated historicity of the cherry tree, the philosopher’s rustic wall engages humanity on the road of the productive dialectic. When the two workers have entered the workshop, the philosopher at the window will give way to a more severe figure of the dialectical Third: the time-keeper, a pure representative of the Exigency of worked matter.

Lying Buddha - Ernst Auer

in the shy room

with wasted colours of

three wooden palettes

a pregnant wardrobe,

a loose cardigan
green

to wipe this uneven floor

the beads of sweat off the faces of six walls

the bride, the unhappiest bride waits

'please turn down the fake autumn of science.'
yet it would be unbearable

without the ceiling light as the sun

for one humid half-truth

for a false dawn whenever the door opens

when the buddha lies

not on the bed or the altar table

but just nine things about him.