Hiroshima, mon Amour

HE: "What was Hirioshima to you, in France?"
SHE: "The end of the war."

[A poem signed Paul Eluard]

And today Stalin dissolves our sadness
Trust is the fruit of his brain of love
The cluster reasonable in its full perfection

Thanks to him we’ll never know autumn
Stalin’s horizon is forever reborn
We live without doubt and even in the deepest shadows
We produce life and regulate the future
For us there is no day without a morrow
No dawn

[…]

For life and men have chosen Stalin
To embody on earth their boundless hope

Pensée-Cadeau: vers un ami - Ettie Stettheimer

Je voudraus être faite sur mesure
pour toi, pour toi
Mais, je suis readymade par la nature,
pour qoui, pour qoui?
Comme je ne le sais pas j’ai fait des retifications
Pour moi –

(I would like to be made to measure
for you, for you
But, I am readymade by nature,
for what, for what?
Since I don’t know I have made adjustments
For me –)

Ettie Stettheimer to Marcel Duchamp, 1922

Doughnut, ring and Breakfast at Tiffany’s

‘Let us consider a gold ring. There is a hole and this hole is just as essential to the ring as the gold is; without the gold, the ‘hole’ (which moreover, could not exist) would not be a ring, but without the hole, the gold (which would none the less exist) would not be a ring either. But if one has found atoms in the gold, it is not at all necessary to look for them in the hole. And nothing indicates that the gold and the hole are in one and the same manner (of course, what is involved is the hole as ‘hole’, and not the air which is ‘in the hole’). The hole is a nothingness that subsists (as the presence of an absence) thanks to the gold which surrounds it. Likewise, Man who is Action could be a nothingness that ‘nihilates’ in being, thanks to being which it negates.’ – Aleksandr Vladimirovič Koževnikov (also known as Alexandre Kojève), Introduction à lecture de Hegel (Gallimard, 1947, p.485)

Although it is not gold, this doughnut is a ring because of the hole. Although it is not absurd to see it as a ring, this doughnut is not a Tiffany Ring. Although it is not advisable to swallow a painting of a doughnut for breakfast, visual consumption is also very enriching - and surely more lasting. Hence, we are reminded of nothing but the sweet ending of the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s*.

This is a painting from vertical submarine’s Analogic series.

*Besides the memento – which is a cheap ring from a box of Cracker Jack – the gold-hungry Holly Golightly, the female lead character played by Audrey Hepburn, was involved in a drug ring, and blew her chance of marrying a rich businessman because of that.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann

Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven, 2003,p.354)

he who did the job
Was standing among those who stood with us,
To look upon the corpse. You fancy him-
Smoking an early pipe, and watching, as
An artist, the effect of his last work.

(Evil is in the Eye of the Beholder? - Hegel)

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.