The buffoon I love most is Juan Calabazas. Juan the Pumpkin. He’s not one of the dwarfs, he’s the one who squints. There are two portraits of him. In one he’s standing, and holding at arm’s length, mockingly, a painted, miniature medallion portrait, whilst in his other hand he’s holding a mysterious object which commentators haven’t exactly identified – it’s thought to be part of some kind of grinding machine and is probably an allusion (like ‘with a screw loose’) to his being a simpleton, as was also, of course, his nickname Pumpkin. In this canvas Velázquez, the master conjuror and portrait painter, colludes with the Pumpkin’s joke: How long do you really think looks last?
In the second, later portrait of Juan the Pumpkin, he’s squatting on the floor so he’s the height of a dwarf and he is laughing and speaking and his hands are eloquent. I look into his eyes.
They are unexpectedly still. His whole face is flickering with laughter – either his own or the laughter he’s provoking, but in his eyes there’s no flicker; they are impassive and still. And this isn’t the consequence of his squint, because the gaze of the other buffoons, I suddenly realise, is similar. The various expressions of their eyes all contain a comparable stillness, which is exterior to the duration of the rest.
This might suggest a profound solitude, but with the buffoons it doesn’t. The mad can have a fixed look in their eyes because they are lost in time, unable to recognise any reference point. Géricault, in his piteous portrait of the mad woman in the Paris hospital of La Salpêtrière (painted in 1819 or 1820), revealed this haggard look of absence, the gaze of someone banished from duration.
The buffoons painted by Velázquez are as far away as the woman in La Salpêtrière from the normal portraits of honour and rank; but they are different, for they are not lost and they have not been banished. They simply find themselves – after the laughter – beyond the transient.
Juan the Pumpkin’s still eyes look at the parade of life and at us through a peephole from eternity. This is the secret that a meeting in the Rambla suggested to me.
It is of the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity.
It is of the nature of reason to regard things not as contingent, but as necessary. It perceives this necessity of things truly, that is, as it is in itself. But this necessity of things is the necessity itself of the eternal nature of God. Therefore it is the nature of reason to regard things under this species of eternity. Add to this that the bases of reason are the notions which explain those things which are common to all, and which explain the essence of no particular thing: and which therefore must be conceived without any relation of time, but under a certain species of eternity.
(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XLIV)
A dead badger by the side of the road. Yves found her in the snow, frozen. Yes, she’s a female.
It must be noted here, that I understand the body to suffer death when its parts are so disposed that they assume one with the other another proportion of motion and rest.
(Ethics, Part IV, Proposition XXXIX)
I’m in a hard-discount supermarket, belonging to one of the biggest chains of food retailers in Europe. They run over 8,000 stores. You can buy products here – cartons of apple juice, for example – at half the price you pay elsewhere in other supermarkets. It’s situated in a zone where the autoroutes begin, on the outskirts of this city.
About sixty people work here and there are at least as many surveillance cameras. None of the goods are on display. They are in cases with the sides ripped off. Most of the customers are regular and know their way about.
Among them are the elderly poor buying for themselves alone and many young women shopping for the children, the partner (if there is one), themselves, their dependants. Everyone, according to their means, buys to the maximum, because they don’t want to come here more than once – or at the most twice – a week. The trolleys, queuing up to check out, are stacked high, invariably with several packs of the same dish – macaroni, for instance, or Mexican tortillas or packets of Hachis Parmentier de Boeuf. A few of the elderly pay cash; everyone else uses credit cards. Anxiously, because it is near the end of the month.
Nobody – except the occasional kid – talks. We are all – customers and staff – suspect and our every move is being watched. We are all picking up, pushing trolleys, scanning, tapping in codes, controlling, weighing vegetables, keeping to schedules, calculating, in a vast hangar whose obsession is Theft.
It’s the opposite of a street market, where the key secret is that of a bargain. In a street market everyone encourages everyone to believe they’ve just made a smart deal; here, every one of us is being considered as a potential thief.
There’s little free space – the pallets of goods take up most of it – and the trolleys queuing before the pay counters form a tight line. Two trolleys ahead of me there’s a pregnant woman. Tall with loose fair hair. She might be Polish. I doubt whether the child she’s awaiting is her first-born. She’s frowning as she deposits her purchases on the conveyor belt.
What are the modes of theft which preoccupy – to the exclusion of nearly all other considerations – this hard-discount hangar we are in?
Theft by shoppers. From time to time the firm sends ‘mystery shoppers’ into the store. Their task is to lift and sneak out a number of items and thus to test the vigilance of the cashiers. Theft by their employees who, if they purchase for themselves anything from the shelves, are required to have a chit, signed by the manager, and are liable at any time to be body searched. Systematic theft by the firm of unpaid working hours from those it employs. Cashiers are forced to put in at least two hours’ unpaid work per week. Often more. During their time off, many employees – from the rank of manager downwards – are obliged to be on call night and day in case they are needed in an emergency. No sick leave allowed. No legally prescribed pauses between shifts or prescribed days of rest during a week. Theft of workers’ rights. Finally the theft by agro-business corporations, closely linked to global food retailers, of the initiatives once taken by those who worked the land: decisions about crops, varieties, seeds, fertilisers, the species of animals to breed, etc. Once these were local, pragmatic decisions; today the corporations supply the producers and dictate what is to be produced. Global agriculture is becoming prepackaged – with the aim of turning the whole of nature into a commodity.
The pregnant woman whom I think may be Polish is at the head of the queue. The prescribed target for cashiers is to scan thirty-five items per minute! None can achieve it. Consequently they all have minus marks on their performance records. The pregnant woman, ready to pay, scowls at her credit card.
Then she looks up and clearly sees somebody whom she recognises in the queue behind me. Maybe they came here together. Maybe they planned to come and shop here at the same time today.
Out of a strange discretion I don’t look round to observe whom she has seen. My guess is that he’s not a man. I think she’s a woman. The Pole lifts her head, shakes back her hair and smiles in such a way that I conclude this.
Then she goes on smiling and smiling.
Her smile is an expression of pure happiness. It radiates and absorbs at the same time. Like any sudden happiness it was unforeseeable.
Her smile contains forgotten promises which have for a moment returned to become real.
Am I exaggerating about the promise of her smile or about the thieving hangar? I am not. Both exist. Exist in the same place and at the same moment.
Desire which arises from pleasure is stronger, caeteris paribus, than the desire which arises from pain.
(Ethics, Part IV, Proposition XVIII)
Each spring when the irises begin to flower, I find myself drawing them – as if obeying an order. There’s no other flower so commanding. And this may have something to do with the way they open their petals, already printed. Irises open like books. At the same time, they are the smallest, tectonic quintessence of architecture. I think of the Mosque Suleiman in Istanbul. Irises
are like prophesies: simultaneously astounding and calm.
… all things in nature proceed eternally from a certain necessity and with the utmost perfection. I should add, however, this further point: that the doctrine of final causes turns nature upside down entirely. For that which in truth is a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versa, and so it makes that which is first by nature to be last, and again, that which is highest and most perfect it renders imperfect.
(Ethics, Part I, Appendix)
Coming for a ride, Bento?
I wouldn’t make a direct comparison between a motorbike and a telescope for which you grind lenses, yet they have certain features in common: both need to be well aimed, both diminish distance, and both offer a tunnel of attention and the sensation of speed.
When you stop looking through a telescope, even if you’re looking at a coastline or a stationary star, when you stop looking through the lens, you have the impression of your vision slowing down. In the tunnel of speed there is also a kind of silence, and when you get off the bike or remove your eye from the eyepiece, all the slow repetitive sounds of daily life return, and this silence recedes.
… surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.
(Ethics, Part III, Propositions)
To the key-ring of my motorbike ignition key I’ve attached a little token of a black tortoise. This model of bike (a Honda CBR 1100) was known, when first launched, as Blackbird. The tortoise with his determined slowness and the swiftness of the blackbird’s flying.
For many years I’ve been fascinated by a certain parallel between the act of piloting a bike and the act of drawing. The parallel fascinates me because it may reveal a secret. About what? About displacement and vision. Looking brings closer.
Put in ignition key, swing leg over, fasten helmet strap, pull on gloves, adjust choke, press starter, kick back the stand with left foot.
I remember when bikes had only kick-starters. Lunge, lunge with right leg, using as much bodyweight as one could muster. Cylinders inhaling, coughing, not firing. When they do finally spark into life, the sensation is of being astride a chorale.
Let out clutch gently with left hand, palm throttle with right, move forward. Stability.
You pilot a bike with your eyes, with your wrists and with the leaning of your body. Your eyes are the most importunate of the three. The bike follows and veers towards whatever they are fixed on. It pursues your gaze, not your ideas. No four-wheeled-vehicle driver can imagine this.
If you look hard at an obstacle you want to avoid, there’s a grave risk that you’ll hit it. Look calmly at a way around it and the bike will take that path.
I say expressly that the mind has no adequate but only confused knowledge of itself, of its body, and of external bodies, when it perceives a thing in the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally, that is by fortuitous circumstances, to contemplate this or that, and not when it is determined internally, that is, by the fact that it regards many things at once, to understand their agreements, differences and oppositions one to another.
(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XXIX)
Pilot and two-wheeled machine form a single unit, and its disposition from within, its capacity for self-regulation, is linked to the inertia principle in physics. Like a top spinning, it continues and corrects itself so long as a certain momentum is maintained. But unlike a top spinning, which remains on one spot, this unit traces a continually shifting, ongoing line which feels like a contour. A contour of what? Of what is extensive. Exactly as you describe it.
Before we proceed further, let us call to mind what we have already shown: that whatever can be conceived by infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, appertains to one substance alone: and consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended through this and now through that attribute.
(Ethics, Part 2, Proposition VII)
The contours of what is extensive.
The act of drawing. Any fixed contour is in nature arbitrary and impermanent. What is on either side of it tries to shift it by pushing or pulling. What’s on one side of a contour has got its tongue in the mouth of what’s on the other side. And vice versa. The challenge of drawing is to show this, to make visible on the paper or drawing surface not only discrete, recognisable things, but also to show how the extensive is one substance. And, being one substance, it harasses the act of drawing. If the lines of a drawing don’t convey this harassment the drawing remains a mere sign.
The lines of a sign are uniform and regular: the lines of a drawing are harassed and tense. Somebody making a sign repeats an habitual gesture. Somebody making a drawing is alone in the infinitely extensive.
Think of the bike’s trajectory or track as if it were a line drawn on the ground. The pilot with his body is concentrated on maintaining that line. The bike may follow his gaze, but he has to keep them both on the ground. And to do this he has continually to negotiate with two things. (1) The contact between the ground’s surface and the tyres of the two revolving wheels. And (2) the impetus of the forces brought into play when the line and the bike change direction. Unless you are driving alone on a race track straight lines are brief. You are seldom vertical. To varying degrees you are nearly always heeling over, and, according to the degree, you negotiate with the play of forces involved.
(1) When as a draughtsman your drawing instrument makes contact with the paper, you assess how absorbent the paper is, how smooth, how resistant, how accommodating or intractable, and then you draw accordingly, modifying pressure, the longevity of touches, the amount of ink, the hardness of the charcoal, the amount of spit, etc. And as a pilot, you observe and assess the surface of the road or track in a comparable manner. Gravel, sand, moisture, fallen leaves, oil, white marking-paint, mud, ice, encourage, each in its own way, the tyres to slip. Other surfaces hold the tyres. And you decide accordingly about the instant of each of your own actions, which involve braking, accelerating, turning, slowing down. You react as though you have a bare foot which feels the tread of the tyres on the surface they are crossing.
(2) When you change direction you lean into the turn, and this maintains the turning. At the same moment, however, you coax the front wheel to point in the opposite direction, to point out of the turn. And you do this not to limit or end the turn, but to strengthen the forward thrust coming from the back wheel and to keep the line being drawn taut and tense, to keep it under a constant push-and-pull pressure from left and right, from the extensive which it is crossing. What is one side of the line you are following has got its tongue in the mouth of what is on its other side.
Axiom I. All bodies are either moving or at rest.
Axiom II. Each body moves now more slowly, now more quickly.
Lemma I. Bodies are reciprocally distinguished with respect to motion or rest, quickness or slowness, and not with respect to substance.
… Lemma III. A body in motion or at rest must be determined to motion or rest by some other body, which, likewise, was determined for motion or rest by some other body, and this by a third, and so on to infinity.
(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XIII, Note)
You are riding a drawing.
Spontaneously, I always want to draw on the right-hand page of the sketchbook, rather than the left. A recollection from childhood, a question of hope?
I want to tell you the story of how I gave away a Sho Japanese brush. Where it happened and how. The brush had been given to me by an actor friend who had gone to work for a while with some Noh performers in Japan.
I drew often with it. It was made of the hairs of horse and sheep. These hairs once grew out of a skin. Maybe this is why when gathered together into a brush with a bamboo handle they transmit sensations so vividly. When I drew with it I had the impression that it and my fingers, loosely holding it, were touching not paper but a skin. The notion that a paper be
ing drawn on is like a skin is there in the very word: brushstroke. The one and only touch of the brush! as the great draughtsman Shitao termed it.
The setting for the story was a municipal swimming pool in a popular, though not chic, Paris suburb, where from time to time I was something of an habitué. I went there every day at one p.m. when most people were eating and so the pool was less crowded.
The building is long and squat and its walls are of glass and brick. It was built in the late 1960s and it opened in 1971. It’s situated in a small park where there are a few silver birches and weeping willows.
From the pool when swimming you can see the willows high up through the glass walls. The ceiling above the pool is panelled and now, forty years later, several of the panels are missing. How many times when swimming on my back have I noticed this, whilst being aware of the water holding up both me and whatever story I’m puzzling over?
There’s an eighteenth-century drawing by Huang Shen of a cicada singing on the branch of a weeping willow. Each leaf in it is a single brushstroke.
Seen from the outside it’s an urban, not a rural building, and if you didn’t know it was a swimming pool and you forgot about the trees, you might suppose it was some kind of railway building, a cleaning shed for coaches, a loading bay.
There’s nothing written above the entrance, just a small blazon containing the three colours of the tricolore, emblem of the Republic. The entrance doors are of glass with the instruction ‘POUSSEZ’ stencilled on them.