Wanderings

(novel excerpt, first eight pages)

This is a black and white film. Exclusion, stress, and subordination. If it rains. Stars at night white. Rain clear; rain clears; acidy. Niepce wants to capture Hegel, but Hegel captures Neipce. The end of the world. Fade to black. Because what there is to feel is not enough. Free association, transference, seduction. Earth happened out of an explosion, and from this explosion happened organic life::::that which breathes. The product of chance played skillfully, perhaps played by a master, perhaps played by no one::::only to occur. Instinctual urges. Birth and death.

If you look closely. Sutter washes his hair with aqua regia. Niepce walks to in front of a cave, a square opening, he stands just inside the blackness facing outward; later, he brings Hegel to just this spot, poses him just as he himself had stood, and with the square facade as frame Hegel believes he hears something behind him and lunges forward as the camera clicks. Zentence. In the tavern where they often gather, Nietzsche says to Niepce: "God is not among the living." Recognition, consciousness, subversion. Lumi'ere::::train entering a station. Peace, rest, nothing. And then. Several lives lived at once. Niepce, to take a picture of drunkenness, undresses, sits in his favorite chair, and watches Bernhardt stretch her whiteness, legs, arms, she clasps her calves, legs up in the air, spreads::::he shoots. And then Sutter bursts in, heated, hair matted. A sharp thing in bed. Gray, gray, and gray.

Sutter becomes Muybridge. He grabs Neipce's throat, pushes him to the floor, then lifts. Groan. Sutter lets go::::stares at her, then smiles. Hegel, having heard the scream. Bernhardt bends down and picks up the throat, rubs it along her lips then swallows whole. Consciousness a mask to itself. The human figure in motion. Plasticity. And then Niepce rises; leaving Muybridge, Sutter kisses Bernhardt's bloody lips (dark gray); Hegel turns away. To practice before them the injury that Hegel does to them. Niepce seeks to defy the totality of rationality::::streets empty except for Hegel, standing still to have his shoes polished, everyone else disappears (film not fast enough to preserve movement): the people filling the streets are there, but not there, on film. On that street Wilde turns to Niepce and says: "You kill the thing you love." Flesh (light gray).

If you can say one word. That which mind, when it turns back, thinks before it thinks itself. So Niepce runs and jumps off a cliff onto the jagged shoreline; waves lift him, his body broken but still conscious: he sees gulls banking and diving for fish; he is thirsty and drowning::::barely floating::::begging for water. When Niepce enters on the path of knowledge, he finds that the discriminating intellect is identified with Reason, and that the objective world is fused with Intelligence, and there is no distinction to be made between the knowing and the known. Bernhardt stirs, turns, opens her eyes; seeing the spittal around Niepce's mouth she raises a corner of the sheet and wipes him dry, then rolls over, and with the cool damp corner pressed to her breast, she returns to sleep. Actor, act, and acting. Life is superior to logic. Body, appearance, function; mass, form, force. Niepce's black coat is all wornout after so many years' usage, and parts of it in shreds loosely hanging, have been blown away to the clouds. The gulls dive at him as if he is a school of minnows. After having tried and tried to place the camera closer and closer to his eye, while at the same time trying to place the camera closer to the subject, Niepce abandons the camera, and begins taking pictures with his eyes. Birth and death. White.

A parallel soundtrack with its own logic throughout as something separate from the visual. No longer is a layer of meaning being unveiled to show underneath some other fabrication given as unfabricated; instead::::as if we have a choice::::we are placed, contradictorily, in the face of such lapses in the internal coherences of Niepce, who stands before the mirror shaving, thinking of what he had dreamt; Bernhardt is in the kitchen, shivers from having woken and wrapped herself in damp cloth::::but she doesn't know why::::has only the chill. Niepce takes his camera from the closet and sets it on the kitchen table. Most people stop at these limits and are easily persuaded that they cannot go any further. He pats Bernhardt on the rump; she smiles, and while serving his coffee bends down and kisses him. Bernhardt: "There's a chill in my left breast." Niepce: "'There's a chlll in my left breast." Somersaults, spells, and resurrections. She refills his coffee and serves him a plate of eggs, potatos, and toast; then she sits. On his way out the door, camera in hand, he turns to say goodbye to her, kisses her. Bernhardt: "There's a chill in my left breast." Hegel greets him in the street. They walk briskly for several blocks::::Hegel annoyed by the silence of his friend, but unable to say anything that would begin a conversation; they stop; Niepce bows to Hegel, then turns and leaves. Hegel (to no one): "There's a chill in my left breast."

On first viewing. The propelling of Niepce down the sidewalk. Hegel greets him (nods his head tips his bowler says "Good morning"). They walk together; the brisk pace set by Niepce. If you could say one word. Internal shapes and movements of objects within the frame. The moment of parting; Hegel senses a loss, determines to express himself nothing; he looks after his friend: the propelling of Niepce down the sidewalk. "There is a chill in my left breast." It is the understanding of ourselves and not the sense of the words which reflect ideas and not the experienced feelings themselves. It is like drinking water; one knows by oneself whether it is cold or not. Hegel sits in a cafe; Sutter joins him, and later Nietzsche. Lumi'ere: workers leaving a factory. The negative of time.

Truth and fact are convertible. Hegel: "Niepce has gone on a holiday." Nietzsche: "Where?" Hegel: "It is not a matter of where." Nietzsche and Sutter: "Oh." Law originated when man began to restrain his bestial impulses, which could have only been due to the gradual awareness of a power greater than himself, namely, to an idea of deity. The necessary condition for a thing to be known is that it must be made: if it cannot be made, it cannot be known. To prove by causes, to collect the elements of a thing, to make. Niepce slows, notices an old sleeping man's reflection in a shop window, and sets up his camera so that it doesn't enter into the reflection, and he wonders about the angle; behind the window is a collection of rare books arranged on a cloth, as if it is a sheet on a bed in the mind, and the books are reclining, resting::::perhaps snoring (but it is only a bus passing on the street behind). A way of looking at as well as behaving toward things in which there is room for both mental and physical actions without the two being taken or treated as really different from each other. Behind, beneath, or somehow beyond. Sutter is the first to see Niepce, and he calls out to him. Niepce responds, comes over, and pulls up a chair and joins the group Nietzsche calls out for another beer. Facts alone are meaningless; ideas without facts are baseless.

You too have weapons. We try to solidify and freeze. The mind is not an independent being which is real in itself; it is but a conditional being on the plane of conception although the body is equally a conditional being, it must be regarded, after all, as an individual entity standing opposite to other individual entities of various kinds::::and among these, that which has the most intimate relationship with the individual entity of the body in particular, is the great Earth. Stability, peacefulness, stillness, generosity, and relaxation. Reflection, a reconstruction, a polarization. At one time we imitate nature so closely that we make nothing but sterile copies of her; at another we separate ourselves from her completely and turn toward the abstract, where we float in the void and no longer find anything. Hearing is just like the surface of a mirror; when there is a form, it reflects; there is no form, and it still reflects; this is why there is a sound and there is hearing, and even when there is no sound, still there is hearing. Matter has an individual will which is its Life. Here is a life which, cultivated, enriched by art, will reach a dazzling power of expression that will stir us. Activities: mind, body, speech. Death is only a state of black magic which has not existed that long. Trace, intertextuality, interpret. The American Indians hardly speak at all except outside their homes; each keeps silent in his hut, speaking to his family by signs. Condensation and displacement.

More sure, more beautiful, better justified, Bernhardt calls Duncan, and they arrange to go shopping. They enter a cafe, and over espresso Bernhardt tells her of the phantom chill in her breast. Duncan smiles, and with her eyes looking into Bernhardt's, reaches across, and with the palm of her hand, lightly massages Bernhardt's left breast. They smile::::eyes fall. Too many things and not enough forms. An event that one's forgetting retains. They line up::::Nietzsche, Hegel, Niepce, and Sutter, in a brush-shrouded area of a nearby park, and take a piss. Abortive meeting, mystifications, something irritating. One speaks more effectively to the eye than to the ear. When children begin to talk they cry less. The speaking or articulate voice, the singing or melodious voice, and the pathetic or accented voice. The chilling and displacement of passion. Aestheticization. Comprehension is equivolent to murder.

And start to speak. Bringing this thing that has happened by accident to a much further point by will. One can only want to record one's own feelings about certain situations as closely to one's own nervous system as one possibly can. Niepce and Hegel are walking ahead of the others, who are swaying arm in arm, singing a twilight melody, interrupted by criticisms of each other's singing and arguments over the song's lyrics. Niepce says to Hegel: "Clearly a novel, for example, is imagination::::fiction. Why should I value someone else's fiction, unless it is of the infinitely highest order::::unless it is so vastly superior to me that I absorb it as the truth of my own life and as more than the truth of my own life? A novelist's world must be equal, or in some way superior, to God's for me to agree to experience his world, rather than God's. If it is not, that world of his is a profanation, a surrogate, an imposition, a lie, a fiction." The self-appearance, the self-exhibiting, the self-giving. All consciousness is consciousness of something. Consciousness-of. Niepce and Hegel fall back and join the others, whereupon they begin kicking their legs in rhythm as if some masculine chorus line on the deck of a small boat in rough sea. Sutter stumbles::::pulling all of them to the pavement: they laugh. Suddenly it's quiet: Nietzsche farts::::they all laugh.

Too apt to identify teaching and life, theory and experience, description and fact. The truth is above affirmation and negation. Moral conduct is the skin, meditation is the fascia, the higher understanding is the bone, and the mind subtle and good is the marrow. To be contemplated, to enchant the senses, to edify, to distract. Art generally lies. An image is true insofar as it is violent. Bernhardt tells Niepce of the stillness caused by Duncan's touching her breast. He imagines the scene, but sees them undressed and sitting on the edge of a bed; he sets up the camera, stifling Bernhardt's protestations undresses her and poses her as he had imagined, then tells her to close her eyes and to remember that stillness::::as soon as she opens her eyes the camera clicks. Now let us assume that we are asleep. There are crises of reason in strange complicity with what the world calls crises of madness. Bernhardt reads a book in which repetition is impossible while Niepce finishes putting his camera away, readies for bed, and goes to sleep. To reject it is not, here, to refuse it but to retain it. Reality has not yet been constructed because the true organs of the human body have not been assembled and put in place. Whatever way you turn you have not even started thinking.

Once Niepce leaves, Bernhardt goes to her dresser and retrieves the love letters Niepce wrote to her. She takes them out whenever she feels out of love with him, when he is determined to go off somewhere, and, as she puts it, "behave like a madman" (a recurring argument). Niepce to Hegel: "We'll go into the mountains, all of us; I know a cabin where two friends live, we can stay with them." Hegel: "I'll need boots." Niepce: "Yes." The anchored mind screwed in you by the psycholubricious thrust of the sky is the one who thinks every temptation, every desire, every inhibition. Not something gained through struggle but something received. In its basis. The individual must be free to attain his end: self-preservation and growth. We carry all the tinkling uproar that we cause. Memory empties itself for the snow and flame with which the stars adorn themselves. Blackness. It is not enough to simply indicate changes (the implicit edge of consciousness). Not the membrane of the vault.

Niepce picks up Urmuz at the airport. He has a woman on his arm::::Monroe, and had met Soutine on the flight. Soutine shakes Niepce's hand, and asks if he can go into the mountains with them. Niepce, without hesitation, says: "Of course." Urmuz pinches Monroe's butt, she giggles. She smiles at Niepce, who smiles back shyly, turns, then turns back to her and yells as if angry: "You are blonde without your hair!" Soutine helps Niepce with the bags as Urmuz takes Monroe aside and tries to calm her. Urmuz: "Don't cry. He does things like that. It's meaningless." As she gets ln the car she looks directly at Niepce and says: "You're a funny bastard." They all laugh. On the road Niepce to Urmuz: "It's as always my friend like a label of hells gates stuck on a medicine bottle." Man, at the center of the spirit, must affirm his supremacy over notions emptied of all human substance, over dead objects and ill-gotten gains... Honor, Country, Morality, Family, Art, Religion, Liberty, Fraternity, all these notions had once answered to human needs, now nothing remains of them but a skeleton of conventions, they have been divested of their initial content.

Bernhardt doesn't like Monroe. After dinner Monroe takes Urmuz aside: "You're not leaving me here, with that chatte." Urmuz: "Either that, or you'll be with that (nodding toward Niepce) mountain lion." She wraps her arms around his neck, kisses him, stares into his eyes and says: "I want to be with you." Urmuz smiles. The silent depths of a choice that is both preliminary and fundamental. Juxtaposition, coexistence, interaction. Intelligence occurred after stupidity. Soutine, quietly drinking himself to sleep, stares at a crack in the wall illuminated by the fire, and imagines it represents::::in outline::::the coming ascent, and, coming from the fireplace, he hears the applause of the sea. Urmuz and Niepce talk without worrying themselves about the accuracy of their interesting observations. Of soul, of mind, of Being. You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he. Soutine stands on a path::::a slender gap::::a point of possible disappearance. Retrieving or excluding, justifying or rejecting, this or that utterance.

The overheated spirits are subject to a reciprocal pressure which may give the impression that they are exploding; it's in turn a single affliction that comes and goes from day to day. Without body or stars without voice or end. ln the filth of a paradise. Temporary beauty. On the surface of life. Accumulation, exclusion, reactivation. They have all gathered for breakfast: Hegel, Nietzsche, Sutter, Soutine, Urmuz, Monroe, and Niepce: Bernhardt: "What are you going to bring your friends?" Niepce: "They won't be expecting gifts; we'll be climbing for three days." Bernhardt: "You're not only insane, you're inconsiderate!" She runs out of the room crying; Niepce gets up and finishes serving, says: "She's upset that Monroe's coming with us and she's not." Urmuz: "Let her come." Niepce stares coldly at Urmuz, who quickly buries himself in his breakfast.

Hegel and Soutine go shopping for boots. Hegel purchases a proper pair of hiking boots. After much contemplation, Soutine picks out a pair of high-top sneakers. Hegel: "They're your feet." Soutine: "Yes; and I refuse to wear dead animals on them." Its meaning, its form, its object and its relation to what it refers to. Stimulated by things, feelings or thoughts. Like a within. Reality alone counts::::an institution in which conscience and truth have found refuge. It is a tendency of lofty natures, always one notch above reality, to explain everything in terms of bad conscience, to believe that nothing is ever due to chance and that everything bad that happens is the result of an ill will that is conscious, intelligent, and concerted. Discoveries have forced themselves on people. Niepce, laughing, boyish, sly, as though he were another person, chases Bernhardt around the bedroom, catches her, drops her to the bed; she rips her clothes off, he sheds his::::they embrace, make love. Soutine sleeps in front of the dying embers wearing his new shoes. Urmuz, spent, rolls off Monroe; she moves her hand to the heated upper part of his thigh.

The emotion of knowing is dominated by a sense of the infinite mildness of existence. Niepce awakens one minute before the alarm clock goes off. He calls Hegel (Nietzsche and Sutter are sleeping there). He starts a pot of coffee, comes out, kicks Urmuz; Soutine is sitting up in a corner wrapped in his sleeping bag staring across at the blank television screen. Niepce: "Good morning." Soutine: "I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself." Niepce stands over Bernhardt, her face severe and closed. Monroe pours the coffee and serves Urmuz and Soutine; when Niepce comes out of the bedroom she hands him his cup; he goes over to the window and stares for a long while, turns to the others: "Less rain and more wind." Outside, in front of the apartment, all seven of them are gathered and ready. Soutine picks up a stick out of the gutter, tests it for use as a walking stick; he notices the others observing him, turns to them, and says: "If you have a walking stick, I will give you one; if you have not, I will take it away from you." They start off, following Niepce. Forbidden assent or identification or appropriation or imitation. All true freedom is dark. In modern culture, powerful machinery has been set up whereby dissident work, after gaining an initial semi-official status as 'avant-garde,' is gradually absorbed and rendered acceptable.

Insofar as the imaginary is of the essence of the image to be taken for reality, it is reciprocally characteristic of reality that it can mime the image, pretend to the same substance, the same significance. Discrete, discontinuous, abrupt. As they enter the foothills the wind comes up::::as if to slap them back to the city. Nature as it is. From ornament to ornament. Stones can make people docile and knowable. Openings, filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies. Alignment, immobility, and silence. One should create one's life by giving style to it. Our feelings. Intention is much more important than feelings. It is desire. Move slowly from an idea of an aesthetics of existence to the idea that we have to do such and such things because we are rational beings. Incorporated and transformed.

Exposed to many random occurrences in waking life. In spite of these stars you are aIone now, the center is near you and far from you, you have walked, you do walk, but nothing changes, always the same night that does not end. They stop at a fire, welcomed to it by a gesture from Sartre, silent but smiling, glad for the company. No one says anything. Then, Sartre: "I have a mirror; you want to see?" Niepce and Hegel follow him to his cave; he lights a lantern at the cave's entrance, then leads them in. There's a full-length mirror standing against the wall across from a straw bed, round, like a huge bird's nest. Sartre: "Hee hee." The experience (active-passive) of listening. They return to the fire; everyone rolls out their sleeping bags. Nfounda nbababa nfounda tata. Lies of a night lovely as a woman. Vitreous and vindictive. They all sleep::::a general flow without subdivisions or measures, a flow complete and archaic.

The effort of life to protect itself by constituting a reserve. The body is the body, it is alone and has no need of organs, the body is never an organism, organisms are the enemies of bodies, everything one does transpires by itself without the aid of any organ, every organ is a parasite, it overlaps with a parasitic function destined to bring into existence a being which should not be there. Accumulation, capitalization, the security of the delegated or deferred decision. Danger as Becoming. Desire for full presence, for nondifference: simultaneously life and death. Repression, not forgetting; repression, not exclusion. Repression neither repels, nor flees, nor excludes an exterior force; it contains an interior representation, laying out within itself a space of repression. The structure of language is parallel to and representative of experience; language is genetically prior to experience and modifies and distorts experience. Experience independent of language. The simple, the clear, and the distinct. We must not make assertions about that which we do not ourselves see. Monroe is the first one up. She follows a narrow trail down to the lake, undresses, and dives in. Niepce sets up his camera near Monroe's clothes; she sees him, goes under, pops up, then walks forward staring straight ahead smiling with a hint of lust, hips swaying; Niepce, wanting her to be embarrassed and angry doesn't take her picture, keeps his eye to the camera even as she arrives and pushes a nipple flat against the lens.