maison le miroir ~*~

l'énigme du sphinx

[maison-le-miroir]

That whole time, six years, I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion had been, for medieval people: it gave you the energy to face a life of injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery. The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

[maison-le-miroir]

The whole time everything had been happening with Ivan, I had always been writing about it in my notebook, or on the computer, and sometimes I wondered whether I would ever turn those pages into a novel. The thought made me feel so ashamed. It felt shameful to be so unartistic and self-obsessed, to not want to invent richly fictional characters. It felt shameful to write a whole book about Ivan. What if he found out?

[maison-le-miroir]

I wanted to know how it was going to turn out, like flipping ahead in a book. I didn’t even know what kind of story it was, or what kind of role I was supposed to be playing. Which of us was taking it more seriously? Didn’t that have to be me, because I was younger, and also because I was the girl? On the other hand, I thought that there was a way in which I was lighter than he was—that there was a serious heaviness about him that was foreign to me, and that I rejected.

[maison-le-miroir]

“This,” said the professor, “is the problem with Buñuel. Why exactly does he show us a moon, and then an eye? Two unrelated images. Why does he juxtapose them?” He looked around the table. Nobody said anything.

“Exactly,” he said. “There is no answer, because this is surrealism. We can suggest many interpretations, but we can prove nothing, and we will never have an answer. Let us think for a moment of Freud. I have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and I found it extremely unsatisfying. In this book, for example, Freud interprets a dream. I read his interpretation. I think, Yes, this is possible. Maybe his interpretation is correct. But how can he prove it? He cannot prove it. For this reason, discussion is endless, and it is useless. We encounter this infinite uselessness also in our attempts to interpret Buñuel.”

I looked around the table. The other students were either nodding or taking notes. Nobody else seemed to find it appalling or shameful that a literature professor should stand up in front of a classroom and say that interpretation was infinitely useless.

[maison-le-miroir]

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. “What’s the matter with you?” I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too. It would be like one of those Marguerite Duras books I tried to read in Svetlana’s aunt’s apartment.

Elle pleure.

Il pleure.

Ils pleurent, tous les deux.

[maison-le-miroir]

“I don’t understand anything that happens now, or how. I don’t understand why it will trivialize these letters to say hi, or to actually talk to each other. You say you’re not in the mood for insignificant subtleties. But insignificant subtleties are the only difference between something special, and a huge pile of garbage floating through space. I’m not making that up. People discovered it in the nineteenth century.

“I think I’m falling in love with you. Every day it’s harder for me to see the common denominator, to understand what counts as a thing. All the categories that make up a dog — they go blurry and dissolve, I can’t tell what anything is anymore. Chills go up the backs of my arms and songs go around in my head. “[If I Must Be Put to Death, Let It Be] by Your Aristocratic Little Hand.”