were asked my official, rational opinion, it would be that it is impossible to know someone whose language you don’t speak, whose memories you haven’t investigated,whose associations are all foreign to you. A man for whom sounds and smells, words and tastes and concepts are associated with images about which you haven’t got a clue. That’s my opinion, I have no argument to contradict it, and nevertheless, in spite of my irrefutable opinion, what is it that happens when he turns my face to him, when he looks into my face, when I look at him while we’re fucking? What else can I call it but pure knowledge? And a kind of recognition, as if we were predestined to know, and that nothing else is possible for me.
With the passing of the years, the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much bullshit is involved in this kind of “knowing.” “He looked into her eyes until he saw to the depths of her soul.” “And then, in a moment of grace, his soul was revealed to her.” “They were soul mates,” and all the rest of that romantic novelette rubbish. So he fucks me with his eyes open, so I look at him without fantasizing, so I come at the same time as him without taking my eyes off him, so—what does it mean?
I say: It’s sentimental crap, I think it’s crap, it’s clear to me that it’s crap, and nevertheless, against my better judgement, I still feel it as a miracle, and I am still full of the grace of that knowledge.
I say that I had and still have a deep sense of knowledge, but this subcutaneous knowledge did nothing to abate my curiosity. I wanted to know everything—no detail was too trivial for me—and every detail I accumulated immediately split up into lots of new details charged with magic that also split up at the edges into radiant new reflections of light. Alert as a stalker, I spent my days watching him, me, us, trying to learn things from every word and gesture. This was a new, focussed activity that demanded all of me and concentrated all of me, very far from thesoft, dazed state usually associated with lovers. And even now, when I recall those memories, it still seems to me that there is yet something to be learned in this story.
In the evenings the house would often be full of people. Looking back it’s clear to me that he didn’t regard them as friends or even like them, but for some reason he simply put his place at their disposal. Sometimes he would make them coffee, sometimes he let somebody else wash glasses or grapes from the market and serve, for the most part he seemed to observe them and their arguments from the side.
In the living room behind me—though for some reason I feel as if their scenes took place somewhere else—they chewed over the third world and the cultural revolution, capitalist technocracy and the tyranny of tolerance, artistic fetishism and the right to violence, and suchlike subjects. Menachem Levy wanted to burn down all the museums. Menachem Becker agreed to burn down the lot—except for Van Gogh. And with sentences like these they would burn entire evenings. Becker was a Trotskyite and Levy was a Maoist, or maybe the opposite, in any case I didn’t know the difference, I just sat on the mattress and soaked up Marcuse and Sartre, the Red Brigades, the Rage Brigade, and urban guerrilla warfare.
Alek intervened only rarely, and when he did they listened to him. Once, I remember, it happened when they were arguing about Godard, what he was actually saying and exactly what kind of revolutionary he was. They appealed to Alek because Dalit had heard from somebody that he had met Godard and interviewed him for a student newspaper in Paris. And Alek, with demonstrative reluctance, said that Godard’s political opinions were of no interest to him, nor were Mao’s sayings in
La Chinoise
, nor what Godard thought about Mao’s sayings. He hadinterviewed Godard because he was asked to do so, it was a job, there were people who thought that this was the
With the passing of the years, the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much bullshit is involved in this kind of “knowing.” “He looked into her eyes until he saw to the depths of her soul.” “And then, in a moment of grace, his soul was revealed to her.” “They were soul mates,” and all the rest of that romantic novelette rubbish. So he fucks me with his eyes open, so I look at him without fantasizing, so I come at the same time as him without taking my eyes off him, so—what does it mean?
I say: It’s sentimental crap, I think it’s crap, it’s clear to me that it’s crap, and nevertheless, against my better judgement, I still feel it as a miracle, and I am still full of the grace of that knowledge.
I say that I had and still have a deep sense of knowledge, but this subcutaneous knowledge did nothing to abate my curiosity. I wanted to know everything—no detail was too trivial for me—and every detail I accumulated immediately split up into lots of new details charged with magic that also split up at the edges into radiant new reflections of light. Alert as a stalker, I spent my days watching him, me, us, trying to learn things from every word and gesture. This was a new, focussed activity that demanded all of me and concentrated all of me, very far from thesoft, dazed state usually associated with lovers. And even now, when I recall those memories, it still seems to me that there is yet something to be learned in this story.
In the evenings the house would often be full of people. Looking back it’s clear to me that he didn’t regard them as friends or even like them, but for some reason he simply put his place at their disposal. Sometimes he would make them coffee, sometimes he let somebody else wash glasses or grapes from the market and serve, for the most part he seemed to observe them and their arguments from the side.
In the living room behind me—though for some reason I feel as if their scenes took place somewhere else—they chewed over the third world and the cultural revolution, capitalist technocracy and the tyranny of tolerance, artistic fetishism and the right to violence, and suchlike subjects. Menachem Levy wanted to burn down all the museums. Menachem Becker agreed to burn down the lot—except for Van Gogh. And with sentences like these they would burn entire evenings. Becker was a Trotskyite and Levy was a Maoist, or maybe the opposite, in any case I didn’t know the difference, I just sat on the mattress and soaked up Marcuse and Sartre, the Red Brigades, the Rage Brigade, and urban guerrilla warfare.
Alek intervened only rarely, and when he did they listened to him. Once, I remember, it happened when they were arguing about Godard, what he was actually saying and exactly what kind of revolutionary he was. They appealed to Alek because Dalit had heard from somebody that he had met Godard and interviewed him for a student newspaper in Paris. And Alek, with demonstrative reluctance, said that Godard’s political opinions were of no interest to him, nor were Mao’s sayings in
La Chinoise
, nor what Godard thought about Mao’s sayings. He hadinterviewed Godard because he was asked to do so, it was a job, there were people who thought that this was the
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