Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) van Chantal Akerman verhaalt drie achtereenvolgende dagen van een zichzelf prostituerende alleenstaande huisvrouw en haar dagelijkse huishoudelijke rituelen.

Jeanne wordt wakker, maakt koffie, schilt de aardappelen, verzorgt haar haar, knoopt haar kamerjas, bakt het vlees, doet inkopen, poetst de schoenen van haar zoon, wist haarzelf. Kneedt kneedt kneedt kneedt het vlees. Vergeet haarzelf. Breit. Praat over niks van belang. Vergeet wat ze nodig heeft. Elke dag opnieuw.

Ze doet dit langzaam, stil, vastberaden en beweegt zoals het ritme van de film bijna ondraaglijk traag en gestaag.

De afstandelijke banaliteit van het verhaal, monotoon en strak gefilmd geeft de drukkende eenzaamheid en stilte weer van een huisvrouw die haar eigen stem en gevoelens heeft moeten opsluiten en wegdrukken. Zo onopmerkelijk en stil mogelijk. Zo stil dat krakend papier, druppend water en piepende theeketels akelig luid zijn. De kijker kan de stiltes zelf aanvullen door zichzelf af te vragen wat er in Jeanne’s hoofd afspeelt, wiens hoofd zo leeg lijkt en de jouwe zo vol dat je een sluipend gevoel van ongemakkelijkheid of verveling je overmand en het moeilijk is om niet weg te lopen en nooit meer te moeten geconfronteerd zijn met alle stille huisvrouwen.

Jeanne voert al haar taken stoïsch uit, nauwelijks iemand in de ogen kijkend, als er al iemand is om in de ogen te kijken. Ook haar eigen zoon ontwijkt haar blik, luistert niet naar Jeanne’s weinige woorden en praat enkel weggedraaid van zijn moeder, vlug pratend, monotoon en gevoelloos. De enige vorm van communicatie is met winkelvrouwen terwijl ze geen enkel blijk toont van haar innerlijke wereld.

En traag, onbewogen en bijna onmerkbaar valt ze uiteen. Haar goed verzorgde kapsel raakt in de war, ze vergeet een knoop te knopen, een lepel valt. Langzaam, stil en vastberaden.

Al deze monotone stilte en banaliteit culmineren op het eind wanneer haar weggeborgen gevoelens worden losgeknoopt door iets onvoorzien, iets niet passend in haar routine. Iets dat niet in teken staat voor anderen, iets dat enkel voor haar is en het symbool dat voor haar gewis staat wordt vernield.

Een orgasme, zo puur lichamelijk en persoonlijk staat niet in het teken van anderen. Het wordt niet verwacht van een (huis)vrouw. Voor de eerste keer worden alles haar gevoelens losgeknoopt en voelt ze hoe ze haarzelf heeft gewist, hoe gebruikt ze is geweest, haar bezoeker staat er symbool voor en hij moet worden vernield.

Jeanne kamt haar haar, neemt met haar eeuwig stoïsche gezicht de schaar op haar kaptafel en stekt de man recht in zijn hart. En heel even, een milliseconde lang, zie je de enige emotie die ze toont; een opgeluchte zucht.

The main thing that lifted my spirits was obviously Leonora Carrington’s writing.

I think the internet should love this book. It features a ninety-two year old with a beard, a deep love of cats and a best friend who makes up fantastic fantastical stories and who dreams of machine guns and helicopters. As the story revolves you get to read about more beautiful nonagenarians, crazy nuns, witches, unicorns all in a majestic nursing home that has bungalows shaped like cake and mushrooms and other perfect things. I imagined the ladies very akin to the beautiful babes over at Advanced Style. I don’t want to mention more because delving into it with hardly any knowledge was such a trip. The language was fresh, always funny and the mere fact of reading about ninety-year olds generally kicking ass is such a welcome change to any and all protagonists I have ever read about.

david burliuk and vladimir burliuk

mikhail larionov

olga rozanova

el lissitzky

vladimir lebedev

There are times when you read or see something and all of a sudden it connects with every thing that follows.

I dyed my hair, again. While I was in the store figuring out the right shade of teenage rebellion sehnsucht I was distracted by groups of teenagers, who were anxiously trying on fake plugs or picking out a piercing with jittery fingers trying to say something vaguely cool in front of their friends (and failing), who were equally anxious, and excited all at the same time.

In a different way, like I have been connecting everything this past week or so, this reminded me of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop. I cannot say I loved it all too much, but it’s been lingering in my consciousness. The story itself is unimportant in this but the more symbolic narrative, reinforced by the drugged atmospheric writing sticks in a sort of frightening way.

The book begins with the most sensuous description of a girl’s discovery of one’s own body, the part where you’re that special kind of young where you still love yourself and touch yourself and look at yourself in such beautiful anticipation. But then abruptly stops.

From thereon the story becomes gradually violent, confusing and so smothering, always in that same little dark building with those creepy dolls hovering over you with their weird allegories. With that huge phallic symbol of a ghost man that makes you afraid to breathe. The highlight when Melanie is physically but, I guess, mostly symbolically confronted with a man’s desire was gross and scary and violent and you felt like suffocating, losing your childhood and facing something of an inhibitive stoic adulthood. At the same time your face flushed and your shaking hands were waiting to embrace (sexual) maturity while being too afraid to touch it. But longing anyway. And it only culminated in destruction, however small or however big it seemed. And disappointment, too, but it’s the good kind somehow, and you’re left with a comparative calmness and a stillness so foreign you could never have imagined it. And some zit scars.

Jenny Holzer’s famous truism “Protect me from what I want” [...] can either be read as an ironic reference to the standard male chauvinist wisdom that a woman, when left to herself, gets caught in the self-destructive fury, so that she must be protected from herself by the benevolent male domination: “Protect me from the excessive self-destructive desire in me that I myself am not able to dominate.” Or it can be read in a more radical way, as pointing towards the fact that in today’s patriarchal society, woman’s desire is radically alienated, that she desires what men expect her to desire, that she desires to be desired by men. In this case, “Protect me from what I want” means “What I want, precisely when I seem to formulate my authentic innermost longing, is already imposed on me by the patriarchal order that tells me what to desire, so the first condition of my liberation is that I break up the vicious cycle of my alienated desire and learn to formulate my desire in an autonomous way.”

From How to Read Lacan

in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe

chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow

At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes

I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine

although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you’d be proud of

the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it

is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone

Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I’ll not be cordial

there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is

when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Two days in a row I’d recently read Anna Kavan books, and two nights in a row I had wicked nightmares. First it was a feverish dream of brutally killing unreal-dummy people I felt a harsh alienation to, slicing open their neck, blood gushing all over, in a terribly disaffected mood. Then I was pregnant. That should be enough to freak me out, but upon realising there was a person growing inside of me I couldn’t stop envisioning super gore images of the baby ripping me open, blood streaming everywhere etc. etc.

The first story I read, in Julia and the Bazooka, related a woman just released from a hospital, going out, standing in the traffic seemingly intentional and describing the subsequent hit with a car and blood gushing down the streets and drowning people with it. Near the end of this gruesome vision she writes: “Since the universe only exists in my mind, I must have created the place, loathsome, foul as it is.” I knew right then it was love. What could I do but almost obsessively read more?

Sleep Has His House is up to now my favourite, an autobiographical book told in a ‘night-time language, a dialect we have all spoken during our childhood’ with fiercely strong imagery and crazy symbolism which is occasionally too obscure to grasp thoroughly but by which the reader can easily fill in the gaps in his own way, creating his own meaning and symbolism mixed with the writer’s. It tells the story of Kavan’s increasing withdrawal from the world due to a lack of warm human contact, until she’s left in the darkness that she created.

Kavan sometimes writes poetically but always precise, cold and detached which regardless make her stories relatable in a frightening way to those experienced in those certain moods. And I’m just kinda in love.

Or something like this may happen while you are out for a walk in the country: you feel yourself quite alone for an hour you haven’t seen one living creature, not even a dog or a horse in a field, you seem to be miles from anywhere. And then in this solitude, out of the bushes at the side of the road, a sly face looks out at you, the face of an old man with a beard and a big hat such as is seldom worn these days. Just for a second he looks out at you. It’s really surprising to meet anyone in such a lonely place; but instead of saying Good day, he draws back, disappears into the wood, and you don’t see him again. What is it makes you feel this this old man has been watching you, perhaps following you for some time, hidden among the trees: that he has perhaps been sent to that out-of-the-way spot on purpose to see and report afterwards which track you are following, whether you turn to the right or the left at the crossroads at the foot of the hill?
Nobody knows the exact significance of those feelings which all of us have experienced: but that they bear some relation to our close surveillance by the authorities appears certain. if only it were possible to find out something definite. One feels under constant observation. One has the conviction that every trifling act is noted and set down either against one or in one’s favour. And at the same time one hasn’t the faintest clue to the standards by which one is being judged. How is it possible to avoid anxiety and indecision when a move of any kind involves the whole of one’s future status.

From Sleep Has His House

From If not, winter Fragments of Sappho, a translation by Anne Carson