The Shape of a Pocket

24 Will It Be a Likeness? (for Juan Munoz)

Good Evening. Last week I talked about the dog and we listened to some dogs barking. I suggested that this noise after the aeons of dogs’ association with man had something to do with spoken language. Something, but what exactly?

A number of listeners have written me letters — for which I thank you — all of them about the way in which dogs communicate. Some of you sent photos to illustrate your experience.

I gave you my opinion last week that the dog is the only animal with an historical sense of time, but that he can never be an historical agent. He suffers history but he can never make it. And then we looked together at the famous painting by Goya on the subject. And we decided it was better to look at paintings on the radio than on the television. On the TV screen nothing is ever still, and this movement stops painting being painting. Whereas on the radio we see nothing, but we can listen to silence. And every painting has its own silence.

A listener from the Black Forest has written to ask whether, after the dog, we might consider the butterfly, and in particular the Anthocaris Cardamines, commonly known as the Fiancée. For this listener — although our principal subject this evening is something altogether different — we have recorded here in the studio the Fiancée in flight. And if you shut the windows and settle in your chair you will now hear the wings of the Anthocaris Cardamines beating in flight.

Every butterfly too has its own special silence. For sometimes a sound is more easily grasped as a silence, just as a presence, a visible presence, is sometimes most eloquently conveyed by a disappearance.

Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say goodbye, maybe we do it for this reason — to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.

Excuse me, the telephone has just rung. You can’t hear it, can you? A listener asks what century in God’s name do I think I’m living in? Sounds like the nineteenth, he told me.

No, sir, the one I live in is the sixteenth or the ninth. How many, sir, do you think are not dark? One in seven?

Today everything everywhere on the planet is for sale.

I’m selling. Here’s a back, a man’s working back, not yet broken. Did I hear an offer?

What’s a back for?

To sell wherever they need cheap backs for work.

Bought!

Every evening Goya takes his dog for a walk along the Ramblas.

A heart?

How come?

Sixteen and healthy from Mexico.

OK Taken!

Then man and dog stroll home and Goya draws the curtains and settles down to look at CNN.

A kidney.

Bought!

One male member and a uterus together.

Together how?

They stayed together. They were chased out of their village, they had no land and they were obliged to sell everything to survive.

I’ll take the uterus.

And the male member?

Throw it away, plenty more where it came from.

Difficult — they’re inseparable.

NAFTA! Separate them!

I’m not sure how.

NAFTA! I tell you!

Nafta?

North American Free Trade Agreement.

No sir, I live in this century which I can’t say is ours. And now, if I may, I shall return to the mystery of what makes a presence.

When all the members have been separated and all the parts sold, what is left?

Something more to sell. A whole is more than the sum of its parts, so we sell the personality. A personality is a media-product and easy to sell. A presence is the same thing as personality, no?

Presence is not for sale.

If that’s true, it’s the only thing on this earth which isn’t.

A presence has to be given, not bought.

Three hundred girls from Thailand.

I’ll take them. Ask Melbourne if he’s still interested.

A presence is always unexpected. However familiar. You don’t see it coming, it moves in sideways. In this a presence resembles a ghost or a crab.

He’s let the dog out and the master has gone to sleep.

Once I was in a train travelling to Amsterdam, through Germany, going north following the Rhine. It was a Sunday and I was alone in the compartment and had been travelling for several hours. With me I had a cassette player and so I decided to listen to some music. Beethoven’s one-from-last piano sonata. A man stops in the corridor and peers into the compartment. He makes a sign with his hands to enquire if he can open the door. I slide the door open. Come in, I say. He puts a finger to his lips, sits down and slides the door shut. We listen. When the sonata ends, there’s only the noise of the train … He’s a man of about my age but better dressed and with an attaché case. From it he takes out a sheet of paper, writes some words on it and hands the paper to me. ‘Thank you,’ I read, ‘for allowing me to listen with you.’ I smile, nod and know that I should not speak. We sit there silently in the presence of the last movement of the sonata. This is how a presence makes itself felt.

An hour later when a vendor came down the corridor selling coffee and sandwiches, my travelling companion pointed to what he wanted and I understood that he was dumb, that he could not speak.

Excuse me, the telephone again. A listener wants to know: Who was the pianist?

Piotr Anderszewski.

That’s not true. Why do you lie?

Because Piotr is a friend of mine. He plays marvellously, sometimes he plays with his sister, Dorothea, who is a violinist, he comes from Poland, he’s poor and he’s already twenty-six and soon — such is the competition on the concert circuit — soon it will be too late, for ever too late, for him to be recognised for the great pianist he is. So I lied to help him. Piotr. If I keep quiet, I can hear him playing the Diabelli Variations.

On my way here to the radio station this evening I passed a photography shop. In their window they have a notice that says: IDENTITY PHOTOS WITH A TRUE LIKENESS — READY IN TEN MINUTES!

To talk of a likeness is another way of talking of a presence. With photos the question of likeness is incidental. It’s merely a question of choosing the likeness you prefer. With a painted or drawn portrait likeness is fundamental; if it’s not there, there’s an absence, a gaping absence.

The dog is now asking to be let in. The master gets up, opens the door and, instead of returning to bed, goes to his easel on which there is an unfinished painting.

You can’t hunt for a likeness. It can escape even a Raphael… Strangely, you can tell whether a likeness is there or not when you’ve never set eyes on the model or seen any other image of the model. For example, in Raphael’s portrait of a woman known as La Mata, the dumb one, there is an astounding likeness. You can hear it.

By contrast, in Raphael’s double portrait of himself and a friend, painted in 1517, there’s no likeness present at all. This time it’s a silence without any life in it. Enough to compare this silence with the Fiancée beating her wings, for us to feel the gaping absence.

There’s a village. A Kurdish mountain village in Eastern Anatolia. One night a wolf comes and kills many chickens and ravishes a lamb. Next morning everyone leaves the village, the men with rifles, the women with dogs and the children with sticks. It is not the first time this has happened and they know what to do. They are going to encircle the wolf. Slowly the circle closes, getting smaller, with the wolf in the middle. Finally it’s no larger than a small room. The dogs are growling. The men are holding their ropes and rifles and the end is very near. So what do they do? Wait! They slip a cord over the wolfs neck and attached to the cord is a bell! Then they disperse and let the wolf go free …

You can’t set out to trap a likeness. It comes on its own or it doesn’t, a likeness. It moves in sideways.

Are you saying a likeness can’t be bought or sold?

No, it can’t.

Bad news. Maybe you are lying again?

This time there’s no need to lie.

Wolves! Bells! Things which move in sideways! Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we now know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm — to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.

* * *

Animals are capable of feeling a presence. When a dog recognises a garment of his master by its smell — he perceives something similar to a likeness.

You are obsessed with dogs! I thought we were thinking about invention, creation, human wealth.

One female thyroid gland!

Don’t! A single thyroid is not sellable. If you’re offered one, it’s suspect.

There’s a painting from Pompeii I’d like to send you by radio.

Of a dog, I suppose.

No, a woman. She’s holding a wooden tablet, like a book, in her left hand, and in her right, a pen or stylo, the end of which she holds against her lip. She’s thinking about words not yet written. The portrait was painted in the year 79 — the year in which the town was buried — and preserved — in lava. Probably the words were never written.

Not a great painting, and if I’m sending it to you — it’s simply because it’s a likeness. She’s here in the studio in front of me, with her fringe just out of curlers, and her earrings of gold, which, as soon as she puts them on, are never still.

A likeness is a gift, something left behind and hidden and later discovered when the house is empty … Whilst hidden, it avoids time.

What do you mean ‘avoids time’?

Confuses time, if you prefer.

You wouldn’t get away with this nonsense on television! TV demands speed and clarity. You can’t ramble across the screen as you’re rambling now.

So I send you the Pompeian woman of two millennia ago, with the tip of her stylo lightly touching her lower lip and her hands which are not rough with work and never will be. At the most she’s twenty years old, and you have the impression of having just seen her. Her earrings tinkling.

You are a nostalgic old man!

Or a young romantic?

Anyway they’re both finished, they belong to the past. Today we live in a world of exchanges, calculations at the speed of light, credits, debts and winnings.

And the dead don’t exist?

Let the dead bury the dead — that was well said and has always been true.

Our plan is more kilos for less cost.

The cattle feed

is driving the cows mad

their guts were created

for grasses

not for offal.

More and more kilos for less and less cost.

The madness may be transmittable!

Keep quiet and do not forget: the meat of the future is profit.

I still have a portrait I painted when I was twenty. It’s of a woman asleep in a chair and on the table in front of her, in the foreground, there is a bowl of flowers. I was in love with the woman and we lived together in two small rooms on the ground floor in a house in London. I think somebody today could tell from the painting that I loved her, but there’s no likeness there. Her primrose green dress — she made it herself on the table in the room where I painted — has a distinct presence, and her fair hair, in whose colour I always saw green, is striking. But there’s no likeness. And until six months ago, if I looked at the painting, I couldn’t refind a likeness in my memory either. If I shut my eyes, I saw her. But I couldn’t see her sitting in the chair in her green dress.

Six months ago I happened to be in London and I found myself two minutes’ walk away from the modest house where we rented the two rooms. The house had been done up and repainted but it hadn’t been rebuilt. So I knocked on the door. A man opened it and I explained that fifty years ago I had lived there and would it be possible for me to see the two rooms on the ground floor?

He invited me in. He and his wife occupied the whole house. There were carpets and lamps and paintings and china plates on the walls and a hi-fi and silver trays. Useless to look for the gas meter which we fed with coins when we were cold and needed to light the gas-fire or heat some water. Useless to look for the bathtub, which, when we weren’t taking a bath together, served as a support for a tabletop on which we chopped onions and beat eggs for an omelette. Everything had been replaced and nothing was the same except for the plaster mouldings on the ceiling and the proportions of the large window by whose light she made her clothes and I painted.

I asked if I could draw back the curtains. And I stood there staring at the window panes — it was raining and already evening so I could see nothing outside.

And standing there, I found her likeness, as she sat in the chair in her green dress, asleep.

Likenesses hide in rooms, you find them sometimes when the rooms are being emptied.

There are certain people who are so secluded — they live in a kind of Switzerland of perception — that they can’t see a likeness when it’s staring them in the face.

A journalist is visiting a modern prison of which the local authorities are proud. They call it a model prison. He is chatting with a long-term prisoner. Finally, still taking notes, the journalist asks: And what did you do before? Before what? Before you were here? The prisoner stares at him. Crime, he says, crime …

Talking of model prisons, a new women’s prison has just been built in Britain. Each cell measures 3 steps by 3 steps. A zoo director commented on the smallness of the space. ‘No zoo would confine an ape in an area measuring this. It would damage both the psychological and the physical well-being of the animal. It would not be allowed in any professional zoo.’ A third of the women prisoners in Britain are there for not paying fines or TV licences.

Arno Schmidt in one of his books quotes from a poem in English:

I go towards my likeness, and my likeness goes towards me.

She embraces me and holds me close, as if I had come out of prison.

It is a new day, and Goya is taking the dog for a walk. They are both in exile. In the town of Bordeaux which, when there is a west wind, smells of the Atlantic.

As the Nikkei Stock Average breaks through the 2,000-point mark, European money managers brim with confidence that the market to watch next year will be Japan.

An eye with a perfect retina, going, going, gone!

‘In these parts it is a miracle the people are still alive,’ said Moisés, a young man who joined the Zapatista insurrection in south-east Mexico. ‘Families of seven to twelve people have been surviving on a hectare or half a hectare of infertile soil … We have nothing, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health, no food, no education …’ The year was 1994.

Now I’m going to send you by radio a strange likeness — that of a man whose face we do not know. Whenever he’s in company, he wears a black ski mask. ‘Here we are,’ he says, ‘the forever dead, dying once again, but now in order to live.’ His assumed name is Marcos.

A terrorist! It was agreed that this was a radio talk about economics, and you contrive to introduce a terrorist. An expert in violence!

I’m transmitting his likeness. A likeness created by his own words:

I have the urge to write to you and tell you something about being ‘the professionals of violence’, as we have so often been called. Yes, we are professionals. But our profession is hope … out of our spent and broken bodies must rise up a new world … Will we see it? Does it matter? I believe that it doesn’t matter as much as knowing with undeniable certainty that it will be born, and that we have put our all — our lives, bodies and souls — into this long and painful but historic birth. Amor y dolor — love and pain: two words that not only rhyme, but join up and march together.

Empty leftist rhetoric!

Here is the rest of the likeness:

There is something else about this passionate moving of words, something that does not appear in any postscript or any communiqué. It is the anxiety, the uncertainty, the galloping questions that assault us every time one of the couriers leaves with one, or several, communiqués. Questions and more questions fill up our nights, accompany us on our rounds to check the guards, sit beside us on some broken tree trunk looking at the food on the plate … ‘Were these words the best ones to say what we wanted to say?’ ‘Were they the right words at this time?’ ‘Were they understandable?’

A likeness is a gift and remains unmistakable — even when hidden behind a mask.

A likeness can be effaced. Today Che Guevara sells T-shirts, that’s all that is left of his likeness.

Are you sure?

[Silence]

Silence, you know, is something that can’t be censored. And there are circumstances in which silence becomes subversive. That’s why they fill it with noise all the while.

* * *

Goya is walking with his dog by the ocean.

The other day I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Mozart’s Fantasy in C Major. I want to remind you of how Gould plays. He plays like one of the already dead come back to the world to play its music. And that’s how he played when he was alive!

Three nimble hands.

Why three?

One of the two women had an accident at work.

Bought.

I’ll tell the story of the best likeness ever made. John is the only one who tells the story. The other Evangelists don’t refer to it — though they refer to Martha and Mary. The two sisters had a brother, Lazarus, who fell sick and died in the village of Bethany. When Jesus, who was a friend of the family, arrived in the village, Lazarus had been dead and buried for four days.

‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked.

‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said: ‘See how he loved him!’

But some of them said: ‘Could not he, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man from dying?’

Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. ‘Take away the stone,’ he said.

So they took away the stone.

Jesus called in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen and a cloth round his face.

Jesus said to them: ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go.’

This was the perfect likeness. And it provoked Caiaphas, the high priest, to lay the plot for the taking of Jesus’s own life.

Goya is going back to work in his studio.

Now he is painting. Can you hear him? Faces appear on the canvas. Then they disappear. All have gone.

Try turning the volume of the silence up — higher — higher. Higher still …

[Total silence]

Is this the silence of a likeness, of the mountains at night in south-east Mexico, or of us listening together?