“These bonds are shackle free Wrapped in lust and lunacy Tiny touch of jealousy These bonds are shackle free”
– Placebo
Luna, lunes, Monday, and lunacy all trace back to the Latin lūna, “moon,” an old word that shaped both calendars and metaphors. Spanish lunes descends directly from diēs Lūnae, “the day of the Moon,” while English Monday mirrors the same pattern through Old English Mōnandæg, a Germanic calque meaning “Moon’s day.”1 German Montag follows the identical logic: Mond (moon) + Tag (day). Even lunacy preserves the old belief that lunar phases could disturb the mind, stemming from Medieval Latin lūnāticus, “moonstruck.” It is strange, then, how all these moon-days align in my head, so much so that I find myself thinking of the Mondays on a Wednesday.
Note: A calque is a word or expression created by literally translating the parts of a term from another language. ↩︎
“It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between anitquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of human life was sacred, whereas for the second what is sacred is life itself).’” – Giorgio Agamben, *Se, p.136, Potentialities
I first read this passage of Agamben back in 2011, when I was in Melbourne for about a month. I used a pencil to draw faint vertical lines on the brick wall of where I was housed, counting down to the day I would leave (not knowing what was to come over the next ten years of my life after I left Melbourne). It was a private joke between me and my roommate, the same person with whom I drank cheap supermarket white wine that cost less than bananas.
More than a decade later, I still cannot say I have fully understood the passage. But each time I return to it, one idea continues to unsettle me: life and death are not sacred because they are precious; they became sacred because sacrifice contained killing.
Before encountering the passage, I assumed, like most people, the opposite. I thought ancient people considered life inherently sacred, and that is why they ritualised and protected it. Agamben turns this upside down. In antiquity, it was precisely through killing, through the ritual destruction of life, that the sacred appeared. Sacrifice did not protect life; it made life meaningful by destroying it in a consecrated way. Killing was not simply violence; it was a divine transaction.
This explains something essential about the ancient world: the destruction of human life could itself be a sacred act.
Modernity is the exact inversion. Today, life itself is sacred, individual, inviolable and to be protected at all costs. If antiquity sacralised life through its destruction, modernity sacralises life through its preservation. Agamben captures this contrast with clarity: in antiquity, the destruction of human life was sacred; in modernity, what is sacred is life itself.
I relate this inversion to the disturbing figure of the man who can be killed but not sacrificed.
He belongs to neither world. In antiquity, killing him is not murder because he stands outside the civic order. Yet, absolved from murder, his death is also not sacrifice because it carries no ritual value. His death has no meaning, neither legal nor divine. He is the one who can be killed but never consecrated, who is exposed but not redeemed, who is alive yet abandoned.
What strikes me most is how Agamben links this ancient figure to our modern world. I need to memorise it like how people used to remember phone numbers: antiquity gave life its sacred meaning through sacrifice, and modernity life itself is sacred. To remember in my own words: sacrifice gave life its sacred aura in antiquity. The disappearance of sacrifice made life itself sacred in modernity.
Writing these notes is a reminder to myself that Agamben is identifying a structure that still operates today, wherever people are excluded, detained, dehumanised or rendered killable without consequence.1 The sacred is not an inherent property of human life; it is the shadow cast by the political decisions that determine what kind of life counts. And yet, even as I try to articulate this, I feel I am saying too much and too little at once. The confusion remains, and phone numbers are not remembered with variations unless it is a futile attempt to recall the forgotten number I had not dial for years. Others I remember by heart, but no longer recall whose they are.
The word caesuras comes from the Latin caesura, which means “a cutting” or “a break.” It is built from the verb caedere, meaning to cut, to strike, even to kill.
The term Caesarean section is commonly believed to come from the birth of Julius Caesar, but this is almost certainly a legend. The real origin lies in Roman legal and medical terminology. The Latin verb caedere means “to cut,” the same root that gives us caesura. From it came the term caesus (“cut”) and the Lex Caesarea, a Roman law requiring that if a pregnant woman died late in pregnancy, the child had to be removed from the womb before burial. This procedure came to be referred to as a caesarean birth, not because Caesar was born this way, but because the word caesarean already meant “from cutting” in a medical and legal sense. Over time, the phrase Caesarean section came to mean the surgical delivery of a baby through incisions in the abdomen and uterus.
In classical poetry, a caesura was the deliberate pause inside a line of verse, the small internal rupture that alters the rhythm, as if the poet had made a slight incision in the meter. Although a Caesarean section and a caesura belong to different worlds, they share a deep etymological and metaphorical root in the Latin word.
A Caesarean section is literally a cut that brings a life into the world. Both the surgical incision and the poetic pause involve an interruption of continuity, a moment in which something is opened by force in order to bring something else into being.
In poetry, a caesura introduces a pause that reshapes how the line breathes. In childbirth, a Caesarean section is an incision through which the infant is opened to the world to take its first breath. In both cases, the cut is not merely a break but a threshold, a crossing from one state to another. The poetic line after the caesura is subtly changed, just as life after a Caesarean is altered by that necessary rupture. Perhaps their relationship is not accidental. Both name cuts that create, ruptures that produce new meaning or new life. A cut can be violence, but it can also be a beginning, and poetry quietly preserves this idea whenever its pauses are called caesuras. Yet caesuras are not simply pauses; they are the subtle breaks that hold a structure together by interrupting it, the faint discontinuities where breath gathers before meaning resumes. As I write, I think of my two daughters, both born by Caesarean section, and of the ruptures and continuities that came with their arrival, the incisions that brought them into being, and the renewed structure of life that followed.
Agamben writes of caesuras as thresholds in time, the small fractures through which experience reveals its concealed architecture. This gestures toward what lies beneath them, toward the structures that surface only in moments of interruption. Hypostasis, so often rendered as “foundation,” is less a base than a standing-under, something that quietly supports without ever announcing itself, like a shadow cast by thought.
These notions permeate the texture of ordinary days. A life is shaped as much by its interruptions as by its continuities, by what lies beneath as much as by what stands before us. Even the smallest encounter, a corridor dimmed by overcast clouds outside, a voice speaking without any intention of profundity, can become a hypostasis, a hidden underpinning recalled only years later, when one finally has the patience to read the intervals rather than the lines.
I often see roadkill on the streets of Singapore, small animals, mostly birds, often pigeons or Javan myna. They’re not just struck dead, but slowly obliterated by the endless stream of cars, until all that remains is a dark, indistinct smear on the asphalt. As a child, I was once told there’s a superstition about such sightings that when you pass by roadkill, you must spit, or at least brush the top of your head with your hand, to ward off bad luck. I find myself thinking of George Bataille’s idea of the formless (informe), that image of a “crushed spider or a glob of spit,” formlessness as rebellion against “the mathematical frock coat of ordered thought.”
Just as this passed through my mind, I noticed a pigeon on the right lane, not standing, not walking, simply crouched low. Flattened in posture, breast pressed against the road, as if brooding over a nest that wasn’t there. Or perhaps, this is how old pigeons choose to die. As if this lane, this strip of asphalt, were a designated space for avian suicide. An Anna Karenina moment, only it’s not a railway, but a three-lane road.
For a second, it felt Hitchcockian, but reversed. Not birds attacking humans, but birds surrendering to motorways and death. An unreal procession, a secret rite. Old pigeons lining the road not in flight, but in stillness, waiting not for crumbs, but for wheels. The horror is no longer how the birds might harm us, as in the movie The Birds, but how we could be reminded of unavoidable death.
In this imagined scene, the road stretches ahead, dotted as far as the eye can see with birds flattened, their bodies fused into the asphalt like faded stains. The surface is speckled with pale grey against a stretch of dark grey. Feathers, soft pink smears, and dark rust-red crusts lie dried and flattened across the road. A length of asphalt stippled with the light remains of creatures that once flew. I found myself guessing how many days it had been there, when one could just as easily wonder about the time that remains, the compression of meaning into the present moment.
Mapping the Ontological Apparatus Aristotle Aquinas Hegel Heideger Agamben
Whenever we speak about a person or a thing, we unknowingly perform two moves. First, we name it (“Katie,” “this person here”), which singles it out. Second, we say something about it (“she is kind,” “she is tall”), which assumes that there is already a stable “someone” underneath our words.
Aristotle
Aristotle noticed this and said: beneath all our descriptions there must be a subject (a “this-one-here”) that is already there before we speak. This hidden “underlying thing” is what he called substance. The problem is: this “real thing underneath” can never actually be spoken directly. You can only presuppose it.
Because language can never touch the real subject head-on, we experience it as something that has already happened. It becomes a “what it was”, a past, something already formed before speech. This simple gap, between the person we talk about and the real person we cannot grasp, quietly creates our sense of time. The present moment always runs slightly behind; who someone “is now” always echoes who they “were.”
Aquinas
Aquinas keeps this Aristotelian structure but adds a theological twist: what something is, its essence, comes from God, while its existence comes from being created by God. Essence and existence are not the same. This doubles the gap. A thing is what it is, but only because it has received its being from elsewhere. This reinforces the idea that the true core of a person is both prior and unreachable, known only “in the divine light.” So Aquinas deepens the sense of an underlying subject that cannot be fully articulated in language.
Hegel
Hegel turns this whole structure inside out. He says: the “subject” is not a stable thing hidden under our words, it is a process, something that becomes itself through time, contradiction, and self-reflection. What Aristotle treats as a fixed base, Hegel treats as a movement. The gap between what someone is and what they were is not a problem, it is how consciousness itself unfolds. For Hegel, the subject is this unfolding: a living story, not an inert support. Time is no longer a side-effect of language but the very medium in which the self becomes real.
Heidegger
Heidegger then enters after Hegel because he realizes something deeper: the entire history of Western thinking—from Aristotle to Aquinas to Hegel—has taken for granted that being must be grasped through this subject–predicate structure, where something always lies underneath what we say. Heidegger tries to step outside this heritage. He argues that our sense of time comes not simply from grammar, nor from a theological essence, nor from Hegelian history, but from the way being shows itself and withdraws, always partially hidden.
In other words, for Aristotle, the subject is the hidden thing underneath; for Aquinas, its essence and existence come from God, deepening its hiddenness; for Hegel, the subject is not a hidden thing but a temporal process. In Heidegger:,the very attempt to ground being in subjects or substances is the problem; time arises from how being reveals and conceals itself.
What ties them all together is this simple human reality: when we speak, the real person slips slightly out of reach.
We can only describe them through what they have been, through traces and stories. This small slippage, this impossibility of grasping the “pure now”, creates the line of time we live inside. Our sense of identity, memory, and history all originate from this gap.
In short, naming gives a unique individual, speaking about them presupposes a hidden core, this core cannot be spoken directly, so it becomes something “already past,” and this “already past” becomes what we experience as time.
[The ancient Greek philosopher identified what lies under, a theologian deepened the substance in relation to God, a Prussian philosopher who saw Napoleon in Jena – Weltgeistes zu Pferde – turned it into a dialectical historical process, and the German (related to the Nazis, unfortunately unlike how Aristotle was related to Alexander the Great) tried to explain the ground that makes all of them think this way.]
Giorgio Agamben ties the entire chain together. For him, this split produced by language, between what something is and the silent subject we must presuppose, creates a gap that can never be closed. That gap becomes time, and time becomes the way we understand ourselves as beings with a past, a becoming, a story. This is why he calls it an ontological apparatus: language itself generates the subject by pushing it into time and forcing life to be narrated as “what it was to be.”
And this is also anthropogenesis: the human emerges at the moment language divides us from ourselves, when the spoken “I” and the silent, unreachable subject no longer coincide.
We become human precisely in the fracture that makes us historical beings, always interpreting who we are through what we have been.
Every person carries within them a quiet shape, a way their life has carved them into who they are. It is not just the fact that they exist, but the particular texture of their existence: the small decisions, the losses survived, the habits formed, the joys that stayed, the wounds that never fully closed. Aristotle’s old phrase, to ti ēn einai, simply tries to name this: what it was for this person to be themselves. It is the inner contour of a life, the way the past leans into the present, the way someone’s ‘having-been’ silently informs their being. It is not an abstract essence but a lived one: the quiet truth that each individual becomes who they are through the unfolding of their own story.
What is Dative?
When the ancient Greeks wanted to talk about something that belonged to a person, or something that mattered for a person, they used a special form of a word that meant “for him,” “for her,” or “for this thing.” Instead of adding a separate word like “for” or “to,” they changed the ending of the word itself. So if Aristotle said “for Socrates to be Socrates,” he would mark “Socrates” with this special form. Agamben’s point is that when Aristotle talks about someone’s essence (their “what it was to be who they are”) he uses this same structure. It’s as if Aristotle is saying: “For this person, what did it mean to become themselves?” The grammatical marker simply shows whose life, whose being, whose essence we are talking about.
The Essence: “what it was to be”
Aristotle has a strange way of talking about what something truly is. Instead of saying “the essence of a thing,” he uses a phrase that literally reads: “what it was to be.” At first glance it sounds backward, as if he were talking about the past rather than the present. But what he really means is something much more intuitive: every person or thing has a quiet history built into it, a kind of inner story that explains how it became itself.
Curt Arpe noticed that Aristotle’s expression only makes sense if you understand it as answering a very personal question: What did it take for this particular being to be what it is? For Socrates to be Socrates. For Emma to be Emma. Not a generic definition, but the unique way a life has unfolded. In this sense, a person’s essence is not an abstract label but the shape of their becoming, the way their past leans into their present and quietly defines them.
The short note that follows reinforces this reading. Aristotle, in other works, uses the same kind of expression to describe what something truly is “for” the thing itself. He isn’t concerned with universal categories but with the inner meaning of each individual being. And because his phrase blends the sense of “is” and “was,” it suggests a simple truth: that who we are now is inseparable from what has already formed us. Our essence is not a static definition but the story of what it took for us to become ourselves.
You were very sick during that year. Bedridden in the hospital, unable to walk, you lay staring at the black TV screen in the room. The TV was off. The flat screen, slightly tilted, on the wall like a painting not properly hung.
The book you had with you contained an essay titled Discovery of Landscape by Kojin Karatani. It was half-read. As you stared at the black screen, you realized that Malevich’s Black Square paintings were prophecies of the future: televisions, computer monitors, and phone screens. The faint reflection of the room on the blank screen of the silent television became a subtle, abstract landscape. You didn’t care about the valid or correct art historical interpretation of black squares, but at that moment, that was how you saw it.
Apart from the black screen, which in this case was more of a black rectangle, you lay in bed and stared out of the window. The sense of time could be traced only through the changes in the sky, light to dark, dark to light, and the sounds of the hospital staff pushing carts and trolleys, the clatter of dishes as others were served before you, the soft footsteps interrupted at regular intervals by the nurse checking blood pressure, temperature, and so on, and occasionally a doctor who walked in to show care.
The grey at times could turn blue, or a faint false English grey. It was near the end of the year, and how nice it would have been to be out, to enjoy the breeze and those skies that last only a few months here. You had read somewhere a description of an immobile patient who could see the time and days pass only through the shape of the frame of the window. You cannot recall which book it was, or perhaps both you had read then had something about this experience, of coming out of illness, of the long suspension of days.
It also brought back a memory of a visitor, though you are less and less certain now if it really happened or was only a dream or imagination. You were heavily medicated then.
When you woke up, he was sitting at the edge of the bed, staring at you. Then you must have dozed off again, because later you saw him again, this time on a chair next to the bed. There was only one chair, perhaps borrowed from another bedside. On the movable table, you noticed a plastic bag. Inside it was a bunch of bananas, yellow of course, with brown spots that reminded you of the long necks of giraffes in children’s illustrations.
He was a visitor, a friend who had turned himself into one, but not the relative who strides into a hospital room with practiced cheer, greeting other patients in their robes, dropping a bag of snacks and fruit on the nightstand, occupying the small surface area with things you did not want. He was quieter. He sat and stared at you. At times, when you recall it, it is as if he was feeling the pain and suffering more than you. And during those days when you used to work together, such a description would have been something to laugh about.
Later, when you met him again, he said that your face then had been ash coloured, or ashen, or the colour of ash. When he could have used the word pale. You had spoken, or kept silence, for maybe half an hour, and then, as though a bell had gone off, he stood up and left, as though he had never been there, leaving you to gaze into the eyes of the paralyzed patient across the ward struggling to breathe. Then you remembered, he had come with his wife. It was a somber, quiet visit. Not many came, because not many you had told, because not many cared. Those who visited perhaps are the few who would attend your funeral.
This visit means nothing. It was a visit, simply that, one person visiting another. Yet the more you thought about it, the less certain you became who had been the visitor, and who the visited. Who is the visitor, and who the patient.
There is a passage somewhere, you do not recall exactly where, about a kind of action where the one who acts and the one who is acted upon are no longer distinct. Perhaps that was what it was. When he came and sat there, when you looked back at him through the half-light, it felt as if you were each visiting yourselves through the other. The room became a single body that held both of you in it, one sitting, one lying down, reflecting the other’s stillness, reflecting the other’s illness. But it was your relation with him that had been very ill.
You think about the difference between seeing a patient in a hospital and seeing an art object on display, a sculpture or installation in a museum or a gallery. Some people will apologise out of politeness for not visiting your exhibition as well as your stay in the hospital. You could not walk then, but you remember thinking that walking must be something like that too, to give oneself over to the movement, to be carried by it rather than to control it. A kind of slow visitation between the body and the ground. To walk is an action upon oneself, not upon any external object by force or command. And it was precisely this relation with self and others that had fractured, that was malfunctioning.
So the self commanding the body — if to make this distinction or indistinction could be the soul — but to talk about the soul now is always inevitably sounding like a failed attempt to preach.
Lying there, the black television screen beside you, often to see was to be seen. The body, the bed, the chair, all were caught in the same quiet use. You read about what agent and patient used to signify.
When you were well again and took your first steps outside, you realized that you were still in that same relation, each step a return to yourself. To move was not to leave, and further the indistinction, where walking was another way of lying still. The illness is not a metaphor but an allegory of a relationship with yourself.
Who was the agent, who was the patient? It was surely the misconstrued idea of passion as active, when it is, like root of all vices, that made you passive.
Years later, when watching an old Japanese film by Ozu, there was a scene of an empty clinic. It reminded you of the black square and the smell of the hospital. With the white borders, Malevich painted a black square for us to stare into the black opaque abyss. The black square, a blind window, is now inverted, an appropriated image bordered and framed by black instead.
‘In another man devoured, my own death I do not see, with fever and geometry, I wasted the hours away, and now they keep vigil for me.’
At first glance, Popeye the Sailor seems harmless: a comic celebration of spinach, a cartoon moral about the virtues of healthy eating. Yet beneath its slapstick repetitions lies a darker structure. Popeye is not simply nourished by spinach; he is dependent on it. He cannot triumph without the can. Read allegorically, Popeye becomes less a parable of nutrition than of addiction. The figure trapped in a cycle of reliance, and consumption, his identity bound to a consumerist substance that both saves and enslaves.
In Plato’s Pharmacy (in Dissemination), Jacques Derrida shows how the word pharmakon means both remedy and poison, cure and toxin. It is a concept that unsettles the very opposition between health and sickness. Spinach in Popeye’s world plays precisely this role. It does not simply nourish; it alters him instantly, like a drug that grants superhuman strength. Each episode replays the same ritual: Popeye falters, consumes, and triumphs. The spinach is his pharmakon. What rescues him, but also what chains him to dependency.
The Cycle of Dependency
This cycle mimics the addict’s experience. Popeye delays spinach until the moment of crisis, then surrenders to it as the only solution. His victories, though spectacular, are temporary, erased by the next episode, when the same craving will return. The narrative itself enforces the addiction: there is no Popeye story without the spinach scene. The cartoon, like the addict’s life, becomes structured by recurrence.
Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, distinguishes between the symbol, which seeks wholeness, and allegory, which lives amid ruins. In allegory, objects point not to fullness but to absence, to what is broken or irretrievable. Is Popeye’s spinach can an allegorical emblem? Does it stand for the absent strength he cannot generate within? Each triumph is temporary, collapsing as soon as the credits roll. Popeye’s life is not progressive but cyclical, suspended in the eternal return of compulsive consumption.
The Consumer of Hope
The irony lies in the choice of spinach. Addiction is usually linked to vice such as alcohol, drugs, gambling. But spinach is the symbol of health, a staple of childhood obedience. By cloaking dependency in the guise of virtue, the cartoon anticipates how modern culture often disguises addiction under acceptable forms: casinos as “entertainment,” drinking as “bonding,” workaholism as “dedication,” and of course, the seemingly harmless lottery presents itself as salvation, as hope incarnate: for the price of a ticket, the poor man may dream of wealth, the weary worker of escape.
This marks the shift from the 19th century’s concern with depravity in the relations of production to the 20th century’s logic of consumerism, where alienation no longer stems only from labor and factory discipline but from cycles of consumption itself, of commodities, of images and desires on scoial media. What is consumed here is not merely a product, but hope, espera (waiting) and esperanza (expectation or hope), a secularized providence in which redemption is promised not by faith but by chance. Like Popeye’s spinach, the lottery is a pharmakon: it cures despair by offering fantasy, but poisons by entrenching the very conditions of desperation. The ticket, like the can, is allegorical. It is not a symbol of genuine salvation but a sign of absence, of the life deferred. Spinach, then, is the most insidious pharmakon because it is celebrated, while the lottery is a promise of redemption that perpetuates ruin. Hence, when there is huge snowball prize money of a huge amount in Singapore, we see a long queue similar to the soup kitchen in the West, or unemployed waiting for a job.
I was reminded of a lost photo, few year ago, before Milei became Pressident, a friend sent me, when visiting Argentina, photo of unemployed people queueing for a job in the morning. I was reminded of some of the scenarios depicted in Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes almost a century ago.
Popeye without spinach is still himself, but weaker, mocked, incomplete. With spinach, he is invincible, but only for a fleeting instant. His sense of self is chained to the can. Addiction works the same way: the substance fuses with identity, until one feels powerless without it. What appears as empowerment is in fact enslavement; what looks like choice is only repetition. Through this lens, the comedy of Popeye shades into tragedy. His victories are prefabricated, dependent on the ritualized fix. He is condemned to repeat: to falter, to consume, to triumph, to repeat again. The sailor, whose forearms bulge with strength, is at heart a fragile figure. His destiny is not freedom but compulsion, not growth but recurrence. Here, Popeye ceases to be a simple champion of vegetables. He becomes instead a figure of an allegory, his physical strength depending on spinach is the inversion of his soul in a vegetative state: a sailor forever denied freedom, caught in the loop of a dependency disguised as virtue.
Is the figure of the sailor, in seafaring narratives, not the final attempt at redemption in the history of the proletariat? The recurring gesture of those who, having squandered or broken their lives on land, fled to the sea? Sailors, in this sense, embody a flight from failure as much as a search for fortune.
I once read that conquistadors like Hernán Cortés, too, sought in distance, via the sea, a redemption no longer possible at home. Many were in similar straits: lesser nobles, unemployed soldiers, or men crippled by personal debts. Exploration and conquest were imagined as a gamble for salvation, a wager to restore fortune and honor. To finance their participation, they borrowed, pawned possessions, or promised creditors a share of future plunder. Cortés, of course, was no worker but a younger son of a hidalgo family, from a region that produced many conquistadors. Without inherited land or wealth, and often entangled in debt, often for a variety of bad reasons, he sought both economic survival and social advancement by crossing the ocean.
In truth, these men were sailors by necessity and conquistadors only by contingency: it was the accident of finding treasure or other civilizations to plunder, the sudden license to kill and to conquer, that transformed them into figures of conquest for God, Glory, and Gold.
From Popeye, the sailorman with huge, disproportionately muscular forearms, his spinach-can inventory and strength, I started to digress, I thought of sailors in general, and of the salty breeze by the sea. The figure of the sailor an existential wager, a body fleeing the land it has exhausted.
I am reminded of Mallarmé’s Sea Breeze::
The flesh is sad, Alas! and I’ve read all the books.
Let’s go! Far off. Let’s go! I sense
That the birds, intoxicated, fly
Deep into unknown spume and sky!
Nothing – not even old gardens mirrored by eyes –
Can restrain this heart that drenches itself in the sea
O nights, or the abandoned light of my lamp,
On the void of paper, that whiteness defends,
No, not even the young woman feeding her child.
I shall go! Steamer, straining at your ropes
Lift your anchor towards an exotic rawness!
A Boredom, made desolate by cruel hope
Still believes in the last goodbye of handkerchiefs!
And perhaps the masts, inviting lightning,
Are those the gale bends over shipwrecks,
Lost, without masts, without masts, no fertile islands…
But, oh my heart, listen to the sailors’ chant!
(trans. A. S. Kline)
It is here where escape itself could be the cure, even if the cure is shipwreck. The sailor, like the gambler, consumes hope as his only commodity. Popeye’s spinach, the lottery ticket, the lifting ship anchor: each a different face of the same pharmakon, offering salvation through the possibility of ruin until one admits that no spinach, no lottery, no sea-voyage redeems, except the resurrection, the true Second Coming. It is not an issue of waiting or having hope, but of the means.
Perhaps it is not in all the men mentioned above that we find the right approach, but in a woman who knew how to wait: Simone Weil. In her French, attente means waiting in the deepest sense, a state of attention, receptivity, openness. It is not passive idleness but an active, watchful stillness. For Weil, attente de Dieu (waiting for God) is the stripping away of illusions and false consolations, holding oneself empty so that grace may arrive freely, without being forced.
At times, reading Walter Benjamin, or reading about him, brings me back to that afternoon when she was cooking in the kitchen. The copy I had was from the school library. I remember a renowned local art historian, during some gathering, dismissively calling the library collection “wretched,” unaware, perhaps, that John had asked the library to purchase a catalogue of books covering important titles in the critical theory lineage.
The paperback I borrowed, and renewed, was wrapped in a needless plastic sheet that had yellowed slightly with time. In Singapore, it’s common for schoolchildren to wrap their textbooks in transparent film – surely a decision made by their parents – and I remembered how, back then, seeing a classmate without that protective layer made their book seem almost barefoot, if not semi-naked. This copy felt much the same. Its corners were worn and peeling, and every time I turned a page or shifted my grip, the cover gave off a faint, brittle crackle, like cellophane forgotten too long on the shelf. Not to preserve value, really, but as a kind of premature preservation, sealing the book like a baby embalmed.
Later I discovered those librarians used other, even more atrocious methods of preservation. There were two other kinds of covers I recall: one was a soft plastic jacket that slipped over the book like a second skin, but was crudely, untidily held in place with scotch tape, leaving marks ; the other was adhesive – a kind of laminate applied directly to the cover, smooth but prone to air bubbles if done in haste, and once hardened, left the book cover rigid and unbending, like a paperback trying unconvincingly to pass as a hardcover.
I think I was not even twenty-one then, and my language ability was nowhere near what it is now, at forty-five. The cover of Illuminations, the edition I held, had that familiar image of Benjamin ruminating, as though caught mid-thought. How much I understood of what I read is less important than the fact that I remember it still: the moment, the smell from the kitchen, the sense of something beyond my grasp but already part of me. I also remember the innocuous remark she made about me reading things beyond my abillity, but I’ve since realised that learning a language is not reading what is easy, but about following what draws you. That is the best motivation. It was for me then, and still is, as I’ve found again in learning Spanish and Chinese, and perhaps also in the disappointments of human relationships.
Snow Country (雪国, Yukiguni) 1957 directed by Shirō Toyoda
Not all mirrors are made of glass. But under certain lighting conditions, glass becomes a mirror. I am not thinking of convex or concave surfaces, of a distorted reflection on a spoon, a glass half-filled with water, or the sun glinting off the hood of a car, but only of flat panes that at night, with light behind them, turn reflective.
Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country begins promisingly with the girl on the train reflected in the glass, her face superimposed on the magnificient mountains and the landscape. I was so impressed that, after reading only a few pages, and not returning to the book for a year or two, the image remained vivid:
‘Taken with the strangeness of it, he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the misted-over window. A woman’s eye floated up before him. He almost called out in his astonishment. But he had been dreaming, and when he came to himself he saw that it was only the reflection in the window of the girl opposite. Outside it was growing dark, and the lights had been turned on in the train, transforming the window into a mirror. The mirror had been clouded over with steam until he drew that line across it. The one eye by itself was strangely beautiful, but, feigning a traveler’s weariness and putting his face to the window as if to look at the scenery outside, he cleared the steam from the rest of the glass.’
But the symbolism, or allegory, is repeated and overemphasized as a motif throughout the novel. What might have been more elegant, more poetic, would be to leave it as a passing remark, a single unforgettable scene, rather than exhaust it. The image of fog or mist on glass cleared and appeared the image of the girl is already powerful enough that readers would carry it with them; there is no need to press it ad nauseam. Perhaps it would have been better to let it remain brief and clean as a haiku, the tradition that shaped Kawabata’s anti-realist sensibility. He was not the last to use this imagery, and likely not the first. The effect of a window turning into a mirror lingers in literature well beyond him, and I began recalling other writers who returned to the same vision.
The first that came to mind was Roberto Bolaño in 2666, when Lola left for Paris and took a job as a night cleaner:
‘It told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at ten and ended at four or five or six in the morning . . . For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company’s smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola’s fingers, Lola’s wrists, Lola’s blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.’
In this instance, the poignancy is greater because we have already read of Amalfitano’s troubled relationship with Lola. Unlike Kawabata’s protagonist, who indulges in amorous fantasy and poetic, romantic projection (onto the young girl serving the sick man, onto women glimpsed as passing figures, while thinking of his country geisha lover, and leaving behind his family in Tokyo), Bolaño offers instead a sad understatement of what Amalfitano imagines Lola is doing. She is not a portrait superimposed on the Parisian night sky but a floating figure, spectral and weary. She is not tending to a sick man but a tired woman smoking, having left the man who is now lovelorn, caring for a daughter, and perhaps already mentally unwell, hearing voices.
In Mircea Cărtărescu’s version, in his book Blinding: Volume 1, the glass turns into a mirror for a lonely boy staring at his own reflection, voyeuring at the city if not at his neighbours. Here the protagonist himself becomes the subject of reflection rather than a female figure: a narcissist who will not die, but lives on as the living dead of his memories.
‘Before they built the apartment blocks across the street, before everything was screened off and suffocating, I used to watch Bucharest through the night from the triple window in my room above Ștefan cel Mare. The window usually reflected my room’s cheap furniture – a bedroom set of yellowed wood, a dresser and mirror, a table with some aloe and asparagus in clay pots, a chandelier with globes of green glass, one of which had been chipped long ago. The reflected yellow space turned even yellower as it deepened into the enormous window, and I, a thin, sickly adolescent in torn pajamas and a stretched-out vest, would spend the long afternoon perched on the small cabinet in the bedstead, staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection in the transparent glass.’
What is constant in the three excerpts is the male gaze. The first two are projected onto the female figure, the last onto the self. The precondition for these surrealist or symbolist reflections in glass is always the night sky and a lit interior. This trick of the eye can only emerge under artificial lighting. I begin to wonder whether such reflections on large panes of glass were possible before electricity, in a world lit only by candles—say, in Rembrandt’s time. And what might the night turning glass into mirrors have meant for individuals already alienated from others?
When I was in Kyushu almost two decades ago, visiting an old house open to tourists, I nearly fell from the second floor. The symmetry of the two levels, glimpsed through an interior window, gave the illusion of a polished floor above, so polished it seemed reflective. Perhaps my optical illusion was caused by an installation I had seen at Tate Modern in London: a dark pool of still, reflective liquid, like what I imagined raw petroleum to be. For a moment I believed I could cross the low parapet and walk forward. It was not my reflection I saw, nor anyone else’s, but a depth mistaken for surface. Perhaps it was instinct, or something like a guardian angel, that woke me from the illusion. The writers I recalled used glass to stage memory, desire, absence, solitude. For me it was not allegory but danger. Night turns glass into mirrors; sometimes it is only a trick of the eye, sometimes a vision of loss, sometimes a fall.
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