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For me, to compose a picture with that scene of the swan was at that moment the most immediate way of discovering a meaning in it, and that no doubt came about because of my feeling designated, chosen, somehow lionized by chance or fate on being the birthday boy. It was even possible that what I’d picked up on somewhat apprehensively — the father’s derisive remarks to his daughter and her brief look — had in fact been a simple commentary, a piece of information, he told his daughter it was my birthday or that it was about to be, either way it was all the same, except that it would have been more inspiring if he’d said the latter, so that she had smiled shyly in my direction without knowing whether she should believe her father or not.
And I now recall Kentridge, the famous South African whose animated characters, especially one, named Felix — for whom he has a special affection, so much so that he seems to be an alter ego — rarely look out at the viewer. Nonetheless, they compensate for that characteristic, if indeed it must be compensated for and not entirely abandoned, by projecting visible gazes, I don’t know of any better name for them. A visible gaze would be the path traced by someone’s gaze, as if it were a beam of light or a luminous fluid. William Kentridge draws visible gazes by means of dotted lines, like those of the jets of water spurting in manifold directions in the fountain of the park I was in, which I described above. In this way, something physically impossible for painting or drawing to depict, as is the visual behavior of characters whose eyes we don’t see, is successfully achieved. We can observe Felix with his back to us, or from the side, while he contemplates a point in the landscape, a corner of the room, or the stars in the firmament, and we note how intermittent dashes leave his eyes to make up the dotted line, giving the impression of a column of ants or an action in progress, in this case almost the same thing.
The gaze thus drops its habitual burden of passivity. The physical argument, possibly erroneous, that supports this idea, I suppose, is that light is not unduly speedy, and as a result contemplation itself can become material, and hence easily seen. The dotted lines represent not only a co
Once the scene in which they are the protagonists is over, these people yield to their own bodily transformation. One sees the silhouettes in motion and beholds the supreme weariness that overtakes these characters by the time they’ve nearly given their all; a moment comes when they appear to stumble, they get muddled in the forest of dashes the screen has become, and one frame later they’ve been dissolved or transformed. Needless to say, I feel more and more often like a Kentridge character, especially Felix, that errant being, someone versatile set adrift in history and the course of the economy, but at the same time exaggeratedly indolent in the face of what surrounds him, things or individuals, to the point where he succumbs with no sense of shock to the consequences, at times definitive, of his actions.
On the terrace of the Café do Lago, I was taking this in as the afternoon shadows lengthened: my day’s walk, or perhaps my fast-approaching birthday as well, had united me still more with any of this artist’s characters, especially during an episode’s final vicissitudes, when they seem to get squashed, to dissolve among the elements or to vanish down the bathtub drain. I had the sensation of having been dragged to my table on the terrace, impelled by a private devotion, not overly fervent, but indeed pretty inertial, one that dwells on the minutiae of life and reality as a passport to daily existence. I imagined that as Felix I could fling myself into the lake and sink into its waters to drink them, through dozens of self-generated transfusion tubes; the next moment, the lake would empty, sublimating its waters toward the light of the stars and of something like the sun and the moon, a surrogate for the two, and I would remain in the middle of the empty pool, probably naked among the disabled swans, toppled and atilt on the earthen lakebed. The celestial body, moon or whatever it was, would shine, nearly full, and its alabaster reflection bathing the trees would be drawing’s self-evident homage to the gray scale of photography. .
The waiter had gone completely into hiding behind the window, and I began thinking of the strange coincidence of both my friends’ begi
When I raised my eyes from my observation point on the terrace of the Café do Lago, I could make out some palm trees scattered as if at random throughout the park. Of course, only a few were actually visible, in fact no more than two or three, which stood like solitary columns above the rest of the trees and all the other plant life. During my walk I’d found it amusing to observe, time and again, the isolated plume of some one of them, as if it were definitively safe from any upheaval that might take place on the surface. I kept imagining that if the palm trees could think, and if they had time to harbor human feelings, disdain for the ground — for them no doubt a kind of despised and incomprehensible netherworld — would occupy a good part of their meditations. At the least sign of upheaval or turmoil, or indeed at any hint of activity on the lower level, that disdain would return each time, like a leitmotif, a recurrence that, far from making these trees suspicious of their own judgment and preconceptions, would confirm the appropriateness of their forebodings as well as the permanent chaos, as they saw it, from which they considered themselves safe. That reiterated thought, on the one hand, kept them safe, according to their logic, and was, at the same time, a concrete expression of their detachment from the ground.