Skin
Soap belongs to that category of objects or materials that do not possess a skin, such as candy, lipstick, certain cheeses, etc.; that is to say, their interior is indistinguishable from their exterior — the inside begins immediately on the outside. «No shell, not even an epidermis: because there is no claim to autonomy,» says Ponge. These are likewise things that do not allow for use, only abuse; that is, with every use they return visibly stained, diminished, until, finally, they disappear without leaving a trace, a remnant, or waste. They are fair objects. Their use merges with a kind of recycling; until they vanish completely they dissolve into another system — the soap into the bathwater, the lipstick onto the lips, the candy into the now-sweet saliva. Nothing remains of them.
Format
Standing lunches are always difficult exercises in juggling and dexterity. Between the plate and the glass, the fork and the food, chewing and talking, everything results in an awkward and clumsy arrangement, always on the verge of collapse. On one such occasion, someone dropped the soup mug, which must already have been empty, and so it smashed dry but noisily onto the floor among the standing diners. No problem, all the material is here, only the form has been lost, said the waiter as he gathered the shards onto the open dustpan. Indeed, everything was there, though scattered across the floor. That incident showed us the mug as merely an intermediate moment between its production and the horizontal shards. The mug revealed itself, too, as merely an event, quite fleeting, something that happened for a certain time. The form, the contour — the mug, in short — was only that temporary force that kept everything recognizable and together, and which suddenly disappeared at the end of that fall at the beginning of that lunch.
September 11
The twin towers of the World Trade Center remained twins until the end — both were pierced by airliners full of passengers and fuel, suffered two catastrophic but separate fires, and ultimately collapsed vertically in a kind of implosion, two falls straight down; straight because they unfolded as if they had been foreseen and planned. Although the direction of a fall is vertically towards the ground, not all are so precise. They fell vertically like rain and the shadow at noon. From the two towers jumped many of those already doomed — those falls had the form of suicide, but in truth they were murders, one by one. Everything that day was shocking, unprecedented, and visible. Wisława Szymborska has a remarkable poem in which she describes the fall but not the deaths, trying to preserve as she could those abbreviated lives — what kills is not the fall through empty air but the collision with the ground:
«They jumped from the burning floors.
One, two, still a few more,
higher up, lower down.
The photograph held them in life,
and now preserves them
above the earth heading toward the earth.
Each still whole,
with an individual face
and blood safely kept.
There is still time
for their hair to flutter
and for keys and some loose change
to fall from their pockets
They are still within the realm of air,
within reach of the places
that have just opened up.
Only two things I can do for them:
describe this flight
and not add the final line.»
With the double ruin, the materials from each tower that had been separated at the beginning of construction came together again, like a bifurcation that closes again, like the river as a boat passes through. In the end, there stood that thorny, promiscuous and instantaneous hill at the centre of one of the centres of the world. It caused astonishment, and even lunatic theories, that that combined kilometre of solid, vertical construction resulted in a heap of rubble only a few dozen meters high. That kilometre was squeezed and compressed by its own weight, forcing the void out. Blanchot wrote, regarding Mallarmé, that «if we squeezed the world to make the void come out, it would fit in the palm of our hand.» The interior of the towers, the interior of any house, contains more emptiness than things, more air than matter, like poetry pages. They are sponge-spaces, spaces crammed with emptiness to be filled, with nothingness to be completed — it is the emptiness through which we move or through which light spreads and illuminates. Houses contain more nothingness than matter, which allows for compression in the case of catastrophe or demolition; destruction always takes up less space. Inside houses, space is a luxury — the more emptiness, the more nothingness, the more luxurious; the small and poor house is always full. The opposite happens with the refrigerator and the pantry in the rich house.
Fragment
The piece — the fragment — has its limits where they should not be; its contour is wrong. The problem of the fragment is a problem of form, that is, of limit; it is a problem of how air outlines the form. We see the piece, but simultaneously we see the whole object; only in this way can we recognise that the piece is missing a piece, that is, that in the place of the remainder that would complete it there is air; that the air does not surround the thing in the proper place — which would be around it — as if lining it, as if lining its contour, but now traverses the area that the once complete thing used to occupy. The assumption of a piece forces us to see what is, in fact, not there; if we assume we are in the presence of a piece — a fragment — we assume ourselves to be a kind of visionaries; archaeologists and visionaries. From a piece, we perceive the whole. Synecdoche.
