‘But that’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’re talking to me. So you are thinking.’
‘Words are coming out,’ she corrected me.
‘Words are coming out in order, in sentences.’
Her mind, she told me, speaking very quietly, was like a lake of black water. For most of the time the water was calm, but every now and then a breeze would rush over it and some foam would appear on the surface. That’s what her thoughts were – foam on black water.
On the worst days, her mind was swarming with ‘pieces of sentences’. From these fragments, sometimes, an item of sense, or half-sense, would materialise. These moments, she said, were like ‘birds flying out of fog’.
Agamédé and the guileless Nicolas Guignon, in a chamber to which she has led him, examine a painting in which a roguish-looking man, in pink satin breeches, is playing a guitar for an audience of richly attired young adults, who recline on the grass of a romantic garden, amid roses, urns and statuary. After some discussion of the picture, Nicolas Guignon confesses to Agamédé that he has lost his heart to Delphine, his pupil, the youngest daughter of the Count. He needs to speak of the accomplishment and beauty of Delphine; Agamédé allows him to. He has much to say about his philosophy of love. Sitting beside him, Agamédé listens. Then she takes his hand, as a mother would. Her demeanour becomes grave. Transfixing him with her gaze, Agamédé says to him: ‘But I have found that love, Nicolas, is too often a thing of the imagination. A man imagines the woman he thinks he sees, and imagines that he loves her.’ So few people can bear to be alone, she tells him. ‘This weakness is the cause of what they take to be love.’ Belying their meaning, the words are spoken in tones of great tenderness. The young man is weakened by the scrutiny of Agamédé, by her voice, by her bewitching hauteur, the delicious glaze of her skin, the penumbra of candlelight in her hair. He pretends to be considering what she has said, but already he is losing his heart for a second time, or so he believes.
‘Nothing really dies,’ William states. We are sitting in the park; he clamps his hands on his knees and sweeps his gaze over the town. It makes no sense to talk about death because every human being is a field of energy, and every thought is an electrical event, he explains. Energy can never be destroyed. So it follows that we can never disappear. Radio waves play some part in the argument, as do sunlight and cosmic radiation. ‘We are information,’ he says. ‘That’s what we are.’ The monologue is punctuated by variants of this idea. ‘Information can never be lost. That’s a basic law,’ he tells me. He tells me about black holes. ‘You think black holes are these whirlpools in space, right? Cosmic plugholes,’ he proposes. Eventually everything will be sucked into them and lost forever – that’s what we think. But this isn’t right, says William. Scientists have a new idea about what will happen. Information will stream towards the black holes and be held there, on the edge, instead of plummeting into the abyss. In time, all the black holes will come together. And you could say that the result will be God. ‘All the information that there has ever been – that’s God. And we will be part of it. We will become part of God,’ he explains, with every appearance of rationality. His manner is that of a physicist rather than an evangelist. ‘I know you’re not sure about this,’ he says. ‘These things are difficult to understand.’
In London, at night, we saw a couple admiring the spectacle of luxury that had been staged in the window of a furniture shop: tables that cost as much as cars; carpets created by picturesque craftspeople in picturesque villages. In the next doorway a hand was held out. The gaze of the window-shoppers slid over the human object; the act of semi-blindness might have been determined by shame, or embarrassment, or a belief that the beggar is there by choice, or is not truly destitute. Reasons can always be found. Not a rare occurrence; we have all done it. ‘I am not seen, therefore I do not exist,’ Imogen remarked, on Oxford Street.
MARCH
Online, a Q&A session with Antoine Vermeiren, recorded in Paris after the release of Le Grand Concert de la Nuit; intermittently subtitled. The attire is smart, and slightly dandyish: sugar-white shirt; a black suit of self-evidently expensive fabric; similarly fine footwear. The one exception to the monochrome scheme is the hosiery: violet socks. The other extravagance is the hair: a thick sweep of striated grey, just short of collar-length. For every question he has several hundred words; the voice is drowsily low-decibel; as he speaks, his left hand describes curlicues in the air, mimicking the turns of his thinking; it holds a cigarette, which is deployed with easy technique, like a miniature baton. The right hand is for raking the hair. Before each answer, the hair is raked or a cigarette sipped.
Inevitably, a questioner remarks that the subject of sex is prominent in Vermeiren’s oeuvre; the director is invited to share his thoughts on the subject. Another cigarette is lit at this point; Vermeiren considers the lights in the ceiling. ‘Sex is not that important,’ he pronounces. ‘Sex is of less importance than work,’ he goes on, squinting into the light. Work, productive work, is what makes us human; the separation of sex and work is the basis of civilisation. ‘And I work very hard,’ he says. The cigarette is halted in mid-air, in anticipation of a downbeat. ‘But sex is also of great importance,’ he resumes. Some of the things he says are things that Imogen said to me; the same phrases are used. But he goes further: sanctity and transgression, he maintains, are inseparable. Nobody could deny, he proposes, that the libertine is closer to the saint than is the man who has no desire. His work is ‘profoundly spiritual’, Vermeiren asserts, because ‘the things of the body are the things of the spirit.’ A strong emphasis on sont – as if the syllable were a hammer with which, at a single blow, he shatters the carapace of hypocrisy.
The characters in Le Grand Concert de le Nuit – indeed, in all of Vermeiren’s films – are loquacious, extremely so, a member of the audience observes. ‘They deliver speeches,’ she says, at which Antoine Vermeiren smiles and nods; he encourages her to continue; she is pretty. The question has something to do with rhetoric. The eighteenth century was the golden age of rhetoric, Vermeiren states. That is why he likes that period so much. That is why he loves the music of the eighteenth century. ‘It is reasonable music, but it has passion,’ he says. He suggests that the questioner has identified a paradox that lies at the heart of Le Grand Concert: ‘These people talk about their wildness, but how can wildness have a language?’ He wants it to be understood that Le Grand Concert de le Nuit is not merely set in the Baroque era – it is Baroque in spirit, because Baroque art is concerned with ‘the representation of what cannot be represented’, and is imbued with the ‘melancholy of failure’. There is something of the Baroque in Vermeiren’s answers; the logic is hard to discern, but the performance is enjoyable, like an opera with fine music and an unfathomable libretto.
He must be absolutely clear: he is no apologist for violence. This is something that he deplores in American culture: its appetite for violence without consequence, its use of violence as entertainment. Within a minute he has declared himself to be a vegetarian. This is connected to his ideas on Christianity. Contempt for animals is intrinsic to Christian morality: ‘The beasts are beneath morality, and therefore disgusting,’ he explains. ‘I do not share this disgust,’ he says. ‘Deus est anima brutorum. God is the soul of beasts.’ The cigarette performs an intricate loop.