The dream of touch: that which joins me to the other by bringing both of us to life.
But it remains a dream so long as one is not working. So long as one is not advancing towards the boundary. Which means so long as one is not prepared to cross the boundary. To return to the empty room. The silent mirror. The temptation, the melancholy of addiction.
So long as one imagines that grasp, finality, can be substituted for touch.
The work I complete when I have brought the boundary into being is not constructed primarily out of words but out of gestures. A series of gestures which bring the words in their wake.
The structure consists of a series of gestures in a certain order which satisfies.
The structure is never final. As soon as it has been completed satisfactorily it ceases to matter. The search for boundaries begins again. It will always begin again. Not as Sisyphus rolls his stone up the hill again and again, but as the sun rises each morning, as one breathes in and out and then in again and out again.
Yet it is not as natural as breathing. Not even as natural as swimming or kicking a ball. For it is never possible to tell in advance where the boundaries will be or even if they exist.
There is no end to it. But ends no longer matter.
*There are always counter-examples to frustrate the neat schemes devised by historians of ideas. Here such a one would be Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, written well before the Revolution but whose hero exhibits many of the symptoms I have ascribed to post-Revolutionary men.
23 The Room (2)
It is very quiet in the room. The boy leans over the table, holding a card in his left hand. The operation is most delicate. His right arm, bent at the elbow, provides a solid fulcrum for his body; his left rests more lightly on the green baize, so that the card, when he will finally set it down, just so, on the fragile structure already erected, will not cause it instantly to collapse.
He is not tense, nor does he slouch. His head is held high, his neck firm, the black tricorne, fitting snugly on his head, shuts out whatever is above him. His large eyes, rather hooded, look down on the precarious structure before him.
Everything is still. The small drawer of the table is slightly open, jutting out towards us, but the boy is as unaware of this as he is of everything except his immediate task. Soon he will have placed the card he is holding on the fragile construction before him, and then either the whole edifice will collapse and he will have to start again from scratch, or, this step achieved, he will be ready to take up another card from the small pile in front of him and see what he can do with that.
At the moment, though, he has no thought for what is to come, his entire being is concentrated on the card he holds so lightly.
Four paintings by Jean-Baptiste Chardin.
8. (right) The Young Draughtsman, 1737. (Musée de Louvre. Photo © RMN)
9. (below) Child with Spinning Top, 1738. (Musée de Louvre. Photo © RMN)
10. (facing page, top) Soap Bubbles, 1738? (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Wentworth Fund, 1949)
11. (facing page, below) The House of Cards, 1736–7. (National Gallery, London)
Now we are in another room. This time the boy has no hat but a fine wig fastened at the back with an elegant black ribbon. (Or perhaps it is another boy, slightly younger, perkier?) Instead of leaning on the table from the left and presenting us his right profile, he stands to the right of the table and we see him in three-quarters profile. The table too is smaller, and rather more crowded, with an inkwell in which rests a splendid feather quill, two books, a rolled-up parchment. These have been pushed to one side to make way for the top which the boy has clearly only just spun, though his hands now rest demurely on the table and his eyes watch the little top as though it had nothing to do with him. Empowered by the spin, the top has come quite close to the edge of the table and now hovers over another open drawer, though this one seems rather full. Striped red and green wallpaper at the back reinforces the sense of verticality imparted to the scene by the boy's upright stance and the fine quill, the dark inkstand and the top, which at present is just a little off the vertical.
In a moment it will fall over onto its side and come to a convulsive stop. But just now it is still spinning, almost still in its centripetal movement. No wonder the boy is gazing at it with such delight, a half-smile on his childish lips imparting to his face a freshness and naturalness quite at odds with the formal, elegant coat and shirt, the fine waistcoat with its prominent buttons, the powdered wig. But the hands tell us that this is a deft and agile child, not an overdressed mother's boy.
Now we are in a third room. Another boy, slightly older than the other two, equally elegantly dressed, the black tricorne on his head, but a long tress of hair hanging down his back this time, tied at the neck with a fine bow, leans on a simple table from left to right. His left elbow takes his weight and in his left hand he holds a pencil which he is sharpening with the knife held in his barely visible right hand. Covering most of the table is a large portfolio, tied by a ribbon, the ends of which hang over the edge of the table. He too is engaged on a task which, though requiring concentration, is mechanical enough to allow him to dream as he performs it, and his hooded eyes look down at his hands as though at a mystery at which he is content simply to be present.
12. Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Glass of Water and Coffee-pot, 1761. (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Howard A. Noble Collection, 66.12)
And now we move out into the open. A young man leans over a stone parapet. Leafy branches surround him. A glass, four-fifths full of a milky liquid and with what might be a spoon sticking out of it, stands on the parapet beside him. He leans far over, anchored by his left arm which is bent at the elbow, and resting his right arm on his left wrist. With the tips of the fingers of his right hand he holds a straw, one end of which is in his mouth. He is blowing bubbles, and a huge bubble has in fact just formed at the end of the straw, on a level with the parapet which is visible through the transparent film of the giant bubble.
His coat appears to be torn at the right shoulder, and his long hair, caught up at the back, has escaped at the sides, giving him something of the appearance of an orthodox Jew. To his left, a little surprisingly, a face is visible, topped by a curious twisted hat and cut off at the mouth by the parapet. Though the eyes of this figure appear to be staring straight at us, it is in fact at the bubble, which floats between him and us, that he is gazing. However, he is too much in shadow for us to be able to make this out with certainty. The eyes of the youth are lowered over his straw.
What these young men and boys are doing is in no way significant or important. They are not figures from Greek or Roman mythology, nor are they biblical or historical characters. There is nothing about them we need to know, for there is, in a sense, nothing about them that is worth knowing. The young man with the pen is probably a draughtsman, but what we see him engaged on is merely preparatory to the exercise of his profession. As for the other three, they seem merely to be passing the time.
Passing the time, but not only that, the scholars tell us: they are positively wasting time. These, we are told, are vanitas images, showing the ways in which idle youths waste their time; or rather, the ways in which Idle Youth Wastes Its Time. But the absurdity of this suggestion, which has been current since his day, is so blatant that it merely highlights the fact that there is something peculiarly resistant to interpretation in these paintings of Chardin, so simple and so quiet, so wondrously beautiful. A gap opens up between our immediate, physical response to them and the ability of the intellect to provide explanations for them: Why these boys? Why doing these things? What is Chardin trying to tell us?