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 connecting link, but the gaze in a process of continuous renewal, stretched toward the point under observation, as if each line, no matter how small, were a concise or great concentration of energy shot from the eye which will, on reaching its goal, vanish. Kentridge is famous for his animated films in graphite that tell stories for adults in the style of the pioneers of animation. Sometimes he seems to seek to represent the insatiable appetite of the capitalist system, devourer of souls, bodies, and nature; at other times he presents graphic reflections charged with melancholy about feelings and human actions. By and large, I’ve been moved after witnessing the physical metamorphoses of his characters, who are subject to earthly forces that literally dissolve them, extinguish them, or reconfigure them in another form in the next drawing.
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’ beginning their birthday books with a reference to the moon. One presents his theory on the visibility of the moon, the other starts his story by practically commending himself to the lunar cycle, since he’s setting out on a twenty-eight-day journey. I’ve known both men for years, and that’s why I can say, based on experience, that we are, I with each of them, obedient to differing regimes of friendship. In the end, you could say the same of any relationship or person, and even more when you’ve reached a certain age, there are as many types of friendship as friends, though in my case it’s worth clarifying, because there are some friends I’ve stopped seeing from one day to the next, with neither preambles or explanations. To describe what happened in detail would take me another book, probably of a more confessional tone, because I’d have to expand on my responsibility in the matter, or my share of responsibility, and I’d also have to explain the singular perception of time that, owing to those decisions, has been with me ever since. Is this related to my eternal sense of not getting any older, of feeling that the progress of time responds more to the peculiar elasticity of life’s episodes than to an accumulation of events and years? I don’t know. I could say I coexist with several hypotheses and that not one of them manages entirely to persuade me, when here comes a new criterion or substitute argument, the new idea that takes charge. The more I think, the less convinced I am; but it’s not just a question of thinking: I’m actually proceeding in the realm of pre-cerebral intuitions. When I’m on the verge of sighting a definite theory, or a clear one at least, all at once the idea retreats, as if it were afraid of taking on an unexpected responsibility. And so the moon is an astronomical enigma for one, and a narrative clock for the other. I’m not about to discuss their points of view or their choices; I couldn’t begin to do so even if I meant to. If I had to summarize, arbitrarily and in a few words, the sense I gather from both books, I would say that these two writers, on the eve of their fiftieth birthday, were attempting to show the system of beliefs that sustains them.
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.