For Sure
Page 13
“Half de time, those sayin’s don’t make no sense at all.”
“I tot dat one come from de Bible.”
“Well, wouldn’t make no sense at all comin’ from de Bible, now would it.”
“Why, pray tell, not?”
“Well, who would ’ave said it?”
“Don’t know, do I. You tink I knows every wag in de Bible?”
“I never heard it in Church, dat’s fer sure.”
“Me neider.”
“Whoever ’twas, should ’ave said ‘hell is de Other,’ wid a capital O.”
“When somebody’s just sayin’ it, folks aren’t goin’ to see de capitals, now are dey?”
“Right enough. De big indivisible O.”
“Invisible, you mean . . .”
“I means both.”
“Wot are dose two yappin’ about?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
. . .
. . .
“Shall we haul ass out o’ here den?”
“Awh? You don’t like it ’ere?”
298.100.1
Proverbs
Human beings are not made to be happy? This is how Freud describes life in relation to the id, the ego, and the superego: a rider (the ego) holds a fractuous horse (the id) in check, all the while fighting off a swarm of bees (the superego). In addition to these already perilous tasks, the horseman must constantly survey the surrounding landscape, and learn from his experience as he advances. Hence Freud’s idea that man does not live; he is lived by this condition.
299.39.9
Freud Circuitously
Terry explained as best he could, and still Étienne came back with exactly the same question, and in the same words as the first time:
“How come den ee was swallowin’ money?”
Terry tried again:
“On account of dat was ’is sickness: swallowin’ money.”
“Dat’s a sickness?”
Entirely by accident, Étienne had once swallowed a dime. He’d never told anyone, because his parents had often warned him not to put coins in his mouth.
“Anytin’ can be a sickness, see, if a fellow overdoes it.”
Étienne was somewhat relieved, but happy nevertheless that Terry’s explanation did not end there.
“See, dis fellow we’s talkin’ ’bout, swallowin’ all dem loonies . . . well, fer sure dat boy ‘ad a problem. On account of a normal person wouldn’t do be doin’ dat, now would dey.”
. . .
“A normal fellow wouldn’t even tink of such a ting. See?”
“But, how come ee was swallowin’ money? How come not stones?”
“Well, wid him ’twas money he were swallowin’. Some udder fellow, might be stones, anudder might be nails. All depends on wot ’twas caused de problem in de beginnin’.”
Terry slid the shepherd’s pie into the oven, and glanced at Étienne; he could see his answers had not entirely satisfied the boy.
“See, a fellow might decide to swallow, I don’ know, de cap off a bottle o’ beer, say, just for a lark, showin’ off in front of ’is pals, or some such ting. An’ could be it don’t even make ’im sick or nuttin’. Sure and a ting like dat could happen.”
Étienne nodded.
“Right, well de next day, dat same fellow’s not goin’ to up and swallow anudder beer cap, now is ee? If ee do, and if ee gets to swallowin’ more an’ more beer caps all de time, on account of ee can’t stop himself, well den, dat’s startin’ to be a problem. In de first place, on account of our stomach isn’t built to handle metal. Could end up killin’ ’im, like dat fellow who was swallowin’ coins.”
So far Étienne understood, but he was waiting for the rest of Terry’s explanation, which didn’t seem to be coming.
“An’?”
“An’ wot?”
“You said in de first place. Don’t dat mean der’s more yet to come?”
Terry wondered if it was normal for a four-and-a-half year old child to have such a logical mind.
“Alright den. In de second place, like I says, most folks don’t have a yearnin’ to swallow metal and such. Most folks just wants to eat food, and food dey likes besides, food dat makes dem feel good. Take me, for example, I can’t say I really likes turnip soup. Only I knows it’s good for me, so I end up likin’ it a wee bit anyway, on account of it’s good for me body.”
“I don’t like turnip soup neider.”
300.87.4
The Body
Among the 29 authors of whom at least five titles have been selected by La Bibliothèque idéale, Hugo and Voltaire share first place with eight books each; Flaubert, Gide, Nabokov, Sartre, and Stendhal are close behind with seven works each; then six each by Balzac, Calvino, Cendrars, Duby, Malraux, Paulhan, and Zola; five each by Bataille, Breton, Canetti, Cocteau, Diderot, Jünger, Kafka, Maupassant, Michelet, Musil, Nietzsche, Proust, Sand, Verne, and Yourcenar. Listed according to date of death, the list would read as follows: Voltaire (1778), Diderot (1784), Stendhal (1842), Balzac (1850), Michelet (1874), Sand (1876), Flaubert (1880), Hugo (1885), Maupassant (1893), Nietzsche (1900), Zola (1902), Verne (1905), Proust (1922), Kafka (1924), Musil (1942), Gide (1951), Cendrars (1961), Bataille (1962), Cocteau (1963), Breton (1966), Paulhan (1968), Malraux (1976), Nabokov (1977), Sartre 1980), Calvino (1985), Yourcenar (1987), Canetti (1994), Duby (1996), and Jünger (1998).
301.46.8
La Bibliothèque idéale
“De wot?”
“De Color Marketing Group, dey’s de folks dat decides which colours is goin’ to be in fashion from one year to da next. Once dey’ve made der choices — say two or tree years ahead — dey makes up wot dey calls de palette of colours fer dat year, an’ dey sends ’em out to de manufacturers so dat everyting matches up.”
!
“Wot? Were you tinkin’ everytin’ was matchin’ up by some miracle?”
302.2.1
Colours
In other words, still according to Freud, the human being is born in such an immature neurological state that it is impossible not to injure it.
303.35.8
The Detail within the Detail
“Mum! Mum! Dad wanted I should drowns meself . . .”
“Drown. I should drown myself.”
Terry had come from the swimming pool with the children. He’d brought them in through the secret door, as he called it, to drop in for a brief moment on Carmen at the Babar.
“. . . an’ I couldn’t do it!”
Carmen could not guess the source of the child’s excitement.
“I was only about showin’ ’em it’s not so easy to go an’ drown yerself. In de end, a body doesn’t want to sink.”
“An’ now, I’m not afeard no more of puttin’ me head under water.”
“Is that right? Well, that’s wicked! An’ how about you, me beauty? Did you swim as well?”
Marianne nodded beaming.
Terry glanced out at the bar.
“Are you busy, den?”
“Won’t be long, now. Wot’re you three plannin’ on doing with yerselves?”
“I promised Étienne I’d make de macaroni an’ sausages fer supper.”
Carmen mussed her son’s hair.
“Mmmm, that sounds tasty. Mum’ll come up fer a bit in a while.”
“To read a story?”
“If you like.”
Carmen stepped behind the bar, grabbed four candied Marachino cherries by their tails, and handed two each to the kids.
304.6.2
The Babar
“Wot do we say?”
In France, they say talkie-walkie instead of walkie-talkie.
305.64.4
Opposites
Freud’
s father Jacob’s third marriage was to a woman 20 years his junior. One of two sons from Jacob’s first marriage had children, which meant that when little Sigmund was born, he was already the uncle of a child a year older than he, and who would become his favourite playmate. Also, the young Freud believed his half-brother Philipp was sharing Sigmund’s mother’s bed, so that he suspected Philipp was actually Sigmund’s sister Anna’s father. All this may shed some light on Freuds’ lifelong compulsion to penetrate secrets. In addition, a nanny to whom Freud had become especially attached disappeared without explanation when he was two and a half years old, which only added more pain to a burden of confusion sufficiently heavy to justify the birth of psychoanalysis.
306.39.6
Freud Circuitously
Sixty-one authors of La Bibliothèque idéale have names composed of a single word. Eight of them begin with s, seven with p, six each with a, c, and h, and five with e. Once again we find the popular a, c, p, and s. The authors in question are: Abélard, Adonis, Alain, Apicius, Apulée, Aristotle, Bashô, Brassaï, Cabu, Chamfort, Cicero, Colette, Confucius, Corneille, Demosthenes, Epictetus, Erasmus, Aeschyles, Aesop, Euripides, Fenelon, Goosens, Hergé, Herodotus, Hesiod, Hitchcock, Homer, Horace, Kalidasa, Lucrecius, Menon, Molière, Novalis, Ousâma, Ovid, Parmenides, Pausanias, Pétillon, Petronius, Pindar, Plato, Plautus, Ryokan, Saki, Sallust, Sempé, Seneca, Shitao, Sophocles, Stendhal, Suetonius, Tacitus, Taillevant, Terence, Thucydides, Vercors, Virgil, Voltaire, Vuillemin, Xenophon, and Zeami. The shortest names are Cabu, author of a comic strip entitled Le Grand Duduche, and Saki, author of L’Omelette byzantine, listed in the category of “Laughter.” These very short names appear all the more so in Comparison to names like Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais; Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; Marie-Jean Antoine Caritat de Condorcet; José de Espronceda y Delgado; José Maria Ferreira de Castro; Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle; Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais; Félix Lope de Vega Carpio; Hippolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray; Oscar-Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz; Edward Georges Bulwer Lytton; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis; Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau; Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
307.46.9
La Bibliothèque idéale
Leafing through La Bibliothèque idéale, Élizabeth cannot believe that the word inexplicabilité does not appear in any French dictionary.*
308.24.10
Élizabeth
* In fact, it would be preferable to speak of mystère, a shifting, flickering word, more open and infinite than inexplicabilité, whose interrupted thrusts and stumbling blocks hammer away at the primitive stuttering of the universe.
310.143.9
Varia
The doors to the psychoanalytic fraternity were opened to Lacan thanks to his theory of the mirror stage. This moment of maturation, which occurs between the ages of 6 and 18 months, when the child first encounters its image in a mirror, leads to the illusion of the self, or the ego, from which speech will emerge. Because the imaginary self corresponds to a speaking subject, the subject being that which arises from an unconscious desire as language. More or less.
309.34.6
Lacan
In addition to Francis Thibaudeau — Terry’s distant cousin? — who drew up the first real classification of typographic characters, Acadian enthusiasts of genealogy will be happy to learn that there exists a genealogy of printing characters. The founding families are the Gothic, Old Style Roman, Italic, Transitional Roman, Modern Roman, Antique, Egyptian, Calligraphic, Script, and Ornamental.
311.19.2
Interesting Details
“Der’s someting about usin’ a word fer de first time. ‘Specially in French.”
“You mean dat it’s a bit tricky? On account of you can’t be certain yer usin it like yer supposed to?”
“No, more like: Well, now dat’s a pretty word! An’ why wouldn’t I use it?”
“Ya. Dream on.”
312.82.1
Moncton
It is still too soon to speak of the Other.
313.138.2
The Other
Demonstration based on randomly selected numbers: the 32 divisions of the Compass Rose; the 338 entries in the Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse (Dictionary of Psychoanalysis) by Roland Chemama and Bernard Vandermersch (Larousse), which includes 101 entries under the letters a, b, c, and d, or 15 percent of the letters of the alphabet accounting for 30 percent of the entries (2 of the 101 entries actually refer the reader to other entries); and finally, a factor X to be chosen in the heat of writing this:
a) 338 – 32 = 306, a more or less insignificant number;
b) 101 – 2 = 99
99 × 2 = 198, a more or less insignificant number;
However:
c) 12 × 12 × 12 = 1,728
d) 1,728 – 198 = 1,530, which might also be read as 15 and 30 percent.
And finally, selecting the five in the heat of writing, since we’re now engaged in the fifth operation of our demonstration:
e) 1,530 ÷ 5 = 306, which brings us back to the result of our initial mathematical operation.
314.72.7
Equations
A cerebral hemorrhage, or cerebral vascular accident, was the cause of death of the Italian author Italo Calvino in 1985. He was 62 years old.
315.78.2
Accidents
Marianne is kind of the clown of the family. Nor does it take very much to arouse her playful nature.
“Marianne went down to the mill, Marianne went down to the mill . . .”
Immediately the child’s face lit up.
“She went down to mill her grain, She went down to mill her grain . . .”
As he sang, Terry watched Marianne in his rear-view mirror.
“She was riding on her donkey, oh my little miss Marianne . . .”
Terry’ decided to take a ride up by Salisbury, where someone had advertised a trailer for sale.
“Riding on her donkey Catty, goin’ down to the mill.”
Unfortunately, he hadn’t taken into account their ancient jalopy’s recent minor mechanical troubles.
“The miller saw her coming, The miller saw her coming . . .”
Now here they were, waiting for the tow truck by the side of the road.
316.5.1
A Movie
Second irritant: books with the page numbers on the inside margin. Often the page number comes close to falling into the gutter of the binding. An error in layout? This is clearly the case of the pocket dictionary Proverbes et Dictons (Proverbs and Sayings) published by Robert. It takes a while for one to realize that the more useful numbering in this work is that which identifies the particular saying one is searching for. A tedious process, because of the book’s odd system of classification, which in the end confirms the usefulness of numbering pages, if only to facilitate replacing those pages when they inevitably fall out of this bizarrely designed and badly bound book. Ouroboros.
317.89.2
Irritants
Élizabeth turns the pages. Observation, treatment. Observation, treatment. Bodies, Spirits. Turn the page: ways they are the same, ways they are discordant. Hector Berlioz’s Mémoires, Erik Satie’s Écrits.
318.24.9
Élizabeth
Blissful blue. Sky blue, lavender blue, nattier blue. Periwinkle blue. Bleu d’Auvergne, bleu des Causses, bleu de Bresse. Gros bleu. Blue note. Blue overalls, blue boiler suit, blue jeans. Blue Bayou. Midnight blue. Blue Blood. Bluebell. Blue pencil.
319.83.5
Bliss and Colours
“It’s raining, Bergère, bring your white sheep in . . .”
Marianne also liked “Bergère.” She thought the song w
as about a particular lady named Bergère.
“Come into my cottage, Bergère, come quick . . .”
Terry looked at his watch. They’d been waiting for a half hour by now. Should he go back to the little house in the curve of the road to phone the garage again? And call Carmen, too, this time? But she’d want to know what he was doing in Salisbury.
“I hear the rain afalling, water beating on the leaves . . .”
In the rear-view mirror Terry could see Marianne was on the brink of sleep. While she slept, could he leave her alone just long enough to go and phone?
“The storm is coming fast now, see the lightening flashing.”
320.5.2
A Movie
The infant, who does not yet know that he or she is a whole being, realizes that she does indeed correspond to the image in the mirror. This recognition allows her to anticipate the eventual conquest of her body, which she does not yet master.
321.35.7
The Detail Within the Detail
In addition, the following observation:
144 = 1 + 4 + 4 = 9
144 × 2 = 288 = 2 + 8 + 8 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
144 × 3 = 432 = 4 + 3 + 2 = 9
144 × 4 = 576 = 5 + 7 + 6 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
144 × 5 = 720 = 7 + 2 + 0 = 9
144 × 6 = 864 = 8 + 6 + 4 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
144 × 7 = 1,008 = 1 + 0 + 0 + 8 = 9
144 × 8 = 1,152 = 1 + 1 + 5 + 2 = 9
144 × 9 = 1,296 = 1 + 2 + 9 + 6 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
144 × 10 = 1,440 = 1 + 4 + 4 + 0 = 9
144 × 11 = 1,584 = 1 + 5 + 8 + 4 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
144 × 12 = 1,728 = 1 + 7 + 2 + 8 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
Regardless of by which number one multiplies 144, the result of the preceeding operation will always be 9.
322.72.8
Equations
Collaborative works by two authors in La Bibliothèque idéale are especially numerous in the “Cartoons” category. It also turns out that it often takes two, if not more, to compose music. Familial collaborations, for their part, seem to have been particularly fruitful among names beginning with the letters g and s. Among the names beginning with g, we should note the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Fairytales, Cheaper by the Dozen by the couple Ernestine and Frank Gilbreth, and the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s Journal. Among those beginning with s, are Bolivar, Le Libertador by Gilette and Marie-France Saurat, The Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Monday Begins on Saturday. As for the brothers Kotek (Joel and Dan), and Pebyre (Pierre-Jean and Jacques), and the Verroust couple (Jacques and Marie-Laure), they respectively tackled, with apparent success, the subjects of Russian agriculture, truffles, and French sweets.