Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  The beauty of particular things. Scarry, ibid

  Oh, things – things are beautiful!

  Love does not care for objects. Love is unmaterialistic, revolutionary, anarchic – but merciless. A step away from love, from grief, are secondary pleasures: first a cup of coffee, then a meal, then a dress. After a storm, a wreck, objects bob to the surface, made significant by survival. Glanced at by the sun, they seem to be remade, although they’re only washed-clean, and by salty water. They look new, though they were there all the time, meaning just the same as they did before the crash. That last thing’s good to know. The trick is to untangle objects from memory.

  Our first argument was about Dior lipstick.

  I bought a tube of Dior lipstick.

  You emailed: How’s that going to help the revolution?

  I emailed: Dior lipstick really is more beautiful than the other kinds. It costs more, but not a lot more than the less beautiful kinds, and the thought that goes into the colours makes it so much more beautiful.

  I meant we could have a revolution in Dior lipstick, you meant we couldn’t.

  At the time I was working for the revolution in a tented city in the rain, wearing Dior lipstick, and you were at home, or away, not working for the revolution, not directly at least, but not wearing Dior lipstick either, which may or may not have been a revolutionary gesture.

  ‘The people I know who make beautiful things,’ I said, ‘don’t do it for the money. They just do it because they want to make beautiful things.’

  People come and come through the door until the carriage is almost full. A German couple in their fifties (sixties?) board and fuss about who is sitting where, something no on else has done, although we are all sitting in the wrong seats. They show us their tickets, each with a number. A girl with a backpacker’s backpack has to leave. We all look down and away. The compartment enforces camaraderie – of one kind or another.

  Despair was a state that arrived while I was looking out of the other window. It was a state in which I was unable to make beautiful things, or to make things beautiful. It’s not that I couldn’t see that things could be beautiful, it’s just that I no longer cared for beauty, and I didn’t care for things at all. I wrecked my favourite jacket not caring, brushing up against wet paintwork. Now there’s a broad white stripe across the back and, though I scrub it, the paint particles are knit with the weave. I was careless when I was in love. I cared for nothing. I destroyed some things I cannot mend.

  Once when we were walking through a city’s streets together, we went into a shop and it was a chain store, cheap and unisex, selling men’s clothes as well as women’s football-cupped bikinis. You tried on a shirt: ‘Should I buy it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you need it?’ For a moment, through a gap in the changing-room curtains, I saw, in the gap between your shirt and jeans, what I desired. But it was only for an instant. I don’t know if you expected me to be more enthusiastic about the shirt because I wore Dior lipstick. I don’t know whether you wanted backup about how nice it was, or backup about how nice it was to buy something, but you were somehow as disappointed in me as in the shirt, so we walked out of the shop and, when we came back later to buy it, it was gone.

  Why do people go on making beautiful things? I thought you meant, why ever spend time thinking about dresses or beaches when you could go round niggling at the bad bits of life? Why bother putting on lipstick or bikinis? Beauty was too easy, you thought: it’s easy to see what beauty is so it must be easy to make, so easy it’s untrue, like those magazine ladies, working overtime to look like leisure. Did you think the truth was ugly?

  I think you believed in beauty though, that the magazine women were beautiful, and maybe you desired them too, though they were glossy as their pages and I could never see a way through. I think you believed the beauty was theirs, not the photograph’s or the makeup’s or anything else. I’m not sure you believed that beauty could be made, or that it could be made more so by adding things, like lipstick. You did believe in art, and that art could be made, and that it could be beautiful, but you didn’t like lipstick on a woman, though you did like oil paintings of them. This was something I found confusing.

  Something, or someone, gave rise to their creation and remains silently present in the newborn object.

  Scarry, ibid

  Genoa station pulls the train away from the coast, and lets in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and also a woman who hands me a card with a picture of a Buddha and an inscription. She is not beautiful, but she smiles out of her lumpy body and tells me, ‘This motto is very important for discovering happiness.’

  The Germans fuss and fuss about something. The woman holds the travel documents, as so frequently amongst couples. She digs into her bag, brings up a jar and rattles it out, counting pills. Then she goes into the corridor where she has has a coughing fit.

  The German couple leaves the carriage to queue by the exit door exactly eleven minutes before the train pulls into Milan station.

  Milano–Roma

  26th April

  How long does it take you to feel at home in a city? For me it’s twenty-four hours, perhaps only twelve before I’ve adopted cafés, shops, sides of the street, metro stops, before the whole place becomes almost too familiar and it’s getting near time to move on again.

  The arrivals hall at Milano station is so big and so beautiful that I am unable to leave. Porta Nuova (The New Door) leading out of the station is a gate without a view, a gate to a tangle of technology they don’t know how to hide: car park on one side, rails on the other. Looking back, the station is shored up with scaffolding, draped with plastic, and there’s no clear way from this marble monument to another, from here to the Milan I had intended to see between trains.

  Why build a palace for leaving a city? Why build it – so beautifully – in glass that’s got to get dirty? Why make stations like crystal palaces? This one took generations, and each twenty years piled on a thousand years of style: ancient Egyptian, Roman, Classical, Baroque. Now it’s a palace of everything, of accesses of convenience we never knew we wanted at a point of departure: underground shopping centres, public showers, restaurants. I’m here for only a few hours, to change trains. Perhaps all I need to know of Milan is its station. With its unfixed population, all arrivals and departures, with all the amenities of any city from police station to public gardens, but no bedrooms, it’s a city on fast forward, a city that doesn’t sleep.

  At a bar in Milano Grand Central station I buy a coffee and find, by chance, a WiFi network. By chance I have the privilege of being connected – of being the only one connected, an elite. I am the only person here with a laptop, and such a shiny, expensive, up-to-date machine at that. In the gleaming tank of the entrance hall I sense the triangular milling of people in the non-space between the drinks stand, newsagent, ticket office: environmentally dictated repetitive action – patten recognition. I am at home. A cover band plays flamenco versions of Sinatra songs over the speakers. The fake (or real?) black marble walls bounce light, as do the transparent salad containers stacked on black, marble-imitating formica behind spotless plastic visors at the counter. They are all equally beautiful.

  I shouldn’t be this happy.

  You have emailed me.

  What did you say? Just a few words: something I could interpret in many ways, friendly or unfriendly. It’s most probably both, but whatever it is, that space that was once alive between us opens out again instantly, digitally, some kind of sci-fi flat pack. It fills all the space in the very large hall right up to the dome of the roof and, suddenly, more than anything that is in front of me, here you are. You make here for me: the marble floors, the haze from the skylights.

  You make the station a fascist-designed joke (or is it me who makes it in the presence of your communication?). You make me want to write back, to tell you everything, knowing that each time I reply, my answer remakes me. You get me, every time – a still of me – a magazine mome
nt, something convulsive, caught. In Milan station, I am entirely present yet entirely absent, as love, like hope, slips momentarily from the present tense, and I live (I love) mostly in the clumsy future perfect, where love exists, or when it will have existed. I will have written to you… you will have written back… we will have met again… Helpless vistas thread faults, deep as fantasies, into the marble.

  But it’s time for my train. The virtual space folds in on itself, 3D to 2D, then 1D – a single point on my screen as it shuts down – and here is now again and, as I climb them, lines of light sink down into the marble steps, and I am skating on a surface. I walked with the constant fear of falling, like Stendhal in Florence, as though reality might drop away from me, or as though I might sink past it. What is this I am feeling?

  Is this Stendhal Syndrome – hyperkulturemia? I’ve heard of it. People faint, sometimes, in Italy, in Florence especially, when they experience great beauty. Faint? An appropriate reaction to beauty is to attempt to escape it – or an attempt to escape what you become in its presence – at any rate, an attempt to go into nothingness, to get some distance from the beautiful thing.

  Does anyone suffer from Stendhal Syndrome any more, being too used to beauty reproduced everywhere: webpage, magazine, ad, whatever? I was in the Uffizi Gallery once, in Florence, where Venus emerged from the waves, undecided as a model on a billboard. The Botticellis stared at me, dingy and tiny, from dark walls. Unlit, to hold onto them just as they are, they were smaller and greyer than I’d thought they possibly could be. But that was years ago and I was with the man I’d just married. There was no Google then but there were postcards, books, and posters and all the long week we were in Florence, we looked at things we’d seen before at a distance. Not knowing what else we should have done, we looked and looked at pictures in churches, and monasteries, and galleries and, because what we saw changed but what we were doing did not, it was as though we stayed still and the walls were moving, or like we were in one dark continuous room with slides, the blinds occasionally drawn up to blind us with accesses of sun. I don’t know what he felt – we were so young it was as difficult to ask as to answer – but I knew the pictures did not move me, except in their curious difference from what I’d thought they might have been.

  In Florence, Stendhal played tourist. He spent his time sitting in coffee shops, bought guide books and wandered from palace to palace. He was already familiar with the city’s map, he wrote, from ‘views’ he’d bought at home. Following them he noticed only what he’d been told to notice, went only where he was meant to go. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much then, when there were not so many people who wanted to look, when no one queued to see the paintings I saw. No one had given them a second glance for centuries, before Ruskin did, fifty years or so later. No one had Stendhal Syndrome before Stendhal, and no one who lives in Florence ever has it. Getting it is something to do with distance.

  There is even a movie that shows what it might feel like: The Stendhal Syndrome, directed by Dario Argento, starring his daughter Asia. She’s a cop stalking a serial killer, a beauty suffering from beauty’s overflow. When she looks at a painting it seems to come to life or rather, she seems to enter it as if it is her life (is this what beauty is?). The paintings in the movie move, separate into layers, pixilate. Floating blobs indicate their enveloping nature – early CGI, meant, I think, to show the overwhelming power of beauty – but the paintings, disintegrating, become silly, lose that frail travelling coincidence that beauty is.

  I board my train, and it pulls out of the station. I try to take some photos, but I am finding it difficult to take pictures here: I am always coming upon beautiful views. Just as I am travelling too light for souvenirs, I have no room for beauty, which is another souvenir, something moving no sooner recognised than stored in the memory to be accessed again and again. That’s nice – but, also – isn’t it terrible? The model photographed is already over, her intensity part of the past, and beautiful paintings go on just the same, whatever happens to you. Art is not always moving. If you want art to move you, you must move towards it until you are at exactly the right distance from it, like with those villas outside Nice except, even when you get up close to a painting it will show you no more, no less than it did before, but, when you get close to the villas, you sometimes find they have cracks and dirty yards and people having rows over broken drainpipes. Art’s another heartless trick of the world, but a heartening one.

  I’m travelling through central Italy now. The landscape is flat and industrial and, as it is not beautiful, there are no more ads showing beautiful women, and that’s OK with me. Looking through the window at the billboards on the beautiful line outside Nice was like looking at Matisse’s Nice paintings of colourful women in colourful interiors, where the woman sitting with the book is just as beautiful as the goldfish, or the jug, or the tablecloth, which is exactly as still and decorative as the room, which looks precisely as flat and as bright as the landscape, which is shown – its flowers lush as wallpaper – framed, like a second painting, though a window. Woman, room, landscape; all three are equally beautiful, each observed with no more, no less attention than any other. Still life: I wouldn’t want to think a picture the same as the real thing, though I’m always scared that I might.

  The girl, the bird, the vase, the book now seem unable in their solitude to justify or account for the weight of their own beauty. If each calls out for attention that has no destination beyond itself, each seems self-centered, too fragile to support the gravity of our immense regard.

  Scarry, ibid

  But people are not always beautiful, not like in paintings. And, even in Matisse’s paintings the women are lumpy, disjointed, but maybe he liked them that way, and, if he did, that’s nice, for who can second-guess what men desire? I don’t want to look like Matisse’s women, though, looking at the billboard models it’s impossible for me not to want to look like them. If I were a painter of women, and not also a woman myself, I guess I could just look but, if beauty were in my eye only as beholder, I would be nothing but a taste mortician, arranging other women on a slab. As for when I try to make myself beautiful – do my hair, put on mascara, lipstick – I move away from beauty, which must be spontaneous, innocent of itself, before the beholder gets hold of it and tackles it to the ground. But, if I were innocently, unknowingly beautiful, what good could that ever do me?

  Persons, too, though often beautiful, cannot be said to exist for the sake of being beautiful.

  Scarry, ibid

  There isn’t any beauty anywhere… Because, don’t you see? Beauty’s based on the principle of exclusion.

  Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

  No, I don’t want to be beautiful, not beauty seen. I tried to explain that to you once: that I wanted to look a certain way, but I didn’t want to always be looked at a certain way. We were in an art gallery, as it happens, but not paintings: a modern gallery showing an exhibition of films and photographs of performance art, of art intended to move only its first live audience. Most of the art we saw looked like it was meant to be shocking, and I don’t know whether that was also some kind of attempt at beauty.

  It may even be accurate to suppose that most people who pursue beauty have no interest in becoming themselves beautiful.

  Scarry, ibid

  There are people who complain that kind of art isn’t art because it isn’t beautiful, like art used to be when it was a painting of a vase of flowers, or a woman reading in front of a window looking onto a view of Nice. Or maybe that’s only what they used to say. Now even the sort of people you think might say that like all sorts of art, even a picture of violence like Picasso’s Guernica, which is a beautiful painting because it’s attractive – if it hadn’t been, it would have been forgotten. Beauty struggles with what beauty was, and we’re always changing our minds about it and the poor artists, whatever they try, don’t seem to be able to help making beautiful things. In The Stendhal Syndrome, which is such a violent movie that, at
first, it seems odd that it’s also about beauty, Asia Argento doesn’t look ugly when she is tortured. Her director dad keeps her alive but in pain, an attempt to hold beauty down without deadening it. There is no disjunct between beauty and horror.

  Of course it is imaginable that someone perceiving a beautiful garden might then trample on it, just as someone perceiving beautiful persons or paintings might then attempt to destroy them; but so many laws and rules are already being broken by these acts that it is hard to comprehend why, rather than bringing these rules and laws to bear on the problem, the rules of perceiving need to be altered to accommodate the violator.

  Scarry, ibid

  But what I felt at Milan station wasn’t that kind of beauty; it was a physical euphoria, an overflowing benevolence, or happy receptivity, something connective – at any rate, a boundlessness. I’m not sure whether it was directed inwards or outwards, was to do with recognising beauty or feeling that I might be beautiful. It seemed to be both at once. I get my bag down from the parcel shelf so I can look at the women in the magazine again to see if they’re still beautiful, and to check whether, after having a beautiful experience, I can recognise myself in them but, rifling through my packed clothes, I think I must have left it in the station bar, an unexploded grenade for someone else to find. Wait, here it is, shoved into my laptop sleeve and, looking twice, the poor models don’t even look beautiful any more, other than as a sort of code to what beauty might be. They’ve lost their power to shock me into connectivity. It doesn’t seem possible to experience beauty as it is first viewed except as a shock. If it doesn’t blow you away, you’re left with anxiety: look at the page, look away, look back. Is it still beauty?

  André Breton ends Nadja by saying something about beauty, just when I thought he was going to say something about love. He says beauty is ‘convulsive’ – a combination of stop and start, not like the models who look like they’re moving but aren’t, not really, that ‘beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon, and which I know will never leave, which has not left,’ that it’s moving like life, and still like art, all at the same time, like a movie, which is what a writer would talk about in the 1920s, but a movie that can’t be repeated. And that’s what I wanted to be, isn’t it, always leaving but never, oh no not ever, moving fast enough to arrive? Because no one is ever so beautiful as when she is leaving.