The paticcasamuppāda formulation (as I see it) does not admit of alternative interpretations—there is one and one only

 

In any case, the paticcasamuppāda formulation (as I see it) does not admit of alternative interpretations—there is one and one only. I do not see that anyone offering a number of different interpretations as equally valid can possibly be right in any of them. (It is quite possible that someone actually reaching sotãpatti, and therefore seeing paticcasamuppāda for himself, might still hesitate before deciding on the meaning of the expanded—twelve term—formulation, since what he sees for himself is imasmin sati idam hoti,* etc., and not its expansion in terms—avijjā, sankhārā, and so on—whose meaning he may not know. But one thing is certain: whatever interpretation he gives will be in conformity with his private knowledge, imasmin sati…, and since he has already grasped the essence of the matter he will not look around for alternative interpretations.) But the Ven. Thera may have had something else in mind when he spoke.

Nanavira Thera
**
As I see it at present, the importance of the paṭicca-samuppāda lies not so much in the twelve (or less or more) members as in the relationship imasmiṃ sati … (and its undoing imasmiṃ asati) which is underlined in DN 15. This firstly implies complexity in experience (no complexity: no experience). The choice of the “12 members” is less philosophical than psychological, which is why it is variable. The undoing, as I see it, is the “detail of voidness,” which is the ethical key to the, Dhamma, since it is the “Abschattung” (shading off. —Ed.) of voidness in saṃsāra itself that renders it impossible in the Dhamma to ascribe absolutiveness to any particular value (such as divine grace, justice, etc.) and so enter upon the “War of philosophical systems of the absolute.” The formula imasmiṃ sati, …’ (applied psychologically by a choice of interrelated-instances) is used as an instrument in DN 15 to describe and analyse the mental process of naming (function of nāma-rūpa) and language (nirutti, etc.), and in MN 38 to describe and analyse the peculiar nature of consciousness (viññāṇa) in its constitutive relationship (through mediate states) to being. But both can only be studied in the Pali with careful discrimination of roots…

Nanamoli Thera*

* On his understanding of the paṭicca-samuppāda:

According to Ven Nanamoli, regarding dependent arising, «To the question: “What are these sets of terms intended to describe?”

we may answer tentatively that they are intended to describe experience of any possible kind where ignorance (that is lack of personal realization of the Truths) is present. »

“The Buddha’s purpose is to describe enough of the world to be able to show how suffering can be ended, not to produce full and detailed elaborations, which would be endless and arrive nowhere.”

For him, one can equalise suffering and conceit “I am”, nibbana is the cessation of asmimāna (AN 9:1O one who perceives non-self eradicates the conceit ‘I am,’ [which is] nibbāna here and now.”) Since Suttas define also nibbana as the cessation of bhava (… I know this, I see this: ‘Nibbāna is the cessation of bhava.’” (bhavanirodho nibbānaṃ) SN 12: 68) Ven Nanamoli emphasis the necessity to translate bhava as being:

I argue, to translate (even to interpret to oneself) bhava by ‘becoming’ is an opiate that leaves the illusion of ‘being’ untreated.

According to Ven Nanamoli dependent arising «is not a logical proposition, nor is it a temporal cause-result chain. Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible.»

As I understand him, he sees dependent arising as a kind of mirror where one can see one’s own ignorance, namely that what was previously taken for granted: one’s own being ( “I am” ) as impermanent, suffering, and dependently arisen upon ignorance. When paticcasamuppada is seen as a process, immediate dependence of one’s own being on ignorance disappears from the vision, so he says: “Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible”.

As to details he suggests that the Buddha, by the way, has solved seemingly unsolvable philosophical problem:

«But this particular description (dependent arising) is aimed at including everything.

And here a difficulty arises. A description must be made in terms of something other than what it describes, or it is not a description. It has to reproduce in other material certain structures that are in what it describes. This fact makes it impossible for a description to be a description and complete at the same time. How is the D/O complete, then? Or is it not a description after all?

It is in fact both, but it attains that in a rather peculiar way. (…)

The right way of treating this fact is to take the D/O, not as an individual description, but as an integrated set of descriptions. Each member provides in fact a set of terms to describe the rest of the world. Together they cover the whole subjective/objective, positive/negative world.»

According to Ven Nanamoli the relationship between these descriptive items is that of sine qua non.

So for example “with feeling as a condition craving” is not description of temporal process where something is first felt, and than it leads to craving -at least as far as dependent arising goes- but that of dependence, structurally craving can arise only when feeling is present, without feeling there is no possibility of craving to arise. Such vision, unlike cause and effect interpretation makes possible to see now and here one’s own death as impermanent and dependently arisen: as unborn, I cannot die, and to see the body as “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self” should undermine one’s own certainty of being born.

In other words, Ven Nanamoli regards the death as merely certain event in the field of consciousness, which can be observed objectively, but not experienced subjectively. More or less in the same way as I cannot imagine my own death, however well I exercise my imagination, observing funeral, “my own” dead body and so on, I will always survive as the observer. So he says using so called indirect communication:

In a syllogism (1. All men are mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3.Therefore Socrates is mortal), the generalization (all men are mortal) must have been arrived at by induction. No inductive process is ever absolutely certain. There is always the leap, the assumption, of generalizing and therefore one of the premises of a syllogism must have an element of uncertainty. So it cannot prove anything with certainty.

A syllogism is therefore a signpost pointing where to look for direct experience, but can inherently never give information that is 100% certain. But a syllogism (on metaphysical subjects) can also point to what can, inherently, never be experienced; then it is an anomaly.

In other place he says: All the questions asked about death are wrongly put.

All informations provided here can be found in the Thinker’s Notebook, perhaps except an idea of sine qua non relationship between the items of dependent arising, which as far as I remember can be found somewhere in his translation of the Neti."

Tucker Carlson: "You sort of wonder, like, where are the dads here?" Is he himself among the missing?

 

Tucker Carlson is appropriately indignant that public school teachers are using their classrooms to sexualize schoolchildren. He seems genuinely perplexed as to why we allow such an obviously disgusting practice and especially why “parents” allow this to be done to their own children. Frustrated, he adds:

Adults are not allowed to get involved in the sex lives of children unless they’re the parents of those children, period. … I am just against, across the board, creepy teachers talking to other people’s children about those children’s sex lives. That is totally wrong. … I think it’s a crime, and I don’t think any normal father would put up with that. And you sort of wonder, like, where are the dads here, saying, “You talk to my child about his sex life one more time, I’m gonna hurt you”?

Does he really not know? Can such an intelligent commentator on public affairs really be so clueless about “the biggest social issue…facing America”? I realize that the word “parents” still invokes images of two-parent families in suburban houses, as in 1950s television series. Does he really not know that very few such “parents” exist anymore and the few that do remain do not put their children in public schools?

Does he not know — to answer his question — that the dads have either been thrown out of their homes by welfare agencies and divorce courts or were never allowed in in the first place or are so intimidated and emasculated by the possibility of being ejected that they can do nothing to protect their children from this and worse? Many are not allowed even to see their children or know what happens to them in public school, let alone rescue them from it.

I suspect he does know, when he stops to think about it. I think he knows, because for years his commentaries have been laced with little asides indicating that he knows — and cares. He also interviewed Dennis Hannon and Jeffrey Younger, both of whose sons were ordered to be castrated and physically turned into girls by feminist judges. (Neither interview led to a larger investigation of why courts can issue such orders.) In fact, I am certain he knows, because, years ago, he invited me onto his public broadcasting show to discuss my first book on the systematic elimination and destruction of fathers by family courts. That was just before he was dismissed from that network, and the interview never took place. Nor did any other.

So why is he perplexed and why does he persist in this illusion?

Clearly, he is afraid. He may also be a little embarrassed that he has conspicuously never investigated this. Many of us see Carlson as a cut above other journalists, even dissident ones. But in this case he adamantly refuses to “go there”. And he is not alone. The almighty and lucrative divorce juggernaut terrifies far above any other government operation: far more than the FBI, CIA, or Homeland Security. It is the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States, and it operates with no scrutiny precisely because it intimidates — and yes, emasculates — even the most stout-hearted men, including politicians, journalists, academics, and other public figures with more to lose.

Elsewhere, Carlson himself expresses the impact not just on fathers themselves but on the most powerful men throughout our society, including Republican and conservative politicians, who often talk big about “manhood” and scold others for their alleged deficiency of it, but who are themselves too feminized to act against the government officials and policies that undermine it, even though scrutinizing the abuse of power is their job: “They’re weak,” Carlson says. “They’ve decided, ‘The other side is ascended.  The Left is winning.  I’m not gonna push any buttons that might infuriate them.’  They’re not lion-hearted.”

Tellingly, he adds, “The only ones who will do it are women.”

Tucker Carlson does an excellent job of telling us all about the foolish and destructive things being done by leftists in power. (I think most people would surely agree that sexualizing and mutilating children tops the list.) Where he has been less successful is telling us why they are allowed to get away with it and how we can stop them. Destroying men, fathers, and masculinity is more than a tangential reason, and he surely realizes this or he would not drop so many hints about it.

Carlson stands at a threshold. If he can summon the courage to answer his own question with the depth he applies to say, the joys of rural life, he will have earned the gratitude of not only Americans, but the world. If not, it may be time for us to find another journalist in shining plaids.

https://substack.com/redirect/d8584b66-8b06-4afc-a766-4cee5cdae79a?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

Mark Collett Starmer’s Guide to Rioting – Two Tier Policing Explained

[In this video Mark Collett, leader of the pro-White British nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, says:

“Britain’s system of two-tier policing has now been exposed to the world – but what are the rules? How can you get away with rioting and destroying public property? Who gets a ‘free pass’ and which rioters does Starmer and his cabinet cheer on? Find out all this and much, much more…”

– KATANA]

TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 1,922 – 12:03 mins)

So, let’s take ten minutes or so to just go through exactly how the UK’s two-tier justice system works when it comes to the rights of protestors, or if those involved are White “rioters”.

And that’s a nice place to kick this off, with the issue of race and ethnicity – because let’s face it, how you are treated largely depends upon your ethnic background.

If you are black, if you are a Muslim, or if you are from a minority background, you’re getting an immediate pass. You will always be referred to as a “protester”, any acts of violence or disorder that you are involved in will be down played or completely ignored by the State and the media, and the police will treat you with kid gloves. You won’t be faced down with riot police, instead you will likely be greeted by police officers in regular uniform who will back off and retreat rather than confronting you.

What’s more, if you’re of Afro-Caribbean heritage and you’re rioting over the death of a black career criminal, the police will get down on their knees and grovel in front of you, begging for your approval!

The media and the government will then go to great lengths to explain to the wider public the apparently completely understandable and totally legitimate reasoning behind any acts of disorder. Politicians and leading police officers will then call for dialogue with community leaders and confusing phrases like “policing with consent” will be thrown around to reassure any unruly mobs that they can do as they wish, whilst simultaneously attempting to explain to the public why no one got arrested. Because apparently, when an ethnic minority group is involved, members of that group have to give their “consent” in order to be policed, or something to that effect.

Often, leading politicians and even future Prime Ministers, will then get behind the rioters and their cause, releasing statements that support both those involved and their ideological goals. This happened in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots when both Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner took the knee and made heartfelt pleas to the black community, reassuring them that they were totally on board with all of what happened and that they firmly believed that every act of violence was carried out for the “right reasons!”

When dealing with ethnic minorities, there will also be other interesting uses of language and seemingly bizarre political framing. For example, if large groups of heavily armed Muslims gather together wearing balaclavas and then blockade roads, attack motorists and threaten those they perceive to be outsiders, the media will play this down and politicians will jump to their defence. The public will then be reassured that these Muslims are just defending their community and that they were scared of “racists” coming in from out of town.

The police will not intervene, the police will not attempt to confiscate their weapons and the city’s police chief will then quickly book an appointment with the local Imam and spend an afternoon sat at a Mosque in order to be “educated” so that he can better understand why this was all a legitimate course of action.

Sometimes however, the media will be unable to retain any credibility if they continue to use the term “protest”, especially when a major city is literally in flames and people are being publicly beaten in the streets.

In these cases, the government and the media will resort to Plan B: Painting the rioters as “social justice warriors” who only behaved in such a manner because of decades of systemic oppression that was callously ignored by the establishment and fuelled by White people’s racist attitudes! This is literally what happened after the 2011 riots that took place in London.

Finally, when the rioting and violence has ended, the judiciary will ensure that anyone who was arrested will get the most lenient sentences possible. The media and the press will agree with these sentences, going to great lengths to paint those found guilty as good boys who “dindu nuffin” and who were just swept up in an unfortunate moment. The media will then announce that these “good boys” needed lighter sentences, as otherwise they could have been prevented from going on to become rocket scientists, brain surgeons and entrepreneurs – the very citizens who will enrich modern Britain in ways that White people simply couldn’t!

Modern day historians will then lovingly look back on these riots as defining moments in the struggle for social justice, with the riots as defining moments in the struggle for social justice, with the rioters themselves being painted as urban folk heroes who risked everything for freedom and equality! These are the “heroes” who will one day replace the likes of Sir Admiral Nelson in our children’s school books!

So, what happens if you are White and involved in disorder?

Well, that depends on what the disorder was connected to. So, for example, if a White person was being an “ally” to a person of colour, then that White person may also be given a pass. Take for example groups like Antifa or the White individuals and Left-wing groups who supported the BLM riots in 2020. If a White person is caught committing acts of criminal damage, like say, destroying a historic statue and dumping it into a river, those people will be praised by the media and politicians and let off by the courts. What’s more, the local police will stand idly by clapping and cheering as the criminality takes place.

So yes, you can be White and get away with violence and disorder, but only if you’re fighting for an anti-White cause!

But what happens if you’re White and you are out protesting because of an injustice suffered by the White the community? Well, then you’re in for a very different ride, …

The first thing you must understand is that the government, the media and the police will NEVER even acknowledge White communities exist, let alone that those communities may have grievances or may have suffered some form of injustice. Those who do suggest that there are White communities and that those White communities deserve to be heard, will immediately be branded as “racists”. But if, in very rare circumstances, the media do hint at there being White communities, you can be reassured that it will always be in the context that those particular communities are boring, stale and in need of a dose of diversity.

Even before any protest has actually taken place, the media will warn of possible violence and predict all manner of wrong doings, with the protestors being referred to in negative terms – either as thugs, hooligans or as “far-Right”. Far-Right being the new pejorative term for White working folk who are willing to stand up for their own interests. Once White protestors do take to the street, they will not be met by smiling officers dressed in their beat uniform. Quite the opposite. White protestors will be met by riot police, mounted police or face off with snarling dogs whilst being kettled and intimidated. And you can bet your bottom dollar that officers won’t be going down on one knee when policing White people.

Once the media coverage of a White protest begins to emerge, the protesters will always be painted in the worst way imaginable. The pictures in the papers and the clips shown on television will always be carefully cherry picked in order to paint White protestors as violent, feckless, drunk, and, in short, as the kind of people you would

expect to see on the Jeremy Kyle show. This is done in order to prevent other White people from identifying with the protestors or wanting to join them.

And if violence or disorder does break out, you can guarantee it will be dealt with both swiftly and in the harshest manner possible. The police will not begin quietly retreating, there will be no polite calls for calm and policing by consent will never, ever, be mentioned! Then the head cracking will begin – and that policy will extend to the young and old and male and female alike. You won’t have policemen in White shirts on their knees pleading for calm, you will have old ladies carrying placards slammed face down on the pavement, arms up their backs, being hand cuffed and hurled in the back of a van by militarised officers that look like extras from a futuristic dystopian science fiction fantasy!

The press and the media will then immediately brand the protest as a “riot”, and the pejorative terms will be ramped up to maximum. The media will also publish the faces of protestors demanding more information on them and looking to name and shame those involved. The following day, politicians and police chiefs will appear at press conferences to demand the harshest possible sentences, endorse draconian crackdowns and to issue calls for tough new legislation.

Never once will any of the underlying reasons for the protest be addressed and politicians certainly won’t be delivering any fawning addresses about “victims rights” or “social justice”. It doesn’t matter if the protest was over the fact that hundreds of thousands of White girls were groomed by migrant gangs or if it was called because White children were murdered by a knife wielding Rwandan. According to the establishment; there’s no justification what-so-ever for Whites to act in this manner – there will be no White George Floyd, and Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner will not be standing in solidarity with Whites who have just been told that three little girls were butchered by a man that the press are describing as a “choirboy”.

In fact, anyone who does speak out in solidarity with the protestors will be attacked and threatened. Whites who are angry over the underlying causes of the disorder and who attempt to articulate their concerns online will be accused of fanning the flames of violence, and then it will be time for police officers to begin kicking in the doors of people who said the wrong thing on social media.

Finally, as the dust begins to settle on the protests, the newspapers will enthusiastically praise the judges who have handed out multi-year sentences to dads, business owners and those with previously clean criminal records – as after all, a message has to be sent! To White people!

And that message is crystal clear: DON’T YOU EVER, EVER, ADVOCATE FOR YOUR OWN RIGHTS or IN THE INTERESTS OF YOUR ETHNIC GROUP!

This is modern Britain, this is what the press, the media, the police, the judiciary, the politicians and of course, what Keir Starmer, our Prime Minster, call “justice”. And all of these people will then have the bare faced cheek to tell you, that they believe in equality.

Katana →

The man who will lightly sacrifice a long-formed mental habit is exceptional

You said that, in your view, the incident of the burning of the let-ters was the act of an unstable mind. To this I replied that nothing is done in the world, either good or bad, without passion; and I said that ‘mental stability’, too often, is simply lack of passion. As it happens, I was reading yesterday one of Huxley’s earlier books of essays (Proper Studies, 1927) and I came across a passage that discusses this very point. Perhaps it will make my own statement clearer. Here it is:

The man who will lightly sacrifice a long-formed mental habit is exceptional. The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar.
Trotter, in his admirable Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, has called them the ‘stable-minded,’ and has set over against them a minority of ‘unstable-minded people,’ fond of innovation for its own sake…. The tendency of the stable-minded man… will always be to find that ‘whatever is, is right.’ Less subject to the habits of thought formed in youth, the unstable-minded naturally take pleasure in all that is new and revolutionary . It is to the unstable-minded that we owe progress in all its forms, as well as all forms of destructive revolution. The stable-minded, by their reluctance to accept change, give to the social structure its durable solidity . There are many more stable- than unstable-minded people in the world (if the proportions were changed we should live in a chaos); and at all but very exceptional moments they possess power and wealth more than proportionate to their numbers. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted and always derided as fools and madmen. A heretic, according to the admirable definition of Bossuet, is one who ‘emits a singular opinion’—that is to say, an opinion of his own, as opposed to one that has been sanctified by general acceptance. That he is a scoundrel goes without saying. He is also an imbecile—a ‘dog’ and a ‘devil,’ in the words of St. Paul, who utters ‘profane and vain babblings.’ No heretic (and the orthodoxy from which he departs need not necessarily be a religious orthodoxy; it may be philosophic, ethical, artistic, economic), no emitter of singular opinions, is ever reasonable in the eyes of the stable-minded majority . For the reasonable is the familiar, is that which the stable-minded are in the habit of thinking at the moment when the heretic utters his singular opinion. To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.(pp.71-2)

Amongst people of Buddhist countries it is, I think, not properly understood (quite naturally) that, generally speaking, Europeans who become Buddhists belong necessarily to the ‘unstable-minded’ and not to the ‘stable-minded’. The Buddha’s Teaching is quite alien to the European tradition, and a European who adopts it is a rebel. A ‘stable-minded’ European is a Christian (or at least he accepts the Christian tradition: religion for him—whether he accepts it or not—, means Christianity; and a Buddhist European is not even ‘religious’—he is simply a lunatic).

But in a Buddhist country, naturally, to be a Buddhist is to be ‘stable-minded’, since one is, as it were, ‘born a Buddhist’. And ‘born-Buddhists’ find it difficult to understand the unstable-minded European Buddhist, who treats the Buddha’s Teaching as a wonderful new discovery and then proposes, seriously, to practise it.* The stable-minded traditional Buddhist cannot make out what the unstable-minded European Buddhist is making such a fuss about. I am not, naturally, speaking in praise of odd behaviour for its own sake (the Buddha always took into account the prejudices and superstitions of the mass of laymen, and legislated as far as possible to avoid scandal), but I do say that it is wrong to regard odd behaviour as bad simply because it is odd. I myself am in a very ambiguous situation: here, in Buddhist Ceylon, I find that I am regarded as a most respectable person—complete strangers show me deference, and uncover their head as they pass—; but my relatives in England, and no doubt most of my former friends too, think that I am a freak and a case for the psychiatrist, and if they were to take off their hat when they saw me that could only be to humour my madness. Actually, however respectable and stable-minded I may appear (if we choose to ignore a deplorable tendency to suicide), I do not feel in the least respectable (I don’t care tuppence for the durable solidity of the social structure) and I certainly count myself amongst the ‘unstable-minded’ (which does not mean, of course, that I am mentally fickle). But although the passage from Huxley is quite good, I really mean something rather more subtle than the mere expression of unorthodox opinions.

* It often happens, of course, that he has got it upside-down and inside-out; but at least he has enthusiasm (at any rate to begin with).

Nanavira Thera 

My depression points to my not knowing how to lose ...

For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic-it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?
The wound I have just suffered, some setback or other in my love life or my profession, some  sorrow or bereavement affecting my relationship with close relatives-such are often the easily spotted triggers of my despair. A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the norrnal category of normal people or else falls on a  loved one with the same radical effect, or yet . . . What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day ... All this suddenly gives me another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair , scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of my despondency, the impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems unbearable, save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up to the disaster. I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow ... Absent from other people's rneaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.

My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne's statement "To philosophize is to learn how to die" is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred-which came to a head in Heidegger's care and the disclosure of our "being-for-death." Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.

Nevertheless, the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms me. What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which realize l have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, or grief over someone or something that once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned rne. Depression points to my not knowing how to lose-I have perhaps been unable to find a valid cornpensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being-and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

from the book Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia by  Julia Kristeva

In Sporting Endeavors

 

(in which we wonder whether Philippides would have used public transport after the Battle of Marathon if given the opportunity)

Like anthropology and journalism, sport provides fertile ground for those wishing to describe places they haven’t been to. If numerous sports take place in enclosed arenas and therefore aren’t directly concerned, a substantial number of risky practices like mountaineering, sailing or motor races, aeronautical escapades or hunting in faraway countries1 necessarily lead their devotees to ask themselves whether it is worth throwing themselves into a dangerous, exhausting venture if they can instead limit their efforts to the essential and concentrate on the story.

It is well within their interests to develop skills that will allow them to speak with accuracy about a sporting performance they have refrained from making and produce a convincing line about it that includes plenty of descriptions of the places they have been to, in order to remove all doubts from those suspecting that they may have taken a shortcut or stayed at home.

In 1980, a woman by the name of Rosie Ruiz, a young American of Cuban origin, twenty-six years old, entered the annals of athletic history for two different reasons. The first one, purely sports related, was that she won the women’s division in an important athletic challenge, the Boston Marathon, also setting the third-fastest time for a woman in any marathon.2

This event is one of the oldest distance races and one of the most famous in the world. It usually takes place on the third Monday in April. It has the characteristic of not being open to all candidates but only to preselected runners who have achieved a minimum qualifying time in another official marathon, ensuring an exceptional sporting standard.

It is still easy today to peruse the images that have survived of this historical course and the triumphant arrival of Rosie Ruiz. We discover a young woman in a yellow shirt, wearing the number W50, running the last few meters of the race with a stumbling stride before collapsing into the arms of spectators who help her, half-fainting, across the line. After this, two policemen take over and support her under her arms to prevent her from collapsing entirely.

Next we see her answering a journalist’s questions. Carrying the laurel wreath that right until 1986 was the only reward given to winners of this race and holding a silver cup, Rosie Ruiz, clearly in a state of euphoria, struggles to catch her breath and only briefly responds to the questions. Asked whether anyone helped her, she replied that she trained alone and was her own coach.

Rosie Ruiz’s sporting performance was remarkable in any case because she ran the marathon in two hours, thirty-one minutes and fifty-six seconds, which was the best female time ever recorded at the Boston event and the third best time ever run by a woman in an official marathon. This fact alone made her an instant celebrity, something she was to remain.

However, it wasn’t Rosie Ruiz’s exceptional time that brought her so much fame. She mainly went down in history for having lost her title again so quickly, after being accused of not actually having run the full course.

One of the things that attracted the organizers’ attention was the exceptional time Rosie Ruiz made compared to her previous performance at the New York City Marathon. An even more revelatory indication in their eyes was the fact that the young woman recovered so rapidly after having crossed the finish line and could give no other explanation for her stunning physical condition than that she’d got up that morning brimming with energy.

Worse still, the officials sitting at various points around the race could not remember seeing the young woman pass by and wondered what mysterious, unknown path she had taken to be able to cover the distance between the start and the finish in record time.

The scandal reached greater proportions when the officials, looking into the New York Marathon—which had enabled Ruiz to qualify for the Boston event—became convinced, with witnesses to support it, that the young woman had covered part of the course by metro.

Accused of having cheated, Rosie Ruiz was disqualified from the Boston Marathon and the runner up, Jacqueline Gareau, was awarded the title. But Ruiz never admitted the fraud and continued to calmly affirm, despite all the evidence, that she had completed the legendary marathon in first place.

I personally have difficulty understanding the reasons that lead the organizers to strip Rosie Ruiz of her title. As someone who is rather insensitive to sporting disciplines and remains perplexed by the idea of anyone spending part of their life trying to run a certain distance in a minimum amount of time, it isn’t easy to understand the reproaches made to this young woman.

In terms of history, in any case, she doesn’t seem to have lacked respect for the spirit of the marathon, which consisted of finding the best way of getting from one place to another in a limited amount of time. When Philippides ran from Marathon to Athens to tell the Areopagus that the Persian army had been defeated, he chose the only method that was available to him, but it is obvious that he would have chosen a faster way if he’d had the opportunity.

In terms of sporting logic, aside from the fact that I doubt that using public transport is expressly forbidden in the marathon’s rules, it would be naive to suppose that Rosie Ruiz was an isolated case. Other similar cases have been identified—suggesting that the number of frauds is actually quite high.3 One only needs to leaf through the abundance of literature dedicated to exploits in inaccessible places with something of a critical mind to guess that some of these texts, like those of Marco Polo and Chateaubriand, were written at a fireside, and that the writers should be judged for their literary performance, not their sporting prowess.

The strangest thing about this story is that Rosie Ruiz was primarily reproached for her lack of imagination. The organizers considered it to her detriment that she was incapable of accurately describing certain parts of the route, in particular a girls’ college that all the competitors should have passed—Wellesley College—whose students traditionally cheer with rapturous enthusiasm.

It is somewhat paradoxical that part of the charge against her was Rosie Ruiz’s inability to describe the route, as if to criticize her refusal to resort to the particular kind of fiction—artistically fertile but unacceptable in sports—that is literary truth. The argument can easily be turned around because it would be just as easy to think that, if she’d really wanted to cheat, Rosie Ruiz would have gone to the trouble of gathering information on the route.

As for myself, I would have no trouble, if asked, recounting the time I took part in the Boston Marathon some years ago.

For example, I have clear memories of the start of the race in the small town of Hopkinton, the gentle descent toward Ashland and going past the clock tower, then the train depot at Framingham, before skirting Lake Cochituate on our left and hearing, around the twenty-kilometer mark, the screams of the Wellesley students in the distance, carried by the wind.

How would it be possible to forget those groups of enthusiastic female students, frantically brandishing placards bearing inscriptions as encouraging as “I love you!” or “Marry me!” in front of the magnificent campus lost amid squirrel-filled trees. I can even give you a detailed description of the young blond woman wearing a blue suit and a red scarf who took it upon herself to run alongside me for several meters, spraying my face with a bottle of water.

And I can still remember, after we’d passed the park with the kangaroos, the hills before Newton, in particular the most difficult to climb, Heartbreak Hill, which precedes the prestigious Boston College, whose gothic tower spiked with four spires irresistibly reminds all Parisian competitors of the slender silhouette of the Saint-Jacques Tower.

Finally, I remember the route’s gentle decline toward Boston after that last climb that heralds the Charles River, and how, although exhausted, my companions and I were transported by an increasing mass of spectators who were more and more enthusiastic the closer we got to the finish line, where we were taken into the care of an army of volunteers who carried us off to rest and regain our strength.

Despite appearances, Rosie Ruiz’s fraud, if ever proven; the fantastical filter Marco Polo used to describe China to his beloved; and Margaret Mead reinventing the Samoan Islands with her playful young friends have more than one thing in common.

The first thing they have in common is the fact that we are talking about what I earlier called an imaginary realm, even if in one example a city is concerned. Undoubtedly we find ourselves faced with a different scenario than that of China or the Samoan Islands since a proliferation of concrete details is set against an abstract representation of loci here, reduced to a cord stretched across a finish line. But what the experiences do have in common is the rewriting of space, or, if one prefers, its reconfiguration, allowing the subjects to find themselves in a new place, more fulfilling in terms of fantasy.

The imaginary realm invented by Rosie Ruiz, where, like Peter Pan, she is capable of overcoming the laws of nature and achieving improbable sporting exploits, is modeled on that of childhood, whose privileges she rediscovers for a while. It is a realm where everything is possible: there are no barriers, no limits; dreams can rapidly become reality. It is a place where it is conceivable, for example, to transport oneself, without difficulty and seemingly without time, from one place to another in a city that has become a purely psychological space.

It is this experience of infantile omnipotence that Rosie Ruiz acts out in an imaginary place, completely constructed around the instant she triumphantly crosses the finish line to a cheering public, experiencing a jubilation that presumably resonates with the most distant of her experiences. There is neither distance nor time between desire and its realization in this fantasy space with its dreamlike construction where the pleasure principle overrides the reality principle.

In both cases, this rewriting has an identical goal: to highlight the subject in a state of absolute pleasure. The amorous scenes with Chinese women dreamed up by Marco Polo and the multiple sexual encounters Margaret Mead imagines taking place over the entire Samoan Islands, transformed into a kind of primitive “general scene,” are condensed in this moment of unique self-celebration, its intensity multiplied by the prism of the media, in absolute narcissistic happiness.

So the example set by Rosie Ruiz shows how talk of imaginary realms cannot be understood without introducing a third notion corresponding to the unconscious life of the subject, that of the inner landscape.

Freud used this expression for a while to describe what was repressed in the mind, though finally it wasn’t retained by psychoanalytic theory. “Repression,” he wrote in his Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1933), “is for me an inner foreign country (inneres Ausland), just as reality, if you will allow me to use an unusual expression, is an outer foreign country (äusseres Ausland).”4Thus he evoked the image of an inner country or landscape and other related images like those of regions and provinces5 in his search for tropes that would allow him to describe unconscious reality and the words best suited to showing it and thinking about it. It is an image that is a continuation of the propositions he often used to represent the interior of the psyche as a spatial form.

If the notion of an inner landscape is fitting, it is because it expresses how the interior of the psyche is certainly of a topological order, as Freud imagined and as Lacan further intuited with his idea of topology. It can also be thought of in geographical terms, with its landscapes, its elevations, its pits and even its inhabitants, which could include those parts of ourselves that seem to lead their own lives and, at times, be ready to seize autonomy at our expense.6And it is to this fantasy image of an inner landscape that we refer to more or less consciously when we represent the insides of our minds like a region, a country or a city, open or fortified but separated from the others by frontiers that are more or less easy to cross and that assure our protection from the external world, even if we sometimes let down our barriers to certain privileged people.

The inner landscape, which might be another name for the unconscious, has both a collective and an unconscious dimension and is not isolated from the real world. On the contrary, it is behind the transformations to which we subject our representations of reality. And it is when the subject does not find peace there that he undertakes to substitute an imaginary world for the real one, whose geography is influenced by that of the inner landscape, becoming a place where he invents a realm that suits his needs.

If it isn’t possible to know Rosie Ruiz’s inner landscape with any accuracy—that is to say, her unconscious life with its spaces and its inhabitants—we can still try to gain an idea from the traces left in her transformation of the real landscape of Boston into an imaginary realm, reduced in its totalitarian fiction to a space contracted around herself and her virtual exploit.

It is an inner realm that she would have complete mastery of and where she would also have control over space and time, as each of us secretly dreams. It is a place where she would rule without sharing, adored by subjects overwhelmed by admiration, retransmitting to her in a kind of infinite refraction that glorious image that certain self-obsessed rulers have others build for them in the form of statues in all the public spaces in their countries so as to have the pleasure, when walking, of being reflected back at themselves continually.

As we can see, the reproach made to Rosie Ruiz of being incapable of accurately describing the route of the Boston Marathon can be understood in two different ways. First of all, it can be understood in the traditional way as a reproach for having tried to appropriate a title for herself that she had no right to.

But, according to a different kind of logic, it can also be understood as a reproach for not having been enough of a writer and not managing, by attaining that particular kind of truth that literature aims at, to reconfigure space in a sufficiently convincing manner for her readers and listeners to be able to accept it as their own and attempt to inhabit it in their minds.

1.    See the example the eponymous Tartarin de Tarascon sets in Alphonse Daudet’s novel.

2.    VP+

3.    One celebrated case is that of the 1906 Tour de France, in which four cyclists were disqualified for taking the train from Nancy to Dijon.

4.    Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenburg Verlag, 1981), 50. Unfortunately, the recent Presses Universitaires de France translation has used the expressions “territoire extérieur interne” and “territoire extérieur externe.”

5.    “Superego, ego and id, these are the three empires, regions (Gebiete), provinces (Provinzen), between which we share the psychic apparatus of the individual, and now we are going to focus on their interrelationships.” Ibid., 62.

6.    Later in the text of Neue Folge, Freud constructs a complete allegory around the inner country and its different regions: “I imagine therefore a country whose terrain presents a varied configuration: there are hills, plains and lakes. The population is composed of Germans, Magyars and Slovaks performing various activities. Let us suppose the Germans, cattle-breeders, live on the hills, the Magyars, farmers and winegrowers, live on the plains, and the Slovaks, fishers and weavers, on the edge of the lakes. If this distribution was tidy and absolute, a Wilson would be delighted; geography would be easy to teach. But it is likely that when visiting the region, you would find less order and more confusion. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks sometimes live all mixed up, it is possible to have arable land on the hills and cattle on the plains.” Ibid., 63.

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Pierre Bayard

Encounters with Someone You Love

(in which we see, along with Bill Murray and his groundhog, that the ideal way to seduce someone by speaking about books he or she loves without having read them yourself would be to bring time to a halt) 

CAN WE IMAGINE two beings so close that their inner books come, at least for a while, to coincide? Our last example of literary confrontation brings up quite another kind of risk from that of appearing to be an impostor in the eyes of a book’s author: that of being unable to seduce the person you have fallen for, because of not having read the books he or she likes.

It is a commonplace to say that our sentimental life is deeply marked by books, from childhood onward. First of all, fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.

It is a strange adventure indeed that befalls Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), the hero of Harold Ramis’s film Groundhog Day.1 The star weatherman of a major American television station, Connors is sent in the dead of winter, accompanied by the program’s producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman, to cover an important event of American provincial life, Groundhog Day.

The day takes its name from a ceremony, widely reported in the media, that happens in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, every year on February 2. On that date, a groundhog named Phil ( just like Phil Connors) is pulled from his hutch, and based on his reactions, it is determined whether the winter is about to end or will continue for six more weeks. The groundhog consultation ceremony is rebroadcast throughout the country, alerting the nation to whatever bad weather is in store.

Having arrived on the eve of the ceremony with his crew, Phil Connors spends the night in a bed-and-breakfast. The next morning, he goes to the spot where the segment is to be shot and provides his commentary on the behavior of the groundhog, which indicates that winter will continue. With little desire to steep in small-town life any longer than necessary, Phil Connors resolves to head back to Pittsburgh that very day, but the crew’s vehicle gets stuck in a blizzard as they try to leave town, and the three journalists are forced to resign themselves to spending another night in Punxsutawney.

Everything begins for Phil the following morning, if that phrase makes any sense, since the following morning is exactly what fails to arrive. Awakened at six o’clock by the music of his alarm clock, Phil notices that the music is the same as that of the previous day, but is not particularly concerned. His anxiety begins when he realizes that the broadcast that follows is also identical to that of the day before, and that the scenes he is seeing from his window are those he saw a day earlier. And his uneasiness increases when, upon leaving his room, he runs into the same man as the day before, who greets him with the same words.

In this way, Phil gradually realizes that he is reliving the previous day. The remainder of the day is, in fact, an exact repetition of all the scenes he experienced twenty-four hours earlier. He encounters the same beggar asking him for money and is then approached by the same college friend—whom he hasn’t seen in years, and who has now become an insurance salesman bent on selling him a policy—before stepping in the same puddle of water. And having arrived at the location where the groundhog ceremony is being filmed, he observes the same scene as the day before, in which Phil the groundhog delivers the same verdict.

During the third day of his stay in Punxsutawney, on hearing the same radio program for the third time as he awakes, Phil begins to realize that the temporal disorder plaguing him has not caused just one repetition, but that he is condemned to relive the same day eternally, without any hope of escaping either the small town or the time period that has enveloped it.

His entrapment is airtight, for even death has ceased to offer any deliverance. Resolved to put an end to the sequence of identical days, Phil, after consulting a physician and a psychoanalyst both unable to intervene in this unprecedented clinical case, despairingly kidnaps the other Phil (the groundhog), steals a car, and, during a police chase, hurls himself with the animal into a ravine—before waking the next morning to discover himself unharmed, in his bed, listening to the same radio program at dawn of the same day.

This temporal disorder is the source of a whole series of highly original situations, and linguistic situations in particular. Present on two stages—that of the day itself and that of other identical days, past and future—Phil is free to play continually on the double meanings permitted by his immobility in time and, for example, to declare to the woman he loves, as he carves an ice sculpture of her face, that he has spent some time studying her.

If reliving the same day an infinite number of times has its inconveniences, the situation is not without its advantages. It allows you, for example, to perform actions that are possible only because of a detailed knowledge, right down to the split second, of the organization of each day. Hence Phil notices a moneybag left unattended for a few seconds in the back of an armored vehicle parked in front of a bank and, during that brief moment of inattention, makes off with it.

The situation also ensures total impunity, since Phil is certain that whatever he does, his crimes and misdemeanors will be expunged in the night. He can thus exceed the speed limit, drive his car on train tracks, and be arrested by the police without its making any difference, since he will wake up without any of those events having occurred.

A stoppage in time also allows you to use the strategy of trial and error. So, for instance, when Phil meets a young woman he finds attractive, he asks her to tell him her name, what high school she went to, and the name of her French teacher. When he runs into her again “the next day,” he passes himself off as an old school friend and refers to their supposedly shared memories of adolescence, thus increasing the likelihood of a conquest.

Having gradually fallen in love with Rita, the show’s producer, Phil attempts to seduce her through the constantly improving technique accessible only to those whose actions are without consequence due to the eternal repetition of time. While having a drink with her one evening, he takes note of her favorite drink, so that he can deliberately order the same thing “next time.” And after committing the error—one that is less than fatal only in this subset of space-time—of proposing a toast to Phil the groundhog, to the scorn of his beloved, who tells him frostily that she drinks only to world peace, he improves his performance “the next day” by proposing a toast befitting a true pacifist.

It is in the context of Phil’s day-by-day perfection of himself as a romantic interest that the scene relevant to our inquiry occurs—a scene that shows the role unread books may play in the genesis of a love affair. After many days of practice, Phil has managed to have a conversation with Rita that she finds totally satisfying—and for good reason!—in which her suitor articulates, one by one, every sentence she dreams of hearing in an ideal world of love. He is thus able, for instance, despite his being happy only in cities, to mention in her presence his dream of living in the mountains, far from all civilization.

At this point, Phil suffers a moment of distraction and, forgetting to watch his words, makes a new mistake. In a moment of shared confidences, Rita confides to him that her college studies did not initially incline her toward a career in television, and when Phil asks for details, she tells him, “I studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry.” Her response causes Phil to burst out laughing and blurt without thinking, “You must have had a lot of time on your hands!”—at which Rita gives him an icy look, and he realizes his blunder.

But there is nothing irreparable in this world in which everything always begins identically anew and in which mistakes can be rectified so quickly. The next time Phil hears Rita confess her passion for nineteenth-century Italian poetry— having ransacked the local library for material in the meantime, presumably—he is able to recite, with considerable pathos, excerpts from the libretto of Rigoletto,2 as the young woman looks on admiringly. Forced to talk about books he hasn’t read, all he has to do is to stretch the few seconds of his reply by one day, and he is able to comply perfectly with his beloved’s desire.

Phil’s attempt to seduce Rita goes beyond literature. Phil takes advantage of his halt in time to learn how to play the piano and goes faithfully to his lesson “every day.” He has learned that Rita’s ideal man plays a musical instrument. Based on intensive training during a single time slot that extends over days, he is able, one evening when Rita goes to a party with live music (as she does, by definition, every night), to appear with the band as a jazz musician.

Conversely to our other examples, Groundhog Day’s complex narrative device allows it to play out a fantasy of completion and transparency in which we see two individuals communicate about books, and thus about themselves, without any sense of loss. Having the time to study the essential books of another person, to the point where we come to share the same ones, might perhaps be what is necessary to achieve a genuine exchange on cultural matters and a perfect overlap between the two inner books.

In the numerous situations where we find it necessary to charm another person, such a method might allow us to indicate to him or her that we share a common cultural universe. By training himself in Rita’s preferred reading material and thus penetrating as deeply as possible into her private world, Phil is straining to create the illusion that their inner books are the same. And perhaps an ideal and deeply shared love should indeed give each lover access to the secret texts of which the other is composed.

But the images and fragments of text that are the stuff of our inner books are so singular to each of us that only through an indefinite extension of time might two inner books find communion—for to do so is to achieve a melding of two people’s private worlds. In the slow-motion existence Phil is living, language is no longer an uninterrupted and irreversible flow, and it becomes possible, as in the scene of the toast to the groundhog, to stop at every sentence and examine its origin and value, connecting it to the biography and inner life of the other.

Only such an artificial halting of time and language would allow someone else to reproduce the texts buried within us; in real life, these texts are caught up in an irresistible movement that transforms them constantly and renders all hope of overlap impossible. For if our inner books, like our fantasies, are relatively stable, the screen books about which we speak endlessly are perpetually being modified, as we shall see, and it is futile to imagine we can put a stop to their metamorphoses. 

The fantasy of overlap can thus be staged only by way of recourse to the supernatural. As we have seen, most of the time our discussions with others about books are necessarily and unfortunately based on fragments reworked by our private fantasies, and hence on something quite different from the books written by writers, who in any case don’t generally recognize themselves in what their readers say about them.

Beyond the humor of certain situations, there is something frightening in the way Phil sets out to seduce Rita, since it effectively suppresses the uncertainty that is normally part of communication. Endlessly telling the Other the words she wants to hear, being exactly the person she expects, is paradoxically to deny her as an other, since it amounts to no longer being a subject, fragile and uncertain, in her presence.

Since there is a moral in films, if not in life, it is not through his possession of Rita, but through his dispossession of himself, that Phil will finally achieve his ends. If the slow accumulation of the words awaited by the Other allows Phil to kiss Rita, getting the girl is not sufficient to set time back in motion; no matter how much progress he makes with his beloved, Phil continues to wake up on the same day.

But as time goes by and events repeat identically, Phil changes and loses his arrogance toward others. He begins to take an interest in them, to ask them questions about their lives, to do them favors. The days continue to repeat, but they are now devoted to helping others, with Phil using his method for personal improvement for benevolent purposes, such as preventing an old man from freezing to death in the street or catching a little boy who falls out of a tree.

In becoming interested in others, he himself becomes interesting, and he manages, through his kindness, to win Rita’s heart in a single day. And after falling asleep alongside her in the room where he has been waking up every day without progressing in time, he has the surprise, one day, of reawakening to discover the young woman still with him and to hear, for the first time, different music streaming from his alarm clock. Thus does he manage at last to cross the border, in one unsurpassable moment, that separates his day from the days to come.

1. Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

2. FB++.

How to Talk About 

Books You Haven’t Read 

PIERRE BAYARD

In the Bosom of the Family

(in which we see how Emmanuel Carrère manages to move a city to the edge of a lake)

Family life, like the different professions we have just examined, offers a number of notable situations in which the ability to speak of places you haven’t been to might be required. At least two of these situations—in which it is important to know how to make others believe that you were elsewhere—are worth calling to mind.

The first is adultery. If led to describe his daily activities, the person telling fibs to his official partner will necessarily be obliged at some point to talk about places he hasn’t been to, since he is unable to talk about those he really went to at that time.

The second, murder, is fortunately less common, but any one of us might become confronted with the necessity of having to take this route to ensure our peace and quiet one day. The way of proving that you were somewhere other than the place where the murder was committed has a name, an alibi, and it is often crucial for the accused to be able to furnish one that seems valid.

The term alibi moreover could refer to the whole set of issues studied in this book if we think about it, since all armchair travelers go about things in the same way assassins do, situating themselves fictionally in a different place from wherever they were in reality.

Many people know the terrible story of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who led his family and friends to believe for twenty years that he was a medical specialist, occupying an important position at the World Health Organization in Geneva, while in reality, he never made it through the second year of university.

Romand wasn’t happy with just pretending to hold a prestigious medical position. He invented for himself—and without doubt ended up believing—a complete alternative existence in which he often traveled abroad, brushed shoulders with important figures in scientific research and politics and shone like a diamond in the salons and corridors of power.

To survive for such a long time without any income while living the kind of lifestyle befitting a medical specialist employed by an international organization, Romand was reduced to practicing scams—for example, divesting his family-in-law of all their savings by claiming to have invested them, and selling fake cancer medicines.

Curiously, during all those years, none of the people close to Romand, nor anyone he came across or conversed with about his imaginary life, ever seemed to have noticed the improbability of his accounts, nor tried to verify what he said by inquiring at the WHO or consulting a medical directory, for example.

Yet sensing that the moment was approaching when he would be unmasked once and for all, and no longer able to handle his financial situation, Romand decided to bring his life to an end, as well as his wife’s, his children’s and his parents’. But, though he killed his relatives, he failed at his own suicide, was tried and given a nonreducible life sentence of a minimum of twenty-two years.

Just a few days after this multiple murder, the writer Emmanuel Carrère became interested in the Romand affair, which he had read about in the papers:

On the morning of Saturday, January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our oldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal. I usually devote Saturday afternoons and Sunday to my family, but I spent the rest of that weekend alone in my studio because I was finishing a book I’d been working on for over a year, a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The last chapter described the days he spent in a coma before his death. I finished it on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning opened my newspaper to the lead article on the Romand case.1As the parallel between their two lives suggests, Emmanuel Carrère soon felt moved to action by the Romand affair and even came to experience a kind of fascination for the murderer, expressed in the first letter he sent to him in prison, six months later:

I am a writer, the author to date of seven books; I enclose a copy of my latest work. Ever since reading about your case in the newspapers I have been haunted by the tragedy of which you were the agent and sole survivor.2Although equally interested in setting up a meeting, Romand, on his lawyer’s advice, waited for the investigation of his case to be closed before entering into correspondence with Carrère and agreeing for the latter to write a book about him.

Carrère then undertook to investigate the affair, reconstructed Romand’s life and visited its primary locations, followed the trial, met the murderer on several occasions and, after many years of work which he almost abandoned due to the psychological stress of it all, managed to write and publish The Adversary.

In his book on the Romand affair, Emmanuel Carrère doesn’t just reconstruct the murderer’s life, he tries to get on the inside, taking advantage of his emotional closeness to the man to experience and have his reader experience what his protagonist felt. More than just an investigation, it becomes a simultaneous, double investigation Carrère makes not just into Romand, but also into himself.

During this quest, Emmanuel Carrère grows particularly interested in the periods that seemed to him to mark the essence of Romand’s existence, namely the interminable days he was forced to spend away from home in complete indolence, due to the lack of a professional occupation:

In the beginning he went to WHO every day, later on less regularly. Instead of the road to Geneva, he’d take the one to Gex and Divonne or the one to Bellegarde, that leads to the motorway and Lyon. He’d stop at a news-stand to buy an armful of papers: dailies, magazines, scientific journals. Then he’d go and read them, either in a café—he was careful to change cafés often and to choose them far enough from home—or in his car. He would park in a carpark or at a service station and stay there for hours, reading, taking notes, dozing. He’d have a sandwich for lunch and continue reading throughout the afternoon in a different café, at a different service station.3At other times, Romand prepared his virtual trips abroad and Carrère imagines scenes in which he researches places he hasn’t been in order to be able to convincingly describe his travels to his family:

Lastly, there were the trips—conferences, seminars, symposiums, all over the world. He would buy a guide to the country; Florence would pack his suitcase. He’d drive off in his car, which he would supposedly leave in the long-term carpark at Geneva airport. In a modern hotel room, often near the airport, he would take off his shoes, stretch out on the bed, spend three or four days watching television and the planes taking off and landing outside his window.4Romand didn’t just buy travel guides for the countries he was supposed to be visiting. He put together the entire story of his trip in order to be believed by his loved ones when he returned:

He studied the guidebooks so he wouldn’t make any mistakes in his stories when he got home. He telephoned his family every day to tell them what time it was and what the weather was like in São Paulo or Tokyo. He’d ask how things were going in his absence. He’d tell his wife, his children, his parents that he missed them, was thinking of them, sent them a big kiss. He phoned no one else: whom would he have called? After a few days, he went home with presents bought in an airport gift shop. Everyone made a fuss over him. He was tired from jet lag.5And so there are—aside from the interior place where he sought permanent exile—a multitude of imaginary realms that, during his alternative existence, Romand undertook to reinvent to maintain his wealthy identity and protect the bond he had with his loved ones from an unbearable reality.

Even more than in the previous cases, we see how the opposition of real and imaginary places, and the partial or complete substitution of one for the other, only make sense when they are discussed in the context of that third space I suggested calling the “inner landscape,” after Freud. Here in this case of absolute mythomania (compulsive lying), the inner landscape has become all pervasive.

Whereas in the previous examples, it only interfered with a limited part of the reality it played a part in distorting, here the inner landscape has become the subject’s alternative reality and that of those close to them. Where Margaret Mead let herself go in a fantastical reverie about an imaginary island, where Jayson Blair reconstructed places he might have been to, where Rosie Ruiz invented the ideal moment of bliss by erasing the surrounding space, Romand goes much further by forging all the parts of a second personality that allows him to survive. This second personality even becomes necessary, to the point of having to resort to murder when it risks being unmasked.

The same issue is at work in each of these different examples, whether the discourse on places these armchair travelers have not visited leads to success or to failure. For them it is a matter of finding, in greater or lesser denial of a disappointing reality, an ideal, fantasy place—that of the narcissistic pleasure an infant experiences in his mother’s gaze and which is lost forever.

This unfindable ideal site of primitive pleasure, which we might call an original place, is something Romand won’t stop trying to reinvent; he doesn’t just limit himself to a single episode in his life but transforms the entire world in his mind to fit his purpose. We might suppose that he found shades of the lost bliss of the child in the dazzled eyes of his own children, filled with admiration like Wendy in Peter Pan as they listened to the tales of his heroic exploits on the other side of the world.

And it is no trivial matter that it was to his children—and to the child inside himself who hadn’t wanted to grow up, we can surmise—that Romand recounted his travels to imaginary realms he’d never visited, as though he himself, like Peter Pan, hadn’t managed to evolve, or feared that his children too would be confronted with the pain of becoming adults one day.

If I wholeheartedly support Margaret Mead’s struggle to introduce libertinage to the Samoan Islands and Rosie Ruiz’s attempt to legitimize the right to use public transport during sporting activities, if I can understand that Jayson Blair, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, described places in the United States he hadn’t visited, there can obviously be no question of approving Jean-Claude Romand’s behavior, especially once you know of its dramatic conclusion.

The fact remains that one can understand Carrère’s fascination with Romand, a fascination that was so great he dedicated several years of his life to writing Romand’s story and started to feel like he was losing his sanity. Interestingly enough, Romand has several things in common with writers, and in particular novelists. To start with, both handle questions of identity to a great degree. Just as novelists project themselves onto their imaginary characters, allowing themselves to limit denial to one area of their thoughts, Romand invented the entire persona of a great doctor, which he then acted out to perfection over many years. Similarly, the question of knowing who we are is something that has haunted Carrère for his entire literary career, starting with his early novel The Mustache (1987), and has since become its major theme.

Who are we, and more particularly, what is the nature of that dark side that threatens to engulf everything? Carrère recounts how Romand didn’t really feel comfortable with him until he read his novel La classe de neige, a frightening story in which a child begins to realize, little by little, that his father is a murderer. But the question of knowing who we are is evidently not just about our internal dualities, it is also about the criminal potential that can arise in us in certain circumstances and whose uncontrollable power Romand experienced.

However, it is not just the question of identity that brings the two men together, it is also a form of relationship to space. Returning to his own passion for the Jean-Claude Romand case, Carrère suggests several times that there are commonalities between his life as a writer and the falsified existence of a killer, one of which is their relationship to place.

Evoking the endless days that Romand spent bored and alone—a duration of the kind that fascinates him, situated outside of any temporality—he proposes a significant parallel to the days spent by any writer:

I reread the letter he’d sent me with directions, I looked at the water, looked up at the grey sky to follow the flight of birds whose name I didn’t know—I can’t identify birds or trees and I find that sad. It was chilly. I started the engine to get some heat. The hot air made me sleepy. I thought about the studio where I go every morning after driving my children to school. This studio exists, people can visit me and phone me there. That’s where I write and piece together screenplays that usually get filmed. But I know what it’s like to spend all one’s days unobserved: the hours passed staring at the ceiling, the fear of no longer existing. I wonder what he felt in his car? Pleasure? A mocking exultation at the idea of so masterfully fooling everyone around him? No, I was sure of that.6In the passage that immediately follows this one, he evokes Romand’s imaginary travels. Carrère explains that one of the places the fake doctor went to during his extratemporal peregrinations was the town of Divonne,7 which is where one of his earlier novels, Hors d’atteinte?, is set, a novel that describes how a teacher slowly succumbs to a gambling obsession:

Divonne is a small spa near the Swiss border best known for its casino. I once used it as a setting for a few pages of a novel about a woman who lives a double life and tried to lose herself in the world of gambling. The novel was meant to be realistic and well-researched but, since I hadn’t visited all the casinos I wrote about, I put Divonne on the shores of Lake Geneva when it’s really about six miles away. There is actually something there referred to as a lake, but it’s only a small sheet of water next to the place where Romand often parked. I parked there, too. It’s the clearest memory I’ve kept of my first trip to the landscape of his life.8

In so doing, the writer rewrites the world and transforms it in the same way the mythomaniac killer does, albeit on a completely different scale. Both are confronted with the difficulty of inhabiting a space and neither of them succeeds in finding an adequate place—that is to say, a balance between the inner landscape and the real world—both of them finding themselves compelled to rewrite places in order to construct a makeshift identity.

Carrère’s studio and Romand’s car are nonspaces that they are forced to inhabit through professional necessity, but also because they respond to a profound psychological inability to invent an autonomous space that would allow them to establish their identity in a permanent manner.

Rewriting places, practiced to varying degrees by both of these men, has to do with the fact that they feel, probably more sorely than anyone else, that the space they inhabit deep down does not correspond to the real space that existence has led them to occupy, hence them finding themselves constantly driven to reshaping it in order to inhabit it.

The major difference between the two situations is that Carrère’s empty studio, however anguishing it may be, is a place of research and self-exploration, while the car Romand uses to endlessly roam the roads for years is nothing but the burial chamber of an identity lost in the imaginary sparkle of his invented accounts.

So we are dealing—writers undoubtedly more often than others—with complex spaces with indistinguishable boundaries that can only be imperfectly superimposed on the spaces of the real world, spaces we never stop transforming to suit our travels through our inner landscapes.

Based on the idea that writers, more than ourselves, live in aberrant spaces irreducible to real ones, I now propose in a final section to move on to some practical advice, taken from my long experience of armchair travel, for anyone finding themselves in a situation where they have to describe, for whatever professional or criminal reason, places they have never been to.

1.L’Adversaire (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 9. Published in English as The Adversary in a translation by Linda Coverdale (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).

2.    Ibid., 36.

3.    Ibid., 96.

4.    Ibid., 97.

5.    Ibid.

6.    Ibid., 99.

7.    UP–

8.    Ibid., 98.

From:

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been

By PIERRE BAYARD