The Voice Over

It may be that this is a genuine solution or at least a direction one can take: if you cannot live your life without the color scheme of daily horror, you can still tell it the way it was conceived. This strange kind of everyday heroism (entirely divorced from pathos, devoid of any pathetic element) leaves very little room to maneuver. The answer to “how are you?” can only be “fine, thank you”; it seems unthinkable to just squander your pain in public—and almost the entirety of your life is left beyond the borders of what can be said. You end up having to rеinvent it, to lay it out in all its splendor, turn on all the lights, remember all the plots that can fit the story line of this great adventure. Make it so that only the front-facing part of the story remains. Live in a way that leaves no room for shame.

In a movie that’s currently playing in theaters, the hero survives a shipwreck and finds himself on a boat with a giant tiger—and together they drift for a long time until they reach a safe shore. There, of course, it turns out that he imagined the tiger in order to forget the unthinkable and unbearable events that actually occurred. The story of Alisa Poret, who spent years not wanting to notice the tiger in her own boat and wrote a picture book about it, is one of the few happy endings of the previous century. And one of its models.

4.

A large fish, which had lived for quite a long time in an aquarium at the zoo, was released into the sea. They watched it from the pier. All day long it swam in circles no bigger than the walls of its former cell. The next day, the circles grew a little larger, on the third day even more so, and only on the fourth day did it swim away.

This entry in Alisa Poret’s notebook is called “FREEDOM.”

2013

Translated by Maria Vassileva

The Last Hero

(Susan Sontag)

1.

Susan Sontag’s detractors, of whom she had many, often accused her of exploiting her looks—and it’s true that she gave us plenty to look at. In the posthumous corpus of what remains, which includes books, movies, texts, interviews, and journals, the photographs of the author—young, ageless, aging, dead—are like the temporary exhibit displayed on the honorary first floor of the museum. Some visitors never venture past it, and there’s a reason for that: the images of Sontag don’t tell or comment on her story—they supplant it, providing the viewer with the main thing, an emblem, an identity card: X was here. In the case of Sontag, the sum of her features, repeated in dozens of photographs with the precision of a series of freeze-frames, tells us the following. In this body, in this face, with its high cheekbones and large mouth, with its limited range of poses—hands behind the head or on the hips, hands holding a cigarette, feet up on a table, on the back of the couch, eyes fixed on the viewer (summoning, courageous), but more often looking off to the side (detached, unapproachable), her hands embracing her son—there is drama. This face, this body (in black, white, gray) are perceived simultaneously as the hero and the arena onto which that hero steps out; they tell you: something will happen here, the scene of action has been charged or colored by fate. When we look at an actor’s picture, we are offered an empty house, an empty theater that we have seen fill up with a fictitious life. In the case of Sontag, the house is inhabited, and you can trust that. You have to take her message at face value; her features insist on their own importance—they are part of that larger reality where a private history becomes shared, instructive, exemplary (the last being one of Sontag’s favorite words). The way this woman looks asserts the weight of everything she’s said or done. It is a trademark that you can’t help but trust, the italics that make the text stand out, the packaging that compels you to read its lettering.