You can be pretty – beautiful – enough to feel a responsibility towards your beauty: what does it deserve? how might I curate it? Hasn’t it marked you out for an extraordinary destiny? High cheekbones, let’s say, a slim waist, let’s say, a soft skin: haven’t they come to live their own lives, those cheekbones, that waist and that skin? Hasn’t beauty become, for you, a kind of fate, demanding to be curated and bestowed to the world?
‘I owe it to myself’: no, you owe it to your beauty, and it is as though you lived in a National Trust property. There are rules to be followed; what is yours should also be for the good of all. What beauty! they will say when they see you, and even you are surprised. But doesn’t beauty also demand a kind of modesty, that you efface yourself before what you have been given by chance?
Beauty lives its own life; it unfolds a fate for you of which you are part. ‘I was beautiful then’: said when you were very old, meaning: in me, across me, beauty led its life. But what beauty can ever say to herself: I am beautiful? Whoever admires their own limbs, or the brightness of their face? True, these limbs, this brightness can become part of an armory: a device to ensnare whomever will give you what you want. But still, even then, your beauty precedes you; it advances ahead of you into a room; it catches you in intrigue. And don’t you owe it to your beauty to be intriguing?
When I remembered, with her, the immense beauty of X. (another X. – those posts are gone), she said, everyone young is beautiful, and perhaps she was right about that. Perhaps it meant, beauty travels through the faces of the young; it seeks itself there – it finds itself and doesn’t beauty seek out beauty to mirror itself, to play lightly across bodies? Those faces are so young they haven’t an expression of their own – they’re not owned, not particularised. Who is responsible for them?
Then beauty can be caprice, cruelty. A single look and you are slain. Better not to be hypnotised by beauty – better not to be lost where it leads you. Everyone young is beautiful, said X., and didn’t this mean everyone was also no one, and that a young face, as yet uncarved by smiles or frowns, as yet ungrooved, unwrinkled, was also everyone’s face, anyone’s face?
No doubt beauty’s wasted on the young, like youth: what do they know of what, for a time, will possess them? What do they know of it, the beauty that passes through their faces, their bodies, giving them the chance of a great destiny? Do you really want to be picked out by your beauty? Selected, as though light was always shining on you?
What was the name of that beautiful nun who held a hot iron to her face? Beauty was her trial; she wanted to sink into another anonymity, far deeper than the anonymity of beauty. And this is what X. said, modestly refusing to acknowledge the beauty that once played across her and even condemning herself for letting what she called her prettiness lead her through life like a unbridled horse: hadn’t it led to to risky adventures, to misery in a foreign country, where she was whisked away like a prize?
This is what she said, although her beauty had taken her everywhere, all around the world: she wanted to be the anonymity of obscurity, wanted all eyes, all attention to turn away from her. She was happily obscure, she said; still beautiful, although her beauty was softer, more dispersed. Although it was like a mist through which also shone a great benevolence.
A little girl, alone on an island, will make jewellery for herself: where did I read that? and isn’t it nonsense? Still, beauty asks to be supplemented – ornamented. It asks – and don’t you deserve to give it what it asks – to be set into that frame that will let it shine still more brightly? Eyeliner and mascara make the eye into something to be watched – the most delicate register of passing mood.
She looked away – she looked at me – each time it is as though the whole universe had turned away from you, or turned towards you. I’ve been selected, picked out – to be seen, and by her, a beauty. Or I was selected not to be picked out, for her glance to pass over me, and forget me. Divine forgetting! Divine neglect!
And mustn’t it be a dreadful pest to be bothered for your beauty? Who’s sent over champagne? Who’s dancing next to you? Who spoke to you on the train? ‘I wanted to stab his eyes out,’ said X. many years ago, of man who looked lasciviously at her on a train. Not to be seen, to subtract sight from sight, to be allowed, for a short time, relief from your beauty: but that isn’t part of the deal.
You are exposed to sight all the time. You are beautiful when you wake, and when you fall asleep, beautiful dressed up or scruffy; your neglect only sets beauty off more strongly; your indifference increases the charm of your beauty, its insouciance. What will you ever know of the world? Who will ever tell you of anything bad, or dark? You charm everyone, they want to see you laugh, and your eyes to shine out yet more brightly.
His aunts, David told me, used to take turns to comb the hair of the prettiest sister. And didn’t I see it for myself, girls grooming another girl, the most beautiful one, as though they would each have a share in its brightness, its light? Console yourself with this: the beauty will learn little of a world that is drawn to its best whenever she is seen. It will part for her; the world will make way, and she will think it is the kindness of the world and not the kindness of her beauty to which she owes her life.
The women of Blanchot’s novels are often called beautiful – and young. Each time, beauty and youth live their own lives, unfold their own destinies. Blanchot often writes of the way the corpse seems to absent itself from the world and draw the world with it: this is the source of its fascination. But doesn’t he write, even more often, of beauty, of youth? For both, each time, are impersonal – both are possessing; both become a kind of fate, a way you survive without yourself. For neither can be kept, youth, beauty. They keep you; their play is that keeping, remembering and forgetting itself in your face, your limbs.
Divine sport! Divine caprice! – and isn’t it cruel to you from whom beauty begins to withdraw, whose face is like the world that is made by God’s absence, even as it still remembers him, and dreams of him. Beauty’s withdrawal can also be seen, like a beach at low tide, stretched out, expansive. Yes, that is where beauty was; it is there that beauty loses itself and dreams of itself, in those shallow pools that look upward to the sky.
Beauty withdraws – and who are you now, half-beautiful, quarter-beautiful, in whom others can see only traces of what once possessed you? But X., like the former Miss Yugoslavia in Handke’s No Man’s Bay, welcomes beauty’s retreat, her new anonymity. Who is she? One who can lose herself anywhere. One who is happily lost, one among others, and she could not have been before.
Who was she, then – all those years ago – when her beauty was sufficient to turn the world from its axis? Who was she, for whom an adventure might begin as she walked up the street? It came to her, the world – it ran up to her like a puppy, or a child: trusting, wanting your love, wanting to be bathed in it.
The adventure could begin today, or tomorrow, and you were young even as anything could begin, and at any moment. But this, too, was the temptation: couldn’t beauty lead her from where she should remain? Couldn’t it chase ahead of her, her fate, leading her away from what was most certain? But while she was young, she was also this will o’ the wisp. Wasn’t that her youth? Wasn’t it what let the world hover on the brink of adventure?
Dangerous adventures, though. Quagmires. Happily, in the end, she was rescued – she rescued herself; she stayed in the room in which I am writing with a worthy beloved, and I thought, beauty has released her. Beauty is leaving her behind, and I could see she was happy.
What is happier than watching beauty anoint itself – those ceremonies of perfuming and the application of make up? Once, in my naivety, I asked Y. why she made herself up at all, and in that high Manchester bedroom, she said, ‘watch’ and I did watch as she talked me through her beauty ritual. She had become beautiful; she’d assisted beauty, letting it come to herself. I was impressed; in a few minutes, I had learnt a great deal. She sprayed perfume on her wrists and she was done; beauty was in the room. Beauty was the third, the other one, accompanying us. ‘Do you see?’ Yes, I saw.
Lars Iyer's Blog 