Whenever I have conversations these days, the sentences seem to be spoken as if by a defendant. It’s a performance, defence, in front of an invisible jury. People no longer talk, they defend. The invisible jury’s glowing faces, like knives (borrowed from Anne Carson), are ready to cut into the very flesh of the guilty. I am constantly reminded of Kafka who wrote in The Trial, ““But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak.”
I recently went to see the Hockney exhibit at the Louis Vuitton Foundation just outside Paris. There was something maddeningly captivating about his landscapes, especially the ones painted in California, with its deep beetroot, fuchsia, ultramarine blues, and bright reds or even the smudge of greens in front of a treasury building or something. One could spend hours in front of Hockney landscapes but every time one of his portraits made an appearance in the exhibit, I wanted to leave the room. I felt nothing deeply mysterious lies behind a human face, no great mystery or silence in those void-like irises moving like automated machines scanning the object in front of it analysing its material and dimensions to arrive at a result, a verdict.
Perhaps I am exaggerating but I know that grass is more beautiful than people’s eyes.
