The Criminal
An excerpt
Leslie Kaplan with an introduction by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap
The Criminal: An Introduction
by Julie Carr and Jennifer Papp
From the beginning of her career, poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. As a student in the 1960s, motivated first by the Algerian war and then by the oppressions and inequities of mid-century France, she got involved in the établissement movement, in which students and intellectuals chose to work in factories in an attempt to be part of political upheaval alongside workers instead of apart from them. L'Excès-l'usine (Excess—The Factory), her first published book, appeared years later in 1982. Its spare writing rendered the factory work experience, offering the reader the closed and crushing "universe" inside the factory where life is reduced to repetition, the handling of objects, and alienating spaces. Excess—The Factory gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. Le Livre des ciels (The Book of Skies)[1], published a year later, follows the same central speaker in the period after the ‘68 events, as she now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. Class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal while, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions sometimes as aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, and other times as an enveloping force, holding and extending the suffocating factory in poisonous and shifting forms.
With Kaplan’s third book, Le Criminel (The Criminal) (1985), things take a dramatic turn. The space and environment of the factory has given way to an unbordered space in which individuals can "circulate,” and collective life is possible. The location of the book is exceptional: although it is never named, we know that the setting is based on Clinique de la Borde, where Kaplan worked as a volunteer during the summer of 1973 and intermittently for the following year.[2] La Borde, created in 1953 by neuropsychiatrist Jean Oury and others, in keeping with the institutional psychotherapy movement, sought to redress the stigmatization, segregation, and systemic abuse of the mentally ill. Patients, workers, volunteers, doctors, and other staff lived, ate, and created art together (La Borde was famous for its annual theatrical presentations, attended by people from the surrounding villages), and patients engaged directly in planning and implementing the therapeutic process. As Camille Robcis summarizes, life and work at La Borde were radically “horizontal, anti-authoritarian, and ‘deterritorialized,’” committed to a disalienated approach to the psychic and the social at once.[3]
“Relationships, desire, and psychic transformations can occur in this radical therapeutic environment with its wide open windows and doors, its surrounding forests and fields, its perpetual movement.”
While in Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies we find a suffocating timelessness—“You move indefinitely, outside of time. No beginning, no end”—here at the château, time is possible, narrative is possible.[4] Relationships, desire, and psychic transformations can occur in this radical therapeutic environment with its wide open windows and doors, its surrounding forests and fields, its perpetual movement. For the first time, Kaplan offers us characters whose story we follow. A love story evolves between Jenny and Louise, another volunteer, as they move in and out of the château, in and through the landscape, finding an intense union that at the same time highlights the separation, the necessary strangeness of the other.
Who or what is the criminal of the book’s title? To this question, Kaplan theorizes “criminality” as an alternative to the social repetition of the same. In an interview with us from 2017, Kaplan makes a distinction between `le crime’ and `le meurtre’: crime and murder:
The reference to the criminal in the book is a sort of metaphor for something extraordinary happening, whereas on the opposite side is murder, murder being repetition. That is, you have violence that can open things — criminality — and violence that just perpetuates the same thing, which is repetition and murder.
For “something extraordinary to happen,” psychically or socially, we must invite and submit to an upheaval that is not merely rhetorical or metaphorical. The named “criminal” is a monstrous image, the “unknowable other” “introduced,” perhaps, by language itself, and generative of rupture.
An inaudible mother tongue offers a direction, and, yes, something is going to remain unfinished, trembling.
The unknowable other is introduced, brutal like a criminal. His precarity.
You see him existing. The spotted skin, red. The crystal fingers. Hollow grimaces. Aged.
The air splits, fine ruptures. Movement.
And indeed, a few lines later we learn, “Something always begins again, almost new.” This newness, this fragmentation, this beginning again are crucial in the psycho-political dynamics of the longer story told by this and Kaplan’s first two books. For what keeps us locked in a factory, in the alienated and in fact murderous “line of assassins” (Kafka), is the inability to imagine and enact change.[5] This adherence to stasis is, in fact, the fascist impulse, a suicidal (and not only murderous) addiction to power. To admit the “criminal” is to admit the fracturing reimagining of what is.
from The Criminal
by Leslie Kaplan
for Heitor O'Dwyer de Macedo
PART I
* * *
The main path. Hot, dry air, gravel. The crunch of white pebbles under the sandal. Light.
It’s summer, the afternoon. The sky is smooth, without depth. Crisp blue, a foundation.
Vast afternoon, yellow and blue. Jenny walks inside of it. The path becomes transparent in this light. Jenny walks, interested.
Sometimes a bench, modest, its black curves. Little flower beds, naked flowers.
Flowers in bunches, simple. One color for each stem. Jenny looks while passing by.
Wide light, equalizing. It pushes things back, makes them abstract. Lines are blurred.
Jenny walks on in the hot air.
Someone is playing the violin. Because of the music, you suddenly feel the thickness of the trees, all around, the bushes and groves, the branches. The path unfolds, granular. Also, sounds of a motor.
Plenitude, fragility.
[...]
Walk, discovery.
To one side, a kiosk. Pointed roof, faded wood. Through a window, the empty interior, the circular bench. A shirt is lying on the floor. Further on, an old pond. Grasses are floating, some ducks.
The pathway gets wider and turns. You can see the big house and the lawn, the tables, the ping-pong table.
[...]
The immense day, the sky, the voices like wires. Jenny lies down. Today she’s arriving, she takes her time.
Between the trees, the white light. You can still hear the sound of the violin.
* * *
A big bay window, and beyond, the trees.
My parents wanted a boy. My name is Louise.
She is sweeping. The other is looking at her. They are together in the hallway.
Background noise, you think of rubber. It’s like breathing.
Something rebounds.
Big hallway, bright and yellow. It’s rounded and cold. A blue bucket, an orange shovel, and the walls that continue from the ceiling.
Louise moves in front of the bay window. Jenny really sees her. Overalls with the straps crossed, her belly, and over her breasts, the buckles.
Jenny is next to her, a scarf over her shoulders. A big skirt. Fabrics.
The hallway is a hallway. Dreaming matter, a lack, elastic and fine, spreading out like some interior water. They’re in it. Not without worry.
Two women.
The one named Jenny is wearing red. Big clothing, enveloping. She doesn’t know this place.
Louise shows it to her.
Louise. She observes. She loves, too. She can love.
It’s summer. A transition.
They sweep the hallway, they exchange words. Outside, the sun, the trees, that commotion.
Soon they’ll go out.
Jenny has the other girl in her eyes. Louise, a person. Vague and present, solid. She wears blue overalls, with indifference maybe. The breasts are there, too, in the shirt.
Rhythm of the air, far off pulse.
Jenny thinks, an idea traverses her, It’s her gaze. Jenny feels it, a black and veiled thing, filtering. Occupy her, occupy her at any price.
Louise, you don’t know what she thinks.
Outside, the green, the flies.
Through the big bright window, the gravel, the benches. Further on, the countryside, remote. Already the severe old man, full of bones, is starting his rounds on his bike, all his plastic bags hooked onto the handlebars.
It’s morning, early. Finish the rooms.
The rooms are all singles, without exception. They are spread out over two floors.
Little white rooms. Negative.
Modern radios, telephones. The cupboards are always empty. On the walls, some pictures nailed up, figures.
Calm rooms, you could say. Calm and full. But you feel the sinks relentlessly protruding. And in the vases the flowers seem too supple.
Like an insult to good will.
Always when you enter the rooms, the world presents itself to your thoughts, the limitless world, a large and empty surface, a spread open box. It’s like that for Louise and Jenny. Entering there, into the rooms, they are, they also are, absorbed into that thought of the world, that representation without form, indirect and broad.
Louise and Jenny go around with the broom and the dustpan. They clean, just a quick sweep, and talk with the people in the rooms.
In the first room, at the end of the hall, an enormous girl. She is lying down, peaceful, inside her large body. Her name is Camille. She’s not mute, no, but the words are too small.
She has tinted glasses, fragile eyes. They’re swollen.
Her mother often visits her and they walk together, side by side, on the grounds. Camille looks a lot like her.
She likes her excrement too, its consistency.
She welcomes it all, Camille does.
[…]
Next, the patricide. Christian Abrame. Tall and heavy, with a worn-out pair of pants, and a black jacket. He talks a lot about the universe, other worlds. Calculations, thoughts like dust. Constellations. How to listen to him? Very attentively, you listen to everything, all the words. It’s easy to get distracted though. Jenny notes this. Louise agrees.
When they’re done, they leave, leave the intensity of the halls.
Outside, the blue air, arrested, the terrace.
Wide, cold steps, a view.
Nature is there, active.
The base of things, dense and green, and at the same time, lifting. Seductive nature, dilated, dark and hidden corners. It also exists on its own, in some places. It can. It is full of forgetting.
Here and there little isolated houses, painted white. Sometimes a tent. Further off, the fields, striped and yellow. A limit.
The trees are high, often old. Beautiful trees, so moving. People hang up hammocks, they stretch out, sway. You can study the lines in the bark. You can wander the strange paths through the trees, protected and open. Leafy paths, with little dead ends. Clearings.
People take walks. Above, the sky is rolling.
One of the paths goes along a damaged pond, a hole.
You choose a route, you discover things.
The air gets bigger.
It’s summer, you hear everything.
The animals are there, too, the different species. Horses for riding. In the trees, always the cats. But dogs are a problem, to have them, or not.
[…]
Louise, her presence, her voice.
Jenny has the feeling that Louise’s voice has preceded her. A soft thing, a weak thing. It’s also an action, particular, which creates a distinct far-off precision. This voice covers a hollow space, it suggests the inverted volume of the breasts.
Jenny’s thought: smother Louise, stop her. Hold her. Capture the Louise who runs under her words and who leaves Jenny speechless.
In fact, Louise speaks very little. Jenny is ill at ease, too attentive. The silence is unbearable to her, she feels that it asks something of her that she cannot give.
In front of them, on the gravel, a young woman is playing bocce ball. Louise knows her, her name is Michèle. She’s recently had a baby.
It’s hot.
Louise and Jenny feel the château at their backs. Soon it will be time for lunch. This week they are not in charge of the kitchen.
They talk about walking to the pond. Later, maybe.
They look at the big trees, the green leaves, the sun. They think about going into the surrounding countryside, too, on bikes.
Jenny realizes that she’s thinking about a story she read in the paper. A man was convicted of abusing his little girl. He was living alone with her and with his own mother. He’d beaten the child so badly she would always be disabled. The grandmother had seen nothing, had known nothing. At the trial, the man had kept silent except for one sentence: Fear, I know what it is, he said.
While remembering this story, Jenny is suddenly very afraid. Michèle is still right there on the gravel. She throws the ball with more and more force. The balls are dense, very heavy and black.
The yellow gravel, the trees. Sounds of flies.
You have to aim for the smaller ball.
High sun, perfect light.
Three women, under the sun.
The air is thin, traversable, paper-thin, too delicate. Jenny senses that she is now inside Michèle’s body, making all the movements with her, at the same time.
Fear.
She gets up, she gets up. She says to Louise, Come.
Louise follows her. It is almost noon.
* * *
[…]
The cook is nice, capable. A professional. Alongside him, teams and rotations. Groceries are planned, there’s a little truck for shopping.
Some people don’t want anything to do with the kitchen. When it’s their turn, they stand around, stiff and tight-lipped. But other people, of course, overdo it.
In the middle, the coffee machine, beautiful and old with its pipes. A terrible old woman is in charge of it. She decided this herself.
Jenny really likes breakfast. When she can, she makes it slowly, on a large clean table. An indefinite and soft moment. A childhood.
[…]
Louise and Jenny told everyone they wouldn’t be there. They’re going to walk in the forest, they’ve been thinking about it since morning. They write down the time in the big notebook and leave.
Off to the side, a little round house with a pointed roof. Some people are rehearsing. Makeup.
Further on there are gardeners, their serious work.
Louise and Jenny take a path bordered with big low bushes. It’s like a dance, a procession. From time to time a gunshot, it’s normal. Because of this noise, brief and flat, one feels the leveling of the countryside, and the sky appears as a far-off lake, horizontal water.
The air is very dense. Sounds roll through. Things propagate.
The countryside spreads out like a parenthesis.
Louise talks about her work. How does she talk? Jenny would like to be able to describe it. She only grasps the words like pebbles, their distinct intensities. A violent and directed attention, and yet, unmoored. It’s impersonal.
They approach the forest. A cloud, pretty and white, some birds. Louise doesn’t talk enough. The sky spreads out. Heavy sweetness.
At a curve in the path, near a tree trunk, an overstuffed blue plastic bag. Louise thinks she’s seen old Antoine riding around on a bike near here, tall and thin, with the bags hanging off his handlebars. He must have hiding places.
[…]
This big, overstuffed bag, mute, and the trees behind. An entrance.
The calm becomes massive. A growing depth. They’re in an ark, big and moving with holes. The leaves, everywhere the leaves.
The green floats, both compact and loose. Fragments of light. Layer upon layer, branches. Some brown, some white. Undulations, back and forth. Fringes.
They walk on. The sky has disappeared, melted into the air. Liquefied. Play, passages, Jenny spreads her fingers.
Fragments, sparkles. The light is alive.
The creatures, the little sounds rise up. Underneath, the sonorous depths, sonorous and limitless like a long-awaited music. A slowing. Richness.
On the ground, forms, tree trunks. Little curled mosses, acorns. Rocks and clumps of earth. The rocks are violet. Here and there, mud, long and soft. There is no direction, only the trees, the beautiful grand way of trees, their movement.
Jenny and Louise let themselves be carried, they move on. It’s fluid.
From time to time, scraps of machinery, a tool, left there. Papers and bags. Old forest, human. People have been there.
When they entered, at the beginning, they thought about what they’d just walked away from. The lawn, the meal, the people. Then, little by little, the trees take up all the space. Louise and Jenny, open to the trees.
“I feel the trees thinking,” says Jenny. “The trees are thinking about me.”
Louise understands but finds her a bit exalted, annoying. Louise’s silence.
They arrive in a clearing. The trees are at a distance, they are all alone, they sit down.
Sounds of summer.
The void is too close. Naked circle, this clearing. Above, the hot thick sky.
This fluid shattered forest, Louise and Jenny realize they haven’t seen it. It’s impossible to see.
The air sways, blue reflections, volume of time.
They sit down, stretch out. Louise in her overalls, a white blouse, Jenny in a wide red skirt with folds, Jenny thinks suddenly that she loves clothes, putting them on and also just looking at them, for themselves.
She kisses Louise.
She finds herself, yes.
Nothing has ever been better.
Louise laughs with her head thrown back. It’s without meanness, a laugh that engenders, that leaves room.
The air hardens. The huge sky descends.
They might be late. It’s a regular day, they have to go back.
[…]
PART II
[…]
It’s summer. People hardly sleep. The air explodes, sun, sun. People move around everywhere, in all the transparencies. They look at the swelling sky, powerful and blue. The château is present and full, with everyone, with noise. The windows remain open, people climb through them. You’re inside, you’re outside. They call to each other.
The charm of each floor, of the stairways. The bathrooms are bright and warm. People rearrange the rooms.
On the lawn, big, long tables, small groups. Once, for several hours there was a circle around a young man, with a deeply lined face, who told overly dramatic stories. In the intervals he closed his eyes. Then in a low voice he would ask: the big suspension bridge, does it still exist?
Jenny, this is true, is rarely afraid. In the morning, she gets up early, she walks. She watches what is happening. The strange nebulous color of the air, and the pebbles still blue. What surprises Jenny the most is not so much nature as a whole, with all its glory, but the details, their possibility.
Generosity of the visible. Active movement of forms.
* * *
[…]
Jenny adores Louise all the time, her measured ways, her absence. Bright and rigorous Louise, her hair, and the nipple, that thing so good to suck.
They’re preparing the festival, constructing a theater, a replica of an opera house. There is scaffolding, big braided cords that hang, fabrics. All this activity is at the far end of the lawn, where the trees begin. Everybody likes working next to the huge independent trees, and that strange, striking effect of boards leaning on the tree trunks. Cushions, pillows, already some benches. The areas are separate, varied, there is a stage.
Leaning over, letting your arms hang down. You stick your head in the slots between boards, you mark off little rectangles. Constructing, running around everywhere. You throw yourself into it. Using your hands, inventing colors. Lots to paint. Jumble of fake looking statues, tinsel. Painted stars on pillars. The falseness is really obvious, it’s funny. Gestures.
[…]
* * *
This place. Difficult to think about it. You are in it.
Sometimes Jenny says to herself that everything is lightly veiled, that she sees everything as if behind a veil.
At the same time everything is raw. She doesn’t understand.
Things are isolated as are the people. Mechanisms.
One evening Jenny hears music, a woman’s voice singing, and she thinks that this music, this voice, are made of the same material, the exact same material, as the château. The voice engenders a space, and the world thus awakened, is wide and breathable. Warm like brass. Reflections. Inside, colorful figures, compatible. Silent walking. The background is black, a compact and total blackness, like the great background one imagines unifying everything.
All at once the voice rises and retreats and Jenny is thrown back to herself. Violent memory of a thing that never was. Pain.
An inaudible mother tongue offers a direction, and, yes, something is going to remain unfinished, trembling.
The unknown other is introduced, brutal like a criminal. His precarity.
You see him existing. The spotted skin, red. The crystal fingers. Hollow grimaces. Aged.
The air splits, fine ruptures. Movement.
Presence is given with separation, and the pain gets larger, it is lost.
PART III
Now Jenny.
The sky is blue, very strong. Unfolding of the sky. Jenny sees the sky, the way it borders the world and extends itself. She sees the blue, its stable impatience. To walk, surrounded by the blue noise of the sky.
The blue is not an object to describe, thinks Jenny, nor a state. But it sets up a resistance, it’s like a gift. Below it, I am permitted.
Wide blue like a womb turned inside out, full blue.
Ah, Jenny often says, ah.
Widening blue that sweeps everything away.
Jenny has the idea of a strange summer, an unnatural season, that wouldn’t move toward autumn and its blurred dissolutions, but toward an even sharper tension, a new beginning.
Creative fragmentation.
Things seem to be in the right place, but without harmony. Orderly straight lines, play of forces.
And always pushed, pushed outside, never outside enough.
The naked air, the heat. The flies. One likes them, they’re a sign.
Inside, the coolness. One walks around. Few people, vast hallways.
Traces of sun on the wooden cabinets on the walls. Drawings.
Sometimes a hallway seems to extend outdoors. Networks. It’s surprising.
Between the trees, hammocks. Black ropes. When you sway, the sky seems more familiar.
On the edge of the pond, the hardened mud, the furrows. Blades of grass and bubbles. Camille is walking there in a bathrobe. Fluttering.
To give Serge your hand. Something always begins again, almost new. Serge with his yellow hair.
The kitchen and the cook. Puddles in the sun, cleaning. The mops, they are worn out.
Talking, talking to the cook. He’s familiar with the beans, the meats. For him, the food is animate, living.
The lawn. People grouped. To drink a limonade. The women’s long skirts, striped pants.
Once, on the lawn, Jenny met a very strong man, with enormous shoulders. He wanted only one thing, to have a child. He would have given everything. He pretended to play with marionettes, imagining himself with the child. A big stubborn carcass. His veiled expression.
[...]
* * *
Catherine organizes a day at the sea, they take a little van.
Early morning departure. Quick coffee in the kitchen, standing. Cool air. Desire.
Serge is there, Camille. Michèle and the baby. A new woman, some old people. The old people hold hands, make a group.
Jenny is very happy, Louise too.
When they arrive, amazement. The light, the sounds.
Everything is bright, illuminated. The endless brilliant sea. Sparkling waves, a little wind. The water moves its surface.
They get there, they settle in.
Put a hat on the baby’s head.
Someone stays close to Michèle.
An old man has brought his radio. He listens to it all alone, behind a rock.
Jenny and Louise take a walk together. Jenny holds Louise.
They walk along the sea on the wet part of the sand. Their feet in and out of the water.
The water gathers the sky, supple mirror. Vibrations, indistinct presence, the waves throw themselves, breaking.
Louise and Jenny walk along, they dance a little. The world is a force.
The sparkling water’s motion, its energy seizes and hypnotizes. The sea is there, perfect, not an image, not a thing in a frame.
Jenny and Louise run, tumble. Jenny catches Louise, Louise laughs with Jenny on top of her. Play.
The air swims, blue and white, like the sky, like the water, and the sun is an invisible and omnipresent force, inside them.
Enveloping sounds, circular. A conch, an echo chamber. Holding the sea.
The air and the sounds revolve around each other, the same substance. Louise and Jenny move within this fierce equality, this non-differentiation.
The wind, sweeping. Everything rolling, going beyond itself. The light, the sounds. You no longer belong to yourself. You give everything away.
There are rocks, upright, here and there. To climb up and down; rest for the eyes that are otherwise drawn constantly by the insistence of the horizon line.
Now and then a sail, also, a motor. The pleasure of that slight difference, appearing and disappearing so quickly. Deep sound of the motor that gives back the underside of the sea, digs into it, persecutes it a little.
Further on the beach becomes more crowded. Fries.
Jenny and Louise hold each other and walk on and look at the sea.
Louise has a two-piece bathing suit.
Jenny walks along, watching her.
Boundless and complex admiration. The hazy precision of the body.
Jenny is swept along by an exaggeration that she feels is unbearable, obscene. Desire to name, to speak to Louise, to say to her: Louise, your soft breasts. To just say it.
Jenny looks at Louise and the idea comes to her that for Louise, silence is a necessity. As if Louise demanded that you protect a secret. Not about your feelings, not hiding yourself of course, but a secret about words themselves.
Jenny walks without saying anything.
She walks on with Louise, her feet in the waves. The sky and the beach, the blue.
Unheard of happiness.
Walking on a tightrope, and you will never fall. Radiance.
But to be constrained, perhaps. To be constrained by a keen confusion which then expands and imposes itself. To grip, to take. And to slide, to come back.
To live an immobile exaltation.
The sand is firm and flat. Immense noise, concave, and the rapid color of the air. Holding Louise's waist, Jenny thinks of the pleasure of holding a baby, a little baby that is soft and plastic. You could do anything to it without restriction. It wouldn't resist.
Jenny remembers Louise’s bad mood. Her own body weighs on her, a mass. Immobility is now difficult, and covers her, all of a sudden, like a heavy sticky sheet. Throw it off.
“Let's run, let's run,” says Jenny out loud, she's shouting, and to where? She wants to beat Louise.
The little waves arrive, move their surfaces. Tremors. Pure life, which is enough. She enjoys herself and is renewed. It's like a thing revealed, Jenny says to herself, a demand. All this water.
[…]
* * *
[…]
The play is starting. Everyone goes to the stage set up at the back of the garden. It’s sculpted and painted and you feel like you’re in a big decorated box, free. Even the chairs are particular pieces of the universe, alive.
It’s an old, familiar play, learned in the schools, with improvised variations, possible new endings. It’s a success.
Soon, the dance.
The dogs move and turn, the small ones freely, the big ones on a leash, pulling the girl who takes care of them. She’s put muzzles on some of them.
Christian Abrame is very well dressed. A tight jacket, a new shirt. He wants to dance.
[…]
The night becomes full, fluid. Inhabited black, deep vault.
Absence of sky.
The round light of the moon.
Words flow, conversations. What some people say to others. The language that moves along, calmly, under the words.
The festival. You hear foreign languages, also, blending in the air, and these far-off sounds, now closer, provoke a troubling encounter with yourself, a mild but surprising intoxication, sexual.
All languages, all nights.
[…]
The festival, full moon. They’d planned it that way.
Everyone is more and more awake.
Jenny dances with Louise. Swirling, scarves. The closest thing in the world. Louise and Jenny, whole.
The blue night, the lost sky, the paths and the trees. From outside you can see the indoor staircases of the house, the levels, hallways.
They release the balloons. They’re magnificent, all colors. Some are golden, others look like cats, rabbits. Abundance, youth.
The dance goes on. Michèle is still dancing with her baby.
Suddenly, Christian Abrame. He’s no longer dancing. He’s swaying all alone, his eyes closed, his face tight. Lost, turned inside out like a glove.
Serge notices first and starts trembling. The gardener notices next. Laughs.
Hovering. People watch.
Christian Abrame backs up. He backs up insides himself, he regains the strength that is there, waiting for him.
People watch.
A large passive strength. It starts to show itself.
Jenny sees it now. An emptiness filled. She stops, then she goes, she embraces Christian Abrame. She dances with him, she holds him, she dances.
She turns.
The feet and the knees move. The torso, the neck, the shoulders.
Jenny turns.
Immense sadness, also, of this dance. Body to body. What has been completed.
Jenny cries in the arms of Christian Abrame.
The blue night. The trees. Nothing else.
[…]
[1] Leslie Kaplan, The Book of Skies. Trans. Pap, Jennifer and Carr, Julie. London: Pamenar Press, 2024.
[2] “Throughout the 1960s, La Borde became a mythical pilgrimage site for the French intellectual world, as it welcomed philosophers, artists, writers, and filmmakers, in addition to medical personnel.” Camille Robcis, “Introduction, a Politics of Madness” in Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2021), 7.
[3] Robcis, 8.
[4] Leslie Kaplan, Excess-The Factory. Trans. Carr, Julie and Pap, Jennifer. Oakland, CA: Commune Editions (May 1, 2018) 13.
[5] Kaplan refers to Kafka's statement that writing allows one to move out of the line of assassins in "Writing Moves the Sky," (her 2013 lecture at the New School): https://publicseminar.org/2013/11/writing-moves-the-sky/.