Blue Self-Portrait

not take advantage of his generosity, though often I do take advantage, I mean I serve myself without restraint or consideration, I take what interests me and use it to fill my own void, my void is all I care about, I’m nothing but an empty stomach. I know because I’m personally concerned, as illustrated perfectly by my ultimately failed marriage which was intended to fill the void, a marriage I believed in for years with the sole concern of being fulfilled, that way I had of filling the marriage with all kinds of things I would bring back and cook up, my marriage was nothing but a succession of banquets of things, I told my sister in the souvenir shop, in self-interest I stocked up things and more things, I always made a meal out of whatever it was, it all tasted good and to finish off my disgust for small dishes and for plenteous banquets and the pathological slimming. My pathofogical slimming marked the end of my successful marriage, I said to my sister, to sustain a successful marriage we should have kept up a desire for cooking and a desire for cleavage, not just the resources to cook out of love but also to cook for the sake of one’s cleavage, so eat, said my sister and stop with the self-analysis, you need to be making red blood cells and processing iron, the analysis can come later, our priority is your blood, you need healthy blood with plenty of red and white cells, platelets and iron, for cleavage one needs aptitudes not given to every woman, healthy blood should suffice to keep your end up, no need for a belly or excess weight to maintain resistance. Take the great résistant Jean Moulin, he wasn’t heavy but he had a good count of platelets, blood cells and iron, that’s what made the man Jean Moulin, a varied, iron-rich diet, there is iron in strength, perhaps in popcorn too, I thought about Jean Moulin and his iron and swallowed some American cinematographic nutrition, the expression came into my head but I didn’t want to say it, managed not to get started on America again, once is enough. Thanks to my capacity to accept a minimal gift of American popcorn, a capacity not innate but acquired through a successful education in the rules of exchange, further reinforced by Jean Moulin’s blood, I played a discreet part in the pianist’s relaxation, made his relaxation possible by giving up on all discussion of popcorn. The results were before me, I could contemplate them despite the semi-darkness, truly fine results, courtesy of this food-sharing that I accepted knowing how to say thanks, he was, yes, the pianist in his civvies, was relaxing in the cinema. Not I. There was the problem with my legs, a long-standing problem that I’ve never managed to fix and which damages my social position, tarnishes my public image and makes me unfit for all cultural integration. I’d be folding my legs around, crossing and uncrossing them and hooking them onto my arms, and I’d wind up totally embarrassed by the part of myself made up of legs and this throughout the whole film, an hour and a half of leg-awkwardness, I coiled them up like venomous vipers and imagined them the limbs of a paraplegic so I’d not have to deal with them, but they wouldn’t be tamed so easily, on the contrary, the more I thought about my paraplegic legs, the more alive and kicking the legs themselves became. In the end I trapped them by wedging my feet up on the seat and wrapping the whole bundle in both arms, that’s how I finished the film, in fetal position except for my head which was watching the film and not my navel. I was floating too thinking nothing but fetal thoughts but that’s pure invention, I’ve no fetal memories and that’s fine by me, I decided once again during the film: people who have their fetal memories at their fingertips are scary, everyone who can go back upstream like salmon upriver to the spawning ground of their fetal origins terrifies me, I remembered that type, I’d never want a single fetal memory, iron-curtain out the fetal condition, that’s the way to go, I’d said to my sister, that leaves space for the fetal imagination not to return to its origins in the fetal position, having no defined origin is stimulating for the memory, the quest for primal memory amounts to nothing more than dying having done nothing other than retell your founding fetal myth and nothing could matter more, I would say to all and sundry, I’d discussed it with my sister, now in the plane I was considering this discussion about origins that I’d inflicted on my sister but I could clearly see, she didn’t get it, my sister and I understand each other on most things but not on origins, it’s not an ideological divergence, my sister and I are almost perfectly in tune ideologically, it’s a primordial and practically fundamental difference, my sister feels no drive to return to her fetal origin like salmon returning upriver because she naturally recalls her forebears and still spontaneously luxuriates in the amniotic fluid, she doesn’t share my view on the original quest because she doesn’t comprehend the first thing about this quest, being directly connected via her belly button to the first principles of life and knowing everything a fetus knows about the whole world, about its place in the universe and the point of ontology. My sister’s expression had been forbidding, as if I were refusing her right to fetal conscience, begging me not to go on because then she’d have had to explain herself and sometimes explanation isn’t possible, that’s my sister, she knows where possibility ends and doesn’t embark on endless discussions about the beginning of time, simply acknowledges the starting blocks for everything, not I, in the cinema I’d no way of