How these vain ornaments, these veils weigh on me!
Phaedra, Act I, Scene iii
Pompously adorned as on the day of her death
Athalie, Act II, Scene v
Who puts on a uniform? The priest wears the cassock or chasuble, amice, stole, depending, the rabbi wears a beard and a hat, and that’s for the sacred; the admiral adorns himself with stars and stripes, which he displays the way a soldier does his twill gaiters, gold buttons, and fourragère; the doctor has removed his biretta but puts on the aseptic white coat; the magistrate, standing and seated, hides under a black robe; professors, orators sometimes unfurl a broad sleeve supplementing the rhetoric; the tragedian appears in a toga on the stage. Religion, the army, science, and law converge on the theater.
We make fun of these rites, liberated, we say, from these slow heavinesses, but we rarely laugh at elegant women in violets and furs, each stiffened after her manner by the uniform of fashion or cosmetics and even less at the athletes in the numbered jerseys, governed by implacable rules, in the space of the field and the time of the matches, subjected to the violences of certain contests and to the judgment of the clock, of rankings and referees, ambassadors of cities and nations, therefore combining the political, the religious, the military, the judiciary and a clever skillfulness that’s joined to the spectacle. The ritual varies in changing its ceremonial place but it remains invariant for a given group.
I perceive myself to be naked, weighed down by clothes I always find to be heavy. Certain men and women seem comfortable in their shirts and shorts, pushing their skin toward these coverings; others like me burden themselves with garments that hamper them. A coat sometimes induces claustrophobia like a box with cramped walls; you can feel completely bound by a jacket, suffocating in an undershirt. You only act quickly, supplely and in a sharp manner when almost naked: love, at the height of freedom. The dress slows the gymnastic gesture or the agile, rapid, inventive thought that loves to have a free hand and plenty of elbow room.1 I find myself covered. And then contemplative, very slowly.
Not far from the polar circle, on the open bridge when the winter winds came, we would formerly put on four, five, six wool sweaters one over the other under our pea jackets without for all that warming ourselves up and were suddenly transformed—with our arms spread away from our trunk and our chests stiff and starchy—into immobile, fat deep-sea divers, round rag dolls with rigid armor: a few clumsy robots, poorly adapted to the blows of the sea, stumbling over the duckboards. The ship took on a phantom look, steered, in the middle of the ice floes, by statues.
Life, they say, evolved in the past from bodies with hard boxes containing flabby flesh to bodies with soft outsides attached to stiffer internal skeletons: life began with crustaceans so as to pass over to mammals, external or internal framework.2 Thus the hard can hide the flabby, grasp it by the periphery, assure its upkeep. We protect ourselves by means of armor; we sculpt ourselves, less by solidifying the center or axis than by covering our skin. As though, become statues via the draped and the buckled, we were attaining an age-old archaism. The armor or the corslet, formerly, the robot or the diving suit, modern, bring us back to the lobster’s crust or the insect’s chitin; we become very old animals again; I was going to say fossils. The metamorphosis of the body into a cockroach doesn’t come from a rare cooling of innermost life since it’s a question of changing tunics, rather this metamorphosis is produced most often by the everyday relation to the exterior: make-up and clothes don’t hide so much as they harden and make blasé; we’re moved less by togas, already, than by skin; by rouge less than by mucous membrane, and ceruse than by the tip of the breast. The painted and pompously adorned queen, weighed down by vain ornaments and veils, bothered by the hand that knotted the hair gathered on her brow, loses the subtle suppleness of expression and her gestural vivacity: slower than slow, she stops, fixed, an idol petrified by cosmetics; then life, afflicted, vibrates beneath the stiffness of the tragic mask and protests a final time before death, in front of the sun, at the memory of a dream. As though cosmetics were preparing the death pangs. The toga and the tragic mask slow, solidify, articles of death, sculpt the character; here’s the statue—adorned on the stage or the throne, prepared for the sacrifice, like a bull with a spotless or meticulously varied coat.
Here’s the body—embalmed, anointed, bandaged. Mummification subjected the head to the body—a head poorly held by a too-weak internal skeleton—by means of a scholarly folding of narrow linens. Make-up, natron, clothing, wrappings, by superficial layers, stiffen well. They enclose the flabby in the hard of the surface. Every day the Egyptian priests of old made up and dressed the statues of the gods for which they were responsible before feeding and praying to them. They looked after them religiously, without neglecting a single detail, continuously created them or finished sculpting their form.
Sculpture, the most archaic of the arts, brings us back to the tragic, to death, to mummies and gods, but again to antediluvian animals via the surface veils. The layer of chreme, the veil of linen form the final stratum of the granular rock, foliated, out of which the colossus comes or the first wall of the black box, of the anthropomorphous sarcophagus in which said colossus rests. The series progresses from the hard varieties to the soft ones, finishing at signs and writing, passing through tissue, a middle variety, half hard and half soft.
Crusts of color then of wool, cardboard, varnished wood, marble, and granite superficially retain the flabby inside that flows, flees, rots in every conceivable direction. The painting holds the plaster, the plaster holds the parging, the parging holds the joints, these latter hold the stones, say what holds the wall. Does your solidity put its trust in your vertebral column or your decorations? In your tan?
And how I love that the French language, by means of two roots or origins foreign to each other, has formed two homonymous verbs about which one might dream that the one opened the meaning of the other, since farder [to make up] also means “to weigh,” “to sag under its own weight” like a wall, or “to hold up” under a weight or burden [fardeau]: how these vain ornaments, how these veils fardent me!3
Have you ever seen, passing through Tokyo, on some stage, the traditional Japanese model receiving, standing, with crossed arms, an appalling number of kimonos on her? Around her bustle about slowly and for a very long time, as though for a rite, bearers and dressmakers, while a narrator recounts that a very ancient custom is being reproduced there; and the uneasiness takes hold: ornament or suffocation? The woman is disappearing beneath the layers; we’re at a massacre, without understanding. This is the tragic scene, without words. How those vain ornaments, how those veils crush her! Who could withstand those bonds, those knots and their weight? Veils kill by tightening as much as stones do by impacts. I have therefore seen a living mummy getting bandaged, a statue sculpted from life. My memory was strangling me, breathless beneath the sweaters and pea jacket, on the winter sea, on board a war ship, armored, armed, sailing toward death, for exercise.
The priest prepares to climb up to the altar of the God who delighted his youth. Over his black soutane, he slips on the alb or the surplice, both white; next he slips on the amice that he knots around his chest like a good sailor does his detachable collar, then the long stole takes its place around his neck; he doesn’t forget to put on, after the chasuble that changes colors depending on the liturgical days, the short maniple, which ends in a dove tail, over his left forearm. Is my memory failing? Has he left anything out? The deacon Saint Stephen is presented in a dalmatic before Saint Peter, at the entrance to the city, for the consecration, pompously adorned as on the day of his death, dressed in this way for the debate before the learned, standing for his thesis clothed thus to give his course before the listening crowd, and still beneath the same heavy draperies before the tribunal and the assassins that lynch and stone him. Do these ornaments and veils hamper or protect the condemned man? Do they mark him for sacrifice, like the spots, in the past, on the coats of the bulls? Carpaccio painted the first deacon beneath the burden of the sacerdotal cloths that were worn by deacons a millennium and a half after him in memory of him. Before Saint Peter and beneath the stones, beneath the weight of the garments.
What is a statue if not a dressed body?
The ancient Egyptians, who went almost naked except for a loincloth, and above all the women with their transparent dresses, so adorable when they put a narrow band along their mane, loved to abominably overload those who occupied a sovereign or sacerdotal position with infinite details, as though they were counting their limbs or numbering their bones.
What is there in the garment that we have lost the memory of?
Certain priests of ancient Egypt carried the skin of a wildcat on their shoulders, a panther or leopard: did they just come from sacrificing it? Did those remains protect them from death? Heracles likewise suffocated his face at the bottom of the open mouth of the Nemean Lion that he had suffocated. The poets sing of our ancestors dressed in animal skins. I don’t think however that they were only protecting themselves from the cold. They were becoming hardened from fear.
What courage will soon be necessary for others to strip the gods and men?
Those who are going to stone the holy deacon lay their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. There he is on the last canvas, on the left: above, the stone city surrounded with walls overlooks the witness, seated, watching over the tunics and robes, below.
They undress to assassinate; they watch or give death, almost naked. The victim is dressed in the dalmatic: pompously adorned on the day of his death. The devouring hounds, for their part, are running, their coat of fur outside.4 These vain ornaments, these veils weigh on him or her who is going to die and hamper for throwing stones those who are going to make them die. Clothed victim, practically naked lynchers, like wild beasts. Adorned victim, no longer adorned murderers. The victim with all the trappings, in grand pomp and ceremony, the others no longer with the trappings.5 The unique victim marked, painted, made-up, anointed, the criminals no longer marked. If one of them were wearing clothes, dress, make-up, unction, the mark of a seal or finery he would in turn run the risk of taking the place and role of the dead man. Nothing changes things like a badge. So there they are almost naked, without robe or tunic, no longer in pomp or marked so as to remain in anonymity. Naked: neither seen nor recognized. The group of killers enters into fusion, burning with anger and hatred, a unanimous social crucible in which everyone abandons identity. The assembly killed while exonerating each of its members, naked. Clothing designates, separates, names, distinguishes, and therefore accuses; nudity confuses and erases the name: a double innocence.
He who is watching over the clothes is rightly going to change his name: Saul will call himself Paul before dying a martyr. There he is, on the left, at the bottom, separated from the group of killers, already marked like Stephen. He is soon going to slip on the clothes he’s watching over: charging himself with all the garments in the world. Witness of and substitute for the statue.
The real must be imagined as veiled.
The veil must be conceived as a mixture of hard and soft: object, still, sign, already; sign, still, object, already.