Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
But which time was it? Which was the penultimate? Had he actually been present on that day with the painting, flashing through that secure room?
Clare had read, too, Lacan’s 1957 lecture on veils.
By 1957, the painting would have been hanging, for at least three years, on the wall in the study where Lacan retired each Sunday to plan his classes. Three years of staring at it masked or unmasked, as the analyst liked. Headless, legless, armless, a sort of globe, this pelvis in creams and pinks and browns.
Lacan says, meanwhile, in the text derived from his 1957 seminar, that it does not matter. He’s talking about love. He says that what is instructive is to think about veils. He says if you put a veil in front of something that does not exist, you create an image of something that is there, only hidden. And if you put a veil in front of something that does exist, you create an image of something that is there, only hidden. The crucial thing is not whether it is there. Real presence does not matter. The thing is, whether we can imagine it—and at the same time imagine its absence. This is what the veil permits: it is a screen on which loss and gain mix, in which something that is not there and something that is become equivalent. The veil is the image of a loss, an image we cannot otherwise picture. We give ourselves this veil. We give ourselves this image. We put it in the world. This is how we love.
Twenty-One. Grief
Twenty-One
Grief
In the recordings, Loudermilk experiments with various styles of self-presentation. For the third session, he’s a provocateur, which is to say, an ass. Admittedly, he is abetted in this project by his instructor, Professor Hillary. In a repeat performance of the affective stylings of class number one, Hillary makes no attempt to conceal his rage. If anyone asks Harry, which no one does, Hillary’s ire is caused not by anything in particular Loudermilk happens to do or say. And not even Loudermilk’s loudness, which may be a contributing factor, is sufficient as irritant, as it were. Nor can Hillary’s explosion be entirely explained by his combination of possible hangover plus definite renewed drunkenness, the slur under half of what he says, the growl of dehydration. No, there is something more. Hillary is imagining Loudermilk having sex with his wife, Harry is sure of it. It’s the first thing on Hillary’s mind the minute Loudermilk walks through the door and it remains Hillary’s primary thought until the last second of the day’s lesson, such as this lesson is.