If you’ve enjoyed any of the posts here, I invite you to check out “Notes for a Copywriting Class“, a Substack I’ve recently launched on the art, practice, and teaching of persuasive writing. Part teaching journal, part swipe file, part ad-history rabbit hole, it’s a bit more focused than “Breach of Close”, but still with its share of digressions. Like this one on advertising strategies, with a (longish) detour into a coca-leaf wine that was awarded a medal from the Vatican.
The cut-up blocks of text that form the ground of Antonis Donef’s fascinating canvases, on show in “Time’s Witness”, the artist’s new exhibition at the Kalfayan Galleries (Athens), are a curious mix of the weighty and the waggish. Their sources include: an Italian-Russian dictionary; a Greater Metropolitan Athens telephone directory; a German introductory physics textbook; trigonometric tables; city maps; a hospital romance novel in Finnish; parliamentary discussions on the revision of the Greek Constitution; 19th century French encyclopedias, vintage instructions for DIY furniture (including a set for a combination cocktail bar and bookcase!), a German hydraulics reference work; and a 1950s book on parenting—all apparently collected by the artist himself during expeditions to second-hand bookstores, antiquarians, and flea markets.
The scholars, mapmakers, and lexicographers who created Donef’s source material were assemblers by inclination and profession, working, often in tandem with associates, to turn diverse bits of unstructured data into useful information. Theirs was a work of synthesis, Donef’s is one of uncoupling and re-assembly,
Most of the compositions in “Time’s Witness” are built from irregular grids of cut-out material from these sources, set in seemingly absurd, yet compositionally precise arrangements. They are delightful. In one, an illustration of common birds in Israel abuts a passage (in French) of affreightment contracts and river navigation; in another, a page from “The Boy’s Own Book of Indoor Games and Recreations” (1890) — “vaulting movements, when neatly performed, are very pretty”– sits aside ads for paint strippers and colored roofing felt.
Detail from Antonis Donef, Untitled (2025) from the exhibition “Time’s Witness”
Atop this field of texts are swathes of densely meshed, repetitive abstract patterns—meticulously hand-drawn in India ink—that ooze across the tesserae of printed text. Some of these patterned drawings—the word “doodles” comes to mind—resemble the feathers on a bird’s wing, others call to mind fish scales or the nubs on a rubber garden house, rows of alligator teeth, the spiky finials of an iron fence. Some are so densely drawn that the underlying ground of text or map is obscured. With thousands and thousands of hand-drawn lines, requiring of Donef months of painstakingly detailed work, these doodles, are certainly a witness of time in themselves.
These geometric patterns share the pictorial space with Donef’s more figurative drawings: Dior-like silhouettes from 1950s fashion magazines, scenes from children’s story-books, oversized slippers and wooden legs, and phalluses. The drawings, figurative and geometric, serve as chutes and ladders that guide the eye up and down and across the canvas.
Once you get in, that is. There is no focal point or path of entry to these compositions. How could there be? There is simply too much going on here visually. You begin from whatever point catches your eye. One would no more “read” the canvas directionally, from left to right, say, or top to bottom than one would read a dictionary or encyclopedia, one entry after the other.
The richness of textual and iconographic detail invites lingering and wandering. In one work, the eye traverses from an ad for pre-fab parquet panels to a jaguar crouching on a tree trunk, then climbs up a lattice-work of doodles to land on an encyclopedia entry for Johan Zoffany, an 18th-century Anglo-German neoclassical painter, known, among other things, for his large-scale group portraits of artists of the time and smaller-scale “conversation pieces” depicting gathering of friends or family in gardens or drawing-room. The eye shimmies back down again to an ad for a curious two-bladed plane-and-file hand tool (Donef seems to nurture a fondness for such DIY material) before finally alighting on a biographical entry for Rudolf Carl von Slatin, an Austrian soldier and colonial administrator in the service of Britain and Egypt, who became famous at the time for his daring escape from an eleven-year-long imprisonment by Mahdist revolutionaries in the Sudan.
Leaking the Past
Donef’s practice bears some resemblance to the Cubists’ collages and the Surrealist’s cut-ups (découpés in French), an aleatory narrative technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text through altered juxtaposition. But his material is less quotidian than the former’s—no newsprint or wallpaper here—and his selection more deliberate than the latter’s.
Still, parallels can be found. In a lecture on the “Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups”, American writer William Burroughs discussed his own experiments with the technique, which he had learned from his friend Brion Gysin, a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist. Burroughs recalled that as he experimented with this technique, he began noticing that some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts could refer to future events: “When you cut into the present the future leaks out,” he said. “Cut-ups put you in touch with what you know and what you do not know”.
Donef’s cut-ups leak, too. But they tend to leak the past. Not explicitly of course. Very little of the prodigious amount of archival material that Antonis Donef has cut up and laid across his canvasses carries an actual date. The moment the pages from these books are loosened from their spine, the connection to the volume’s dated frontispiece is severed and with it the metadata of time. I could only find one explicit chronological reference in the works on exhibition. This one date—September 1959—appears at the bottom of several yellowed pages of advertisements, all apparently from the same magazine, even though they have wound up on different canvases.
But although undated, the vintage maps, encyclopedias, and dictionaries that forms Donef’s source material witness the time in which they were produced. They are works of chronologically delimited authority, and their accuracy has an expiration date. Words fall out of currency, new ones are minted; roads are rerouted, extended, renamed.
Paradoxically, it is this impermanence, this trace of obsolescence that lets us retrieve some of the lost metadata. If these fragments leak the past, they also invite us to track it down—sometimes literally—through the trail of a single, half-forgotten word.
In one of Donef’s works (they are all untitled), there lies an entry, perhaps from the Larousse – Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, for attrape-parterre, sandwiched in a stack of definitions between attrape-mouche (fly-catcher) and attraper (to catch) under an illustration of a treehouse-crowned peg leg in an oversized slipper.
Detail with “attrape-parterre” from Antonis Donef’s Untitled (2025).
You will not find attrape-parterre in the online Larousse dictionary. When I googled “attrape-parterre” Gemini replied that the term was not a standard French phrase. “It appears to be a combination of ‘attrape’ (catch, trap) and ‘parterre’ (ground level, flower bed),” it said, and offered some clever guesses as to its meaning. It suggested, for example, that it might be a trap for insects in a flowerbed or a device to catch something from the ground level of a theater (a guardrail for a mosh pit came to my mind). It could, Gemini speculated, also be “a playful or metaphorical term for something that catches attention, or a trap for unsuspecting people, playing on the theatrical sense of parterre.”
In and out of fashion
It is, in fact, none of these (though the third comes close). According to the definition that appears in the cut-up, arrete-parterre is defined as “artifices de déclamation ou de style, propres à séduire un parterre, un public peu délicat.” That is, declamatory and stylistic devices useful for seducing a not-so-refined public. Clap-trap for the pit, so to speak.
The term makes an appearance in earlier dictionaries, notably Le Littré, dictionnaire de la langue français, a four-volume dictionary published in 1873-74. The entry contains a brief excerpt of a letter Voltaire wrote to his longtime friend Charles-Augustin de Ferriol d’Argental (one of the more than 1,200 the two exchanged over the course of their lives), dated May 28, 1759. In this letter, Voltaire tells his friend about his new play, Trancrède, which was set not in the heroic rhyming Alexandrine couplets which was the standard form for dramatic poetry at the time and in which all his earlier tragedies had been written, but in the “less declamatory” style of vers croisés.
N’allez pas vous attendre à de belles tirades, à de ces grands vers ronflants, à des sentences , à des Attrapes-Parterre; style médiocre , marche simple, voilà ce que vous y trouverez. Mais s’il y a de l’intérèt , tout est sauvé. (Don’t expect grand speeches, or verses of lofty maxims, or claptrap for the pit; mediocre style, straightforward pace—that’s what you’ll find here. But if there’s interest, all is saved.)
Attrape-parterre makes an even earlier entrance in, of all things, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1801 dictionary of neologisms (!) entitled La Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles.
Strictly speaking, Mercier’s work is not a lexicon but rather a collection of newly coined words or words with novel meanings, reflecting his view that language is and should reflect societal changes. Today, we would he call him a descriptivist. Mercier challenged the idea of a fixed, standardized language, arguing against the “caprice” of institutions that sought to control linguistic norms.
We talk about the importance of a good dictionary: the first thing would be not to entrust him to a race of stiflers who kneel before four or five men from the time of Louis XIV, in order to dispense, I believe, with the task of studying and others, and who, riddled with the most miserable prejudices, closing the little temple of their idolatrous admiration, do not know that there is no fixed perfection in languages.
Mercier is right, of course. There is no fixed and perfect state in which a language ought to be preserved, the fate of attrape-parterre a case of point. It entered Mercier’s Neologie at the start of the 19th century; by the 20th it was already on its way out of circulation.
These vintage encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases—we may think of them now as eclectic curios, relics of systematized but now obsolescent knowledge. At the time of their appearance, however, these ambitious works were imbued with an almost sacral authority. They were the unchanging repositories of knowledge, the world in its utter facticity.
We know this to be an illusion, of course. We know the dictionary is out-of-date the moment it is published, indeed, even before the type is set, and also very much “in-to-date”, anchored as it is to the time of its production . It, like its encyclopedia and cartographic counterparts, captues a cast of characters whose permanence is always in question. Like the figures in Zoffany’s conversation pieces or the comings and goings of attrape-parterre, not all will return for another sitting or edition.
Each scrap of text, each strip of map is time’s witness. Here on Donef’s canvas, freed from their spine and interleaved with ephemera of other times, they provide occasions for associative exploration. Text fragments, drawn figures, and layered motifs act as nodes in a network of possible meanings (which we construct ourselves). There is no single interpretive route; instead, we are invited forge their own. They invite us to play, to make stories. They are browse for our imagination and intellectual appetite.
Donef’s art is a visual rhizome, inviting us to drift, graze, hop across disciplines, periods, and sensibilities. It is, in other words, a practice of curiosity. And in this, his work, though assembled from paper relics of the analog world, feels deeply consonant with the structure of contemporary thinking—closer in spirit to the hyperlink than to the index.
The pleasure and curse of the hyperlink, of course, is that you never really know what is on the other end, an impasse or an occasion of serendipity.
Donef’s art offers much more of the latter. Indeed, this text was itself prompted by the unlikely discovery, buried within a few square centimeters of a herringbone of spindly map strips, of a time and place from my own past. This work, unlike many of the other compositions in “Time’s Witness” eschews the grid in favor of a swirling mass of cross-hatched splinters of maps, directories, and colored bands. Somewhere in the middle of this frenzy of toponyms and city-blocks I chanced up strips of a crimson county map, laid over a yellow ground of what seems to be a page from a Greater Athens phone directory. Only a few letters could be read: a snippet reading “uds”, and the slightly below to the right, “H bo n”, and finally, a bit further down to the left, RS Y over TY.
Detail from Antonis Donef, Untitled (2025).
The traces were enough for me to decipher the Hudson county city of Hoboken, where I was born and grew up, as well as the neighboring town of Jersey City.
Even more strangely, a few centimeters northwest of this point I discovered a strip from another map—in chartreuse, this time—with the first few letters of what I could quickly see was the name of the small town in suburban New Jersey my family moved to when I was twelve.
Critics have suggested that Donef carefully selects the extracts that go into his compositions. But the sources themselves? The books and atlases from which these pages and strips are cut, too? It’s hard to imagine that Donef was looking for a map of northern New Jersey to use in his work.
Whether he had or not is beside the point. His work operates on the principle of encounter, not prescription, even if it is composed of materials we ordinarily consider works of authority and fixed truths. In Donef’s hand, the encyclopedia and atlas become a space of wonder once again, a field for imaginative play and visual storytelling that can lead us to that something new we hadn’t been looking for.
Featured image: Detail from Antonis Donef, Untitled (2025). From the exhibtion “Time’s Witness”, Kalfayan Galleries, 10 June – 6 September 2025
“Uncle Gabe passed away,” my brother tells me over the phone. Gabe, he says, short for Gabriel, though I’m sure when we were kids we all called him Gay.
I’m shocked by the news because I’m certain he is already dead. In my family, the men of his generation, their lives cut short by the sludge of tar and plaque their bodies accumulated through a lifetime of bad but then common habits, barely made it into this century, much less two decades in.
But then my uncle had always stood out. Unlike his brothers, he didn’t smoke and rarely drank (which may explain why he lived into his 90s) and had married a woman who wasn’t Italian or even Catholic. Florence was a Presbyterian of English stock with auburn hair and a reedy, warbling voice all sophistication, who played the organ and had a job in the city. But what most stood out was the fact that Uncle Gay had no children.
It was perhaps his inability to father children —for in my young mind fatherhood was a matter of fitness, not choice—that made me think of him as a meek and reserved man. But no, he was indeed a gentler man than his brothers. I never heard him raise his voice to anyone, and certainly not to his wife, whom he treated with far greater respect than my uncles did theirs, almost as if they were friends.
Growing up I was certain my uncle couldn’t father children. I pieced together an explanation of why not from scraps of stories I believed I had heard, something about radiation treatments he had undergone as a young man for an unspecified cancer. I didn’t think it odd that someone would have thought it necessary or appropriate to explain to a 12-year-old boy why his uncle couldn’t have children when they never bothered to explain to us how children came into existence in the first place.
But I had come upon the facts of life on my own, around the same time I read John Hershey’s Hiroshima, which figured on a summer reading list my school had sent me. The sex education book I stumbled upon in the town library was a curiosity of sorts, nothing more. I already knew about erections from my own and was intrigued by the thought of the millions of potential babies housed in my sperm, but the rest held no interest for me.
Hiroshima was another matter. Although my imagination had been fed with the cinematic tropes of green-glowing creatures and fizzing rays of energy, scary in the way a campfire horror tale would be, Hershey’s depiction of radiation sickness gave me nightmares for weeks.
The books may thus have sown in my subconscious the seeds of an explanation for Gabriel’s childlessness. If exposure to radiation could make gums bleed and skin blister and hair fall out, even a measured dose, I imagined, would be enough to kill off the sperm his body would try to make. In my 8th-grader’s eyes, he was a damaged man, though his scar, unlike the tremors and limps and dangling limbs of other more visibly wounded relatives, was unseeable, and like radiation, and measured only in the absence of something else.
As a boy I felt sad for him. I remembered him sitting at the immense oak table in the dining room of my grandparents’ country house, along with his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands. As the adults sat through the long hours of coffee and cake and grappa, they would be called to deal with banged heads and pleas for seconds on dessert, like ministers at a council of state tugged aside by a secretary with urgent news. All save Uncle Gay and Aunt Flo. They were never pestered. There were twelve of us cousins, and none of us ever ran up to them for anything.
I was sad for him in a way I wasn’t for myself and never would be, for even in 8th grade I was sure I would never get married, and that was neither good nor bad but just the way things were. I didn’t know if other boys my age thought of themselves as future fathers, but I knew that they liked girls in a way I didn’t, in the way you had to like a girl if you wanted to be a father.
I still don’t know why my uncle had no children. There is no one left but his youngest sister to ask, and I will not burden her with my curiosity.
I find I can no longer disentangle fact from remembered experience. All I have of my childhood are bits of scenes , sometimes nothing more than a quality of afternoon light recalled on a quiet, sunny street or the scent of boiled turnip. To salvage these scraps of recollections, I anchor them in a tale, unwittingly supplying the missing elements so that they can bond into an indissoluble narrative.
Daniel doesn’t remember anything about radiation therapy, but that proves nothing. We are both evangelists writing a history years after the events took place. His accounts are always kinder and more forgiving of their subject’s failings than mine, probably because Daniel himself is a kinder, more insightful person than I am. He remembers, for example, that Florence and Gabriel befriended my father in a way that went beyond the obligations of kinship, and this surprises me, too, because I rarely think of my father as having any friends.
Like Matthew and Mark, we do not always tell the same stories, and even when we do, the details do not always match like the b in Gabe and the sarsaparilla soda our uncle offered us instead of Coke when we visited him. Once Daniel tells me, though, it makes sense. It’s the kind of choice a man who was not a father might make.
But we both remember the cars and the barbecues.
Like my father, my uncle was a negative cutter, his wife a better paid color timer, all three jobs arranged by my grandfather, whose influence in the movie business no story of mine has yet been able to accommodate. With two incomes and no children, my uncle and aunt had more money than anyone else in the family, enough to buy a new Cadillac every two years and a sprawling split-level in a leafy suburb in northeastern New Jersey, a town of long sloping front lawns and no sidewalks.
They were the first to move out of the city and thus the first to have a real back yard, where, as far back as I can remember, they gathered us all together, the whole lot of siblings and spouses and the dozen cousins, for a barbecue. It was held on some inconspicuous Sunday in midsummer, never on the 4th of July or Labor Day, because it was a holiday in its own right and as eagerly anticipated.
It seemed to me that the house was built with this single day in mind. At the back of the ground floor next to the music room was a utility room that led through sliding glass doors to their spacious backyard. The room housed their washer and dryer, the latter one in a long series of gadgets and appliances they were always the first to acquire but it was also outfitted with a refrigerator, a sink and counter space. It was a makeshift kitchen that served as supply point and wash-up station between the yard and the serious kitchen upstairs.
For one day in the year their yard filled with the rare squawks and laughter of children playing, as if a band of migratory creatures had alighted on their immaculate turf for a brief and noisy visit. And here in their yard they would finally be pestered and my uncle pleaded with to take us for a ride in his Cadillac.
Daniel tells me that as a boy he wished at times my aunt and uncle would adopt him. He says he sometimes prayed that he would be left behind after one of our visits and thus ensconced him in the privileged world of an only child.
I tell him, I, too fantasized about being raised by them, not for the privilege of being their only child but for the chance to be part of their quiet, elegant world, where music was played and no one fought, and in the place of argument a discourse of affection and civility reigned. I would learn to play the organ and go to a better school, a place where no one would know about Jamie Marsh and the names he called me.
But my fantasies never lingered. Unlike Daniel, I was wary about being the focus of attention, and the thought of being an only child, and indeed to such eager, long-deprived new parents, unnerved me. At first they’d ask me after school how my day went but soon they’d move on to why I was hanging out with Anne, who wasn’t the kind of girl a boy would want to take to the school dance, and besides, why wasn’t I going to the dance anyway? And then later on they’d ask me about Jamie, for I was sure they’d find out about the bullying, and their questions would raise this accident of fate into a problem, a thing to be investigated and dealt with, and the last thing I wanted was to be scrutinized. For though I told myself I was queer only in Jamie’s twisted mind, I knew I was different. I couldn’t help feeling that there was something in me that Jamie saw that I couldn’t and that my uncle and aunt might see as well.
It was better to recede unobserved into the chaos of my own family, my parents’ attention distracted by their own constant skirmishes and the more pressing needs of my younger and unrulier brothers. Though I silently resented my father for not protecting me from what I did my best to conceal from him, I was relieved he didn’t pry.
A more attentive father in more tolerant times would have noticed how often I was sick on gym days, or how I sometimes came back from school hungry because I had missed lunch at the cafeteria. He would have helped me feel right about myself and deal with my nemesis. A father like Daniel.
He tells me I’m selling our father short. He says, yes, he wouldn’t have understood, but that wouldn’t have changed his love for me or his desire to keep me safe.
He’s right. of course. When I came out to my father years later, he told me he loved me and just wanted me to be happy. And then added, “But it makes me sad to think you won’t have children. Don’t you want to?”
I remember my first Dutch lesson as if it were yesterday. I felt like a teenager daring a flirt at a bar, all awkward and inadequate, but eager to make a good impression, as I tried out sounds that had equivalent to the ones I ordinarily used. I even wondered for a moment or two whether it was a mistake to start on this project at all (“He’s out of my league, why am I bothering?”). But my sense of inadequacy was outweighed in the end by the pleasure I had of actually saying something in the language, even if it was very simple: I described a picture of a man sitting behind a table with a book in his hand: Een man zit achter de tafel. Er heeft een boek in zijn hand.
I remember all my first language lessons vividly. Even now, many years later, I can recall the dialogue from my first French lesson in high school, which began with a child asking his mother, Maman, dînons-nous en ville ce soir? The phrase made a huge impression on me at the time. I thought the French must be terribly sophisticated if a 12-year old could ask if they were going to have dinner in town. My family and I rarely dined out (which was a word we didn’t use anyway), and only on special occasions, like a grand-aunt’s birthday or my jockey cousin winning at the racetrack, and then I didn’t need to ask where we were going because we always went to the same restaurant.
This initial exposure to the foreign language, this first dialogue, seemingly so innocent, so lightweight, with the most basic of words and expressions, always seems to leave a lasting impression on students. I only know because I used to teach English and would ask my students if they remembered. Many did. The beginners’ textbook we used started with a dialogue of a rock climber who had lost his footing and slipped to a narrow footing. There was a picture of him perched on this sliver of a landing, his fingers wedged into the rockface as he held on to life and limb. The first word in English my students heard was “Help!” I still wonder what image of America this communicated to my students. (Curiously enough, the textbook we were using for Dutch is called Kunt u mij helpen? — Can you help me?)
My first Dutch lesson began differently but even more dramatically. Or rather, more theatrically. My teacher held up a pen and announced to me, Dit is een pen. She said it as if she were revealing a sacred object, the relic of a saint perhaps or an obscure surgical instrument used in esoteric rituals. Dit is de tafel, she said, pointing to where we were sitting. She made it sound as if it were an altar, making me forget for a moment that we were in her son’s bedroom and the item of furniture wasn’t a table but her son’s desk. In her priestess voice, it was a table. Ik wijs de tafel aan. Dit is de tafel. This was the table, no doubt about it. The table where it is all going to happen.
She laid the pen on the desk. Ik leg de pen aan de tafel. She fell silent for a moment and added, De pen ligt op de tafel. She made it sound as if the pen that lay on the table had gotten there by an act of teleportation. She reached for a small bag, not really a purse, more like a zip-up vinyl pencil case. It may have been her son’s. She opened it and put the pen inside. Ik doe de pen in de tas. And then out. Ik pak de pen uit de tas. Like a magician at a children’s party, she repeated the process of situating and de-situating things with other objects, each time adding a few more motions. This was plot development!
Then it got personal. She announced her movements, one by one, as if reading directions from a script. “I am sitting in the chair. I am standing up. I’m walking toward the door. I’m opening the door.” Ik zit op de stoel. Ik sta op. Ik loop naar de deur. Ik doe de deur open. She walked out of her son’s room toward the kitchen. I tried to be polite and not look beyond the door into more of her family’s private space but I was thinking maybe I should look because if she disappeared into the kitchen I would certainly want to hear what came next. She had me Yes, what came next! With this sequence of simple sentences and a few well-timed gestures, she had me on the edge of my seat—which I almost could have said in Dutch that day. I was enchanted.
Eventually she came back to her seat (after going to the window and opening and closing it a few times). She looked at me and said Nu pakt u de pen. I did as I was told and took the pen (the u was a tipoff). Pak het boek. I took the book from her hands. Leg het boek op de taafel, naast de pen. Doe het boek open. She raised her hands and extended six fingers and motioning to the book with her thumb and said, Op bladzijde zes. Nu geef me het boek. I don’t know why I had to open the book to page six before I gave it to her, but I did what I was told.
I yielded myself up to her firm but reassuring voice. She could have told me to take my shoes off and whirl myself around like a Sufi mystic and I would have done it, though of course I wouldn’t have understood anything so sophisticated. I would have done it happily because I was on some very basic level communicating. Well, in the sense of following instructions, which is in fact an authentic task, even if in real life nobody would ask you to put a pen in a bag or walk to the door.
Next, she showed me some photocopies of paintings. Portraits by Frans Hals. A man. A woman in a white lace cap and fur-trimmed black gown with a starched white ruff. A man, also with a ruff. Group portraits, she said, of four women and of five men. Dit zijn vier vrouwen. Dit zijn vijf mannen. (I recognized them as the Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse and the Regents of the St Elizabeth Hospital of Haarlem, respectively, but didn’t say anything. It was enough she had slipped in the first plurals of the afternoon). The photocopies really didn’t do justice to Hals’ paintings and lots of details were lost, but they would have been lost on me anyway if my tutor had described them to me in Dutch. As it was I had a hard time figuring out who was standing achter de tafel, who voor de tafel and who naast de tafel; they all seemed to me be around the table, but that was the nerd in me speaking.
I loved the exercise. Talking about paintings with my friends is something I do in real life, and again this seemed to be real communication. It was a bit of a struggle to suppress my over-achieving self , who wanted to talk about why the regents were looking in different directions. But learning a language means being content with a little. The beginners’ world is necessarily one of simple feelings, basic impressions and unambiguous likes and dislikes. Films become “interesting” or “awful”. Your sharp-witted yet compassionate friend is flattened into “a nice guy”. You like a painting or you don’t.
Still, I did talk about a painting, even if in the crudest of terms. My first impressions of the Dutch language were now linked to drama and painting and philanthropy. And that was not a bad way to start.
This text is adapted from something I wrote the day after I had this lesson. With the start of the spring semester, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of the first day of class, and decided to resurrect it. I’ve also just resumed Dutch lessons. Much time had passed since this day with the pens and desk and Regents, so I had to start again with the basics but —alas! —without the drama and the paintings.
Writers and writing teachers often advise novice writers to read widely so that they may write better. “Read, read, read!” urged William Faulkner, when asked in an interview for The Western Reserve what the best training for a writer is.[1] “Read everything —trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it.”
This is bad advice, but it is frequently given. Stephen King, for example, claims that “if you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.[2] Two sentences later, he confesses that as a young writer he read out of pleasure and not a desire “to study the craft.” Nonetheless, he is sure that “there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.” He does not elaborate on how this learning takes place, whether it is automatic or deliberate, or, as Faulkner suggested, simply a matter of observing and absorbing.
Admittedly, this notion of reading extensively to absorb the practices of effective writers has a certain attractiveness. It sounds much like the immersion method of learning a foreign language: all you need is an environment with a lot of exposure to the language—a year abroad or a native-speaker lover—and you will gradually “absorb” what you need to know. Consequently, to be a better writer, expose yourself to a lot of well-written prose.
But if immersion works for learning a foreign language, it is not simply because we have extensive, frequent, and varied input, together with the linguistic and cognitive structures of our own language that accelerate learning. We need more than this. I know I could eventually learn Dutch by living in the Netherlands, without formal language instruction, without a tutor, perhaps even without a textbook or grammar—provided I not only listened to but also interacted with other speakers (admittedly a challenge given how quickly the Dutch launch into English when a foreigner tries to address them in their language).
Interaction gives me important feedback on how well I am achieving my communicative goal. I can gauge, even from the early stages of learning the language, when gestures fill in for missing words and trial-and-error compensates for mangled grammar, if I am being understood. As I grope towards understanding the other and making myself understood, these iterative corrections, even when they are as simple as a puzzled look, help me adjust my course and “feel my way” towards meaning. The environment is “fertile”, that is, conducive to immersive learning because it is rich in terms of language input but also because the feedback that I, as an apprentice speaker of the language, receive from master speakers provides cues with which I can adapt my behavior and learn. The environment of the written text, on the other hand, gives no such real-time feedback.
To return to Faulkner, there is a fundamental difference between the apprentice carpenter, who observes the master in the act of working with his wood to produce a chair or bookcase, and the “apprentice writer”. Unlike working a lathe or painting or making music (but like composing music), writing is not usually an observable act. We see only the finished work, the textual equivalent of a finely crafted oak table or porticoed house. The apprentice writer is a fiction because there is no master to be apprenticed to.
If we cannot observe the master carpenter at work, then perhaps we could reconstruct this labor from the finished product, as David Jauss, a short-story writer and the director of the MFA program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, suggests:
Reading won’t help you much unless you learn to read like a writer. You must look at a book the way a carpenter looks at a house someone else built, examining the details in order to see how it was made[3].
Jauss’s counterpart at Princeton decades earlier, the poet and critic Allen Tate, had also written about reading, writing, and buildings. In an article in The Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1940, he described his experience teaching Creative Writing in the university’s Creative Arts Program, one of the first in the country. Tate was convinced that writing could not be taught, and so rather than designing and teaching a standard writing course with grades and mandatory readings and assignments, he formed a “Creative Writing group”. While students could submit and discuss their manuscripts with Tate in private sessions, the group’s meetings were dedicated to close readings of creative writing; in his words, “we try to read a certain poem as if we were writing it.” This meant, in part, seeing how the text was constructed.
There are many ways to read, but generally speaking there are two ways. They correspond to the two ways can trace the origin and development of Corinthian columns; we are interested as historians. But if we are interested as architects, we may or may not know about the history of the Corinthian style; we must, however, know all about the construction of the building, down to the last nail or peg in the beams. We have got to know this if we are going to put up buildings ourselves[4].
What is this fascination that writers have with carpenters and architects, I wonder? Is it because we can see writerly equivalents to laying a foundation, raising load-bearing beams and girders, fitting together bricks or slabs of cementer. Or is it that we picture the writer as the builder-architect who gives order to the text, ensures that the components are well-integrated, and outfits it with the details and well-founded evidence that enables the text to stand and function. Perhaps, again, it is because houses have style and contain the possibility of beauty in a way that machines, at least for most people (wrongly so, in my view), do not.
Or, in the end, is it more the idea of the architect’s passage from sketches to site and floor plan drawings? Are we drawn to the clarity and logic of the architectural plan that we see evidenced in the built structure, and see parallels to the structural beauty, seamless coherence, and argumentative logic of the finished text?
Writers do make plans, of course. They create outlines and mind maps and develop storyboards, Journalists have their nut-graphs, copywriters their 4 P’s. These are all tools that can be taught to novice writers, though they will need to be aware that these plans are almost certain to change as they write and develop their argument.
If the final text seems to reflect a masterfully elaborated outline, it does so as an artefact of the writing process, a post-hoc attribution of an initial order that never existed. What we read is a palimpsest of redraftings. The final text incorporates and at the same time conceals the decisions the writer has made along the way, all the excisions and revisions it has undergone, the paring down and the fleshing out, the words reshaped or shifted, and the absent words, too (as David Mamet said, “omission is a form of creation”).
The text contains its own history, but one which can only be inferred. Only the writer knows this history; as Margaret Atwood once said, “[writers] have been backstage and know how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat.[5]” We, as readers, only see the rabbit come out of the hat. Of course, we can try to work out how the trick was done. But if you are adept at such inference and can see the decisions the writer has made in the text you are reading, you are likely already a proficient writer. If you can’t see these decisions, exposure on its own won’t get you there.
It is not only the writer’s sleights of hand that we miss, but also the times the writer got into and, more importantly, out of trouble. Since the published text leaves no record of the expert writer’s acts of recovery it is of no help to novice writers when they get into trouble themselves. Which they easily do when they lose track of their thesis (or start without one) and write themselves into dead-ends. The final text is again too good a model for imitation learning[6].
We once could glimpse these recovery acts through the cross-outs, insertions, and arrowed transpositions writers made on their manuscripts and galley proofs. Marcel Proust was a prodigious editor, sometimes redrafting entire passages as he read the proofs of his manuscripts. Without annotation, however, these edits are difficult to decode.
Proust himself did not think his corrections offered much insight into his writing. In a letter he wrote to his friend Sydney Schiff and which is now in the collections of the University of Illinois Rare Book & Manuscript Library, he wrote:
It is not very pleasant to think that anybody (if people still care about my books) will be allowed to consult my manuscripts, to compare them to the definitive text, to infer from them suppositions that will always be wrong about the way I work, the evolution of my thinking, etc.
Proust realized that the galley proofs and notebook entries offered a partial and misleading look into the process of composing. They did not capture what was on the verge of being written but was lost or rejected before committed to paper, all the phrases that never succeeding in bridging the gap between conception and action, that critical moment when the writer paused to complete or extend his thought and then withdrew the gambit before pen touched paper again. Who knows what sheets of paper were burned after a day of writing?
Let us assume for a moment, though. that we could see the writer live in action. What would it look like and would be helpful?[7]
The linearity of the text, the sense we have when reading it that we are moving or being led towards a terminus, makes us believe that the method of its composition was also straightforward. We might be tempted to think that live-streaming the writer at work would be instructive, too.
But writing involves too much recursion and revision for a screen capture to be of much use. Certainly, it would be a trying exercise visually, since most of the changes would probably be at too fine a level of detail, with the cursor hopping around the screen like a flea in a Looney Tunes cartoon. But now and then we would see more dramatic moments—a sentence vanishing only to reappear a few sentences earlier in the text, a block of text highlighted and made to disappear, a word backspaced out of existence to make way for a more synonym.
The straight-forward-ness of a well-written text belies the disorder through which it was created. We are deceived by the text’s flow and directedness, the linguistic stiles and steps that lead us from one idea to another, from tenet and claim to example and evidence and on to the next, the signposting and foreshadowing and backreferencing it does—all that knits together sentences and paragraphs, concepts and arguments into a line of thought or line of argument.
But our thoughts rarely spring forth from the mind finely articulated and in full armor, as Athena did from the head of Zeus. They begin more as half-shaped or fragmentary entities, which are then shaped and reworked—rethought—as one writes and new ideas emerge.
In a remarkably prescient essay written in 1987 and titled Does Writing Have a Future? Vilém Flusser defined writing as the bringing of order to thought.
Writing is a gesture that aligns and arranges ideas. Anyone who writes must first have thought. And written signs are the quotation marks of right thinking. On first encounter, a hidden motive appears behind writing: one writes to set one’s ideas on the right path[8].
Or as Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”[9]
This process of bringing order to thought is marked by many false starts, deletions, interpositions, and shifts of words and sentences and whole passages, all of which have been tidied up or swept away before the written product is shown. We can never reconstruct the process by which the text reached its final form; the writer’s path, one of countless possible trajectories, is forever lost to us.
Immersion and imitation are imperfect means to becoming a better writer. What novice writers need is not a model of finely written text on its own, which they cannot emulate, but a model of writing in the service of thought. What counts is not so much the ordered thought as the process of ordering thought.
If the finished text does not directly reveal the writer’s decisions that went into its composition, we can—if we are skilled and careful readers—reverse engineer its composition to some extent. We can discern from the text at least a structure and (re)construct the argument, locate its main points, and trace the ways in which they are then elaborated. We can analyze how the text works on an organizational and rhetorical level, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, asking for each: what is this doing here? How effectively does it serve the writer’s purpose? How convincing is it? How does this bit follow from what has been said before and lead to what is said next? With what cohesive links, logical bridges, and devices of recapitulation and anticipation does the writer tie the text and its components together? Where has the writer anticipated her reader’s questions and where she is marshalling evidence to buttress her point? What is missing from the text and what is in it that could have been left out?
Granted, these are not questions that students usually ask when they read or that most are skilled in answering. Most read to understand what the writer is saying rather than question how she is saying it. They may be engaged by what they read, or bored or frustrated, or surprised. They may be made curious or put off, eager to get to the next sentence or tempted to skip ahead. Only attentive readers (and not all the time) will stop to wonder, how did the writer do that? Yet only by helping students acquire this habit of attentive questioning will reading make them better writers.
Featured image: Portrait of Edmond Maitre (The Reader), Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1871.
[1] From “An Interview with William Faulkner” published in The Western Reserve in Summer 1951, reprinted in Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by M. Thomas Inge, 66-72. (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1999).
[2] Stephen King, On Writing (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012), p. 164.
[3] David Jauss, “Articles of Faith.” In Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy. Ed. Joseph (Moxley. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989)
[6] Knowing how to recover from error is an important part of learning not only for writers but also for neural networks. In his book The Alignment Problem: How Can Artificial Intelligence Learn Values (London: Atlantic Books, 2021), Brian Christian describes the efforts of Carnegie Mellon graduate student Stephane Ross to train a neural network to drive the course of SuperTuxKart,3D, an open-source racer game. The training data consisted of a million frames of Ross’s recorded play. The neural net starts off well but soon drives off the road. The problem, it turns out, was that the network was training on the driving data of an expert who didn’t “get into trouble”. But a novice gamer does, and quite early on.
[7] Henrik Karlsson, an anthropologist and programmer, and author of the fascinating series of essays Escaping Flatland, has described something similar for programmers. He imagines a video stream that allows novice coders to observe code development in real time. The apprentice could pause the playback, try out a solution, and then resume to see how the expert handled it. A more ambitious scenario envisions developers sharing their coding environment with the apprentice, who can “jump in and code themselves.” Henrik Karlsson, “Apprenticeship online“, Escaping Flatland, Oct. 9, 2021.
[8] Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future, trans. Nancy Ann Roth, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6.
[9] Joan Didion, “Why I Write.” New York Times, Dec. 5, 1976
As Roland Barthes once remarked, one may know a photograph from memory better than one observed. For me, Scarlett Coten’sMohaned is one such image. I discovered it in a feature that LensCulture dedicated to her Mectoub project, an award-winning series of portraits of young Arab men, of which this photograph forms a part. Years later, I could still recall the photograph in all its striking detail.
I remembered, of course, the rose Mohaned holds and its stenciled serialization on the white-washed wall behind him. But I could also recall how this redoubling of man and rose was present in other, more subtle images. I remembered how the curve of the flower was traced along the axis of his slouching body, swooping down from forehead to crotch, how the outline of the rose’s petaled head is repeated in Mohaned’s wavy black hair, the stems of the flowers recapitulated in his long slender fingers, the leaves in the twin ends of his undone scarf. This is not a portrait of a man holding a rose but of a man who has become one.
Clearly the scene has been staged, though less clearly, by whom (who thought to bring the rose, I wonder, photographer or or subject?) It is not by accident that the top of his jeans is perfectly aligned with the edge of inverted sky running across the bottom fifth of the photograph. But the artifice of the tableau is undermined by the irruption of the sensual, as he slouches in his chair, legs splayed, gaze fixed on the camera, waiting. His spindly fingers bend from the cocked wrist to alight on his thigh, as if his body were an instrument he was set to play.
Mectoub was not the reason I travelled to Paris this summer, but it did determine my departure date. Coten was among the artists whose work was to be exhibited in 2nd Photography Biennale of the Contemporary Arab World last September, affording me the rare chance to see a part of this remarkable project up close instead of online. Ironically, I would never have known that the photo would be among those on exhibition had it not adorned the poster for the show (as it would later the exhibition catalogue). But there he was, Mohaned. I felt as if I had received an invitation.
A work by a white, French-born woman is perhaps an odd choice for publicizing a photography show dedicated to the Arab world, especially when the great majority of the 50 or so photographers featured in the exhibition were Arabs. Why Coten? Jack Lang, the President of Arab World Institute, where most of the show was held, said that he had started the Biennale as a way of revealing the hidden realities of the Arab world. He saw in Coten an artist who revealed the upheaval still at work in the Arab world by rendering visible the boldness of an emancipated generation and the challenges being made to the traditional image of Arab men.
Coten’s work for the project spanned seven countries and took four years to complete. She began it in 2012 in the wake of the Arab Spring and it is perhaps best read in that context. The extroversion implicit in the movement’s demands for democracy, economic equity and government accountability fueled claims for greater personal freedom as well. It called into question not only the established political order but also constructed norms of gender and identity. And it is this remise en cause of gender and identity that animates the portraitsin the series.
She met these men as strangers on the street during his travels to Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries, and convinced them to pose for her. Pose is the wrong word, I suppose. From what I have read from interviews she’s given, she gave her subjects no instructions other than not to pose but instead to look at her.
And look they did. Their gaze is a tantalizing mix of vulnerability and sexual energy. It says, come here. These men are supplicants who seduce by art, one ordinarily seen as the purview of women. Indeed, many of these men are photographed in poses one associates with submission or defenselessness—reclining on a bed or couch, for example, or like Mohaned, slouched in a chair, or lying on the floor. But these are not works of Orientalism. Unlike Matisse’s Odalisque in a Turkish Chair, whose head is turned slightly to avert the artist’s gaze, these men look straight into the camera.
Mectoub undermines the gendered dynamic of power at play in the relation between artist and model, not only reversing the roles of each, but also questioning the very notion of the artist’s power over her subject. If these men here have yielded control, they are also winning it back. They are not merely an object of desire but a desiring subject as well, returning the camera’s—and the photographer’s—scrutiny with their own seductive, near brazen gaze. Here, as Paul Hill once said, the photographer is as much bounty as hunter.
Coten rightly calls these portraits an unveiling. The act of self-revelation always implies a metaphorical disrobing—and here, given the number of men who are photographed torse nu, a literal one as well. The mask of traditional male identity they discard (if indeed they have ever worn it) is no less confining than the veil used to conceal the face of a woman.
A subtle homoerotic undercurrent runs through these portraits, only occasionally breaking through the surface, as with Hazem, who is photographed standing in red sequined high heels (which I learned figured in a ballet on gender he had choreographed). The presence of this undercurrent can be sensed in the settings. While several of the men are photographed in their bedroom or on an ornate sofa, most, like Makarios in Cairo, sprawled on a litter-strewn concrete floor atop coils of white industrial tubing, are shot in places of abandonment—in a rubble-strewn hall of a derelict palace, a disused Renault garage, a weed-choked railway siding.
They are all places removed from public view. The secluded venues enabled Coten to create an intimate setting in which the men, extracted from their familiar milieu of friends, family and coworkers but also from the eyes of the street, could be invited—or in her words, challenged—to reveal themselves. At the same time, however, they are also elements of an industrial landscape in decay that has long been part of the iconography of the sexual encounter, loci of cruising, like the dilapidated piers of New York documented in the work of photographers such as Leonard Fink and Alvin Baltrop.
I’m projecting. I don’t know if Coten was aware of this visual lexicon or would disavow it if she were. But the power of her work is due in part precisely to the multiplicity of readings it allows and the associations it triggers.
I may be the only one to think of Cavafy’s poem One Night upon seeing her portrait of Yahia in Tunis. Coten has photographed the shirtless young man lying on a “common, humble bed” bed in what cc ould be a tiny room in a cheap tradesmen’s hotel, perhaps, I think, like the one on which the poet lay and “had love’s body.” Again this redoubling, Yasia’s tattoos, a mark of rebellion even more marked in Islamic culture (one of the young men she photographed in Algiers was sent to prison for his), refigured in the paint splatters on the wall behind him and the floral imprint of the bedclothes. Again, the arresting, unplanned punctum, here the arm of the dervish or ankh in Yasia’s pendant resting against his nipple. Again, this unsettling, beguiling mingling of sexual tension and vulnerability. Intimacy among the ruins.
At the same time, there is something celebratory and liberating to these photographs. “Mectoub” is a portemanteau of the Arabic mektoub, “it is written” and the colloquial French mec or guy. In other words, a man’s destiny. An ironic title, for these hauntingly sensual portraits speak of a freedom that seeks to elude destiny.
I hear the boys stampeding towards the locker room, the shards of their shouts and high-pitched laughter ricocheting down the cinder block corridor, rending the meditative quiet of the pool that accompanied me during my workout. The loudest of the pack burst in first, just as I finish toweling off; they strip to their swim suits and dash for the showers. By the time I lace up my sneakers, the lone stragglers have arrived, quietly shuffling in on their own, one or two with a scowl that suggests the idea of going to swim camp wasn’t theirs.
I watch them as they exit the showers to cross the obligatory foot pool out to the main pool area. Some start with a running jump and splash into the ankle-deep water, others noisily slosh their way across, like soldiers fording a steam. And then there’s the boy, one of the stragglers, fair-skinned and slight in build, who eases his left foot in first as if to test the water—though he should know by now it’s always ice cold—and then tiptoes through the water for the rest of the distance.
There’s one in every summer camp and Cub Scout troop, the reticent puppy of the litter, the boy who doesn’t like playing rough or getting dirty, who hangs back and off-center, giving wide berth to the other, more rambunctious boys. By now it’s habit, inscribed in his body, though he can’t be more than 10 years old.
I know because I was one of those boys.
I was vaguely aware I was different from other boys my age, sometimes because I was told so by adults, like the time a teacher took me aside after recess to explain that boys don’t play jump rope, as I had been doing with the girls at recess, and that I should join the other boys in my class who played stickball at the other end of the street.
I knew there were boys like my cousin Gary, who played baseball and wasn’t afraid of the dogs my grandfather kept chained on a runner and would even crawl into their doghouse on a dare, and boys like me, who never went near them and would disappear at the first signs of an impromptu touch football game being organized. There were boys who skipped Mass and cursed and hung out at the sweet shop after school, and there were boys like me, who were altar boys and rummaged the stacks of the city library after school.
Until middle school being different was never a source of pain or discomfort. I didn’t always fit in, but it didn’t matter. Though I envied the ease my brother and cousins had in the presence of my uncles—and their dexterity with bats and balls and gloves—I didn’t want to be like them. My mother told me I was a happy child and judging from my own recollections of those years, I have no reason to doubt her. I was, to borrow language I would not have used or understood at the time, comfortable in my skin.
But that all changed when we moved from the city and I was plunked into the 6th grade of the local public school, where I encountered Jamie Marsh.
I can’t remember the first time he called me a faggot. He called me it so many times during the next two years that all the scenes have merged into one. I tell myself I should be able to remember, since I would have been so shocked to hear it. No one had ever called me names before and besides, I was sure there was nothing girlish about me. Because that was what faggots were, I thought, boys who acted like girls, sick and shameful creatures.
To my horror, he called me it the next day and then again and again. I had only been at this school for a few weeks and was just starting to make friends. Who would want to be friends with a faggot? Would Todd, who was the first and the best friend I had made at school, would he still want to be seen with me?
I lay awake at night trying to discover what it was that Jamie saw in me that I couldn’t see. There must have been a reason he had singled me out. It couldn’t have been because I was scrawny or smart or hopeless at basketball. Todd was all that, too, and he was no tougher than me. And if anyone was girlish, it would have been Billy, with his longish, wispy hair and gentle voice. Why me and not him?
If I had looked harder, of course, I would have seen signs of a more radical difference. I would have remembered how I lingered in the company of a young uncle who looked like James Dean, how I lay awake one night in our attic dormer listening to the breathing of a handsome distant cousin who had come to spend a week at our summer house. But this was before desire had become palpable, before my differentness had acquired the mass and contours of something more fundamental than taste or interests.
Jamie’s taunts shattered the enchanted innocence that had been my world in the city, and made me conscious of myself in ways I hadn’t been before. I became watchful of how I talked and walked and moved my body. But try as I might I could never identify the trace of faggot in my voice or gesture that perhaps he saw. Even after I came out I continued to think it was my vulnerability—and not any mark of effeminacy—that caught the attention of my demon, who, like most bullies, had a sixth sense for knowing which boy wouldn’t fight back.
Until last year, that is, when my youngest brother Daniel sent me an envelope of photos. They were in a box of memorabilia he had found among my father’s belongings when cleaning the attic.
The pictures bear the marks of their age—the scalloped borders and faded greys, the date scribbled in ink on the back–and they seem somehow more reliable documentary evidence than the unblemished digital record of our lives we now have. One of them was taken at our summer house. I must be about 10. My brother Charlie is on my right, leaning into the picture, taking on the camera like a lineman at scrimmage; in front of us is Daniel, still a toddler, with his round face and enormous eyes locked in a gaze of bewilderment. And then there’s me.
I’m standing tall as if at attention and squinting, my head held high with a broad but tight smile, and, yes, looking a bit prissy, too, like a boy who’d tiptoe through the foot pool. And then another picture, this time at Confirmation. I’m in a white suit, kneeling before a card table my mother had set up in the living room and draped with white cloth. I’m looking down into the missal I hold in my hands, a mix of devotion and delight on my face. I realize this is the boy that Jamie saw, a willowy angel who would run away from a fight.
I remembered these pictures a month or so ago when I came across a photo of five-year-old Prince George. It was taken at an airport in Germany, a military one I think, because he’s just stepped into a helicopter. He’s dressed in a neat, checkered shirt and short pants, his legs together, slightly bent at the knees, his arms drawn equally close to the side. His hands are cupping his cheeks, as if to contain the delight swelling within him. He’s utterly, endearingly, contagiously thrilled to be there. It’s not the way most boys would react, but there’s no self-consciousness, much less self-censorship to him. He’s genuinely tickled pink.
It’s a picture many gay men, myself now included, can identify with. As Louis Staples wrote in the New Statesmen, the affinity has very little to do with the young prince’s sexual orientation but with our own recollections of an age of innocence, “those precious years in early childhood when I didn’t know I was supposed to be manly.”
We can never regain that innocence, nor should we want to, for doing so would be nothing more than self-willed blindness, depriving us of the ability to see the hate and structures of prejudice that still impinge on our liberty. But it is one of the great gifts of coming out that we gradually free ourselves from the need to be watchful and feel again that enchantment of being alright in our skin.
The Way He Looks is one of those films that you want to rush out and tell your friends about after seeing, as you might a marvelous six-table restaurant you discovered in a part of town that few venture to visit. It’s not great art, although it did garner the Fipresci prize for best feature film in the Panorama (and a Teddy for the best LGBT-themed film) at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. It won’t change your life or the way you see the world. That said, this enchanting movie of young romance will probably leave you feeling pretty good.
Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro’s first feature film tells the story of the friendship and budding love between two teenage boys who meet when Gabriel (Fabio Audi), the newcomer to town, enters his new classroom in a middle-class Sao Paolo suburban school and is assigned to sit next to a blind student, Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo).
The Way He Looks is less a coming out story than a tale of coming of age. In a refreshing re-writing of sexual awakening, the two 16-year-olds seem much at ease with their sexuality. The anxiety that ripples through the film as they become aware of their attraction to each other is the same that haunts every young person who falls in love—why doesn’t he or she call, am I being too forward, have I said the wrong things?
Not surprisingly, the notion of seeing and being seen reoccurs throughout the film. Gabriel takes his friend to a park to “see” an eclipse, and describes for him the movement of the sun and moon, and the magical darkness that sets in. He is Leonardo’s narrator at the cinema, and guide at a field trip to a lake. In a telling scene, we see the boys alone in the locker room shower after gym (Leonardo confides to Gabriel that he’s uncomfortable showering with the other boys). Gabriel guides him to a shower head and hands him a bar of soap, and then retreats a few steps, watching as his friend slowly drops his shorts and begins soaping his back. His gaze fixes on his friend’s buttocks until he glances down at his crotch and quickly grabs a towel to cover himself.
The beloved’s gaze is never far away. It stands behind us as we look into the mirror after the morning shower, and seeps into our thoughts throughout the day. Do I please him? It is a question that Leonardo puts to his best friend Giovana, who is as much in love with him as he is with Gabriel. “Am I attractive?” he asks. The irony of the question, posed by such an endearing, handsome teenager, is wrenching.
Leonardo has no “objective” standards against which to compare himself. For him, there is no golden mean of symmetry and proportion that describes the faces of the beautiful we see in art and advertisement. Yes, there are qualities of the beloved’s voice that embody a broader sense of the other’s beauty, the warmth of timbre and attentiveness that suggest desire. And then there is touch. When finally the two young boys kiss, Leonardo’s fingers gently trace the contours of Gabriel’s face to finally see his lover. Of his own beauty, however, he remains unaware. His blindness is a poignant metaphor for the sightlessness of the young lover. Who among us when first in love, save for the few graced by nature with brilliant beauty (and not even all of those), have not asked themselves the same question? How do l look?
None of the boys’ questions, however, have to do with being gay. That Leonardo and Gabriel are comfortable with their sexuality from the start is part of what makes the film remarkable, given that the struggle to self-acceptance has been a recurrent motif in films about gay youth to date, including such gems as Get Real and Beautiful Thing.
Not surprisingly. Coming out is one of the most defining experiences gay men and women undergo. Whether we suppress or embrace our sexuality, whether we tell all or no one, our desire—and the ever sharpening and ultimately undeniable awareness of our differentness that it engenders—remains an incontrovertible fact of our existence. It cannot but be acknowledged, even if it is not dealt with. Even when the journey from troubled innocence to the community of the initiated is short and relatively free of angst and self-doubt—as Leonardo and Gabriel’s seems to be—it is one we all make, and one made, at least in the beginning, on our own, a rite of passage without guide or catechism. And if our sexual awakening is rooted in an acute sense of not belonging, or perhaps more tellingly, of no longer belonging, we, unlike other initiates, do not yet know much if anything of the community which we will become part of.
Leonardo and Gabriel’s story, however, is not a struggle for self-acceptance but the longing for and pursuit of their first kiss. When and how they have come out to themselves is a backstory the film declines to investigate but instead takes as a given. A simple matter of fact. While the film arguably underplays the real-world difficulties of gay adolescence and blindness both, it is a lyric tribute to what a better world might look like, and what hopefully for some gay teenagers growing up today, already is.
Breach of Close 