The Shape of a Pocket

thinking about invention, creation, human wealth.
    One female thyroid gland!
    Don’t! A single thyroid is not sellable. If you’re offered one, it’s suspect.
    There’s a painting from Pompeii I’d like to send you by radio.
    Of a dog, I suppose.
    No, a woman. She’s holding a wooden tablet, like a book, in her left hand, and in her right, a pen or stylo, the end of which she holds against her lip. She’s thinking about words not yet written. The portrait was painted in the year 79 – the year in which the town was buried – and preserved – in lava. Probably the words were never written.
    Not a great painting, and if I’m sending it to you – it’s simply because it’s a likeness. She’s here in the studio in front of me, with her fringe just out of curlers, and her earrings of gold, which, as soon as she puts them on, are never still.
    A likeness is a gift, something left behind and hidden and later discovered when the house is empty … Whilst hidden, it avoids time.
    What do you mean ‘avoids time’?
    Confuses time, if you prefer.
    You wouldn’t get away with this nonsense on television! TV demands speed and clarity. You can’t ramble across the screen as you’re rambling now.
    So I send you the Pompeian woman of two millennia ago, with the tip of her stylo lightly touching her lower lip and her hands which are not rough with work and never will be. At the most she’s twenty years old, and you have the impression of having just seen her. Her earrings tinkling.
    You are a nostalgic old man!
    Or a young romantic?
    Anyway they’re both finished, they belong to the past. Today we live in a world of exchanges, calculations at the speed of light, credits, debts and winnings.
    And the dead don’t exist?
    Let the dead bury the dead – that was well said and has always been true.
    Our plan is more kilos for less cost.
    The cattle feed
is driving the cows mad
their guts were created
for grasses
not for offal.

    More and more kilos for less and less cost.
    The madness may be transmittable!
    Keep quiet and do not forget: the meat of the future is profit.
    I still have a portrait I painted when I was twenty. It’s of a woman asleep in a chair and on the table in front of her, in the foreground, there is a bowl of flowers. I was in love with the woman and we lived together in two small rooms on the ground floor in a house in London. I think somebody today could tell from the painting that I loved her, but there’s no likeness there. Her primrose green dress – she made it herself on the table in the room where I painted – has a distinct presence, and her fair hair, in whose colour I always saw green, is striking. But there’s no likeness. And until six months ago, if I looked at the painting, I couldn’t refind a likeness in my memory either. If I shut my eyes, I saw her. But I couldn’t see her sitting in the chair in her green dress.
    Six months ago I happened to be in London and I found myself two minutes’ walk away from the modest house where we rented the two rooms. The house had been done up and repainted but it hadn’t been rebuilt. So I knocked on the door. A man opened it and I explained that fifty years ago I had lived there and would it be possible for me to see the two rooms on the ground floor?
    He invited me in. He and his wife occupied the whole house. There were carpets and lamps and paintings and china plates on the walls and a hi-fi and silver trays. Useless to look for the gas meter which we fed with coins when we were cold and needed to light the gas-fire or heat some water. Useless to look for the bathtub, which, when we weren’t taking a bath together, served as a support for a tabletop on which we chopped onions and beat eggs for an omelette. Everything had been replaced and nothing was the same except for the plaster mouldings on the ceiling and the proportions of the large window by whose light she made her clothes and I painted.
    I asked if I could draw back the curtains. And I stood there staring at the window panes – it was raining and already evening so I could see nothing outside.
    And standing there, I found her likeness, as she sat in the chair in her green dress, asleep.
    Likenesses hide in rooms, you find them sometimes when the rooms are being emptied.
    There are certain people who are so secluded – they live in a kind of Switzerland of perception – that they can’t see a likeness when it’s staring them in the face.
    A journalist is visiting a