Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [97]
As for art, film, beautiful objects, books even insofar as they are also objects (think of that passion, which I find unintelligible, of what’s called bibliophilia, which I sometimes discuss with one of the masters of the genre, Pierre Leroy), the truth is regrettable. The real truth, which I’ve never dared to say to anyone before, is that none of that interests me unless, once again, it provides a pretext for writing. I am capable of spending an enormous amount of time at Perugia, Monterchi, Borgo San Sepolcro, the National Gallery, the Staatliches Museum in Berlin, the Frick, or Arezzo if the Éditions de la Différence ask me for a book on Piero della Francesca. I can go to the worst flop that Lauren Bacall ever starred in, if I know that I have to use her lovely face in another book, this time in images and sounds, which will be Le Jour et la nuit. But to do it for its own sake, without any reason, for the love of art and pleasure … What pleasure, for God’s sake? I couldn’t give a damn about that pleasure. I realize with horror that it’s been years since I sacrificed a day or even an evening of good writing for the mere pleasure of going to see a film, to admire a painting, go to the opera unless I know I’m going to use it in a text. And with an even greater horror I realize that when it’s finished, when I’ve completed the text I’ve been asked to produce, when I’ve translated into words what I’ve understood of Mondrian, Macau, a great contemporary novel, the plays of Thomas Bernhard, Warhol’s collages, the photographs of Richard Avedon, the ruins of Lagos or Kabul, the heart of America, the last nights of Baudelaire, the films of Coppola or Woody Allen (the only thing that has saved me and because of which I am nevertheless interested in a certain number of things is—and we keep coming back to this—my insatiable appetite for writing, which over time, just as in love, has had to vary its situations and positions somewhat), I realize and not without a certain shame that once they have been put into words, stored in some book or analyzed in an article, things cease to concern me, I lose interest in them, they are so to speak deactivated. I can spend the rest of my days without ever going back to see The Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, although it enchanted me when I went to see it for my book at the Uffizi in Florence.
Naturally, I try to keep this in check.
There are cases—in which, in order to speed things up, what’s at stake is not only art or cinema but politics or morality and the actual destiny of actual men and women—where I’m particularly aware of this rapacious, predatory side, which is the correlate to my belief in the virtues of departing from syntax, the imperceptibly new use of a punctuation sign, of a word catapulted beyond its usual usage, an unshackled sound that rises beyond the realms of silence and noise …
And it’s the reason why I spend so much time in organizing safety devices for myself to protect me from myself, such as the radio I’m helping to set up in Bujumbura in order to make sure that I’ll go back there, an irregular correspondence with some old, young people I met eight years ago in Vienna, knowing that part of me might well be tempted to see them only as bit players in the report I wrote at the time on the “anti-Haider resistance,”* a somewhat forced friendship in N’Djamena to maintain the link with Darfur, a brotherhood kept up with a Pakistani “fixer,” or my Nouvelles de Kaboul, which I carry around, so that I won’t be able to look away.
But that is the truth.
That is the underlying logic.
Words or things? I can’t even understand