Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

But not for him.

He hasn't learned the language. There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings.

But what did she know? Nothing. This is the rule of time. It is the thing you know nothing about.

She listened to him say it, on the tape, in a voice that was probably hers.

But she could have made it up, much of it. Not from scratch. But in retrospect, in memory.

But she had it on tape and it was him and he was saying it.

Then she said it herself but so what. So what if she said the same thing in the same words.

Means nothing. People saying the same thing.

She had him on tape, saying it, but she might easily have misremembered what she herself said when he dropped the water glass. Might have been different. Slightly, very, moderately different.

But so what if it's the same.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

But not if you are him.

This is a man who remembers the future.

Don't touch it. I'll clean it up later.

But if you examine the matter methodically. Be smart, she thought, and analyze coldly. Break it down and scrutinize.

If you examine the matter methodically, you realize that he is a retarded man sadly gifted in certain specialized areas, such as memory retention and mimicry, a man who'd been concealed in a large house, listening.

Nothing else makes sense.

It is the thing no one understands. But it makes and shapes you. And in these nights since he'd left she sometimes sat with a book in her lap, eyes closed, and felt him living somewhere in the dark, and it is colder where he is, it is wintrier there, and she wanted to take him in, try to know him in the spaces where his chaos lurks, in all the soft-cornered rooms and unraveling verbs, the parts of speech where he is meant to locate his existence, and in the material place where Rey lives in him, alive again, word for word, touch for touch, and she opened and closed her eyes and thought in a blink the world had changed.

He violates the limits of the human.

For a while she stopped answering the phone, as she'd done intermittently since the first days back, and when she began to pick it up again, she used another voice. Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childhood can save us from awe and shame.

At first the voice she used on the telephone was nobody's, a generic neutered human, but then she started using his. It was his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird humming on her tongue.

BODY ART IN EXTREMIS: SLOW, SPARE AND PAINFUL

We are sitting in the dim upper room of an Arab cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lauren Hartke is eating a goat cheese salad, stabbingly, like she's mad at it.

Between bites she talks about the recent performance piece she created in a dungeon space at the Boston Center for the Arts.

She has transformed herself shockingly for this event and although the brief run is over, she continues to look – well, wasted.

She is not pale-skinned so much as colorless, bloodless and ageless. She is rawboned and slightly bug-eyed. Her hair looks terroristic. It is not trimmed but chopped and the natural chestnut luster is ash white now, with faint pink traces.

Can I use the word "albino" and eat lunch in this town again?

"It's vanity. That's all it is," she says. "But vanity is essential to an actor. It's an emptiness. This is where the word comes from. And this is what I work toward and build on."

Hartke, 36, was married to the film director Rey Robles when he committed suicide. Her father, Dr. Robert Hartke, is a classical scholar who is spending his retirement as a field volunteer on archaeological digs in the Aegean. Her late mother, Genevieve Last, was a harpist for the Milwaukee Symphony. She has an older brother, Todd, who is a China specialist in the State Department.

"I don't know if the piece went where I wanted it to go." she is saying. "Some of it is still inside my head, reshaping itself."

The piece, called Body Time, sneaked into town for three nights, unadvertised except by word of mouth, and drew eager audiences whose intensity did not always maintain itself for the duration of the show. Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully. This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed.

They missed the best stuff.

Hartke is a body artist who tries to shake off the body – hers anyway. There is the man who stands in an art gallery while a colleague fires bullets into his arm. This is art. There is the lavishly tattooed man who has himself fitted with a crown of thorns. This is art. Hartke's work is not self-strutting or self-lacerating. She is acting, always in the process of becoming another or exploring some root identity. There is the woman who makes paintings with her vagina. This is art. There are the naked man and woman who charge into each other repeatedly at increasing speeds. This is art, sex and aggression. There is the man in women's bloody underwear who humps a mountain of hamburger meat. This is art, sex, aggression, cultural criticism and truth. There is the man who drives nails into his penis. This is just truth.

Hartke's piece begins with an ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage, gesturing in the stylized manner of Noh drama, and it ends seventy-five minutes later with a naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something.

I saw two of the three performances and I have no idea how Hartke alters her body and voice. She will speak on the subject only in general terms.

"The body has never been my enemy," she says. "I've always felt smart in my body. I taught it to do things other bodies could not. It absorbs me in a disinterested way. I try to analyze and redesign."

(Personal disclosure. Hartke and I are former college classmates who have stayed in pretty regular touch. We used to talk philosophy. I sat in on lectures. She was twisted enough to major in the subject until she dropped out of school to join a troupe of street performers in Seattle.)

Through much of the piece there is sound accompaniment, the anonymous robotic voice of a telephone answering machine delivering a standard announcement. This is played relentlessly and begins to weave itself into the visual texture of the performance.

The voice infiltrates the middle section in particular. Here is a woman in executive attire, carrying a briefcase, who checks the time on her wristwatch and tries to hail a taxi. She glides rather formally (perhaps inspired by the elderly Japanese) from one action to the other. She does this many times, countless times. Then she does it again, half-pirouetting in very slow motion. You may find yourself looking and listening in hypnotic fascination, feeling physically and mentally suspended, or you may cast a glance at your own watch and go slouching down the aisle and into the night.

Hartke says, "I know there are people who think the piece was too slow and repetitious, 1 guess, and uneventful. But it's probably too eventful. I put too much into it. It ought to be sparer, even slower than it is, even longer than it is. It ought to be three fucking hours."

"Why not four? Why not seven?"

"Why not eight?" she says.