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Dear Maria Schneider
Dear Maria Schneider,
I’m writing to you because of your hair. I’m writing to you because once you kneeled in the back seat of a car traveling away from your gaze and you traced rows of trees toward some zero vanishing, green leaves haloing your face in the counter-shot as your arms fell down to your sides and your mouth gathered your smile and your eyes grew serious. You were the Angel of History, and you have never looked more beautiful. That’s why I’m writing you a letter. This is the letter.
Dear Maria Schneider,
I understand why he had to die. Despite a popular commentary, the Angel of History is not some ineffectual redeemer. In fact, she kills. He thought history was a game, a sport and a pastime. It isn’t. He had to die because he did not understand violence or what it is for. I don’t say this to reassure you. You are the kind of woman who lets the dead bury the dead.
Dear Maria Schneider,
You were a student of architecture. What were you looking for on that rooftop? You wanted a sky that was not a shelter. A void sky, uncontained and uncontaining. The void raged down on you and muted your small shoulders. What was there to do, among that muteness? When he asked if the architect was crazy, of course you didn’t answer. Everything we see screams void, and you are narrow, lithe. Your body is an evasion of answers.
Dear Maria Schneider,
Where were you before London? Where did you go after the penultimate shot? I think of how you wandered in the dust of the square, how directionless and knowing. It’s as easy to imagine you alone as it is to watch your way among men. Aimless but not unconcerned, cagey but unsuspicious. I guess the dread might press in then, never entirely absent from your face but held, sometimes, at the same distance as you hold a lover. It is never clear quite how far. When you say you recognize him, perhaps it is this dread you recognize as its distance begins to close.
Dear Maria Schneider,
I don’t care about that other movie. It’s just too obvious, and Bertolucci is a hack. In the film I care about, everything I want to fuck about you is not exhibited but expressed. The careless way you slouch into the passenger seat. How your blouse is more unclothed than flesh. The sly mimicry of your soul by the character your actor plays. How politics means more to you than love.
Dear Maria Schneider,
Fuck capitalism. Fuck capitalism for its tedious images, its interminable slaughter, its glib pharmaceuticals. Fuck surplus value. Fuck debt. Of course you tried to kill yourself, perhaps wanted to nearly always. Why not? You speak of a secret garden and perhaps one exists. But as if it isn’t enough that the body exists under sentence of death, that it is trapped in time, trapped in a mirror, it is also trapped in capital. It’s been killing you since the ’70s—you and everything else it might be possible to love.
Dear Maria Schneider,
Tell me something, what made you so unrestlessly contingent? You asked him (always the same question), “what are you running away from?” Then you followed his instructions. What did you see down that road, behind the future, between parallel lines? Where and how, upon what impossible point, did they converge? If I looked there, if it were possible to inhabit the place formed by your body in that frame, would I be able to see what was there and what was not? If you wrote it down in theses, inscribed the void center of that image in words, what would they say? When you hold the gaze of one man or another, is it there, or is it elsewhere? Is it nowhere? Is it where you are now?
Dear Maria Schneider,
I will say it even though there’s nothing there, like a letter to the dead: if you’re passing by this way, send word.
Yours,
Nathan
