The body will continue to demonstrate mortality as the fate of all humans. It is for this reason that any reference to human animality gravely affects those who dream of its antithesis. They take offence not only at any mention of animality in life, but in science, literature, and the arts as well, as this would disturb their reverie by undermining their rationalist airs and social pretensions.
Bohuslav Brouk, afterword to Jindřich Štyrský, “Emily Comes to Me in a Dream”
Now you are on the shore of the Mediterranean
Under lemon trees that are in flower all year long
You go boating with friends
One from Nice one from Menton and two from Turbie
We look down with fear at the octopuses in the depths
And fish swim through the seaweed images of our Savior
You are in the garden of an inn on the outskirts of Prague
You feel completely happy a rose is on the table
And instead of writing your prose story
You watch the rosebug who is sleeping in the heart of the rose
Horrified you see yourself drawn in the agates of Saint Vitus
You were saddened to death that day when you saw yourself in them
You looked like Lazarus bewildered by the day
The hands of the clock in the Jewish ghetto run backward
And you too go backward in your life slowly
Climbing up to Hradčany in the evening listening
In the pubs the singing of Czech songs
Here you are in Marseilles among the watermelons
Here you are in Coblenz at the Giant Hotel
Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree
Here you are in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty and who is ugly
She’s engaged to a student from Leyden
There are rooms to rent in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember spending three days there and the same in Gouda
You are in Paris in front of the magistrate
Like a criminal they put you under arrest
You have had sorrowful and happy travels
Before you noticed lies and age
You suffered from love at twenty and thirty
I’ve lived like a fool and I’ve wasted my time
You dare not look at your hands anymore and I want to cry all the time
Over you over her who I love over everything that has frightened you
With eyes full of tears you look at these poor emigrants
They believe in God they pray their women nurse their children
They fill the hall of the gare Saint-Lazare with their smell
They have faith in their star like the Magi
They hope to make money in Argentina
And return to their countries having made their fortune
One family carries a red quilt like you carry your heart
That quilt and our dreams are equally unreal
Some of these refugees remain here and find a place to stay
In hovels on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Ecouffes
I have often seen them taking the air in the street in the evening
Like pieces on a chessboard they seldom venture far
They are mostly Jews their women wear wigs
They sit bloodlessly at the back of little shops
You are standing at the zinc counter of some shady bar
You have a two-bit coffee with the down-and-outs
You are in a big restaurant at night
These women are not evil they still have their worries
All even the ugliest have made their lover suffer
She is the daughter of a police sergeant in Jersey
Her hands which I have never seen are hard and chapped
I have huge pity for the scars on her belly
Now I humble my mouth to a poor girl with a horrible laugh
You are alone its nearly morning
In the street the milkmen clang their churns
Night departs like a beautiful Métive
It is Ferdine the false or watchful Leah
And you drink this liquor burning like your life
Your life which you drink like an eau-de-vie
You walk toward Auteuil you want to go home on foot
To sleep among your fetishes from Oceania and Guinea
They are all Christs in another form and of another faith
They are the inferior Christs of obscure hopes
Adieu adieu
Sun throat cut
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” (my translation)
commentary
After this New World interlude I return geographically to the Europe of Apollinaire’s “Zone” and visually to the fragmented body, toying with images taken in locations conjured up in the second half of the poem—the Mediterranean, Prague, Amsterdam, Paris—as represented in their twenty-first-century shop windows.
13.2 was shot in the Quadrio Shopping Center in Prague (outside which stands David Černý’s gigantic rotating head of Franz Kafka); the words the woman is writing, which translate as “love somehow never triumphs over lies or money,” play on Václav Havel’s slogan “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” In one of the most surreal political turnarounds of modern times, the absurdist playwright entered Hradčany (Prague Castle) as president of Czechoslovakia in December 1989.
The psychoanalytic theorist Bohuslav Brouk, who provides the epigraph quote for this essay, was a member of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group founded in Prague in March 1934.
The title of 13.3, “eat me, drink me, love me,” comes from a line in Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market.” 13.4 documents the chance meeting of a comic book hero, a shapely bottom, and the Eiffel Tower on the rue de Rivoli, just down the road from the Louvre. Those who have read my memoir Going Down for Air will understand why 13.6 resonates with me.
But I have reserved the title “fetish” for the striking assemblage of signifiers in 13.7 in homage to the French surrealists’ counter-exhibition to the International Colonial Exhibition held in Paris in 1931. Here an installation designed by Yves Tanguy presented Indigenous artifacts from Africa, Oceana, and America side by side with “fetishes of the West … Christian objects, objects of worship in the vein of Saint-Sulpice, and so on … idols from the world over.”
Camera lucida 
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