Falling out of love is a sort of illness

We always realize things afterwards. Loneliness, for example. It's not when we think we're alone, or when we feel abandoned. That's something different. Loneliness is invisible, we go through it unconsciously, without knowing. At least that's true of the sort I'm talking about. It's a kind of empty set that installs itself in the body, in language, and makes us unintelligible. It appears unexpectedly when we look back, there in a moment we hadn't noticed before.

Empty Set, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, is an attempt to quantify and order interpersonal associations. A cluster of relationship maps, none of them showing the most effective way through or efficient way around them. They plot out the narrator in relation to men and to her mother — psychoanalysis by way of Venn diagram.

When I first picked up this book, I was at the beginning of something. I am a different person than I was a year ago. I have come into myself, to where I need to be. But I struggle to transform all those experiences into a cohesive narrative. I continue to look for signs, everywhere. I want signposts, directions. 

The last thing he said to me was:

Something broke, I don't know exactly what, but we can't go on together any longer.

He didn't know what had broken?

But (I) needed to find out.

So (I) went back over the sequence of events again and again, cut minutes here and there, and ended up realizing what was obvious: we're constantly drawing something we can never manage to see completely. We only have one side, an edge of our own history, and the rest is hidden.

It turns out we're always at the beginning of things, we just don't know what they're the beginning of. Today is the fist day of the rest of your life. I am at the beginning of my last days in this home. I am at the beginning of another new career phase. I am at the beginning of a difficult stage in my relationship with my mother. I am at the beginning of art. We are also always in the middle of things, and at the end of them too.

Gerber Bicecci narrates a breakup and the start of what might be a new romance against the backdrop of her work. She is painting plywood boards, drawing out their grain, dabbling in dendrochronology. To pay her bills, she is archiving the belongings of a dead woman. 

Tordo(T) is a visual artist, but he would have preferred to be a writer. He used to invent a new name for me every day, as if trying out characters on me. Sometimes he'd also attempt to find some likeness between me and the actresses in the movies we watched together; he always discovered something, some detail. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a visual artist, but visualized almost everything in words. My fellow students at art school used to tell me that was really weird.

(I think of myself as a writer, yet I find myself hopelessly inarticulate and am considering the possibility that I express myself better through sculpture. I am considering the possibility that I've spent most of my life thinking I was one kind of artist, while in fact I am another kind entirely. Someone suggested to me I could be both. I'm not sure I agree. Sure, I can do both, but I can be only the one thing that I truly am. These days I am writing about sculpture. I am writing a series of artist statements for sculptures I may never create.)

Her absent mother is ever-present as she traces time.

To forget someone, you have to be extremely methodical. Falling out of love is a sort of illness that can only be fought off with routine. This hadn't occurred to me before — it was my survival instinct that discovered it. So I started searching for activities and time-tabling them. Spend the whole morning lying facedown on the huge plywood board, following the line of a grain with a brush dipped in black, white, or gray. Two or three grain lines a day, no more. A fourth, and my hand would begin to tremble and overstep the mark. Sometimes had to use an ultrafine brush, sometimes a thicker one. It was, above all, an exercise in patience.

Patience. We are always at the beginning of something. 

I quite love this novel. I don't really know what it is, and that's part of the joy I take in it. It is not merely a novel about art; it's in conversation with art. It's a non-empty set — the intersection of novel and painting.

In fact I did feel something, something strange. Not jealousy, just a sensation of disappearing; my body was becoming transparent. I didn't exist there, because in that place, I definitively did not exist. And in fact that wasn't a problem, because I didn't want to exist there, what bothered me was not being able to exist anywhere.

See also|
Verónica Gerber Bicecci and the language to come
The rabbit hole that is Verónica Gerber Bicecci's website