One Essay
There Is Not One Thing in a Thing: Three Things
Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison
To be on the safe side, Kudo attached the envelope to the inside pocket of his jacket with a safety-pin. Every time he moved, the tip of the safety-pin caught his chest. When he dwelt on the fact that the money contained in that envelope had been contributed for his sake by the faithful of this country, he felt a vague sense of pain in his chest.
Shusaku Endo’s writing is an erotics of the nose. His Foreign Studies (1965) bookends Kudo/Tanaka: Kudo, a foreign exchange student in Rouen—post-war—a benefactory of a religious organization; Tanaka, a professor of French literature on a grant, in France, there to research Sade.
Endo’s writing, largely contemplated, at least formally, for its content—religion, faith, war—east/west stuff—is, to me, a formal marvel. Watch him, up there, clamp his metaphor, about the position Kudo finds himself in, onto its literal double: the money (via its safety-pin clip affixed chest-approximate) causes a catch in the chest; the money, as it is thought about, catches his chest.
I am immediately reminded about a scene from Claire Denis’ film 35 Shots of Rum (2008) in which Lionel, a train conducteur, sees himself on a horse galloping ahead on the tracks, he is riding the horse that carries him and his beloved daughter. It is a very close image to use, invoking his feelings of protection and conveyance around his daughter, as many shots in this film, in the lay of its reality, are of him driving his daughter on his motorcycle.
Endo tightens his metaphor, or image, like Denis, tight tight onto the nose, it becomes almost, these coincidences, insane.
In his novel The Sea and Poison (1957)—
Underneath the poplar tree, the old man was still at it with his shovel.
Suguro, a medical student, is conscripted into participating in a series of human vivisections of American POWs, in World War II Japan. From inside the hospital, he at times observes an old man, an “odd jobs man,” digging a hole under a tree and he contemplates the purpose. None is ever apparent.
A fruitless hole. A burial?
Suguro’s odd, conscripted job will be the same.
Endo is obvious, but nothing is, because there is horror everywhere and horror horroring here, now, west, east.
It’s obvious but is it, because it’s never over, is it?
I have never met a writer—Endo—so moral and stylish.
The Sea and Poison cuts in time and narration—it reads like a new wave film—which disorients or excites the reality that you are on the nose, and that every metaphor, or image, is a scene of uncanny—so, so close—return. Reminds me of Isaac Babel—
The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head—
who described the sky from a war. The image of the sun (severed head, rolling) is a literal double of what is actually going on, on Earth.
Reminds me of Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness (1899) within the time of its horrors, during Europe’s “scramble for Africa” (1885-1914). So close. Onto the nose. He spelled it out, wholly, and woolly (remember those two women, sitting out in the waiting room of the Belgian trading company’s offices, knitting interminably, purpose indeterminate, that black wool??). His novel is a description of this trade (genocide) as it was operating as Europe’s subconscious, in those very years of the establishment of that concept, the subconscious (est. 1893), Europe’s colonial incursions and genocides like something you wouldn’t be able to think about, having no reasonable access to it, on a rue.
Endo, like Conrad, wrote about horror in, basically, real time, and both wrote from the perspectives of their fellow citizens, might as well have been them.
Tanaka, the professor in Foreign Studies who is sort of failing at becoming a meaningful Sadean scholar, visits the rue des Capucins in Marseille, where Sade stayed in 1772, in a house where he and his valet, Latour, have an all-night orgy with four young prostitutes, feeding them the aphrodisiacal Spanish fly extract; about this, he is to be procured (he’s on the run) and decapitated—
He wanted to grope around and lick those hollows in the stone upon which Sade and the women must have trampled. This was the most positive, the most honest of all his emotions concerning Sade.
He wants to lick the stone.
He doesn’t—
Tanaka leant against the wall and began wondering what it was about those hollows in the stone which aroused in him that numbing sensation.
That is the Endoic tragedy. To have not licked it. Placed your image, your tongue, right there.
Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day
It is not a question of any particular kiss, but rather that the kiss, in itself, opens on to the bite, and the taste of blood. And consequently it is a question of another well known coupling, that of Eros and Thanatos: not in a dialectic of opposites, but in a mutual excitation and exasperation, each asking the other to go further, to go all the way to the end, to get completely lost. —Jean-Luc Nancy, “Icon of Fury,” 2008
In Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), it is just like that.
Like The Sea and Poison, it tells of medical experimentation, human subjects. Dr. Léo Sémeneau uses mosses, plants derived in colonized space—Guyana—to work on issues of the nervous system, the libido, on a fellow doctor, Dr. Shane Brown, and on his own wife, Coré. The treatment has gone thick. Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo (uh oh) are so sick with interest in eating, actually, who they fuck. They can’t keep it down. It’s a human vivification.
I read Nancy’s 2008 essay (his film criticism?) as pure fanfic—his desire to be inside of it, to be with this film, to enact the film in his bloodraving own sentences. I read it years before I saw Trouble Every Day.
I felt I had seen it.
I knew I could not see it.
I’ve fainted at so many things, at, let’s see—
Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts at La Colombe in Fishtown (Philly), I staggered to the bathroom and took off my shirt (hot) and crumpled on a toilet. It was the sink-top castration of Brad, I think.
Under the Banner of Heaven, I was on a Greyhound bus to Seattle in 2009, thinking I’d move there, politely blacking out in my seat, coming to only to the interminable trip still. Krakauer’s depiction of knife-murder, quiet and certain, caused, in me, psychologically, tossed salad, scrambled eggs…
Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, I was on the back patio at Good Karma (Philadelphia more), it was that combination of drinking blood and the whole intimated feeling of heroin addiction, plus pedophilia, it’s the combinations that make me faint. The Sea and Poison, in the back bedroom in North Adams, MA, 2020, its final vivisection scene where they cut into their patient’s lung in order to see how long cutting it would take to be a death. Blood is washing onto the floor. Drains will do it.
So one has to be careful, so I held Denis’ film, red, under my tongue for years, wrapped up in Nancy’s essay.
I was sucking on it through the paper.
When I watched it, I could.
I’ve watched it many times. I still close and squint and pass my eyes onto the ceiling, that waiting emollient of eyesight.
I can’t watch it all.
I listened to its soundtrack, in 2012, while writing my first novel, The University of Pennsylvania (2014), and only, too, while I was menstruating. I put myself in a Pavlovian situation for sure. You could play its soundtrack (by Tindersticks), and I would menstruate for you and I’d move to write the same story again about eternal bleeding.
At the end of this film is a scene of rape and murder. Dr. Shane Brown cannot suppress his issue. About the fuck-eating. He corners a hotel maid in her hotel’s basement, and he rapes her, and he bites her vagina.
The nose.
It’s unlike the earlier parts of this movie. It’s not what you think the movie is doing, despite its previous violences which were more stylish, they had a milieu. It moves into a totally brutal third act.
I think about Denis’ domination, and her collaboration, her dominocollaboration with Gallo and Florence Loiret Caille, who plays this maid, and with Agnes Godard, her cinematographer. She might have held Agnes’ back—she says she does this often in their work together—as it’s being filmed, holding her cinematographer’s back, beholding the rape, making rape with marigold wool.
A color of extreme intensity, saturated. The rape is like the sun with its head ripped off. It is such an extreme scene. The director is driving this train, conductrice, she makes it so very violent, so furious and so worse, it is iconic, it is hers. She is the worst, the most. She refuses others the position. She removes the filming of rape, the making of rape, from the domain of others who would want to make it theirs, dominating Gallo, telling him what to do, how to act, when to stop, he is surrounded.
Portable Shrine
I wrote this whole book, The University of Pennsylvania, about a college student who menstruates a lot out of a double womb (“womb duplicatum”) at that esteemed, perennial school in Philadelphia. I wrote it in Montana, then in Utah. And I wrote a second novel (in Massachusetts) that takes place at Good Karma, a coffee shop of this city I was born in, and, two days before I was, my mother’s OB rapes her in his office at the hospital, where I was born two days later, growing up to write a third novel, a comedy about gynecological crime set in Philadelphia and in homage to Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison. But I haven’t managed to be gainfully employed in the city.
I didn’t even know that when I was writing it. I told my mother what I was up to (I said, “Don’t worry, I’m not writing about you this time,” to which she said, “You are writing about me. Funny thing.” She hadn’t said it to anyone ever before). Later—I’d been walking around in a bludgeoned manner, with this news—she said, “Include what happened in your novel.”
In Philadelphia, my jobs have only been odd. I’ve made some money as the official underwear-washer of the long-running show Menopause the Musical, and at a movie theater, and at a fucked-up bookstore. I got $5 per theatre review once for something called The Philadelphia Theatre Review, from a man named something like Frank who sent me checks, sweet Frank, and I adjuncted at the now closed (dubiously) University of the Arts, 3200/class, which is, frankly, like a $5 check. I interviewed, once, to work at a different fucked up bookstore. I was implored by its owner to write a review of Philip Roth’s Everyman, which I did promptly, it was published, I saw it there, in his bookstore’s newsletter, I guess he published job applications there, never again contacting the applicants, the women, I’m sure, the young everywomen, I’m sure he had a scheme to traffic all of our generous, job-wanting thoughts about Roth, without pay or notice.
I live in Cleveland, where I have found a job. Cleveland has given me some things I have long been searching for.
It’s a shame.
Because in Philadelphia, I am comfortable and confident, knowledgeable about interaction and being. My usual experience of overwhelming amounts of disorientation in space, and about what is happening, recedes lushly in my living-in-Philadelphia system. I know where I am in that grid. I believe I stand somewhat, affectively, on the shoulders of my mom’s work as a paralegal at Community Legal Services for over 30 years. In my interactions at, say, Rittenhouse Market, buying a kombucha and a banana, I am confident in part (eye-contact, joking, knowing where I fucking am) because of my mom’s public service in the city, her contributions to its social fabric, her workaday determination to believe and stand, before judges, for people who were in need of disability assistance from the city, herself disabled, so, sitting—her tiny apartment in South Philadelphia, the pottery that is there.
In Cleveland, my office is nearby the Cleveland Museum of Art (world class and free, it’s extremely nice) and in a novel middle age (42), I’m fastened rapturously to its vast wing of antiquities. I’ve never felt this way before about them.
A Tibetan portable shrine from 1500 is on the younger side. The oldest thing here is from 3000 BC, a potentially Western Anatolian “stargazer” of translucent marble. Tiny. The portable shrine from Tibet is diminutive, as well, and carved from a single log of wood, with mineral and metal elements.
Its figures practice Tantric Buddhism, its details—detailing is—are so so tantric. The minutest toe, arm, figures of prayer and action, one might be biting a leather strap, in what seems the lush overhangs of forest stuff, these details and arms coming from the wet, wood-dark depths of this miniaturish space. You could close it up. It has hinges. You can’t. It’s within glass.
And yes I feel I want to lick it. To feel my tongue going in the grooves of the many bodies positioned in the forest in the log in three rows going across three panels that can close. Blackish. I would like to feel the ridges of the details, and this extremely exquisite corrugation of these protectors therein of Tantric Buddhism, rippling in a millioness of knobs, toes, strap, on my tongue, completely lost.
Writing to a friend about it all: Maybe we are all just very very young, very silly. Maybe humanity is just silly string, David. But that can’t be true—look at antiquities.
I want to lose my face in this shrine, in Cleveland. Its name suggests I could take it with me. But the glass. Propriety. There’s respect. The closest I would get is if I accidentally, coming so very close to look, bump my nose on this glass. Would, I’ve long held, is a warbling word.
∩
Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). Her previous books include Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022)—winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction—Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Some of these titles have been published abroad with The Last Books (Amsterdam) and los tres editores (Madrid). She lives in Cleveland and is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University.