“We always find something to give us the impression we exist?” Samuel Beckett

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Helene Gala Dmitrievna was barely of age when she came to Paris in 1916 to marry Paul Éluard. She proclaimed: ’I will do anything, but I will look like a woman who touches nothing.

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Max Ernst admired Gala’s talent for coitus. He entered into a menage à trois, encouraged by Éluard.

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“I have always enjoyed the power I had over men. Just walking down the street and swaying and swinging my mandolin-shaped butt in front of their gaze.” Erica Jong

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In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt converts to Islam in Annaba (Algeria). She disguises herself as a man, joins the ranks of the cavalry and circulates as Si Mahmoud Saadi. In June 1901, the sailor Pierre Mouchet arrives in Marseille and turns out to be Isabelle Eberhardt. Suspected of espionage and insubordination, the agent of her own lifestyle is eagerly awaiting her fiancé. Six months later, hardship catches up with her in the Kasbah of Algiers. As the wife of a penniless Algerian, all she has left is air and love. Eberhardt writes even though she is plagued by hunger.Her descriptions cover poor conditions with a glaze. For the European, nomads are “natives”, although Eberhardt is known as a critic of colonial attributions. She gives her heroine a fate that deviates from a probable course. She is promised to the one-eyed Mohammed Elaour, who has trouble raising the bride price. The wedding is delayed and Yasmina fulfills her daughterly duties as a shepherdess. This is how she is found by Lieutenant Jacques, a native of the Ardennes (in a fever of poetry): in a glowing hollow that is also a juniper orchard.He gets caught up in an Algerian shepherd’s play that cries out for a painter.Yasmina flees from the speech, “but she fled the enemy of her defeated race”.

The officer builds a bridge of longing to the disappearing woman. He immediately recognizes what is denied by the rags: a sharp-edged, darkly childish (mystical) charm, which Jacques combines ethnologically with a fetishistic Islam. The admirer is transformed into a humming top of oriental gibberish and African chimeras. Yasmina now serves exoticism. Her absence allows Jacques to mentally masturbate into the desert without restraint.

Eberhardt equips him with a pre-modern soul figure who celebrates a wedding with Yasmina’s untimeliness. I read the story thirty years ago and am now amazed at how clichéd it is.Eberhardt ennobles the Frenchman.  

At breakfast—porridge, toast, orange marmalade—only an older couple remained in the breakfast corner. They had been to the island five times already. Their affection was, however, on lost ground. The innkeeper had no interest in mainland sentimentality. We talked about the weather, the ferry service, and a life without cinema or theater. In Kilronan, the main village on Inis Oírr, fewer than three hundred locals lived.

The innkeeper showed us a drawer full of starfish, toad snails, and walrus tooth fragments. I was particularly taken with her wooden books, their spines made of bark and the titles containing seeds, fruits, and leaves from overseas trees.

I looked for an excuse to shake you off. For the first time, I went my own way alone. I slipped down to the beach, closed my eyes, and lost myself in the contemplation of sexual afterimages that had nothing to do with you. Instead, Goya exerted a compelling influence. A dog’s snout nudged me inquisitively; reluctantly, I left the dream castle of my longing. Seagulls plunged into the water. Children stumbled after them. I discovered a bare shoulder blade in a nest of shells. Seaweed nested in rock crevices as if it had grown there. Driftwood collectors grazed along the shoreline. A sandcastle rose up, telling of adult ambition. Birds examined a slimy algae compound. Trash increasingly became a trap for fish.

I reached a stone building, ruined but still usable as a shelter. Earth had settled on the broken roof, forming an impressive foundation—a work of nature that looked as if it had been made by humans. In its essence, it hardly differed from Neolithic architecture and served as a sheep shelter.

I photographed primroses, cowslips, and carnations. The sea outdid itself in a play of colors between emerald and aquamarine. The sky was dramatic. The horizon was black. A hairpin was lodged in the rubble. In island households, kitchen drawers serve as repositories for medieval brooches, pulled from the earth before every official excavation or exchanged for football stickers.

The light vanished in folds of clouds.

The sky opened its gray maw. Soon after, a Gothic dome illuminated the radiant clouds. Stunted pines lined a path. A nest clung to the dividing wall of a headland. The rock needle looked like the Old Man of Storr as a child.

“The Old Man of Storr is a 48-meter-high rock needle on the Scottish island of Skye, part of the Inner Hebrides.” – Wikipedia