ABSTRACT
SOMEONE NOT ESPECIALLY CONVERANT in French epistolary convention may infer that he stands high in the esteem of a writer who concludes his letter by saying, Veuillez agréer, cher Monsieur, á mes sentiments les plus distingués, until deflated by his rather more cosmopolitan wife, who assures him that the phrase means nothing, certainly nothing of the sort he supposed it did, because that is just the way the French sign impersonal letters. A recent biography of Jackson Pollock makes heavy hermeneutical weather of the way he peed, just the way his father peed, looping urine upon the ground in ways startlingly like the way the painter famously dribbled paint on canvases spread upon the floor. Suppose someone more conversant with the ways men had of relieving themselves, copiously and ornamentally, in the world to which Pollock's father belonged and in which little Jackson grew up. So it didn't really mean anything that he peed that way, as all the menfolk did. Painting may still, to be sure, have in his case been a kind of sublimated micturition, but the unsublimated micturition was merely a matter of male custom in that particular world. Each of us, in seeking to define the contours of the Other, must learn to discriminate in this way between what anyone might call “expressions” from what I shall unfelicitousfy call “manifestations.” The task is complicated by the fact that anything could be the one or the other, though possibly never both at the same time and in the same way. The letter writer may indeed hold his correspondent in some esteem, but then he will have to find a way of expressing this other than by using the closing phrase everyone uses. Pollock may have expressed himself rather than manifested his heritage through calligraphical pee—but then it would have to be explained why this after all everyday discharge should in his case have become the vehicle of personal communication.
