Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

But it was one example of how the city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.

It was the job of the interpreter not simply to state or perform but to repeat the unspeakable. Perhaps that was the real anxiety within the Court, and among the interpreters. The fact that our daily activity hinged on the repeated description—description, elaboration, and delineation—of matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision.

But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.

The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.

That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography.