Pooling- You

Paralyzed, he again looked at me with his blue eyes
and when I saw the blinking I started crying

Good G-d…no blubbering

No sobbing

-Louise Bourgeois’ Annotations to Roni Horn’s Wonderwater- Alice Offshore


Roni Horn’s Wonderwater, transgressing the traditions of writing, is a psychological exercise in response. What Bourgeois writes here is a response to Roni Horn’s phrase “Pooling- You.” Bourgeois answers the idea of pooling with images of eyes, insinuating a falling-into the You, the intimate other that this experience involves. Pooling is also explored in the description of the writer’s tears. But beyond these direct images of pooling, Bourgeois explores the pooling of selves. If eyes are pools into which one can fall, the tears are the response to the failure of the selves to combine, to pool. The man, paralyzed, cannot combine. He does not fall into her; the pooling is one-sided. In the man’s blinking Bourgeois notes that this pooling falls short of a full merging of the selves. His blinking interrupts the pooling, because with each blink a separation is established between the selves. She cannot fall into him; his eyelids are walls. This separation leads Bourgeois to call on G-d, both as an entity that might allow the separation to be breached, and as another You, similarly intimate and separate. This separation insinuates itself in the fact that Bourgeois’ cannot call on God fully. She leaves out a letter, finding herself unable to speak the name of this You. The pooling once again falls short. Blubbering and sobbing might create pools. Small puddles of water would collect, yet Bourgeois rejects blubbering and sobbing because her tears remain isolated. The small pools are not shared with the You that she addresses, first in the man and then in G-d, and so no pooling results from them. Bourgeois’ response to “Pooling- You” ends in the failure of the pooling of the selves, of You, as is in fact initially suggested by the dash that separates Pooling and You.