willow, horse chestnut, lime, a clump of pines. Dovecots, swallows. The child raises its
eyes. Say it’s seven o’clock in the evening. Onto the kitchen table arrive in their place the
milk, the basket of eggs, the skinned rabbit. Then each of the fruges goes to its
destination, the dairy, the cool scullery, the cooking pot, the shelf. The men come home.
Glasses of fresh wine. A cross is made in the middle of the large loaf. Supper. Who will
get up to serve out? Common time, common sense, common place. That of the domus,
that of its representation, mine, here.
There are varieties of the common place, cottage, manor. The ostentation of the
facades. The commoners move around at a distance from the masters’ residences. In
place of pastures and ploughed fields, parks and pleasant gardens offer themselves to the
facade. Pleasure and work divide space-time and are shared out among the bodies. It’s a
serious question, a historian’s or sociologist’s question, this division. But basically,
extended or not, divided or not in its exploitation, the basis remains domestic. It is the
sphere of reference of the estate, a monad. A mode of space, time and body under the
regime (of) nature. A state of mind, of perception, of memory confined to its limits, but
where the universe is represented. It is the secret of the façades. Similarly with action.
The fruges are obtained by nature and from nature. They produce, destroy and reproduce
themselves stubbornly and according to the order of things. According to nature’s care
for itself, which is called frugality. Alla domenica, domus gives thanks for what has taken
place and had its moment and prays for what will take place and have its moment. The
temporal regime of the domus is rhythm or rhyme.
Domestic language is rhythmic. There are stories: the generations, the locality, the
seasons, wisdom and madness. The story makes beginning and end rhyme, scars over the
interruptions. Everyone in the house finds their place and their name here, and the
episodes annexed. Their births and deaths are also inscribed, will be inscribed in the
circle of things and souls with them. You are dependent on God, on nature. All you do is
serve the will, unknown and well known, of physis, place yourself in the service of its
urge, of the phyein which urges living matter to grow, decrease and grow again. This
service is called labour. (With the dubious wish sometimes, to profit also, that the estate
should profit, from growth? One wonders. Rhythmed wisdom protects itself against
pleonexia, the delirium of a growth with no return, a story with no pause for breath.)
Ancilla, the female servant. From ambi and colere, ambicilla, she who turns all the
way round, the old sense of colere, to cultivate, to surround with care. Culture has two
meanings: cult of the gods, but the gods also colunt domum, cultivate the dwelling, they
surround it with their care, cultivate it with their circumspection. The female servant
protects the mistress, for to serve is to keep. When she gets up to serve at table, it is the
nature-god who cultivates the house, is content there, is at home. The domestic space is
entwined and intertwined with circumvolutions, with the comings and goings of
conversations. Service is given and returned without any contract. Natural duties and
rights. I find it hard to believe that this organic life was the ‘primitive form of exchange’,
as Mauss put it.
It is a community of work. It does not cease to work. It works its works itself. These
operate and are distributed spontaneously, out of custom. The child is one of these works,
the first, the first-fruit, the offspring. The child will bear fruit. Within the domestic
rhythm, it is the moment, the suspension of beginning again, the seed. It is what will have
been. It is the surprise, the story starting over again. Speechless, infans, it will babble,
Jean-François Lyotard 257