speak, tell stories, will have told stories, will have stories told about it, will have had
stories told about it. The common work is the domus itself, in other words the
community. It is the work of a repeated domestication. Custom domesticates time,
including the time of incidents and accidents, and also space, even the border regions.
Memory is inscribed not only in narratives, but in gestures, in the body’s mannerisms.
And the narratives are like gestures, related to gestures, places, proper names. The stories
speak themselves on their own. They are language honouring the house, and the house
serving language. The bodies make a pause, and speech takes over from them indoors, in
the fields, in the middle of the woods. Such rich hours, even those of the poor. The past
repeats itself in work. It is fixed, which is to say it is held back and forgotten, in legends.
The domus is the space-time of this reiteration.
Exclusion is not essential to the domestic monad. The poor man, the solitary traveller,
has a place at the table. Let him give his opinions, show his talent, tell his story. People
get up for him, too. Brief silence, an angel is passing. Be careful. What if he were a
messenger? Then they will make sure he is remembered, domesticated.
Bucolic tableau. Boukolein does not only mean keeping the flock. Keeping humans,
too, serving them. Yet the domus has a bucolic air only from outside, from afar, from the
city. The city spends centuries, millennia slowly gnawing away at the domus and its
community. The political city, imperial or republican, then the city of economic affairs,
today the megalopolis spread out over what used to be the countryside. It stifles and
reduces res domesticae, turns them over to tourism and vacation. It knows only the
residence (domicile). It provides residences for the presidents of families, the domini, it
bends them to egalitarian citizenship, to the workforce and to another memory, the public
archive, which is written, mechanographically operated, electronic. It does surveys of the
estates and disperses their order. It breaks up god-nature, its returns, its times of offering
and reward. With another regulation of space-time set in place, it is in relation to this that
the bucolic regime is perceived as a melancholic survival. Sad tropics seen from the
north.
A savouring of the sounds. Come from the near distance, the depths of the stables,
cacklings, a silence hollowed out round the call of the owls when Venus shines out at
dusk, crackling of the alder branches thrown onto the hearth, clogs on the thresholds,
conversation on the hill opposite, wasps round the melon, shouts of encouragement to the
autumn oxen, swifts madly chasing each other around the darkening roofs. The sounds
are toned to the measure of the bittersweet, the smoky, the tastelessness of the boiled
beans, the pungent dung, the ferment of the hot straw. The tones eat each other up. The
minor senses were honoured in the physical domus.
What I say about it, the domestic community, can be understood only from where I
speak, the human world become megalopolis. From after the death of Virgil. From after
the end of the houses. (At the end of the Buddenbrooks.) Now that we have to gain time
and space, gain with and against them, gain or earn our livings. When the regulation of
things, humans and capacities happens exclusively between humans, with no nature to
serve, according to the principle of a generalized exchange aiming for more.... In the
‘pragmatic’ busyness, which disperses the ancient domestic monads and hands over the
care for memory to the anonymity of archives. No one’s memory, without custom, or
story or rhythm. A memory controlled by the principle of reason, which despises
tradition, where everyone seeks and will find as best s/he can the information needed to
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