Interrupts Thinking – Camille Clair

April 5, 2026

The road is guarded by a big grey dog with dark, red irises. As I walk toward the road, the dog laboriously comes to his feet. Dust falls from his trembling body. I check the instructional collection of images Asterios has sent me to make certain that the road I face is the right one. I hadn’t noticed the dog in the picture before, but there he is: a shadowy mound.

The dog’s eyes darken as I draw near, revealing his anticipation. I pause briefly, assessing the threshold, then cross over into his domain. I feel his gaze before I hear his body rise to follow. We continue on together, my companion at my heels.

The dog leads me up a hill with an aristocratic air, seeming to know where I’m headed. As Asterios’ house comes into view —I recognize it from the picture— he abruptly turns and trots back to his throne at the base of the road.

I have come to Asterios’ village because all gravity was sucked from my life in Vienna. It lost meaning, or its substance became loss. The last time I felt that my life’s primary substance was loss, I also made plans to come to the village, but it was flooded. The road had disappeared beneath murky waves, and no one could come or go. The result of the impossibility of reaching Asterios’ village then, of suspending momentum, was that I moved to Vienna.

On the way home once, I said to Aaron “Vienna is not a city”. He pointed out the window, we were at the point when the subway emerges from underground and trails along the canal. On the opposite edge of the water, there are a few tall buildings. At the top of one is a piece by Pipilotti Rist—as with many permanent installations, it grows on you over time, recognized more as a kind of satellite, than as an artwork. Aaron’s finger tapped the glass, landing directly on the illuminated expanse. It flashed by.
I elaborated, “Vienna is not a city, it’s a city-state. One loses track of a city, whereas a city-state has clearly defined borders”.

In the summer, while in New York, I was told Vienna possesses an unusually strong gravitational pull—that here one feels gravity. I have tried researching the city’s rumored gravity peculiarity innumerable times, but cannot find any factual evidence to substantiate this claim. Still I believe it immediately. It’s a pervasive, abstract sensation that is difficult to disambiguate, but felt everyday.
 
Through my research, I learned that inner-city burials were outlawed in Vienna rather late — only toward the end of the 19th century, more than a hundred years later than many other major European cities. Paris, for example, banned churchyard burials in 1776, due to overcrowding and fears of a resurgence in plague. In Vienna, there are 11,000 bodies in the crypt of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral alone. Stephansplatz, Vienna’s tourism epicenter, receives roughly the same amount of daily living visitors. I wonder if this weight—this limp, dry weight that seems to cling to everything here—could have something to do with that, the subterranean mass of the dead.

Vienna is folded together, incongruous things line up, therein lies its cruelty. The carpentry workshop in which Walter is building his sculpture is next to my analysts’ office. I keep track of the pieces’ progress through the window. I imagine his hands laboring over it, his dry knuckles which crack when it gets colder. These sort of coincidences wouldn’t happen in a city, not a real one. I tell my analyst this. He takes his time blinking, is cat-like. Says nothing.

And so I decide to go the village.

The village is on the water, but it’s the off season, early fall, so the strip is deserted. Asterios has not had any visitors for months. The last friend to visit was me, 16 months prior. He only sees the shopkeeper and his neighbor, an old woman, who brings him cheese pies.

A few weeks before my arrival, Asterios discovered a puppy by the dumpsters. He observed her there for three days, then decided to take her home. He had been lonely, had inadvertently asked for her, so that is her name: Aitisi, meaning request.

Asterios is otherwise very afraid of dogs, which limits his mobility in the village. Therefore, his decision to raise the puppy is one of consequence.

The village is home to many stray dogs. There is one with a giant tumor who hobbles around in a parking lot in which people unload and sort, but don’t seem to sell, chestnuts. Asterios and I dubiously survey the chestnut exchange, unsure how to secure some of our own. The little market directly across from the parking lot does not carry chestnuts. Nevertheless, we return each day hoping to find them in stock.

Our hunger for chestnuts grows. As a result, we spend entire afternoons concocting elaborate desserts.
We fill crepes and stack pancakes with the intention of delivering them to the neighbor, but nothing ever makes it her way. Our dishes look confused, rather than serene, as her cheese pies do.

Asterios and I coexist well. We lived together years before, in Frankfurt. We cooked together in those days too. We made fatty soups which clogged the sink. We laughed often, like maniacs. We also often cried. We took turns fighting with Walter and when he was sunburned, we rubbed yogurt on his legs.

Asterios has a series of alarms set on his phone which keep his day on track: breakfast, dog-training, exercise, study, lunch, study, dog training, dinner, study, bed. He passively silences each one —his schedule thrown off by my presence.

I set up a desk on the back porch and read On Metaphysics and Morals by Iris Murdoch until the puppy rips it apart. There is a line, I jotted down in my notebook, “all true and pure love is sympathy, and all love that is not sympathy is selfishness”. Exhaling, I agree, but on the inhale, the intention is gone. Vaporized.

People tend to confuse sympathy and empathy.

Empathy, I learned recently, was derived from the German word Einfühlung—feeling into. It does not have Greek origin—pathos, sure—but empathy was coined in the 19th century, a translation of a word used in aesthetic debate, to describe the projection of feelings into the art object.

Empathy was originally reserved for the inanimate. Sympathy, however, is love. Walter asks me to have empathy. With this request, he is referring to the modern understanding of empathy. He is asking me to put myself in his position…but what he actually wants is for me to stop animating him with my own projections.

Personally, my definition of love is what interrupts thinking. Some people agree immediately with this and others don’t. This definition is one of the few things I’ve shared with my analyst that garnered any reaction. Sometimes I think it reveals everything about me that anyone should ever know. There is a purity to it, but something darker as well. If love is interruption, then what resumes.

Asterios and I take Aitisi to the beach. It’s her first time. Initially, she is terrified of the ocean, we laugh gleefully, marveling as her understanding of existence rearranges before our eyes.

While playing with her, my bracelet falls in the sand. It’s the bracelet I bought from a man off the street in New York, the morning after I was informed of Vienna’s gravity problem, the morning before the day I was to return. I spend hours searching the beach, hoping the silver band will catch the light. It is only once the sky darkens, that I accept it’s lost.

…

Several buses are required to reach Thessaloniki from the village. I catch the first very early in the morning from a stop by the chestnut exchange. The old dog with the huge tumor sluggishly chases after a green apple. The sky is violet.

Leaving the village, I feel premature, blushed. I’m not ready to return to Vienna, to bear it’s weight.

I walk from the bus depot in Thessaloniki to a hotel Asterios has recommended. It’s a long grey stretch to a hotel that is tall, pale blue, and papery. It feels like a diorama, flimsy, or else I haven’t yet earned my sea legs.

I wander around wondering if Thessaloniki is a city. I think it is. It faded into view, it has a film festival, and its only an hour’s drive from Mount Olympus. Mount Olympus, which was of course the capital of mythological living.

In the evening, I duck into a dark cafe tucked between religious supply shops which sell incense and beeswax candles. I order a dish called “bird livers with eggs” and a pitcher of wine. The livers arrive doused in herbs in a cast iron skillet. The eggs are miniature, presumably from a quail. The livers too are very small, derived from unspecified birds. Swallowing the tiny livers, I feel a light expanding in my chest.

I have developed a growing comfort in eating organ meats over the past few years. Quite a feat following a decade of vegetarianism. The liver-eating had always been reserved for camaraderie. But now I have ordered and ingested unspecific livers of my own accord.

Eating the livers, I feel nostalgic for my first liver, which I ate with spinach and pine nuts in Masha’s Frankfurt studio. That was around the time I first met Walter. Asterios introduced us, and the next day, we agreed to meet on a bridge. As I walked toward him that evening, I felt my body diminish. It happened very quick.

It makes sense I arrived at liver-eating very soon after falling in love. I had relaxed all of my defenses, the particularities that informed who I was.

I’ve been writing an essay, its called, A Sculpture and its Shadow. Its about the psychic mechanisms that inform an encounter between a viewer and work of art, the main argument being that if one doesn’t maintain sufficient distance from an object, it’s substance is ultimately subverted by the viewer’s shadow.

The essay ends like this: “The projection of the repressed self, the id, finds no foothold, and in its absence, the viewer is offered something rarer: the chance to exist in the company of the work, rather than in opposition to it”.

To exist in the company of, rather than in opposition to.

I repeat the phrase, my eyes water. The warmth of the livers flares again, in my stomach and in my chest.
Their faintly metallic weight. I feel Walter with me. His dry hand—just beginning to crack—spooning a tiny liver into his mouth. His face is soft and smooth. The muscles are relaxed, I haven’t seen his face this way in a while.

We could exist in each others’ company. Could we exist in each others’ company? We had tried.

Maybe I can love Walter more without him.
Because without me, he’s more himself. He is only himself.

Distance will enable him to fill out another dimension, to exponentially expand. There will be no interruption, because I won’t be there, intercepting him. Newly unencumbered, he’ll develop his own atmosphere, and gravitation.

His absence will resemble him, will garner more pull, than his presence. And once I’ve removed him from me, my presence and the threat of my absence will merge, and I’ll be whole.

I’ll be me, because he’ll be gone. He’ll be him, because I wont be watching.

Love as obsession is its most tempting form. Reason is displaced. There is only overlap. It is engrossing, insurmountably pleasurable. Because you want it to last forever, it wont.

Walter and I met, familiarized, within the body that was our union. We had not encountered each other in the third dimension. There was no vantage, we were compressed, and already us. It was winter, my first real winter. We were in bed — continuous overlap. We fell asleep drinking red wine, woke up to a pale grey sky and refilled our glasses.

We were not afforded complete, unencumbered views of one another. It was impossible. By holding each other too close, we were held out of focus.

The pleasure of dissolve wears off but the union remains: a psychic tangle. The lover receives unconscious content, but cannot hold it. He could not stomach my projection and in turn, I could not find myself in him.

He was rendered my shadow. I looked at him and saw me. I looked at him and saw him seeing me. It takes effort, concentrated effort that isn’t easy to give. When he speaks I hear him through my ears.

My hearing, which dilutes him. I shouted, why didn’t you scream out? But he may have. I had been counting on his scream to interrupt everything.

Now we stand, interrupted, but what resumes?

The overlap which was once blissful morphs into a barrier. When an allowance is made for sufficient physical—and therein psychic—space, the lover receives, but is not subverted by, the unconscious content of the other, thereby enabling a relational exchange not governed by the drives that shaped their union, but by the subjectivity that brought about their initial encounter. 

In the interval between lovers, being is re-articulated: presence is tested, boundaries are discerned, and identity is enacted not as static, but as a continuous negotiation of tensions.

In the process of recovering myself, I embrace my proclivities. All my particularities no longer cast in relation to another, I exist in them, as them.

My writing becomes reinfected with self.
I had convinced myself it would be better to omit myself as a character, yet here I am. However, I maintain, I’m not the subject. My story is the substrate into which the true concerns of my writing dissolve.

I eat a few more livers, sense my blood iron count increasing, and finish the wine.
…

When I was living in LA, I worked for an artist whom I may have been in love with. We produced her first museum exhibition together. Initially, I was paid, but due to a severely mismanaged budget, in combination with a whimsical lifestyle, funds quickly ran out.

Needless to say, I was too involved by that point, and I may have been in love, so I continued working with her. We made every decision together. It felt as if we shared one mind. Late into the night, we’d drink apple cider vinegar and discuss the narrative of the work. During the final stage of production, we slept in the same bed.

It was a very metaphysical time.

At the opening I noticed my name was not listed anywhere, not in the text, the exhibition plan, the wall labels. Nowhere. I walked in circles through the show, clasping at myself to reaffirm my flesh.

A few friends who came from LA for the opening noticed my distress and invited me to step outside to smoke a joint. This of course, only heightened concern over my body’s dissolution.

By coincidence, She, the artist I may have loved, is also in Greece. So we’ve been writing. She asks how my trip is going. I tell her its felt really good as its marked a philosophical shift and I’ve debunked romantic love.

She is curious to hear more.

I write: Ive been working on this essay for a while…about sculpture… the thesis being that if there isn’t a sufficient gap between object and viewer, one ultimately receives their own shadow…which is the repressed self/the id projected into the thing. And as a result one is prevented from ever establishing real ground in relation to it… this is also why so much artwork leaves an empty impression if the installation isn’t thoughtful…

…and i think the same goes in relationships… especially the kind that form from immediate obsession…because you never have a chance to develop a detached, autonomous view of the other…

…and then, or in my case at least, I start to think of the other person as my captor and exclude them from my nternal world…which begins to feel a bit like a covert form of antagonism…and all the while I’m critical of the attachment even though I’m attached because the other person is part of me, my shadow.

She says, What you are saying is true and beautiful. I have a related thought which is that the object is also a mirror and certain things are visible and not, a world, a way forward, a past, spirits and angels or not….

It becomes limiting, maybe there is not one embodied limiter. I don’t know…I might need the obsession with the object…or is there a reality without it?

Luckily, her pretty words no longer have any power over me. What stands out instead is that she—a sculptor, as well as a narcissist—speaks of the lover as an object. It does seem to be their destiny.

Soon after the artist’s exhibition opened, I started seeing one of her close friends. She drifted away after that, and I allowed it to happen, feeling as though I’d been written out of the work we made together.

That was my first genuine experience of heart break.

Years later I was told the artist had been horrified by my relationship with her friend, that she had been, all the time, in love with me. At first, the realization unsettled me, for it was only once I was no longer hers that my presence became one of consequence.

By the time I finish my meal, the liturgical shops are closed. I peer into their darkened windows, admiring the flimsy icons, wishing I could take one home, to Vienna.

On my way to the airport the next morning, I stop in an old church. The interior is smokey. A tarnished chandelier distends into the center chamber. Directly below it, an old woman is sweeping. She is faintly haloed by the chandeliers musty sheen.

I stuff some coins into a metal receptacle and grab a handful of honey-colored candles. As I turn to go, the old woman looks up at me. We hold eye contact.