Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death.
—Elena Ferrante, email conversation with Nicola Lagioia
her mind was met by texts that held her
in space she could find nowhere else to contain—Anna Mendelssohn, Tondo Aquatique
We must reach a unity in reading thereof.
—Simone Weil, Notebooks
It’s been at least three decades since [Lila] told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means.
—Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, ‘Prologue’
‘I’m a scribble on a scribble, completely unsuitable for one of your books; forget it, Lenù, one doesn’t tell the story of an erasure.’
—Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
One can’t go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.
—Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
. . . writing is everything and I am nothing . . .
—Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Diary
INFINITELY WHITE
We will develop a discourse around the character Lila in My Brilliant Friend. Lila is Raffaella ‘Lila’ Cerullo. She is the best friend of the novel’s other main character, Elena ‘Lenù’ Greco, and is the one in the novel who wants to disappear. What is the status of Lila’s disappearance? Does it constitute a drive? Evoking the secret name of the Buddha, we can ask, is Lila the thus-come-gone one (tathāgata)? Is the whole concern of Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga with thus-come-gone-oneness in the form of a ‘brilliance’ of the ‘friend’, or even in the form of what Aristotle and then Derrida called ‘perfect friendship’, as it plays out here between two women, across two lifetimes? What is the brilliance of the friend when the friend is always there as the one going, the one coming—even so incapable, perhaps, of reading the unity of these two?
We will focus—if this makes any sense at all—on the way Lila has of disappearing, of the way she has, as Ferrante puts it, of ‘expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion’. Lila’s thus-come-goneness resembles a silently erotic tryst with distant fascination; it is the driver of obsession with and for herself as well as for the reader; a bruising caress, a cutting away, a more-than-sexual curiosity, a scalpel. In other words, her own fascination with herself is just as much a motive as any imagined fascination of the other (the writer, Elena, for example). Lila betrays self-fascination as a concentrated erotics of self-absence that demands—magnifies and destroys—all reading as a kind of lie that only ‘fiction’ makes possible and, perhaps, bearable.
Let us enter the phantasm Lila evokes and try to make good on it—holding open the possibility that this was Elena’s mistake all along, to spend a lifetime in Lila’s ‘neighbourhood’, revenging herself on Lila’s goneness, competing with it in and as durational writing, without ever quite seeing, save as more writing, the goneness that always forms a certain unity as the Two.
Let us say, as if this were not dangerous, that Lila is infinitely white, an infinitely white twist of space. She betrays a desire to leave and be alone that is so extreme and so soft and so rigorous and so hard that it registers sometimes in none of these lexical and affective zones (extremity, softness, rigor, hardness). It is at extremities such as these—confusing themselves with the death drive as if they had been had—that the equally white figure of the Buddha, whose secret name is thus-come-gone-one, gently laughs. While Ferrante will dwell on the impossibility of aloneness in interviews, the characters in the space of her novels and novellas are as if blinded by a lifetime of refusing to see what happens there in mutual code incompatibilities that are not in fact inevitable—a blinding to other communities, for instance those of lightness, color, balance.
It is as if we speak and say, perhaps even to Lila herself: ‘If you could ever be alone, it would be impressive. If you ever could for a single second leave us all completely, it would indeed be beautiful.’ At the same time, Lila does sound different, she does act as if she is about to act differently, and thus becomes a passion, a vocation, for the reader, and for her own perception of herself, including her fear of loss, of smarginature, her episodes of dissolving boundaries meaning she cannot be let go of, she cannot let go of herself, she fades, she determines, she determines from afar, she feels like a perhaps new ‘determination’. There is a certain sadness that Lila’s name evokes, a sealed sadness almost too much for life—perhaps indeed far too unbearable for life—as if we had to ask, is sadness all but disappearance? What Lila contends with is the ‘I don’t want this to be my life but this did happen to me and I will say it somewhere even if just in determining a certain nothing’ . . . as if to bypass it, as if to leave no trace of her leaving no trace. She wants all that to be only almost inevitable.1
Nonetheless, and with no getup, what thus-come-gone-oneness shows and shows up with ease is that the drive to vanish is itself also at least at times a maiming delusion, a drive occasioned and driven by and in turn span out by the very threat of vanishing it seems to surge towards and want. Such a drive rarely sees itself, as in life we never do, so busy is it wanting to be seen—in life we miss ourselves, and thus rely on the brilliancy of a friend.
OUR BRILLIANT FRIEND
The axis of the title, My Brilliant Friend, is, to say all this in a flash, a ‘brilliance’, and shifts ambiguously between both friends, a bit like the title of Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend. Who is my or our brilliant friend? Which friend is brilliant, which dull? Let us say for the moment—so as to leave it open—that the brilliant friend is subject-X. The brilliant subject is the subject of the title, the title itself. It’s the subject of angelicism, for instance. The transitional nature of any-subject-X. The thus-come-gone-one as strange attractor. We can even say that if the subject-X mistakes and misreads the unity of the ‘come’ and ‘gone’ for the length of a lifetime (the sadness of an irreversible error, the music of the HBO adaption—specifically, the sound of Max Richter’s ‘Spring 1’), it nonetheless knows itself only in the singularity that allows each to already settle in each and every other.2 What we really mean is this: the inner music of lifetime(s).
Our brilliant friend looks like the thus-gone-one but in the pure field of the real is actually only a thus-come-gone-one. If Elena the character is sometimes mistaken about one thing, it is the ability to disappear, which for her threatens to become ‘Lila’ herself. It is within the reality of all vanishing to never vanish, to never have been seen through enough—until it has, until it is (‘death’).3 But this mistake is also the mistake of a genre: which is to say, the novel as Generic Decision. Consequently, Ferrante begins My Brilliant Friend inside the alibi of the mistake and the lifetimes it takes. The ‘Prologue’ has its own music, and will have been all there was to read.
DISAPPEARANCE-ANGER
What Lila’s disappearing evokes in Elena is first of all an anger—an anger that she can only resolve by writing the story of what Lila means, that is, presumably, but not quite, My Brilliant Friend the novel. In so doing, she is able to disprove Lila, which is to say contain the uncontainable vector of disappearance’s entropy within the forcefield of generic narratology. Is the novel thereby simply a trick, a way of loosening the tension around ‘Lila’? Does it reduce, free, betray lifetimes—as music does?
Thus, the gone one (Lila) is gone in the beginning (the novel’s ‘Prologue’). Namely, she is narrated to us as gone (come). We see it from the end. From the end—the end of their lives (music)—it turns out nobody ever did manage to do it (lifetimes). To go. What comes at the start is therefore this. This impossibility of having-gone; and the music of it still having been there. The only way to do it, after all, is what we call ‘death’. And death is no way at all, or rather, underrated. Thus, the sound of sound:
Lila is overdoing it as usual, I thought. She was expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion. She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.
And we read the next line, ‘I was really angry’, and then there is a declaration of war and competition. We may wonder about all this given what has already been formulated. What is happening here since nobody can (quite) disappear and indeed Lila is there with Elena into old age (sixty-six), and it is Lila who will turn out to have her own anger, and Elena too, an anger at the one-sided phantasm of vanishing that will have guided the whole novel from ‘Prologue’ on as a form of revenge, as if such a novel would indeed, however world famous it became, be at least in part only a mistaken (essential) emotion and a misreading of goneness?
I was really angry.
We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.
Why ‘win’? Why the phantasm of ‘winning’? Whenever did a lifetime ‘win’? How can lifetimes—and when—not submit themselves to the fantasy and delirium of competition? What role does ‘the computer’ play here, entrancing Elena and Lila both, in a degree of automaticity that is not quite their own? The passion (to write) Elena evokes is remarkable in its open display of a delusion, the lethal delusion of having to write (not having to write). Lila is, from one angle, the one obsessed with her own disappearance, that is to say, with herself. This ‘Lila’ has the all the all-too-evident self-obsession with her own appearance that all those who wish to vanish the most and vanish extremely usually have. Vanishing from us, these vanishers fail to vanish from themselves—so much so that what they really must want is for their disappearance to be known, and for the logic of vanishing’s (erotic) impossibility to be notated; such is the automated allure of ‘determination’. What fascinates them—these ones caught in the coming mirror of the gone—is their phantasm of a disappearance—any disappearance, in effect—as it appears over there.4
But is all that really ‘Lila’? We can at least say that settling into other logics of the one-point in life that offers trust that is equipollent, a remarkable ongoing resolution is available of that sadness and emptiness and blame and unnecessary withholding and over-giving and under-giving of writing that marks any tropological project as such, especially fine writing, literature, the history of poems, and so on. Does Lila’s inner music contain this too?
Ferrante writes as Proust and many other narrators did before her, in the relatively simple bliss of non-complete identification with her own ‘lead’ voice, Elena. It goes without saying that we cannot simply say Elena Ferrante is Elena Greco, but it would also be stupid to keep them far apart. When Elena says she is ‘angry’, this anger has to do with a power that is or seems to be—in the thus-gone-phantasm—Lila’s, the power to disappear. Lila is overdoing it, ‘as usual’—which is to say her disappearance is itself normal or normative to some extent. To be expected. Hardly new. It has been done before, a thousand times even, and not just by Lila. History is full of vanishers, people who wanted to leave. Think of Christ vanishing from God’s side, or Ciara Horan, or Rimbaud. And in the future, perhaps history will never remember the future extinct at all—as now. But once again, Elena’s decision to write based on Lila’s disappearance is equally a forgetting and a misreading, a quietly magnetized attachment to something like Lila’s explosive determination for her own disappearance to be held, seen, known, dissolved, remarked upon, ignored.
Infinitely white, an infinitely white twist of space, a totally compacted internal music, ‘Lila’ is caught in this vortex of relative and endless entropies, this novelistic strange attractor as sheer sounding, with no real way to cut through to a decision since the only decision available is inside the thus-come-gone-ness she wants more-than-impossibly to swerve from, to decimate into pieces, to erase. It’s as if we say, perhaps even to Lila herself: ‘If you could ever be alone it would be like every time I say everybody, sitting still—but you do sound different, you do act apart.’ It remains miraculous, and deadly.
NOTHING
Part of Lila’s infinitely inner sound is this more dynamic thing, infinitely black, having to do with wanting to reduce the other to nothing:
It’s only and always the two of us who are involved: she who wants me to give what her nature and circumstances keep her from giving, I who can’t give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself.
Here we see, or hear, the other side: Lila’s anger, later in life, and before, and her will to reduce her best friend to ‘nothing’—because she herself is that. ‘Those who leave and those who stay’: here is a phrase that thus-come-goneness knows how to read and be read by. In certain states of mind that may be chosen, we begin to doubt what these words mean—to ‘leave’, to ‘stay’ . . . are they not equal and even? Does ‘nothing’ perturb them? Impossible as it is to simply take Elena’s side, we can see that which she competes with, that which she has to protect herself against, in writing: the reduction to ‘nothing’ that Lila threatens. This word ‘nothing’—one word alone, ‘nothing’—stands in for the history of unreading as nihilism, the refusal to see and read the unity of what comes and goes, those who leave and those who stay.5
It is with this ‘nothing’ that Lila betrays herself and it is in this ‘nothing’ that we can locate the persecution of Elena. The persecution by ‘nothing’ of Elena takes place by way of Lila’s brevity. It is also this brevity that involves becoming-active, that ‘liberates’, that creates a perfected ‘intelligence’:
As usual, half a sentence of Lila’s was enough, and my brain recognized her aura, became active, liberated my intelligence.
Lila’s ‘nothing’ is itself this brevity (her refusal of writing, broadly speaking)—threatening and liberating. It is Lila’s brevity, allied with her supposed superiority, that drives Elena’s desire to write—for the sake of revenge and of competition, and of course to capture Lila out of a lifetime of love, to snatch her back from the ‘nothing’, to spite her own spite into abeyance and soothing.
LOGIC OF THE MYTH OF ABSENCE
Isn’t the absence implied by disappearance (‘nothing’) a myth? No doubt, from a certain angle, Lila’s will to vanish may be experienced as a tropological and phantasmatic violence directed at herself and the other (when it comes to the frantumaglia of disappearance as mythic projection, how can we say what or who comes first?). With Lila’s will-to-vanish, there is a side to it that is ‘usual’, historically trackable and known. However much the determination may be to become a kind of absence singularity (‘she meant something different’), this very ambition brings with it a degree of automaticity, a ‘brilliance’ that enjoys while eviscerating itself even more so by being machinelike (‘the computer’).
But as ‘usual’, we can add, Lila’s will to vanish will have been complete, singular, impeccable, miraculous. Only Elena has been imparted the secret without reason of this willed absenting, and yet still the novel’s highly formalized and formalizing ‘Prologue’ (called ‘Eliminating All The Traces’) contains the suspicion that even being party to this uniquely sealed secret means being left, precisely, with a perhaps more literal ‘nothing’.
Is it possible that in all those years, she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn’t want to keep anything of her? It is.
Such is what is ‘possible’—that the will to eliminate all traces is (literally) nothing—that is, that this nothing is nothing mysterious, certainly, that it is will itself (or pure drivenness itself), that it is banal. We may imagine ourselves a ‘Lila’ who might dispense with the need to keep on reading even the meanings of this ‘nothing’ as they appear in a soul and a lifetime, choosing to stay put in the ‘Prologue’, noticing that it already contains more than the rest of the novel. In other words, the problem of the ‘Prologue’ to the Neapolitan Novels is the problem of the whole of the Neapolitan Novels, which is not so much a proposition containing a value judgement about their quality as an acknowledgement of the immense and machinelike power of formalizing language, as is also heard in Spring 1 as a kind of recapitulating emptying of sadness itself.
Faced with the realization that Lila enforces a certain ‘nothing’—precisely because of her fear of being (a) nothing in the dissolution of all boundaries that will haunt her and us as her to the end (‘ah, what is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing’)—Elena nonetheless ignores her own realization, whose actual cognition would get in the way of the narratological drift of the novel’s own existence as generic choice.6 Whereas Elena (Ferrante) can no doubt read the tragedy of Elena’s (‘Lenù’ Greco’s) own staged ignorance of what this ‘nothing means’, what Ferrante cannot read is Reading Itself, that is, the almost exact resemblance between Greco and Ferrante: reading as such (‘nothing’ computerized three times) is not to be read (even by a machine).
On the other hand, we can also say that what Elena attends to is the ‘something else’ connoted by Lila’s ‘nothing, nothing, nothing’. Lila ‘meant something different’: this statement, read as radically as possible, has to mean that Lila’s will is an evolutionary harbinger and script, an atavistic rageful meta-nihilism that could easily dispense with the word ‘nothing’ or even rest with and within the echoes of the word ‘nothing’ alone. What Lila wants is just this: ‘nothing’. Elena’s response, rather than just being an effect of narrative entropy and the suicidal epistemology of tropes, would be a listening, an attending, a technical love beyond words. It is indeed a matter of Lila throwing Elena the hint, the clue, of passing on what cannot be metabolized, as if their mutual friendship—our brilliancy of lifetimes—were brilliant precisely as a function of a silent transmissibility over decades of ‘nothing’. Lila’s mind, we can say, was met by texts that held her in space she could find nowhere else to contain, even though it is just this that her ‘nothing’ can be said to not stand for. Whether Lila reads Elena’s writing or whether she reads anything at all, this is the function of reading itself for Lila, for anyone—or rather, what it means for the reading space itself to be read and scanned. Reading—viewed from the outside—really is ‘nothing’.
As if automatically, we can also read back over the space of the ‘Prologue’ and locate there once again the exposure of Elena’s mistake, namely the moment where she simply passes over the possibility that Lila’s ‘nothing’ really is just that: a banal no thing. In other words, we can read the bare materiality of the text itself (nothing, nothing, nothing), and this reading of the text’s own principle of ‘reading’ would be a reading of what only exists in this kind of sublexicial, formless, fully dissolved meltdown of language: language as extinction.
NOTHING UNBOUND
Nothing, then, unbounded. What ‘Lila’ comes to ‘mean’ is ‘nothing’ unbound: the unbounded textualization of the extinct mark. ‘Nothing’ alone—as Elena trusts Lila to come to know (such is the friendship of musically vying lifetimes at full stretch)—feels like it has something ‘artistic’ about it that can’t be spoken of. Perhaps it feels like discovering a new art that only in the midst of extinction’s nothing would have no object. The ‘real content’ of nothing therefore just is the expansion of the trace out of all proportion—nothing unusual or usual about this. ‘Nothing’ as the absolutely extinct mark is the only thing that counts ‘for us’, from this highly technical point of view, precisely because this seemingly tiny sign (seven units of letteration) carries with it a resistance and an unthinkable, infinitesimal, almost infinite vulnerability. In this way, ‘Lila’ is not going too far at all. We could even say ‘Lila’ is just right. ‘Lila’ is perfect(ed) as she is. She is right about the future. She is the only one who will have been right about the future.
Why? Lila is inflammatory for Elena (an object of infinite longing and secrecy, enough to make her write for a lifetime) because ‘Lila’ marks the transition to where, in effect, nobody else can go: to a materiality so precise it burns all traditional uses of the word (at this point we can let go of the word ‘nothing’ too as itself banal). Lila is not the one who does not write (as Socrates was described in opposition to Plato); rather, she is the one who does not live. If she evokes signs in language, they are the signs of Reine Sprache (pure language) and its virtual meltdown of linguistic forms to micrological atoms. If she marries, it is to be alone with the secret and its impossibilities—to ‘write’ and ‘live’ in cancelled ‘nothing’. As in Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein, marriage becomes a container for a space she could find nowhere else to contain. To be married is to be left alone to think of ‘nothing’. To be married, ultimately speaking, is to leave. ‘Nothing’ is the word not given for an end of a world. For this ‘ravishment’.
Lila is hard to take7 because she puts us in touch with longer time spans over which the imposition of human metrics makes no real sense. Her fear of dissolution thereby finds an exact analogue: the nonanthropic trace. It is this nonanthropic trace that now finds itself expanding out of all proportion outside of all human experience, by definition, and yet also, right on and at the heart of the felt human algorithm—nothing, nothing, nothing. Perhaps, then, we can associate ‘Lila’ with mud, with stone, with water, with fire, with a grain of sand, with the first second of a new star. We ourselves can follow ‘Lila’ by veering into the precession of face and name, by allowing ourselves to be drawn across the screen and onto her side, the side of material inscription. If such a nonanthropic trace is true only to itself, it does not imply any empiric erasure (including totalitarian burning of archives) nor mental breakdown (the romanticism of complete loosening of boundaries); it moves instead into the secrecy of absolute deletion—and this can only be affirmed from another, at the other side, by Elena for example, to be named ‘brilliance’ at a deeper level, at other intervals, at which point the expansion can only continue, through Lila, through Elena, into something else.
We can say in effect that Lila-Elena are silently creating a new transitional object out of the art of extinction also called affective vulnerability. Becoming-Lila, becoming-Elena: both movements and positions are available to us, so long as we remain here long enough. Lila—who must vanish from Elena too if she really is to do what only Elena trusts she will have known how to do—becomes the name of how to stay alive and absolutely vanish, how to shadow the extinction drive and not die by it, how to witness the cogito ergo extinct as a sunrise. But what this means in the end is that Lila and Elena really do form a single node. We write, we exinct. We write, therefore we extinct. And this also means: since we extinct as we are, we will not write, we will not have written. We are the ones who will not have/never have written. And in that case, why does My Brilliant Friend exist? Is brilliant friendship—as opposed to any one friend—the asking of this question out beyond itself, to, precisely, anyone?8
LOGIC OF PHANTASY OF VANISHING AS LOGIC OF MYTH
‘I loved Lila’, Elena notes. ‘I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last.’
If there is a logic of disappearance as myth, it comes down to everything we have said even as a kind of star friendship: how the power of absence is mostly phantasmatic and yet still persists.9 This is its erotic charge—at distance(s). Across lifetime(s). For example, when a writer like Ferrante retires into the relative anonymity of not being her name, it is as if we are obliged to speak of her in ‘hushed tones’ (mystery, exile, and so on), and yet for the absent one the absence from others is not experienced as absence from others; if anything the absent one feels less absent than ever because they have nobody in no writing, as it were, to feel absent from. Such an absence of emptied mystery—this softness—is what ‘Lila’ really evokes.
Is this comparable to our death? With the phenomenon of death we often don’t experience our own death save through the deaths of others, and so, in the same way, the absent one feels absent only in our own experience of them (their experience of me imaging them gone in them called ‘perfect friendship’ in Aristotle), whether I am the absent one or not. In effect, this leads us to a more radical proposition, as if in Lila’s name: absence is not. Absence is not because first of all it exists only in me thinking of it, so on this side too the absent one or the absence of writing doesn’t exist. Following suit, there is no absence from writing either. What we end up with is the idea that since absence doesn’t exist at all and the absent one doesn’t exist at all, neither does the phantasy of the absent one nor the anguish of the absent one. In that case there should be no pathos at all attachable to any decision to write, or not, to be absent, or not. And what this really means is that we don’t have to write and that we don’t have to not write. We don’t have to leave, and we don’t have to stay either.
She wants to see through even the more than impossible and this is her ‘erotic’ grip on distances.
Every thus-come-gone-one is mistaken in the place of the other. Our brilliant friend is, in this way, neither Lila nor Elena. She, the brilliant friend, exists only between them (our friend)—only as the flooding of mutual code incompatibilities.
And yet what we want to believe makes Lila different is that for her disappearance is not death—she wants to know how to have completely gone from the world without the effort of suicide. Namely, she wishes, perhaps, to see herself gone. To see only herself gone. This is why ‘Lila’ is to be imagined before a certain mirror, reading.
The sexuated object here is the shared phantasm (pass me the hologram of your vanishing, allow me to be impregnated by the far end of an image tool), held with a kind of ancient delicacy in still violent secrecy, of seeing oneself extinct. This is enough to make oneself and the other hard (stone) or even harder than hard (silicon).
Nothing also means for example the drivenness of the drive itself. The infinitely secret erotic tryst of an evacuated and coded cry.
‘A tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it’s like that. And so if she didn’t stay alert, if she didn’t pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.’
‘Ah, I understood why Enzo had left. Living with her had become too harrowing.’
Eventually, something like a conscious uncoupling threatens between the two poles of Ferrante’s Quartet. If the banality of nothing surges through, we begin to see how: ‘From childhood I had given her too much importance, and now I felt as if unburdened. Finally it was clear that what I was wasn’t her, and vice versa. Her authority was no longer necessary to me, I had my own. I felt strong, no longer a victim of my origins but capable of dominating them, of giving them a shape, of taking revenge on them for myself, for Lila, for whomever.’ Is the real driver of these novels the intricate coding and emptying of mutual betrayal?
Ferrante herself clearly recognizes this in her interviews: ‘To the writer, no person is ever definitively relegated to silence, even if we long ago broke off relations with that person—out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can’t even think without the voices of others, much less write. And I’m not talking only about relatives, female friends, enemies. I’m talking about others, men and women who today exist only in images: in television or newspaper images, sometimes heartrending, sometimes offensive in their opulence. And I’m talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I’m talking about all those others who were once in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection—I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia—to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it.’
didnt read it