After the Ghetto - E3

I had started sleeping again.

Dreamless nights: I was sleeping much better now. At night I would shove the coffee table against the door frame and put the two huge armchairs face to face. In the past seven years, with Fred and I sharing the tiny caravan, I had to sleep on my single chair, twisted between the worn out arms, with a spring under my arsehole pushing up to get in. With Fred gone, for the first time, I could stretch again. That was almost as good as a proper bed. When I got up the next morning I felt like jumping all over the place. Waking up rested: what a luxury.

A few days after my brother's death I was woken up by someone shaking my shoulder vigorously. I opened my eyes. Bent over me against the daylight, my uncle was filling the whole visual field, his face drowned in its own shade, grey dawn light weakly glowing through his hair. He was dripping wet. He looked like a purposeful Poseidon, his head crowned in shining silver.

Rain was battering the caravan roof.

"I guess you disposed of the body didn't you? I thought I told you to bring it to my place." His voice was low and growling, like something huge moving inside a deep cave.
"You thought well" I said. "You did tell me."
"And? Is there a reason why you didn't follow my instructions?"
I was starving.
"Listen Val, is there a reason why you are here? I need to eat right now and to be frank, I care little for your wounded pride."
I am not afraid of Val. His looks are godly but his eighty-year-old body is human. He straightened up.
"I came to tell you that I know where the phone call was coming from. I also wanted to check on Fred's body. The phone is more recent than I first thought and if I am right, there should be some visible clues on him. Where did you bring him? Not to that horrible place in New Cross?"
"So you know whom he was talking to?"
"No. I said I knew where the call was coming from. Not who was making it."
"I don't get it."
"The phone call that killed you brother was coming from the Ghetto."
"This is ridiculous."
This angered him some more.
"I am a telecommunications specialist. I don't see how you can dispute my conclusions. The origin of the call your brother picked up is Canary Wharf's Ghetto - you can triangulate the signal if you want, I personally have all the evidence I need-. The phone call killed your brother, I also know that, and I know how it did it. It would have killed you exactly the same had you picked it up, even though you don't have any French, unlike the rest of your family."
This is another one of his favorite topics. We come from Wallonia. We should all speak French. It is a question of duty, of honor. I have lived in London my whole life. I care little for honor or duty and, with Fred dead, I do not care for family any more.
"Why are you interested all of a sudden? You've never liked him, you've never been able to exchange two words with him. You kept treating him as if he was some sort of spoiled child. Why try to do something for him now? What's in it for you?"
"You will have to make an effort. You will have to talk to me nicer than that. You will have to listen more carefully to what I am telling you. You don't seem to understand: I am telling you that your brother is dead and that the Ghetto did it. The Ghetto!"
"You always blame the Ghetto for everything."
"They are to blame. In this case I have hard evidence. That phone call..."
"You would blame them anyway, wouldn't you. I don't see why you hate them so much."
"They made their choice. They abandoned us. They abandoned the human race."
"They had an opportunity and they took it. Come on, they are our children!"
"They are not mine. My child is here with me"
"Oh yes, and he's doing so well isn't he? He's a drug addict."
"Well, at least he is trying to cope with his condition. No one said it was easy to be a human being."
"But what's the point? What is the point, Val, of staying a human being when you have another solution? What is the point of going through all this, this ordeal? See where that led my brother? He was so depressed he couldn't even eat properly. If he hadn't died he would have ended up killing himself."
"How dare you make fun of this, how dare you! THIS IS WHAT WE ARE" - Val started shouting - "WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS! THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO STAY! HAVE YOU GOT NO PRIDE,  YOU AND YOUR BROTHER? HAVE YOU GOT NO SELF-RESPECT? YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING! DON'T YOU WANT TO FIGHT FOR THAT?"
"I would have done what our children did, had I had the opportunity, and Fred too. But you know like I do that we were too old."

I hate it when days start like this. Straight from bed, an argument. For God's sake, I was famished. I didn't even know if I was really angry or if it was caffeine withdrawal. I was trying to get up to push him outside, but something moved behind Val. When I saw what it was my legs refused to lift me.

At the caravan door, his old depressed body standing well upright, his hair that shiny blond they had lost to age these past twenty years, his jaws and fists clenched, his eyes -both of them!- nailed to a spot two feet above my head, my brother was breathing deeply, heavily. I could not tell whether he was struggling for air or trying to control an inner fury. Rain water was pooling around his feet. He was soaked, but alive! My uncle turned around.
"I thought he... I thought you were... he was... I saw him! You told me! You told me he was dead!" he thundered at me, out of himself with indignation.
"He was dead! You were dead! I brought you to Depford! I threw you on these two hunks! I poured perfume on you! Our flask of Fahrenheit!"
But my brother wouldn't answer.
"Well, he isn't dead now" Val said. "If he isn't now then he wasn't before. Death is not something people recover from, you know."
There was nothing I could say to that, except open my arms to mark my puzzlement. Twenty years of boredom. Twenty years of utter dullness since the rise of the Ghetto. After all this time I had no other desire than to die peacefully in the midst of my beloved books. Then the phone call. And now this: zombies. Good, healthy looking zombies.

Val sat down at my sides. Out of his backpack he picked up our phone and put it on a pile of books.

"Well, that just confirms what I thought" he said.

After the Ghetto - E2

Decrepit families. Communities of crumblies. We take care of each other way beyond the use-by date. The Ghetto might be an unnatural creation, but what about us, its leftovers? At seventy-five I was the youngest surviving member of my family after Clem. I was supposed to take care of my incapacitated brother and orders from my authoritarian uncle.

“Bring his body to my house tomorrow” Val had said before leaving. “We will do an autopsy, just in case. I take the phone with me”.

I had nodded. It is the best way to get rid off his kind. Now I was alone with the stinking corpse of my dead brother and sadness fell on me.

It felt like ageing. Suddenly everything was heavy.

It is irrational, this sadness. After decades of scientific dictatorship, after Enlightenment, industrialisation, positivism, Kantism, Einsteinism, rationalism, Darwinism, Dawkinism, the great pantheon of isms, has ripped us all off all feeling, all meaning, has left us agog and panting, poor animal carcasses denied of desires and hunger, still quivering with the will to live but told that this will is irrelevant, that we are no more than old-fashioned mechanisms, too outdated to take the latest upgrades and dumped to rust. Rejected, famished, fighting to go through the day, neither hopeful nor despaired, simply hope-less, unable to breed, our community losing its bounds, talking to each other less and less, looking stupidly inside ourselves until hunger makes itself heard through our drug-induced stupors and throws us on the dump in search of anything carbonated to absorb, what reasons do we have left to mourn? My brother, my beloved brother, had it all: he could get all the love and sex he wanted while I was feeding him, washing him, watching him. To me he was a burden. He never asked me for anything, mind you. I just provided whatever help I thought I should. I have no doubt that everywhere on the dump other humans in the same situation react the same way. His death should have come as a relief - and there was relief in me. But also sadness: deep, shocking, transcendental sadness. I cried. I mourned, for two hours. I haven't felt that way since my sweet Mara left me, twenty years ago, to join the kids in the Ghetto.

This mourning, this is all that remains of my human soul.

I am lucky. Transcendence is a gift. Two hours is more than I could have hoped for. When I felt the wound close, my tears dry up, my stomach gurgle, I stood up from my armchair. I grabbed my brother's body by the feet, I dragged him outside. By the time I managed to pull him on my Tesco trolley I was out of breath and had to rest for a while. Inside the caravan I picked up an old flask of Farenheit perfume. Then I braced myself for the journey.

It was, I remember, the sweetest of evenings -or was it some resonance of my recent mourning, a softness of the heart, a leakage of the soul, resulting from the shock of losing a dear one, from the realization that there was still, on this decomposing world, something I cared for? The sun had disappeared behind the Shard, leaving an amber smear in the dark clouds. In the north, blinking with the lights of a million windows, the pure outline of Canary Wharf Ghetto was rising above the misshapen silhouettes of the dumps, the devastated grounds from which its mathematical perfection had surged. There, where humanity had suddenly become something greater than itself, where almost all the women had fled, where Beauty and Future were said to roam the streets.
"Ah, you would have been happy over there", I told my brother. "You wouldn't have left yourself die like you did."
How wrong I was about the Ghetto, my brother's death, everything!

Pushing my brother's body, absorbing the wonderful spectacle of the Ghetto at night, I made my way through the narrow alleys of Blackheath dump.

I took the long slow climb towards Greenwich Park. I was surrounded by the ghosts of South-East London. All around, under the heaps of rubble and paper, the green wet meadow of Blackheath Commons used to grow. Here the spike of All Saints Church used to pierce the dark clouds in winter and over there, in the East, the grotesque facade of the Clarendon used to blast its thousands lights, smearing the pale fog like fresh paint brushed, adorning the crisp clear summer nights with their tawdry glitter. Only the walls are left, cleanly cut three meters from the ground. The Clarendon's surroundings swarm with depressed old people attracted by the sheltering ghost of luxury. In rusty trailers, makeshift sheds, igloo-shaped brick structures they live the life of poverty we all know -but they still eat in silver and sleep in silk, as if these meaningless rags could keep them afloat while the world is sinking.

The path reached a high point, north of which Greenwich Park appeared: the ruins of the Observatory, the faded Meridian, the defunct Origin of the World. Behind it, across the river, Canary Wharf shone, eclipsing the resplendent half moon.

I took a westward turn and started down. Wider, smoother, the path there was dug with deep dried ruts. As we were going, Dead Fred in his Tesco Trolley was shaking. For a while he looked more drunk than dead.

What was it, I wondered, that he was listening to so intensely on the phone?

This must have been some story, and of the highest form. My brother would not have fallen for less. He was a delicate soul, the kind that feeds on beauty rather than truth. This is what the story must have been: beautiful, full of heroism and love, death, pain, elation and joy. A story where the best people suffer and die for the good reasons. A story full of awe and fear, a tragedy, a story of life as it should be, but also of life as it can be, a story from before the Ghetto, before the dumps, from before that before, before electricity and its parasites, a simple story of men and women, naked in body and mind, a story from before stories themselves.

No, my brother would not have fallen for less. Both of us used to read a lot. Our caravan was full to the brim with our five thousands accumulated books (and a mess of old computers, TV screens, speakers, clothes and frames). There was just enough space for our two enormous armchairs. We had found them on Blackheath dump, near where the Princess of Wales used to be. They were covered in worn-out floral fabric. They were too big for the caravan. We had struggled to shove them in. They had become our whole living space: we ate on them, slept on them, died on them.

With him gone, what was I to do with the vacant armchair? What could I possibly find which would fill such a huge space?

I soon reached Depford. I turned into Pagnell Street where the stench of rotting bodies hit me.

It is sudden like that. One second you are surrounded by the familiar scent of metal, oil, acid, rotting food, dirty waters, unwashed humans. The next, passed the enormous red rusted carcasses of the tractors cemetery, it chokes you as if you were burying your head in the heap of compost flesh. It is a physical contact, that smell: it is a giant, limp, flabby, stinking hand which, as you turn the corner of Pagnell Street, wraps itself around your face.

Although I had passed this street many times, I had never taken a close look at the body dump. The former children playground was all fenced. Tens of braziers were providing a hellish light, full of smoke and jumping shadows. The concrete ground around the fence had been kept clear of rubbish. Two inscriptions spelled in large capital letters could still be seen, stretching over twenty yards:

           I see people sitting, shadows dancing and birds flying

the first one read.

           I touch soft petals and icy puddles, rough hard bark and 
           smooth, green leaves

the other said. Dated from 2012 they were both signed by pupils from Childeric Primary School -pupils today lost to the Ghetto-. I remember wondering what they were looking like over there, trees, leaves, birds, shadows.

Beyond the fence, where swings and scaffolding for kids once stood, is now the mass grave where all the dumps come to drop their dead, from New Cross to Lewisham, from Greenwich to Brockley. Narrow wooden bridges span over the pit like strips of pastry over a giant meat pie.

When I arrived quite a few people where queuing - old people carrying, on a great variety of trolleys, sledges and stretchers, older bodies stripped of their clothes. Among the crowd of old men I was granted this rare and delicious sight: two women, draped in black, their wrinkled faces bathed in tears. They hugged and comforted each other. The men, rushing their business of dumping whomever they had brought, were swarming around them.

I almost ran to the nearest bridge, pushing whoever was in my way. All around me arguments burst out: two men looking like brothers dropped the body they were bringing. A group of five people in their sixties were shouting in each other's face. The tallest pushed the smallest, who bent his knee in the other's groin. In front of me, blocking my way, a fat black guy was unloading three corpses, tipping them over the fence wherever they would fall.
"You're supposed to drop them from one of these bridges" I said.
"Fuck you. You're not happy, go somewhere else".
"A good burial you're giving them. I'm sure they would appreciate".
"Listen" he said, hastily spraying the dead with cheap perfume, "Mind your business, will you? I don't even know these blokes, I'm just doing a job here. I'm the undertaker for Peckham High Street's dump. So move away, there's a woman over there who's been waiting for me her whole life."
"And what makes you think you have a chance? With all the competition?"
"Ah, yes, but how many of them have a job, you reckon, hmm? You have a job yourself?"
He looked at my sheepish face.
"That's what I thought. Out of my way, loser."

It has become so difficult to be a woman on the dumps. For the few who decided to stay, public appearances have become a hassle. Most of them are married and stay indoors like my aunt Nassir, Val's wife. Actually I have not met one single woman in the twenty five years I have spent on the dump. For a widow, staying alone is just too dangerous, even amid a population of pensioners. There is no space for love and no time for sorrow.

I gave up. "I would rather give you a heartfelt funeral than humiliate myself with that horde of dogs" I told my brother. I pushed the trolley onto the bridge. The stink made me retch.

I spotted four fresh naked corpses, almost intact, good looking men in their forties. I jostled Fred on my shoulders and tossed him on top.

I had left him his clothes. He landed with a muffled thud in an awkward position, his face pressed against a hairy armpit, his right arm hugging a chest. "There you go", I said. "They look like the youngest bodies around. I hope you will enjoy them for a little while". I poured the perfume on him. I scratched a match and threw it. Of course the heap is too wet, the weather too cold, the dump too crowded with rats and worms for a body to burn.

Even our cremations are symbolic. Even our symbols show their bare bones.

Behind me the crowd was fighting  for the favours of two sterile females.

This must be the end of a civilization.

After the Ghetto - E1

One day the phone rang at home. I stared at the object for a good ten or twelve rings. In his armchair my depressed elder brother didn't even move. That infuriated me. At last I picked up awkwardly – it had been so long! – and listened to a young, male, tenor voice spitting out words in what I guessed was French.

The tone was very dramatic, with many variations of pace and pitch. It reminded me of old radio dramas; but my leftover French was too poor for me to make sense of it. I hung up.

Across the crowded coffee table Fred looked at me with tired eyes. I told him what I had heard. I felt a bit offended and scared.

"What I can't figure out is how that goddam' phone got to ring in the first place. I mean, look at it: granted, this is a piece of military equipment with its own batteries. But there hasn't been a single network operating in the area since Vodaphone went bust in 2032!"

"Jorge has a phone" Fred replied, his voice plummeting every 3 or 4 words.

"Who has what?"

"Jorge. The neighbour... From there, you know... The Spanish trailer?  With the fried fish?"

"What phone, what phone, how can he have a phone if there's no network?"

"Some landlines are still working... He's got a landline."

"Has he? Does he? What does that have to do with my phone?"

I said "mine" instead of "ours". I couldn't help it. It hurt my brother, this denial of our community of existence. Sometimes, when his depression was running on my nerves, I was doing it on purpose.

He shrugged. "How would I know?"

He turned in his armchair and went back to sleep.

The phone rang again that night, its transparent plastic casing lightening with a faint amber pulse. This time my brother picked up. Although I could not understand what was being said I could hear enough to identify the high pitched male voice.

"Same guy again!" I shouted. "Same voice, same..."

My brother waived me silent.

I knew he could speak French. Recently he had been dating a series of youngish men from various French speaking countries. What I didn't know was how good his French was. His dates were unlikely to involve any kind of conversation. This is another consequence of the abject poverty to which we have been reduced: social rituals have shrunk to their bare essentials. Gone are the long hours spent in nurturing in our sex partner-to-be the illusion that our meeting might be driven by some other, higher, fatal order. Seduction is unaffordable nowadays. Dates are for sex. To get it, you would need but a few words: "Où ? Chez toi. Tourne. Comme ça. Oui. Demain ? Non.”

My brother had been holding that phone for over five minutes without uttering a single word. He seemed unwilling to do anything else. Thus I walked outside in search of something to drink and someone to drink it with. I left him fall into his fatal addiction.

For the next six hours, well after I had come back and fallen asleep in my armchair, he would not let go off that phone. Only when the batteries ran out he gave some sign of life: he disappeared for almost two days. He came back with twenty kilos of battery supply and his face, of which he had always taken so much care, a piece of horror. His left eye was missing.
The next sixty days he hardly moved from his chair. I had to clean around him - I even had to clean him twice, so rancid was his smell. He, in the meantime, gave no heed to anything but the French voice on the phone. Once or twice I saw him react: his face went paler, his hand shook, he shed a few tears.

The last two weeks of my brother's life I had to feed him as if he were a plant or an impotent pet. The infection from his missing eye spread throughout his body. I cleaned it as well as I could, using, instead of the dubious water from the outside barrel, the half glass of vodka I would normally share with him at night. In spite of my efforts his gaping eye socket soon turned brown then purplish. The last three days the stench was unbearable even from outside the caravan. But at no point did my brother show that he was feeling poorly: no complain, no fever, no shaking, no vomiting, nothing. On his last night we were both inside. I had tied an old cloth soaked in chemicals against my mouth to fend off the smell. Fred was listening to his damned phone, the handset in his right hand, the right elbow resting on the arm of his seat. I was reading Gulliver's Travels when, at the precise moment when [....................................], my brother's head slipped from the rest of his hand. His right arm opened at full stretch, his cheek came to lie on his shoulder, his hand opened and dropped the phone. He was dead.

His French had obviously been a lot better than I thought.

As I was leaning over him, someone behind me swore in French.

"What the hell is that smell, God! How you guys can live in a place like this I'll never understand. It stinks worse than inside a monkey's arse."

I turned around. My uncle Val was standing in the doorframe, his tall, square silhouette blocking the night glow, the light of our candle throwing evil shadows on his awesome face.

"I think Fred's dead, Val."

"Dead? How did that happen? When?"

"Just now. I don't know how, he was listening to this goddamn phone..."

"Don't put the name of the Lord to your filthy use. People don't die from listening to a phone. Hang on: a phone? What fucking phone?"

"That phone". I told him about the phone calls, the French voice, the battery hunt, the missing eye, the suspected infection, death. I told him all.

"But, I don't know, at the same time I find it hard to believe that the infection did it. He never looked sick."

"Never looked sick? What about the smell!"

"Yes but... You know what I mean. He never complained."

"Cats don't complain when they're sick. One day they just drop dead."

"Ha, that's the thing. You see Val, Fred wasn't a cat. He was gay and depressed, two states you might never understand. But he was still human."

"Peo-ple-don't-die-from-a-phone-call!" he said again. Val, I recalled, used to work in the phone industry in Belgium.

At that moment the phone rang. We looked at each other. I started towards the handset.

"Don't" Val said. He put his huge hand on my arm. He was starring at the glowing device with what looked like ferocious hunger.

We let the phone ring twenty seven times. When it fell silent, Val took it and examined it thoroughly.

"Army material" he said. "Comes with its own batteries indeed. But who the fuck..."

He put the phone back on Fred's knees. "Anyway. I came here to talk about Clem. He's using again. He's your cousin. You have to do something."

I sighed. Every time this was happening, Val and I had the same conversation.

"I'm sorry for your son" I said. "I wish there were something I could do but you're asking a not-so-former drug addict to lecture him against the overuse of weed and mushrooms. The most likely outcome is that I'll start using again and I'll buy from him. I could do with some weed actually. My hip's killing me."

"If I catch you buying from him, I can guarantee you won't feel your hip any more. He needs help, not  custom. I have enough money for him."

I sighed again, shook my head. "Your son is fifty now Val. And who the fuck needs money anyway.”

It had been ten years. Val was eighty years old. But he still didn’t get it. How hard was it? The disappearance of money was almost a benediction in regards to all the other ones. No more girls. No more children, no jobs, no economy, no energy. What use could money possibly be in such a world?

But for those who had spent their lives cuddling their fortune in the prospect of a comfortable agony, the news was just too big to take. Val was one of them: he had made a lot of money and still had it. He wouldn't admit of its uselessness.

"As for Clem" I added "he's like Fred. What he needs is purpose. Get him a job and a girlfriend and things will start looking different for him. He won't need his props."

Val shuddered in exasperation.

"A job. A girl. Sometimes I wonder if your brother is not the lucky guy."

"My brother’s dead, you moron. What about you? You’re married, for God's sake. And your wife stayed with you!"

"She's dying now though."

I pondered over that.

"I guess she's lucky too" I said.

The Book Sill - L'Anarchiste

L'Anarchiste is an unusual novel in more ways than one. Its structure is articulated in two very distinctive parts : the first part, written or translated in a strangely awkward French, exposes the crisis of a young Cambodian narrator suddenly losing control of violent inner fantasies whilst the second covers in a much plainer language the life of a middle-aged narrator living the poor life of a forgotten refugee in Paris.

Here are a few randomly picked up examples from the early chapters:

p.32 : "L'idée de la mort est dévorante. Impliquée dans l'écoulement du temps, elle nous harcèle sans répit ; mais l'intensité de l'émotion que nous procure l'amour arrive à égaler et à compenser celle de l'idée de la mort". "Impliquée" here is the wrong word, too vague. "arrive à égaler" is awkward, "parvient à égaler" would have been better. "celle de l'idée de la mort" is very awkward too, proper French would avoid at all cost the repeated prepositional structure "de l'idée de la mort".

p.32 :"le type pleure à chaudes larmes, se lamentant à corps perdu". "type" and "chaudes larmes" belong to two different levels of language : "type" is informal, "chaudes larmes" is quite literary. "se lamenter à corps perdu" is improper use of the expression "corps perdu".

p.34 : "C'est pour cela que je ne condamnerai jamais les gens qui s'aiment, même si c'est d'un amour non conventionnel".  There is nothing wrong per se with the sentence; it is simply too common language, with again the use of imprecise words like "gens". A better attempt would have been "Pour cette raison" (replacing the ugly "c'est...que" and the vague "cela") "je ne condamnerai jamais les êtres (far better than "gens") qui s'aiment, fût-ce ("même si c’est" is very common) d'un amour non conventionnel".

p34: "Nous sommes si impuissants devant cette fumée qui est la nôtre". The nasty hiatus "si impuissant" was easy to avoid by using "tellement impuissant" instead, which sounds better.

In spite of these flaws this opening part is a pure dionysiac enjoyment, a jump towards fire, an eruption. In this oneiric tale we attend the surge of the anarchist monster who is (hiding in) A-Chheèm the narrator: his attempt as strangling a prostitute, his fever, his sudden vomiting, the beautiful love scene with his cousin Sinuon and its dramatic conclusion in a psychiatric hospital. We are undoubtedly in a baroque geste, the carnival universe where dreams and reality melt into each other. In this respect A-Chheèm seems related to such heroes as Cendrars’s Moravagine, while to the modern reader he will evoque Louis Althusser’s tragic story or even Léos Carax’s surreal creation Merde (2008).

But while the first part belongs to the impulse, the impetus, the rush upwards, the second is the tale of a collapsing. Starting with the death of a woman, it continues with the narrator’s Don Juan-like exploits, climaxes on the conquest of his sister-in-law whom he calls Mary at the beginning, Mona at the end (1) and “the woman of his life” throughout, moves to the assassination of his best friend Savouth (2) by some Cambodian officials, then tells of the narrator’s revenge and the anti-climax of his escape to France. The chilling conclusion with its atrocious final scene seals the destiny of a weak and coward character whose untidy passions make him unfit for both the revolutionary Khmer society and the Parisian bourgeois culture. As he confesses himself, the only society where his disorderly inner self would have found a way out would have been the half dreamt, half remembered Cambodia from the French colonial period - the very same society he contributed to destroy.

This divide in the book is strikingly akin Cendrars's Dan Yack. Particularly fascinating is this double movement, first towards the sublime then towards the abyss, and how the anarchist monster who is (in) the narrator throws him in turns towards the former and the latter. Reflecting about Dan Yack, Cendrars talked about a movement "outwards then inwards", like an explosion followed by a recoil, both ending up in failure. This, it seems, is exactly what L'Anarchiste takes us through, up to the final pages where even the mutilation falls within a much cruder and grimer version of Dan Yack. Cendrars's main character is a Russian millionaire incapable of finding happiness with or without the riches which life has poured upon his head. L'Anarchiste's narrator is similarly trapped between an inescapable and an unattainable future. For this encaged self, any attempt at breaking through -be it fantasized or real- ends up in blood.

(1) Could this be in relation to Henry Miller’s Mona in Sexus?
(2) Savouth was Cambodia's Education Minister at the time and a close friend to the narrator

Attempt at a Form

With the fiction and the story telling so arbitrary, I find myself in the same position as many a writer in the post Nouveau Roman world : fiction does not make sense. It is meant to build sense - but the foundations of any fiction work are laid on air. From the basic commercial product to the high moral fable, only relativity and void surround any fictional production.

This issue is, unfortunately, unsolvable -lest we go back to the Marxist conception of cultural manifestations as by-products of ideology. But it is possible to work around it. The likes of Oulipo or Raymond Carver showed us the way : constraint, as a unmasked form of arbitrariness. 

My initial constraint will be minimal : my stories will contain no more than 3,000 words. I will build them as I would a novel, researching characters, places and plots, developing backgrounds, structuring the narration in scenes and subplots. This done, the writing will consist in fitting all this material in the pre-defined format.

This will favour the emergence of a visually extremely dense and striking style, concentrating all manners of formal tools and figures in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Should the 3,000 words format prove too diluted again, we will reduce it accordingly. The expected result is a prose resembling poetry as closely as possible, whilst retaining its primary purpose of story-telling.

Freud, Vienna and Judaism

Ce qui me rattachait au judaïsme n'était pas la foi - je dois l'avouer - ni même l'orgueil national car j'ai toujours été incroyant, j'ai été élevé sans religion, mais non sans le respect de ce qu'on appelle les exigences 'éthiques' de la civilisation (...). Parce que j'étais juif, je me suis trouvé libéré de bien des préjugés qui limitent chez les autres l'emploi de leur intelligence ; en tant que juif, j'étais prêt à passer dans l'opposition et à renoncer à m'entendre avec la 'majorité compacte'.

Sigmund Freud, 1926

The Book Sill - Ritournelle de la faim

Ritournelle de la faim by J.M.G. Le Clézio

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The splendid opening chapter is dominated by the figure of Uncle Soliman - and as a representation of the French Belle Epoque, is as close to perfection as I have ever read. Everything in this short portrait shows Le Clezio's visual mastery, from the description of the moment (the umbrellas opening like dark flowers, Paris "smoking under the warm rain") to the description of the period (Ravel's Bolero premiering, the Universal Exhibition and its East Asia theme, the colours of the not so far XIXth century so marvelously rendered in the description of the "Maison Mauve").

Unfortunately, Uncle Soliman quickly dies. With his death, we do not only turn the page on the most brilliant period of France and Europe, but also on the most brilliant moment in Le Clezio's novel. From now on, style seems to fault him. The recent French Nobel Prize shows that he knows his topic. However, for someone who on the year following the publication of this book was to receive the most prestigious award in literature, he also shows an inexplicable lack of rigour. He jumps from present to preterit to past perfect in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence. His other characters lack depth to the point of caricature (such are Chemin the coward or the ignominious Talon). His very main character, who we get to understand later may be his mother, grows from the age of twelve to within her twenties without much emotional building. The context itself is weakly rendered : we go through six years of war almost without noticing. The topic of the book itself, hunger, is entirely contained in the description of an old woman scraping rotten fruits and vegetable at a market in Nice around lunch time. It is as if, tackling a personal subject, Le Clezio had found himself at odds with it, not knowing whether to treat it with emotion or detachment, which part to give to the background, whether to engage in the internal conflicts of his character or stay neutral.

All this makes for a readable novel. But from an author at the pinnacle of his production cycle, I was really expecting better.



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The Book Sill - Dans les forêts de Sibérie

Dans les forêts de Sibérie by Sylvain Tesson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is the diary of a thirty-eight-year-old French writer who decides that, for a period of six months, he will stay in a cabin, three meters long by three meters wide, on the shore of lake Baikal. From Winter to Summer, from fear to joy to pain to peace, this short book is a patient and attentive celebration of nature and the instant.

"J'ai été libre, car sans l'autre la liberté ne connaît plus de limite", says Sylvain Tesson at the end of his book. "I have been free, for without the other, freedom knows no more boundary". Very rarely has a book had the power to slow me down and put me in a state of contemplation, "this word that cunning people give to laziness".

This is not a perfect book. But from now on it will travel with me.



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The Book Sill - Kampuchéa

Kampuchéa by Patrick Deville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



After three decades of covering civil wars and coups across the globe, Deville's voice is full of nostalgia, retained emotion and sadness. The mass murderers swarm in our world and Deville sees no sign of it changing:

"La planète défile sous la carlingue et j'essaie de surprendre les progrès de la raison dans l'Histoire et sous mon train d'atterrissage[...] Khieu Samphân, ancien chef d'état du Kampuchéa démocratique, bientôt octogénaire, [...] demande sa remise en liberté pour se consacrer au jardinage. L'ombre de mes ailes glisse sur l'Océan Pacifique. A Ciudad Juarez, dans le nord du Mexique, le chef de cartel Vincente Leyva se fait serrer pendant son jogging. A Lima, le procès de l'ancien président Fujimori suit son cours. L'ombre de mes ailes glisse sur l'Océan Atlantique. A Arusha, le procès des Rwandais suit son cours. A La Haye, le procès des généraux croates Gotovina et Markac suit son cours [...]
On pourrait cesser de lire les journaux."
(Kampuchéa, p.13)

The anger still shows now and then: "Ce cinglé de Daniel Ortéga", "Nous sommes une dizaine de naufragés assis sur des bancs, quelque part sur cette planète comme une grenade dégoupillée dans la main d'un dieu idiot et distrait". But most of it has drowned in resignation.


Through this tone seeps a deep compassion for a certain type of human beings : those who pursue a dream, which they reach or not and which, when reached, turns sour, bitter, nightmarish, their beautiful romantic vision ending up in death: it is Mohout dying of fever in the enchanted Angkor he discovered for Europe; it is Pavie who sacrifices his whole life to the Mekong and the people who live off it ; it is this young Chinese woman he meets by the Red River, who is leaving her village and farm to go to the big City in the hope of a better life. It is, strangely, the three friends from rue Saint-André-des-Arts who dreamt of a Cambodia as seen by Rousseau and who, carried away by their romantic vision, turned it into a bloodbath. Deville has harsh words for the Pol Pot regime. When he talks about the men, his tone becomes more intimate, full of melancholy:

"Cet homme maigrelet, qui estime avoir assumé la lourde tâche de faire torturer puis assassiner plus de douze mille de ses compatriotes, s'est éclairci la voix, a bu un peu d'eau, puis, au désarroi des responsables de l'interprétation simultanée vers le khmer et l'anglais [...] a récité la fin de La Mort du loup d'Alfred de Vigny :

Gémir, pleurer, prier est également lâche
Fais énergiquement ta longue et lourde tâche
Dans la voie où le sort a voulu t'appeler
Puis, après, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler."

(Kampuchéa, p.18)

These are the melancholic colours that Deville finds to paint the figures of the Khmer leaders. Lost between their childhood in French Asia and their young age in post World War II Paris where sexual revolution was simmering, they dreamt of a Cambodian revolution modeled on the French one -the dream of purity, of absolute, of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse.

He has much harsher words for those who used Asia as a playground for their own personal ambitions. This is for Garnier, who played at being a general throughout south-east Asia and sent thousands of people to death to stage his little wars. This is for Hun Sen, the current leader of Cambodia, put in place by the leaving Vietnamese in 1985 and still in place today. This is for Mayrena, founder and only ruler of the very short lived Royaume de Sedang ("Le Règne du Malin" is the title he chooses to tell the story of the man who became the inspiration for Malraux's Perken in La Voie Royale and Coppola's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now).

Deville spares the poor devils who killed thousands for a dream. He does not forgive those who tricked and manipulated for the sake of their own personal wealth.

This view of South East Asia, through the people who built it, the dreamers who explored it, the madmen who bled it, gives to what should have been a travel book the emotional resonance of a novel. Intentionally, Deville had the word put on the book cover : "roman", indicating that he was not so much interested in presenting historical and geographical facts as in narrating a destiny.

Third World Britain II

A Train's Weather

On August the fifteenth post lunch hour the air
Over the rail flutters, of a lover the skin
The steel track swells and twists like a monstrous snake
Comes alive, scales screeching, slowly stirs
The Extreme Summer Heat has jumped to thirty five
On this moving body you puff, too hot to ride
And your metallic wheels on its metallic spine
Come to a stall

It is October now and the track is so wet
Inexhaustible rains of unexpected fall
On the railway the leaves weave a papery shawl
Such feast of colours - yellows and browns and reds
From untiring skies, coal-coloured, water-clogged
Relentless raging rains drizzle down on the rail
Metal in water rusts ! Your wheels on it derail !
With such Extreme Weather your body cannot cope

January fifteenth - they say Winter Has Come
The Cold Tightens Its Grip on the metallic track
It is Minus Zero ! There is snow on the track
Your metallic lungs freeze and your engines succumb
This last breath you exhale you exhale every year
Christmas in December is no bigger surprise
Than to see all winter these tracks covered in ice
Would there be a pattern to such Extreme Weather ?

So many things have changed since you first saw the day
The seasons were better in eighteen twenty five
Now, twenty thirteen, Britain is in dismay
There is no money left on which you could survive.

Third World Britain I

The Potholes

I am riding my bike around Bell Green crossroads
The surface is porous and crumbles like a cheese
It is what it is not as well as what it is
The holes are so many, oh! English holy roads!

South of Mayow Park is a Disney set of chess
Kingsthorpe moves to Queensthorpe and Bishopsthorpe awaits
Exotic front gardens framed by brick walls and gates
Where potholes and tarmac draw a grey board of chess

Now my legs push north strongly to Ladywell
Her name's a shining bug, her name's a flying song
On my bike my back breaks and creaks riding along
Potholes digging deeper than an old water well

Britain! Glorious age! Scorn all that is foreign!
From your padded car seats, exotic front gardens!
What happened to your roads, your streets, and what happens
To your schools, hospitals, trains, tubes, to your children?

Great Britain you were once, Britain you fight to stay
On top of the (third) world

"Même pour prendre conscience de l'horreur, il faut être un privilégié."

Even to become aware of the horror, you need to belong to the privileged.

Patrick Deville, Kampuchéa, Points, Seuils, 2009, p.30

The Book Sill - Floating Worlds

Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Cecilia Holland is not a science-fiction writer. Any person familiar with the genre will notice her lack of grasp on some of the fan's favorite science-fiction features, mainly the scientific and the gadget sides. The novel use of paraphernalia is ridiculously poor and stamps it irremediably from the seventies: if we were to believe Holland, videophones and air buses would be the only technical innovations humanity could come up with in almost 2,000 years !

This aside, Floating World is a powerful evocation of the female condition - one that makes the best possible use of a utopic / dystopic Solar system. All planets from Venus to Uranus have been populated. In the most remote ones lives a mutated human population, organized in a male-based, extremely hierarchic, fascist society. This society happens to control the biggest source of energy of all the Solar system. This is not the only feature reminiscent of a Saudi Arabia-like civilization : in Uranus too polygamy is a men-only privilege, in Uranus too their wives have to go veiled in public.

Paula Mendoza is a small black woman who grew up on Earth. There, like on any other planet of the Solar system, humanity lives in bubbles. Pollution has rendered the atmosphere unlivable to human beings. Under the massive globes of glass covering London or what is left of New York, Earth's society evolved to a form of pacifist egalitarian anarchy : people are poor, social bounds are loose, passions are low, life has little prospect to offer other than one of chilled-out, low-key survival.

But Paula is ambitious. She wants wealth. And where to find it other than in Uranus ?

The shock between the small, black, anarchist, ambitious, incredibly resilient Earth woman and the big, sur-human, machist, fascist leaders of Uranus echoes throughout the 630 pages of the novel with a strength that never weakens. Ten pages from the end I found myself still entrapped into the action and unable to guess what the final situation would be. The only reason why I wouldn't give this book the 5 stars it deserves in so many aspects is the writing itself: dry, quick, factual, unemotional, it misses opportunities to develop landscapes promising to be stunning -the quick glances we get at the outer planets, at the cities of Uranus, made me long for more ; their dark, monochrome beauty deserves to be put in pictures, in a form or another-.

However, regardless of how much my romantic French soul suffered from poetry starvation, I can see how the dryness of the style serves to reflect the harshness of Paula's condition. The novel covers most of her adult life: kidnapped, beaten, "harem-ed", enslaved, raped, constantly despised, hated, bullied, she earns every single atom of respect she gets the hardest way. Paula's survival through constant struggle is her victory - the victory of the resilience of the oppressed, of men over merciless gods, of Anarchy over dictatorship.



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The Book Sill - Roach Killer

Roach Killer by Jacques Tardi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Tardi has a knack for drawing specific periods and contexts. New York in the 80's looks particularly sinister and hopeless in the main story of this graphic novel. The simple, efficient plot brings out a striking image of a destroyed working class.
The main character was raised in the Bronx after WWII. He is now working as a pest killer in lower Manhattan. Equally rejected by the middle-classes who wallow in their new wealth and by the sordid ghettos which violence turns against anyone who, here and now, does not belong to their petty world, he ends up victim of a blind conspiracy. A masterpiece.



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Are We Tomorrow Yet ? (The Other Face)

Are We Tomorrow Yet ? (The One Face)

Lost and recovered things - November

This month I have lost - at least
A black hat, a red scarf
The hat was woolly, and itchy, and stinky
The scarf was a part of last Christmas costume
A bright yellow jacket which I wore on my bike
A pair of sunglasses, from our trip in America
The same month I celebrated
The return of a beloved book
Hadrian's Memoirs - or Memories
For the French title is ambiguous
Since then, my bold head exposed, my throat exposed
My eyes unshaded
Blending in the dark I have
Reveled, carefully
For, as it is said on page one hundred and eighty
Any happiness is a masterpiece.

The Book Sill - Mémoires d'Hadrien

I bought it four years ago. I started reading it more than six months ago, after it had mysteriously made its journey from a shelf back row onto my bedside table. Then, as I reached page 107, it disappeared.

Two months ago, I met a friend of mine in a pub, for a session of what he likes to call "Viby Thursdays" - a guarantee that you will have to call in sick the day after. As I was handling him a cosmopolitan (we were out with our respective halves), he threw a book across the table to me.

"There you go. That's not English. I don't know who else would have dared pollute my car back seat with such pagan object".

Mémoires d'Hadrien landed in a pool of English ale, on the table of a bar near Angel station, North London.

I have no words for this book - not yet. I have not finished reading it. I cannot start expressing the awe that rise in me as I slowly step through. The only way for me to make it justice is to gather here a patchwork of extracts. The list will no doubt lengthen, as I read and re-read it.

All references are to the Folio 1974 edition.

"Construire, c'est collaborer avec la terre : c'est mettre une marque humaine sur un paysage qui en sera modifié à jamais ; c'est contribuer aussi à ce lent changement qui est la vie des villes" (p140)

"Mais notre art (j'entends celui des Grecs) a choisi de s'en tenir à l'homme. Nous seuls avons su montrer dans un corps immobile la force et l'agilité latentes ; nous seuls avons fait d'un front lisse l'équivalent d'une pensée sage. Je suis comme nos sculpteurs : l"humain me satisfait ; j'y trouve tout, jusqu'à l'éternel. La forêt tant aimée se ramasse pour moi tout entière dans l'image du centaure ; la tempête ne respire jamais mieux que dans l'écharpe ballonnée d'une déesse marine [...]" (p146)

"[...] les beaux vers où le vieux Terpandre a défini en trois mots l'idéal spartiate : La Force, la Justice, les Muses." (p149)

"Une barque à fond presque plat me transporta dans l'île de Bretagne [...] j'apercevais ici pour la première fois un Neptune plus chaotique que le nôtre, un monde liquide infini. J'avais lu dans Plutarque une légende de navigateurs concernant une île située dans ces parages qui avoisinent la Mer Ténébreuse, et où les Olympiens victorieux auraient depuis des siècles refoulé les Titans vaincus. Ces grands captifs du roc et de la vague, flagellés à jamais par un océan sans sommeil, incapables de dormir, mais sans cesse occupés à rêver, continueraient à opposer à l'ordre olympien leur violence, leur angoisse, leur désir perpétuellement crucifié. Je retrouvais dans ce mythe placé aux confins du monde les théories des philosophes que j'avais faites miennes : chaque homme a éternellement à choisir, au cours de sa vie brève, entre l'espoir infatigable et la sage absence d'espérance, entre les délices du chaos et celles de la stabilité, entre le Titan et l'Olympien. A choisir entre eux, ou à réussir à les accorder un jour l'un à l'autre." (p151)

"Chaque glissement nous ramenait à ce point qui, parce que par hasard nous nous y sommes trouvés, nous paraît un centre."
P163

"Depuis les nuits de mon enfance, où le bras levé de Marullinus m'indiquait les constellations, la curiosité des choses du ciel ne m'a pas quitté. Durant les veilles forcées des camps, j'ai contemplé la lune courant à travers les nuages des cieux barbares ; plus tard, par de claires nuits attiques, j'ai écouté l'astronome Théron de Rhodes m'expliquer son système du monde ; étendu sur le pont d'un navire, en pleine mer Egée, j'ai regardé la lente oscillation du mat se déplacer parmi les étoiles, aller de l'œil rouge du Taureau au pleur des Pléiades, de Pégase au Cygne : j'ai répondu de mon mieux aux questions naïves et graves du jeune homme qui contemplait avec moi ce même ciel. Ici, à la Villa, j'ai fait construire un observatoire, dont la maladie m'empêche aujourd'hui de gravir les marches. Une fois dans ma vie, j'ai fait plus : j'ai offert aux constellations le sacrifice d'une nuit tout entière. Ce fut après ma visite à Osroès, durant la traversée du désert syrien. Couché sur le dos, les yeux bien ouverts, abandonnant pour quelques heures tout souci humain, je me suis livré du soir à l'aube à ce monde de flamme et de cristal. Ce fut le plus beau de mes voyages. Le grand astre de la constellation de la Lyre, étoile polaire des hommes qui vivront quand depuis quelques dizaines de milliers d'années nous ne serons plus, resplendissait sur ma tête. Les Gémeaux luisaient faiblement dans les dernières lueurs du couchant ; le Serpent précédait le Sagittaire ; l'Aigle montait vers le zénith, toutes ailes ouvertes, et à ses pieds cette constellation non désignée encore par les astronomes, et à laquelle j'ai donné depuis le plus cher des noms. La nuit, jamais tout à fait aussi complète que le croient ceux qui vivent et qui dorment dans les chambres, se fit plus obscure, puis plus claire. Les feux, qu'on avait laissé brûler pour effrayer les chacals, s'éteignirent ; ce tas de charbons ardents me rappela mon grand-père debout dans sa vigne, et ses prophéties devenues désormais présent, et bientôt passé. J'ai essayé de m'unir au divin sous bien des formes; j'ai connu plus d'une extase; il en est d'atroces; et d'autres d'une bouleversante douceur. Celle de la nuit syrienne fut étrangement lucide. Elle inscrivit en moi les mouvements célestes avec une précision à laquelle aucune observation partielle ne m'aurait jamais permis d'atteindre. Je sais exactement, à l'heure où je t'écris, quelles étoiles passent ici, à Tibur, au-dessus de ce plafond orné de stucs et de peintures précieuses, et ailleurs, là-bas, sur une tombe. Quelques années plus tard, la mort allait devenir l'objet de ma contemplation constante, la pensée à laquelle je donnais toutes celles des forces de mon esprit que n'absorbait pas l'Etat. Et qui dit mort dit aussi le monde mystérieux auquel il se peut qu'on accède par elle. Après tant de réflexions et d'expériences parfois condamnables, j'ignore encore ce qui se passe derrière cette tenture noire. Mais la nuit syrienne représente ma part consciente d'immortalité." (pp162 to 164)

"Saisons alcyonniennes; soltices de mes jours... Loin de surfaire mon bonheur à distance, je dois lutter pour n'en pas affadir l'image ; son souvenir même est maintenant trop fort pour moi. Plus sincère que la plupart des hommes, j'avoue sans ambages les causes secrètes de cette félicité : ce calme si propice aux travaux et aux disciplines de l'esprit me semble l'un des plus beaux effets de l'amour. Et je m'étonne que ces joies si précaires, si rarement parfaites au cours d'une vie humaine, sous quelque aspect d'ailleurs que  nous les ayons recherchées ou reçues, soient considérées avec tant de méfiance par de prétendus sages, qu'ils en redoutent l'accoutumance et l'excès au lieu d'en redouter le manque et la perte, qu'ils passent à tyranniser leurs sens un temps mieux employé à régler ou à embellir leur âme. A cette époque je mettais à affermir mon bonheur, à le goûter, à le juger aussi, cette attention constante que j'avais toujours donnée aux moindres détails de mes actes ; et qu'est la volupté elle-même, sinon un moment d'attention passionnée du corps ? Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre : la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourdeur le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit. Le mien n'est responsable en rien de celles de mes imprudences qui plus tard l'ont brisé : tant que j'ai agi dans son sens, j'ai été sage. Je crois encore qu'il eût été possible à un homme plus sage que moi d'être heureux jusqu'à sa mort." (pp179 and 180)

"La nuit qui suivit ces célébrations, du haut d'une terrasse, je regardai brûler Rome. Ces feux de joie valaient bien les incendies allumés par Néron : ils étaient presque aussi terribles. Rome : le creuset, mais aussi la fournaise, et le métal qui bout, le marteau, mais aussi l'enclume, la preuve visible des changements et des recommencements de l'histoire, l'un des lieux au monde où l'homme aura le plus tumultueusement vécu. La conflagration de Troie, d'où un fugitif s'était échappé, emportant avec lui son vieux père, son jeune fils, et ses Lares, aboutissait ce soir-là à ces grandes flammes de fête. Je songeais aussi, avec une sorte de terreur sacrée, aux embrasements de l'avenir. Ces millions de vies passées, présentes et futures, ces édifices récents nés d'édifices anciens et suivis eux-mêmes d'édifices à naître, me semblaient se succéder dans le temps comme des vagues ; par hasard, c'était à mes pieds cette nuit-là que ces grandes houles venaient se briser. Je passe sur ces moments de délire où la pourpre impériale, l'étoffe sainte, et que si rarement j'acceptais de porter, fut jetée sur les épaules de la créature qui devenait pour moi mon Génie : il me convenait, certes, d'opposer ce rouge profond à l'or pâle d'une nuque, mais surtout d'obliger mon Bonheur, ma Fortune, ces entités incertaines et vagues, à s'incarner dans cette forme si terrestre, à acquérir la chaleur et le poids rassurant de la chair. Les murs solides de ce Palatin, que j'habitais si peu, mais que je venais de reconstruire, oscillaient comme les flancs d'une barque ; les tentures écartées pour laisser entrer la nuit romaine étaient celles d'un pavillon de poupe ; les cris de la foule étaient le bruit du vent dans les cordages. L'énorme écueil aperçu au loin dans l'ombre, les assises gigantesques de mon tombeau qu'on commençait à ce moment d'élever sur les bords du Tibre, ne m'inspiraient ni terreur, ni regret, ni vaine meditation sur la brièveté de la vie." (pp186-187)

"La mémoire de la plupart des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, oú gisent sans honneur des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir."
P228

"Les siècles encore contenus dans le sein opaque du temps passeraient par milliers sur cette tombe sans lui rendre l'existence, mais aussi sans ajouter à sa mort, sans empêcher qu'il eût été."
P229

"Je passai tout un soir à discuter avec lui de l'injonction qui consiste à aimer autrui comme soi-même; elle est trop contraire à la nature humaine pour être sincèrement obéir par le vulgaire, qui n'aimera jamais que soi, et ne convient nullement au sage, qui ne s'aime pas particulièrement soi-même."
P240

"Les pédants s'irritent toujours qu'on sache aussi bien qu'eux leur étroit métier;"
P241

"L'heure de l'impatience est passée ; au point où j'en suis, le désespoir serait d'aussi mauvais goût que l'espérance. J'ai renoncé à brusquer ma mort."
P303

"Si j'ai choisi d'écrire ces Mémoires d'Hadrien à la première personne, c'est pour me passer le pus possible de tout intermédiaire, fût-ce de moi-même. Hadrien pouvait parler de sa vie plus fermement et plus subtilement que moi."
P330, notes

"[...] le graphique d'une vie humaine [...] ne se compose pas, quoi qu'on dise, d'une horizontale et de deux perpendiculaires, mais bien plutôt de trois lignes sinueuses, étirées à l'infini, sans cesse rapprochées et divergeant sans cesse : ce qu'un homme a cru être, ce qu'il a voulu être, et ce qu'il fut."
P332, notes

Language and confidence

Trusting language took me years. Then, just when I was starting to get a good enough grasp on it to feel confident about the meanings it was conveying, I moved to the UK. 

I had to start again the painful journey through the opacity of words and sentences to access what people meant.

Ten years later, I have found that it was possible to trust language -to an extend. One should never lose sight of the moving, uncertain, ill-defined nature of its relationship to its referent - the outside world. Words meanings change, with time, with context, depending on who is using these words, or how many times they have been used, depending also on who hears them and how he receives them.

Recognising the fluctuating nature of language is a skill, not a gift. It needs to be acquired. It is however so fundamental that it is almost never taught. This is a great wrong. Only by getting familiar with this nature can one gain confidence when listening, or reading. Understanding one another is a much harder task than what people think. It can only be achieved if we stop reacting to what the other person says, and start listening, very, very carefully.

"[...] for the theatre is a great emphasizer - especially to young people, who have no great experience in life by which they might judge the experiences they encounter in literature; and who have no great confidence in language, neither in using it nor in hearing it. The theatre, Dan quite rightly claims, dramatizes both the experience and the confidence in language that young people - such as our students - lack. Students of the age of Dan's, and mine, have no great feeling - for example - for wit, wit simply passes them by, or else they take it to be an elderly form of snobbery; a mere showing off with the language that they use (at best) tentatively. Wit isn't tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize on-stage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; on-stage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is."

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Black Swan edition, London, 1990, p:539

I wish to always see...

I wish to always see
The beauty of the tilleul tree
Under a wet autumn
Its bark dark ebony
Its leaves a blazing gold
Alike some Egyptian vessel of gods against
St Paul couleur blanc-gris