A friend picked up a bird that had fallen out of its nest in Lazare alleyway. He put it in a shoebox with some crumpled fabric so that it could hide and stay warm, and gave it a good supply of worms to eat. It was a tiny little bird, which was a little heartbreaking, separated from its mother, so young, a mother who herself must not have understood at all what was happening to her. It died yesterday. Nature is a machine for producing suffering; that of the very young, whether human or animal, being even worse than that which afflicts humans, since they have no intellectual or moral resources, no language to distance themselves from what is happening to them. To be born; to be immediately separated from one's mother, when she represents everything; to suffer from fear and hunger; to die. That is the experience to which life will have been limited, to which the universe itself will have been limited, for this bird.
Tonight I’m watching "The Butterfly Effect", a film I used to watch often with Aude back in the day — like other films from that time that I sometimes revisit in sudden bursts, "The Rules of Attraction", for instance.
These films that talk about adolescence, college, parties, first romantic or sexual experiences — they spoke to Aude and me, back when we were barely out of adolescence ourselves and living more or less the same things as the characters on screen. Even if we lived it all in French, and in a much less glamorous way, we watched those films like documentaries about our own lives. And rewatching them now, I feel what a female character in "Millennium People" called "nostalgia for the American childhoods we never had."
"The Butterfly Effect" has something more — a fundamental sadness, and an absolutely unhappy ending, which sets it apart for a Hollywood film. And all films that deal with memory, with revisiting the past, touch on something deeply personal...
It’s also a film that taught me this: the one who reaches out to others to remember what was forgotten, or to try to heal old wounds,
• annoys everyone,
• only ends up reopening those wounds and rubbing salt in them,
• creates new ones.
You don’t fix old injustices. You don’t undo the harm you’ve caused.
You don’t get to impose your guilt and regret on others.
Nothing will ever happen, and if it ever does, then it will happen in the past.
I live with my dead, and I live in the past — that’s a fact. I don’t know if anything will ever come along to change that fact, in the years or decades I have left to live. And even if it did, the past rivals the future.
The temporal, aesthetic, political, moral, and intellectual distance between the world I grew up in — the world I wish I could live in — and the real world I live in now is immense, and of course, only keeps growing.
I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but as the years go by, the past grows larger; the tangible traces, the documents, photos, audio, video, texts that document and resurrect the past are more and more numerous, and of ever-increasing quality.
The past — as a collection of documents — is already infinite, on the scale of a human life.
I could spend the rest of my days warming myself by these thousands of photos and video archives.
The past is warm; it is bright, cozy, welcoming, energetic, full of life. I increasingly love rewatching, again and again, the TV appearances on Top of the Pops and other shows, of my favorite bands — or even of things I'm only just discovering. These videos of TV appearances and concerts of my musical heroes. The warmth, the light, the crowd, the noise, the joy, the youth. I find myself on the verge of tears more and more often when I watch them.
I remember having terrible nightmares when I was around seventeen or eighteen, but were they really nightmares? I was actually between sleep and wakefulness in the early hours of the morning, paralyzed by terror born of the impression—no, the certainty—of a malevolent presence around me in my parents' house at 33 Rue Saint-Denis. Each time, it felt like a rediscovery; I had the feeling of recovering a memory that had eluded me during the day, as if this supernatural reality was so horrible, so unacceptable, that my mind had to chase it away and only semi-consciousness allowed me to contemplate it.
A few years later, at 3 Rue des Abeilles, I had similar moments, at night or in the early morning, moments of anxiety because of the house, which I was certain was haunted, either by a ghost or by something inhuman and malevolent.
It was this feeling of regaining my memory that was most terrifying in those moments, because they gave me the impression that the rest of my life was a lie, a dream, and that only those moments were real.
Were these real supernatural experiences linked to the Evil to which I had opened the door as a teenager?
I remember having terrible nightmares when I was around seventeen or eighteen, but were they really nightmares? I was actually between sleep and wakefulness in the early hours of the morning, paralyzed by terror born of the impression—no, the certainty—of a malevolent presence around me in my parents' house at 33 Rue Saint-Denis. Each time, it felt like a rediscovery; I had the feeling of recovering a memory that had eluded me during the day, as if this supernatural reality was so horrible, so unacceptable, that my mind had to chase it away and only semi-consciousness allowed me to contemplate it.
A few years later, at 3 Rue des Abeilles, I had similar moments, at night or in the early morning, moments of anxiety because of the house, which I was certain was haunted, either by a ghost or by something inhuman and malevolent.
It was this feeling of regaining my memory that was most terrifying in those moments, because they gave me the impression that the rest of my life was a lie, a dream, and that only those moments were real.
Were these real supernatural experiences linked to the Evil to which I had opened the door as a teenager?
As a child, I wanted to be a chef. I've been rekindling that fantasy since I turned 40. If I can't cook for my wife and children, I'd rather cook for friends, parishioners, the poor and the down-and-out. It's like cobbling together a family. Cooking for parishioners and the poor: here again, an aspect of my character that has always been there, but which has only really come into its own since I became a Christian (or tried to).
Listening to music constantly to drown out another kind of music, an inner one; an infinitely sad song that tells me everything I don't want to hear, everything I try to stifle and forget.
I felt a powerful sense of disgust when looking at old photos (from 2004 to be precise) while reviewing them recently for this blog. A major sorting/cleaning out is needed once again. My files are filled with far too many useless, ugly photos, etc., which I have long treated as sacred objects that cannot be deleted. In fact, with time, it becomes feasible and it's a relief: I dismiss memories, people, places, events, by deleting what remains of them in the form of photos.
The price to pay is gradually losing all "sentimental" ties to my past. There are photos I keep of certain people whom I don't have fond memories of and who probably don't have fond memories of me, and with whom, in the end, I didn't experience anything so intense and solid that they deserve to be in my photos until I die. But admitting this and deleting these photos is tantamount to acknowledging that I haven't experienced anything at all, that I haven't had a life at all, since at the age of forty I have nothing else but these fake memories.
I started watching "House of Cards" again from the beginning. Although it became grotesque towards the end, to the point where, after Kevin Spacey left, it was no longer watchable, it's true, and I had somewhat forgotten, that the first few seasons are excellent—and good entertainment when you want to occupy your mind and ears to forget the noise of your neighbors. The characters in the series themselves spend their lives entertaining themselves, in the Pascalian sense of the term. They work themselves into a stupor to such an extent that they simply have no life, like Doug Stamper, the chief of staff, who never seems to eat (except when he has a restaurant owner to threaten) or go home, and whose job is, by his own admission, the most important thing in his life.
I find myself noticing more and more often that my own artistic activities play a similar role: the thing we feel absolutely compelled to do, like an absolute inner necessity, but which is really just a pastime, a distraction, a diversion. Facing real life and its questions is a much more exhausting and stressful task. Hyperactive people are actually lazy and cowardly. And I am one of them, constantly dreaming of settling down, of really thinking, really taking stock, but never doing so.
There is no more forgetting and therefore no more moving on. Today, we have all the photographs of our entire lives, thousands or tens of thousands of them, before our eyes, at our disposal, all the time. At our disposal, or even when we don't want them, for that matter. There is no more merciful forgetting. Our entire existence has become that moment when our life flashes before our eyes and judges us.
A few weeks ago, I was at the self-checkout at the supermarket, one evening, and a little girl was standing a meter away from me with her parents. She was adorable and was holding a book that she seemed to cherish, called "The Kitten Club". I don't know why, but I almost burst into tears right there and then. Can you imagine anything cuter or more innocent than a little girl clutching a book called "The Kitten Club"?
The midnight Mass I thought I’d be able to attend in Retonfey actually ended at the time I had been told it would begin, so I arrived in extremis—just in time for Communion. No matter. It was warmly decorated, crowded, welcoming; the choir sang a little off-key, but nothing unbearably kitschy or modern. I don’t know why, but it brought back to me that dream which really left a mark on me:
"I am at Laurence’s place, though she isn’t there. I’m in the garage, converted into a game room or something like that. It’s night, very dark. I’m with a girl I’m more or less flirting with. She has either a Slavic accent or a Slavic name. Other people are supposed to be in the house too—it’s some sort of friendly gathering. Suddenly, one of these friends bursts in, panicked, terrified. He explains that one of the guests has vanished. Not just gone missing, I understand, but truly vanished—as if carried off by something, disintegrated, taken into another dimension. The fear I feel is indescribable. Then I am in the city, at dawn or dusk; it’s dim. I take refuge in a church, where a Mass is underway. It’s full of people, the church is beautiful, the atmosphere convivial, warm, reassuring. My father is there, along with others I know. Someone is reading the newspaper. I flip through it and find reports about what happened at Laurence’s house, but the article treats it as if it were a blockbuster film terrifying the public. Someone in the church opens a bottle of schnapps; the mood is friendly, not solemn at all."
The Church as an ark of light in the darkness, where people crowd together, where one doesn’t necessarily listen to the priest but is nonetheless present.
I have reached that age where memories of my twenties, when they come back to me, are an epiphany, a shock, like when you suddenly see a memory from your early childhood that you hadn't thought about in ages, in all its vividness. My twenties seem as distant, as unreal, as mythical, as ideal as my earliest childhood. I am rediscovering whole chunks of my life and personality, like an amnesiac who has been given their photo album and diaries upon leaving the hospital. Another observation: at each age, we assign a different order of priority to the past ages of our lives. My most cherished or haunting memories at age 20 or 30 are not the same as they are today, which is probably obvious, but it sometimes makes me wonder to what extent nostalgia is "sincere"? What exactly does it mean?
Today is a day off. I'm gonna let the shutters close, won't speak to anyone, and just stay still, in silence and peace.
A few weeks ago, my mother told me that Carole was more or less at the end of her life, in the hospital and under sedation for a throat tumor that would not heal. Ophélie had told her the news over the phone. Apparently, although fully aware of her condition, she was very happy: happy to be in bed with nothing to do, to be fed, changed, washed, and pampered by the nurses. According to my mother, she was simply happy to be treated like a small child, something she had never been allowed to be before. When I heard this, I realized that fundamentally, I wanted nothing else in life either. To be loved, pampered, fed, to listen and watch what was going on around me, but without doing anything, without participating, without getting involved.
"I'm walking with Emmanuelle, I'm not sure where. It's chilly and very dark. Maybe she's accompanying me to college. I intend to enroll as an auditor. I'm a little excited about the idea, it's like a new life, new paths opening up before me, a second youth. The atmosphere between us is heavy, sad, with a lot left unsaid."
This dream is one example among many of dreams of silent, sad, or strange walks with my successive companions over the years. It took me a long time to identify this recurring theme and begin to decipher it a little, and to understand that they were metaphors for the wandering that was our life together, a life without direction, without purpose—we moved forward at random, in the dark, not really talking to each other, side by side but fundamentally (already) separated.
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