I 'm walking between a long hedge on my left, and, on my right, a fence that separates me from the railroad.
Beyond the rails: other groves, fields, forests, endlessly it seems. But I can't go there.
On this path, as everywhere else, I am blocked, a prisoner of marked paths; simple corridors from which I cannot leave and which reduce the essence of the landscape, the essence of the world, to just a decor.
I am in the courtyard behind the building where we live, on this street just outside the city, overlooking seemingly endless fields and forests. I see men walking towards the field and the orchards behind the building. Perhaps they are in disguise. Or dressed in a strange way, unusual for the child that I am. I feel that a kind of game is being prepared, a very serious game; something warlike is coming out of all this; that's the feeling that comes over me anyway. I want to join them.
The countryside is decidedly uninteresting, unattractive, a purely utilitarian space in reality, and sometimes, incidentally and accidentally, beautiful. Paradise is not "the countryside", but a garden, that is to say nature staged, arranged, humanized.
There is a topos of the hero who goes wandering in snowy and photogenic forests to forget an intimate drama, and who finds himself there or loses himself there definitively.
All this obviously does not exist in reality. In reality, in real life, when one goes alone in the forest, whether in summer or in winter, whether to forget or to remember, one finds only breathlessness, the banality of nature and boredom. There is no wandering or poetic or saving perdition.
*
When I was younger I liked to walk in nature. But, to my painful discovery, the more time passes the more unbearable it is for me.
When I walk on a country road, along a canal, or on a forest path, I don't feel in nature; I just feel nowhere. This feeling is even more distressing when I go deep into the real wilderness.
I realized over time that I like landscapes where you can see the human presence, landscapes shaped by man; the garden rather than the forest. In the wilderness I feel like a stranger lost in a landscape that has nothing to tell me and where I have nothing to do. I assimilate it more and more to death, to nothingness, to insignificance.
It was the fields behind the farmhouse - a dreamy, mythical, apocalyptic light that photos absolutely don't and can't capture. I looked at the trees in the distance; they were floating in a light mist pierced by the sun's rays, and behind this natural gateway, we could make out a field, other trees, all the way to the horizon. I thanked God for leading me there, and we crossed the barrier of trees. All was silent, and with the light so intense, it seemed as if the world was about to let us in on a secret. But there was just one more field. We returned to the car.
Walk along the bike path this morning. The weather was mild, everything was peaceful and comforting. A Sunday morning walk like I've always liked. For the first time I realized that there was ANOTHER path, parallel to the one I use like every walker, paved, well cleared, wedged between the railroad (inaccessible, fenced) and thick, inextricable thickets. This other path is located below, behind the thickets; it is almost invisible but very real. It is dark, unused, the more one advances, the more the hedges and the intertwined shrubs, with the tortuous, clawed, threatening branches, prohibit the entry to the curious ones. But it is incredibly attractive. One suspects that it leads to dark but unseen things. It is almost an unintentional metaphor, in the landscape, of the two paths a man can take in his life.
From time to time I like to lull myself with the idea that I am going to explore my region to discover places, people, things. But so far I only have an impression, each time the same, whether I am in a random village that I explore, or at the edge of the canal, or in the forest.
The reality is the road, the streets, the suburban districts, the commercial zones. The countryside, including its inhabited areas, is nothing but an empty scenery, in no way a place of life and activity. I would like to be wrong and hope to be one day disproved as I walk around, but it is an extremely powerful impression; more than an impression, an observation, even if I cannot exclude that it is different elsewhere in France.
The corollary to all this is that if the countryside is nothing more than a dead zone that no longer belongs to reality, then walking in it is like walking in a dream, meeting oneself, one's own representations and fantasies.
Stopping, in my car, to take a picture of a more or less abandoned dog club that always fascinated me when I drove along it, all under a blazing sun, I realize that I would have been better off never stopping and settling for the fantasy.
For a few weeks I had the project of exploring my region, on a basis that was both methodical (study of the map, etc.) and left to intuition, to chance; noting names of localities, or precise places (the sawmill at the exit of such and such a village) as I drove along. I stopped that after a few photo sessions. An inexplicable uneasiness, a sadness. I understood some time later that these places only had charm, mystery, as long as they remained elements of a potential story, in my head. As soon as I go there to take a picture of them, their nothingness jumps out at me. They are places that have nothing to tell me, that have no place in my life. I have nothing to do there.
Walk, still along the canal, but in the opposite direction this time - I start from the marina and walk along the water until I get back to the city, to discover on the way the abandoned site called "Les Forges", gigantic and giving off the same post-apocalyptic feeling as the places of my previous walks along the canal.
I decide not to go back there anymore, and even less alone.
Walks along the canal. I park my car on the gravel parking of the marina. It is still cold – a film of frost, almost imperceptible, still covers the landscape and the things.
A sheep's carcass, or an animal I can't identify, on the frozen water. At the same time atrocious and atrociously photogenic.
I walk along the water, towards the farm where E... and I have been a few times, and continue on beyond.
I take pictures that look like post-apocalyptic, Chernobyl-like landscapes, mixing tall grass, rocks, blackened walls, drainpipes coming from who knows where.
I am in a strange mental state. Following this river, in absolute solitude, sometimes punctuated by a dilapidated barn, a brick warehouse or a bare metal structure, on a winter morning, gives a curious sensation of spiritual, religious experience, a kind of local equivalent of the Ganges revised by Tarkovski.
I lead a minimalist, routine, cramped, minimalist life. I need to escape, to explore, to see something else. The world can't be so poor, so reduced to a restricted series of utilitarian places, ugly areas where nothing is possible. There must be something to see, something to do. There must be territories still hidden, where everything is untouched. There has to be.
Morning walk. I went up through the forest to Hellert... A mixture of deep boredom, painful loneliness, and excitement in front of some landscapes – I say excitement and not wonder, for example, because my mental state in this kind of situation looks like a kind of unhealthy exaltation (related to the fact of taking hundreds of photos, partly) more than a healthy appreciation of a landscape.
There is nothing refreshing, mentally and morally invigorating about the solitary walk for me. On the contrary, wandering and solitude lead me to strange, unhealthy, excessive mental states.
It is dangerous to walk around, to go for a walk outside. One believes to air oneself, to see the world, whereas one never wanders but in one's interior worlds, in the various levels of one's interior hells.
Stroll on the heights of Neunkirch, this afternoon – as often these days. When I turned off, after the airfield, to go to the forest, along these endless and inextricable thickets permanently flown over, it seems, by whole nations of crows, I noticed a strange grove. By some chance or necessity, it was exactly on a corridor. It seemed as if a strong draught was coming out of it. And there was something cheerful and lively about this draught, which, I don't know why, evoked adventure, travel, novelty.
I visited, this weekend, in Alsace, with Laurence, several castles, intact or in ruins, but always in height, that goes without saying, and surrounded by a sea of fir trees. Winter sun. Many tourists. There is obviously a real popular fascination for these places. A sentimental, cultural attachment. And even stronger than that: atavistic. I had the impression while wandering in these places that the crowd came there obscurely to seek a lost natural environment, a social organization of which it drags the nostalgia without being able to name it; and that perhaps also these old stones would have a new role to play in the new Middle Age which announces itself.
I walk with my "explorer's notebook" towards the Rehtal, where I take some pictures. A beekeeper, in his orchard with other people, glances at me suspiciously from time to time, and then, like every time I walk somewhere, comes to ask me who I am, what I am doing and why. I send him away, politely and he whines. Then I go through the inclined plane. I drive along the water, slowly because there was a motorcycle accident. I go up to Garrebourg where I photograph the shooting club. I explore the village by car and get lost.
I remember a bike ride with my family when I was a teenager in strange, dark autumn weather. The kind of weather that should be depressing but actually produces the opposite effect; a kind of sinister joy. My father and I had stopped at a village pub to wait for my mother and sister, who were lost on the way. The silence was almost total. No one was passing by. I was fascinated by this silence and this peace, under this heavy and grey sky, which appeared to me then as the sky that suited our region, our "race", for reasons that I was still unable to formulate.
*
Over the years, I have travelled a lot through the same valley, following the river and the villages that lived on its banks. Sometimes on foot, but most often on bicycle. I dreamt a lot about it, too - and the places, and the bikes. Sometimes in my dreams we were large groups of cyclists, a real community, going further and further into this forgotten, peaceful, unspoilt rural area, at the very end of which was and still is a Gallo-Roman thermal town whose ruins can be visited. So it was a journey through space and time; leaving the town behind, pedalling with all one's might towards the past, towards the origins, under a grey, stormy sky, electric like a brain buzzing with memories that want to come to the surface of the consciousness.
Yesterday I went for a walk, as I often do, on the heights of the city, in the fields, near the airfield. I was shocked, more shocked, I mean, than just astonished, to see that the airfield was so crowded – it was obviously an open house or something like that. Whole families were wandering the runways, hangars and various barracks – including, of course, the airfield's absolutely packed bistro. Under the beautiful afternoon sun, it was an almost dreamlike scene, so unexpected was it; I have never seen the airfield as deserted, only the continuous roar of the engines in the sky, which accompanied my entire childhood, suggesting that it is still in activity. I entered the bistro, there were people chatting, drinking, laughing, even in the kitchens and even in the toilets - and I came face to face, one after the other, with my father, whom I hadn't seen for a while, and with Pierre and his mother, already a bit tipsy. I accepted a glass of cheap Champagne, offered by one of the waitresses who was walking around, painfully, with a tray. The impression of dreaming did not dissipate, on the contrary it was stronger and stronger.
While writing all this I think back to the reflection I had made to myself one day while hiking in the forest in the Northern Vosges: what if, at the end of this path, of this hard climb, on which I find myself alone, in the half-light of the forest, surrounded by fir trees and immense sandstone rocks, I came upon an inn, a bright, joyful, welcoming, noisy place, rather than on other kilometers of forest, dark, silent, indifferent, inhuman? The irruption of life, of light, of celebration, in a setting usually deserted and « dead », provokes something that goes beyond, as I said, simple astonishment. It is as if the world - which naturally goes towards death, silence, darkness, emptiness – suddenly reversed its tendency and that life reappeared in all its strength. And when, in addition, one finds relatives and friends there, in the midst of laughter and libations, it is like a glimpse of Heaven.
As a teenager, I once broke into a house. It was at the bottom of my street and bordered a square, or more precisely a plot of land half concreted, the other half with a few trees and tall grass. This square was bounded by an old wall on three sides and surrounded by houses and private gardens. One of these houses was particularly old, half-timbered, and had been called "the executioner's house" since time immemorial. Legend has it that it was the house of Joan of Arc's executioner.
It seemed vaguely abandoned; it wasn't in ruins at all, but there was something silent, still, asleep, like a holiday home, perhaps.
I entered it one summer afternoon with a schoolmate, Julia, with whom I had kept some distant relations. We knew (I can't tell you now how) that a door at the back, leading to the kitchen, was never locked.
My heart was pounding with the feeling that I was committing a transgression greater than a simple break-in. A moral, even metaphysical transgression, which I was unable to articulate precisely at my young age. Perhaps I was simply drawn to committing a forbidden act, drawn to the very idea of crime, of breaking and entering, of voyeurism. Not with the aim of harming anyone, but with the idea, again unstated, that at the end of the transgression awaited me revelations, a richness and depth of existence that a well-regulated, honest, law-abiding daily life did not allow.
The house was not abandoned at all. It was richly furnished and full of fascinating objects, clean and welcoming, warm and woody. I was not at all surprised; on the contrary, it was like finding myself in front of an obvious setting, a spectacle, that I knew obscurely I had to meet one day. A necessary step in my life, an archetypal house that I had to explore soon or later. I wandered with Julia through the rooms, taking my time, stopping on each knick-knack or old piece of furniture, fascinated.
I remember a long wooden table, a fireplace, a kitchen with ochre tiles and copper pans, well framed paintings on the walls, a thick dark leather sofa; I remember exposed beams, thick stone walls, fabric cushions, succulents and old books, I remember the fruit baskets, the first floor with its cosy bedrooms (there were three, obviously a family lived there, the parents and from the decoration, two teenagers, boy and girl).
An Amstrad CPC 6128, old cupboards, a wooden staircase, immemorial. The centuries seemed to cohabit here in peace.
It wasn't dark, strictly speaking, in the house, but the daylight came in soft, golden, lazy rays; it seemed slowed down, muted, respectful of the privacy, the tranquillity, the peace of the occupants, whose lives I wondered what they might look like and what kind of life they might lead in this place. Their existence, at the same time, seemed to me a little incongruous, almost theoretical and implausible; the house seemed made to remain silent, motionless, like a pure décor, a pure idea of a domestic paradise that should not be defiled by its presence. Perhaps the inhabitants avoided going home after having felt the same way I did?
On the way out we came face to face with a woman on a bicycle; the owner of the place. Julia ran away. But the woman was smiling, she seemed amused that she had caught us in the act and that she owned a house capable of producing such an attraction. I told her without any reluctance or shyness about my exploration of her intimate domain. It was like telling her how I would have made love to her – I was unable to consciously make that comparison at my young age, but the situation disturbed me in the same way. The landlady, who must have been in her forties, seemed to understand this, with intelligence and indulgence.
I don't know how long we had been in the house, but as I spoke to this smiling, almost entirely silent woman, who encouraged me to continue my confession with her simple smile, still riding her bicycle with one foot on the ground, I realised that dusk was falling; a warm, intense twilight, which gilded everything in a golden light, an idyllic light which further accentuated the attraction I felt for this older woman with whom I had just established a more intimate bond than I could have hoped for; a heavenly or Luciferian light, I don't know, but which secretly meant, for me alone, that my quest was a success.
I remember one July 14th, a long time ago; I was between 20 and 23 years old, since it was when I was in university. I was spending my summer vacations driving around the region, alone, running away or on the contrary looking for something I would have been able to name. But on that July 14th, I wasn't driving at random; I had an appointment with my parents, who had invited me to a meal with them at the home of people I didn't know at all and who lived in a lost village in the Meuse; the kind of village you have no chance to hear about if you have nothing to do there. It was, as is often the case in Lorraine villages, a single street, lined with old, low, adjoining farmhouses. An impression of dilapidation and poverty emanated from it. There was absolutely no car traffic – it was half past noon – and not a single passer-by could be seen in the street. Towards the end of the commune, for a few hundred meters, the old houses gave way to more recent pavilions, more spaced out, separated by lawns and hedges or fences. There too, no sign of life. No noise, no movement. The whole village, I had noted in passing, was given over to the harsh rays of the sun, since no trees were planted along the road. There was no forest in the distance either, nor any pleasant or picturesque scenery; only the plain, quite flat, and endless. All this gave a depressing impression of nakedness. I had forgotten the address where I was supposed to go, and after parking at random, I had spent a good twenty minutes walking through the village from beginning to end, two or three times – until my mother, probably seeing me through a window, came out of a house. That house was nicely decorated, warm, and had a family that was obviously quite well-to-do, but not a "nouveau riche" family. Many other inhabitants of the village were there; obviously, here, the notion of community was still a reality, it was not at all a dormitory village. I had been quickly slipped a glass of champagne in my hand (but who really celebrates the 14th of July, by the way? who were these people for whom all this still makes sense?) and I had finally spent a pleasant day, telling myself that if nature likes to hide, so does social life, community life; the countryside is perhaps not as dead and anonymous as one thinks when one crosses it as a stranger. They simply protect themselves from us.
Yesterday I thought about a school trip I took when I was about sixteen or seventeen. I was in high school. We went by bus as usual. I can't remember what we were going to visit or where exactly; it was some kind of eco-museum in Germany. Near Freiburg perhaps? I know I visited that town at the time, although I can't remember what it was.
We drove through a huge, endless forest; it seems to me now that we spent hours there. It was as if this forest was the end of the world and a border with... something else.
Then there were fields; a straight plain, which seemed equally endless. The eco-museum stood there, a group of about ten wooden houses, obviously centuries old, which could be visited and where everyday objects from the old days were displayed. Naturally, no one lived there any more. It seemed to me a huge waste: why not take advantage of such a living environment and settle there?
I left the place a bit mixed, happy to have seen beautiful things but frustrated to know that I would never live in such a setting, and that no one here would either. Contemporary architecture, functionalist and rejecting the very idea of Beauty, has always repulsed me. The visit was over, my comrades and I had free time to buy postcards and other goods in the souvenir shop; with a friend I had decided to go away and explore the surroundings. The fields continued up to a very steep drop, I won't call it a ravine, as it wasn't a steep drop, but you had to take metal stairs embedded in the rock to get down.
The path led to a small wood of widely spaced birch trees which in turn, after a hundred metres or so, led to another village, exactly the same as the first, except that it was inhabited. It looked like those ridiculous folklore shows on German television, which we used to watch in my parents' house, as we lived near the border. The typical clothes, the rural setting, the general impression of being in an eternal, archetypal Germany, where time has stopped...
Discovering this hidden, unsuspected human community, this living Hinterland, which secretly survives away from the modern world, which does everything the opposite of what seems reasonable and desirable for ordinary people, was an extremely strong, extremely moving experience for me. I also realised that what is sometimes taken for an absolute exception and a vestige (the ecomuseum) turns out to be only one element of an unsuspected, very real and very alive whole.
I discovered this afternoon this village which is only five minutes away from the city where I have been living for fifteen years, but which I have always neglected to visit, because I simply had nothing to do there, and because I had, for a long time, never even crossed its name.
My goal was to drive randomly in a direction I had never taken and to stop in the first unknown village that would intrigue me.
I parked at the very entrance of the village, even before the first houses, on a kind of intersection between a parking lot and a playground, with a small wooden structure, quite new, that housed benches and a table; the kind of shelter that one comes across in the middle of nature and that is usually used to shelter from the rain or to have a meal, during a hike.
The first building of the village, just a few meters further, was fascinating, I had a real shock when I discovered it. An agricultural building, obviously, whose function still escapes me, but absolutely huge. It was dilapidated, roofless, open to the four winds. Instead of windows, thin and long loopholes. Something threatening - but indefinable - was emanating from it.
A few dozen meters further on, after the first houses (old farm buildings, mainly converted), we turned left to arrive in front of the church. Some beautiful and big houses, that I guessed were welcoming, cozy, in their juice. All this led, to my great surprise, to the banks of a canal, which was bordered by a footpath; I promised myself to take it on occasion, to see where it led.
I then arrived at the edge of an old cemetery, outside the village, surrounded by a stone wall. I have always liked old cemeteries, old graves. Especially in villages. They don't evoke anything macabre, nothing sad, on the contrary, they have something almost soft, even cozy, in this kind of setting cemeteries are true to their etymology of "dormitories". They evoke rest, peace, the proximity of loved ones, the softness of the native land. Just the opposite of a colombarium.
Afterwards, there were only the fields, but in the distance, we could see the neighboring village, a few hundred meters away, whose roofs and church steeple we could make out. I didn't plan to go there on foot, but I dreamed for a few moments of a simpler world, slower, quieter, where people would go from one village to the other through the fields, to trade, to visit each other...
For a few months, when I was about thirty years old, I had a curious habit, born from anxiety, insomnia and loneliness; that of making many trips by car, at night, driving at random in the countryside, with a destination chosen at random but always far away and still unknown, with the very precise aim of feeling lost, of feeling far away, of feeling in the middle of nowhere, alone, in the darkness and the cold light of the moon, driving towards a place where nobody was waiting for me and where I had nothing to do.
Now that I think about it, maybe it was a way to act out what was my situation in life in general, and in a way to mimic it: being alone, being lost, being in the dark. Moving towards an unknown and hazardous goal, which I knew in advance I would not find.
A few weeks ago, I began a relationship with a woman who lives in a tiny town (4,000 inhabitants) at least an hour from any big city, in the middle of a miserable farming region, devastated without ever having been industrialized. Every weekend, after leaving my former mining and steel basin, now populated by low-income housing estates, I drive through dozens of kilometers of fields, orchards and villages with low, gray or weathered yellow stone houses, sometimes with their windows boarded up. But this misery is nothing; it's the price we pay for being far from the Machine. Away from the times. There's even something restful and comforting about it: we're still in the old world, and even in ruins, it's still the most desirable. With every kilometer I cover, I feel a little more like I'm sinking not only into space, but also into time, returning home to this region that I'm still discovering, and reconnecting with the history of my country and my ancestors, rediscovering something that has been betrayed, unjustly and too quickly forgotten, denied.
I open this blog called "Psychogeographical Explorations" without really knowing what I'm going to do with it. I have always liked to walk, to wander, both in a restricted list of favorite places where I come back again and again, as if to haunt them and to revive in less certain memories - and in totally unknown places, new ones, where I let myself be carried away by the pleasure, the excitement of exploration. Often I notice that in these moments I find myself in somewhat strange mental states, which I would like to deepen and explain here.
