It happens about ten years ago. I leave my house one morning, around 7:30. It is cold and dry. The sky is an intense blue, beautiful.
I have to go to a training center where I have to spend the day, for my work.
It's actually an old house at the edge of the city, on the edge of fields and forests, converted into a place to receive groups, seminars, meals, etc. There are meeting rooms, bathrooms and a kitchen. There are meeting rooms, a kitchen, dormitories, bathrooms.
I walk quietly across a large square in the center of town, almost down the street from my house, thinking that something is wrong; but I don't know what. Then I really SEE, and really hear the world around me; I come out of the autopilot where I live most of the time.
I realize that the air is saturated with crows' cries, deafening. And at the same time, in the distance, a fire engine siren sounds – the kind of sound that evokes bomb threats in movies. At the end of the square, a thick, very white mist. The whole scene is incomprehensible, as if someone had placed random elements of atmosphere.
I arrive at the training center, almost in shock. I feel like I'm beside myself, like I'm living a daydream. Everything feels both unreal and much more real.
There is an apple tree, in the grass, near the building. A basket is on the ground, at the foot of the tree, filled with apples.
I spend the day almost unconscious of the people and activity going on around me, writing in my notebook ideas for a personal typology of moods and what constitutes them, as well as basic techniques for creating aesthetic and poetic shocks like the one I had had, unexpectedly, on the street. With the postulate that it was possible to reproduce it at will - in the framework of creation, of aimless reverie, or of personal work on one's own consciousness. It is fundamentally a work on one's own view of the world.
*
Here is a transcript of my notes in bulk:
What is my purpose?
To study the processes (any element of a text, in terms of content, as well as form) to study the effects produced on the reader / player.
Start from stories / scenes that have marked me, that have spoken to me, and analyze them.
Insofar as it is not a question of studying narratives, but immobile scenes, visions (even if they are "evolving"), the term narratology is surely not right. What should we call it? Poetics?
The poetry I want to analyze is not that of the form of the narrative, but that of its content.
*
Azure blue sky, clouds of sheep. Incomprehensible fog. Fire alarm sirens in the distance.
Olfaction
Colors
Elements of the decor
Weather data
Contradictions or Great contrasts (sensory and emotional)
Sound elements
Impression of discovery
Impression of dream
Impression of meaning impossible to formulate or that escapes
Impression that something is going to happen, or that one has something to do
Incongruities, surrealism
Profusion of signs. The human world is a world of signs.
The cold, analytical, topographical description of a place and its elements, and of possible events taking place there, as a new literary form – for a technical age without lyricism.
Influence of the visual arts, of multimedia.
A writing of the presence, of the being there, more than a narration.
Micro-narratives. Refusal of the psychological spreads. No obligation of the "character".
Breaks in rhythm. Three years in five lines. Three minutes in five pages.
A clearing, a spring morning. Corpses on the ground. Bells in the distance. Bloody corpses, green grass. Children singing on the right.
No need to be "an author". Poetry is in the very nature of what is described or told.
The sound of trains running slowly on rails. We are in a large empty room in an abandoned building. It has many windows, on the left, from which enters a golden light. Curtains that fly in the wind. On the right wall, a cross, painted. Furniture and traces of life in some rooms. A platform. One hears dialogues coming from adjacent rooms.
These are exercises in presence in the world.
Techniques:
Opposition (cemetery + children's laughter) // Radical strangeness (cemetery + machinery noise)
Breaks between coherence and incoherence (church + sound of bells, then cemetery + noise of machines)
Interaction and placement in the center of the world and of the attention // Indifference of the world, position of external spectator
Temporality:
- Fixed scene // Flow of time
- Slow / Normal / Fast
- Ellipses or continuity
Weather: weather (depending on the season, snow, rain, sun, heat or not, fog) - color of the sky - outside temperature.
Natural and artificial light sources.
Types of sounds: human (voices, noises, music), mechanical (machines, vehicles, work), animals, sounds related to the weather, related to events (war, holiday, etc.).
Types of places: natural, urban (period? style?), industrial, ruins (period, style?), particular architectures.
Fires, floods, storm, earthquake.
Events : fire, festival, war, religious rite...
Objects: work-related, vehicles, organic, artistic, military, family / daily life, media (posters, newspapers, records, films), animals
Olfactory data: clean air or not (smoke, etc.), odors present (good or bad).
Narrative-camera. Succession of perceptions.
*
The basket of apples at the foot of this tree in the orchard that surrounded the training center. The near ecstasy I felt when I saw it.
Anachronistic, out of step with current life, current jobs, etc.
At the same time, coherent with the place (an orchard, a district at the exit of the city, near the fields)
In short, it is an amplification of the anachronistic aspect of a place.
Trace of human activity.
An immemorial human activity moreover.
The fruit itself is archetypal.
Appeal to archetypes (human activity, place, object)
Human trace, but no other visible or audible human on the premises.
*
Scene with a cheerful / soothing appearance, or sad / distressing
Scene with a cheerful/soothing or sad/anxious feeling
Apparent coherence or incoherence between the elements
Felt consistency or inconsistency between elements
Sense of familiarity or discovery / disorientation
Impression of meaning impossible to formulate
Interaction and placement at the center of the world // Indifference of the world and placement as a spectator of external events
*
Fictitious dream that came to me while walking in the forest yesterday: to advance, at night, in a dark, cold, inhospitable forest, and to arrive, on a summit, in a small, warm, lively village, or in front of a restaurant with illuminated windows, or anything of that kind.
Effect of rupture, of contrast, unexpected, and as well aesthetic as moral.
Let us specify:
Darkness // Light
Cold // Hot
Solitude // Crowd
Feeling of depression and possible or probable danger // Feeling of security and joy
Death // Life
When we say rupture, we mean tension, beforehand.
When the contrast or contradiction between two elements of a scenario do not follow each other in time (a dark forest, THEN a reassuring restaurant) but are superimposed (a dark and sinister forest but where one walks with innumerable pilgrims, each holding a candle, in a moving scene, without any anguish), we are in something else.
Is every break based on a contrast (or even a contradiction)?
The restaurant, the tavern, any lively, illuminated, warm place, remains despite everything "expected", after a dark and sinister forest. There is rupture, contrast, but no contradiction. The contradiction would be to advance in the Sahara, and to fall on an igloo surrounded by polar bears.
The restaurant is expected because it fits with reality, and it is also, deep down, something expected in fiction, the imaginary story, the tale, etc.
The rupture introduced by the unexpected-but-expected place provokes feelings (comfort, etc.) whereas the rupture based on an absolute contradiction only surprises; it provokes nothing else.
Distinguish the wonderful (or magical) from the nonsense.
If instead of the tavern in the forest, or the igloo in the Sahara, we had a flying saucer (both in the forest and in the Sahara), it would be yet another category.
*
I never managed to take the time to organize and enrich these notes, to make them into something usable, like a kind of method. And these famous exercises, as a creative process and as a free and legal method to get high, are something I never pursued. Unfortunately...
