The canal

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.

Dull existence

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.

Pilgrimage

She was back in town today, and on the way to the Fair, to go for a ride on the ghost train, we passed – as we do every time we see each other again – 29 rue de la Source. Only this time I had the idea of ringing someone's doorbell, at random, and going in to take photos in the inner courtyard. Neither of us had been there for years, maybe five or six years. It was exciting as a kid's joke: ringing all the doorbells and waiting for someone to open.

She rang the bell at random and, after several unsuccessful attempts, explained to one of the residents that she had lived here and wanted to take some pictures of the courtyard. So we went in. I went in with a light heart, it was nothing more than a little touristy stroll for me, but she, as soon as she entered the corridor, went from laughing to sobbing in an instant; this surprised me but was, in fact, obvious. Behind the harmlessness of this little excursion, something much deeper and more painful was going on. I was almost grateful to him for shedding those tears.

The walls had been painted white. The shutters of her old flat were closed and we rang the bell but nobody opened. We didn't pass anyone in the stairwell. There was no noise, no smell. It was a horribly sad moment, but with my camera, shooting every five seconds, I felt a little protected, as if I was outside what was happening. Fortunately, everything became lighter when we went back out into the inner courtyard. The pilgrimage had been made.

End of exercise

I have to admit that I haven't really continued my "presence in the world exercises", not having much use for them since I'm not a writer or a video game designer or anything like that. Nevertheless I think it's a very interesting and promising wild discipline - no matter how pretentious it sounds.

Dream last night

I drive alone, at night, towards Champagne. I stop in Reims or Troyes; it is a rather miserable city, ugly, grey, but it has this charm of the novelty which I need so much. This impression of being lost, disoriented, of being an absolute stranger, therefore absolutely free. I also find a rather medieval district, more alive, very beautiful, and I feel like a tourist, like an adventurer a little bit too, it is extremely soothing and pleasant. I also find myself in a kind of family banquet, or perhaps communal, because there are many people. A small sunny midday in province. I walk along a stream, there is a bridge or a ford, perhaps a small waterfall, too, and an old man – the bonesetter, the old sage of the village. There is a very poor little girl, very dirty, who lies down fully clothed in a kind of trough, in town, to wash herself.

Being accepted

One of these last evenings I was walking outside and, on an impulse, attracted by I don't know what, I unexpectedly entered a building where the old, beautiful, wooden double doors were wide open. A muffled music, at low volume, was coming out. I found myself in a long corridor, like in a high school or a hospital; old tiles, woodwork, etc. At the end of the corridor was a room where I could see a small window. At the far end was a room where people (mostly young, in their 20s and 30s) were dancing. I finally realized, when I saw them exchanging in sign language, that they were deaf mutes having a little party of their own. The building must have been an institution and a place for them to live, and this evening was a kind of "open house" event.

I walked away and explored the place a bit, which was dark on the whole, in a nice and intimate way, without anything scary. I entered a room at random; it was a kitchen. Both in the hallway and in this kitchen the architecture and decoration had a decidedly old-fashioned feel to it, but there was nothing unhealthy about it, on the contrary, it was welcoming like a home, a place I would have known or could have known in my childhood or youth. I took some pictures.

A little later, some people I had seen dancing came to greet me, some of them must have been accompanying people or educators, since they were talking, and we chatted a little, obviously they didn't mind my intrusion at all. I stayed there for a good part of the evening. Some of the young deaf-mutes joined in the conversation in their own way, and I felt a kind of fascination with their silent, peaceful, smiling exchanges. I had never lived in such a structure, not even in a boarding school at the time of my schooling, and yet I felt a kind of indefinable nostalgia.

Night walk

This time I decided to walk randomly, where my steps would take me. I went back to the little alley, hoping to see again that illuminated veranda that had amazed me yesterday - a glass veranda, with 5 sides, in which a nice little family was spending time, by the light of candles and small lamps. Something almost unbearably happy. But this time, the house was pitch black. No magic two days in a row, or at least not the same.

Today's was going to be darker and stranger; I should have known it from the beginning, in the previous street, with this dark garden closed by a twisted fence and overgrown by vegetation, by brambles, from which a few small white roses were floating. I stopped in front of it and looked at it for a long time, without knowing exactly why it fascinated me. Further on, when I had left this little neighborhood, without a regret, to take a street at random after the Town Hall, I came back on the same thing, the same effect; a small decrepit house, at the bottom of a long street, very sloping, with a very black gate, that the vegetation partly covered; it hid the main part of the house. I always liked that, that atmosphere of decay, of old age, I don't know why.

I walked up the street, which I soon realized I had never walked down. I was obsessed with the houses, as I always am in my night walks, with their illuminated, warm windows, which make you feel even more lonely, and bring back something probably very primitive - the desire to go knock on the door to get some warmth and meet other people. To appropriate their lives, also, their universe, because a house is a universe in itself. Often, just the color of a wallpaper, a picture on the wall, the shape of a lamp, give birth to stories and fantasies. Each house is a novel.

The street opened on the city. On the whole of my field of vision, small blocks of flats, lawns, concrete paths, garages; a miniature world perfectly organized, domesticated. I walked straight ahead, passing groups of quiet teenagers, fathers, nobody was paying attention to me. The orange, illuminated apartment buildings seemed unreal.

In front of a beautiful house: I positioned myself in relation to the streetlight and the branches of the trees above me, to have the most beautiful light and the most beautiful framing. And I realized again that I don't see reality; I see my fantasies, and I don't approach the real as a real, but as an aesthetic material, a work of art that would only ask to be fixed, by pressing a button.

When I left the blocks, I was once again on familiar ground; nothing prevented me from going back down to the town hall, then returning home. But as in a dream, I saw again paths and streets that went up towards districts that I had not noticed until then. I went up a discreet street where almost all the houses were plunged in the dark. The impression of unreality grew stronger, and culminated when I arrived in front of the cemetery. Its long wall ended the street and blocked the horizon; above it, the moon, absolutely full, yellowish, enormous. The funeral home looked like a Roman building, and with its exotic plants in front, I felt more than ever like I was in a setting. On the other side of the road, there were warehouses, then trees and night.

I walked along the cemetery and down a small path under the branches, which overlooked the fields; we were leaving the city. But another branch led to abandoned military barracks, closed by barbed wire. The ground was muddy. The feeling of unreality gave way to other, more personal thoughts, old faces came back to me. A subtle change of atmosphere, from one step to the other, as always, on several occasions during the walks; each street corner, each architectural nuance, each subtle modification of the lighting took me to other interior worlds. I thought of Emilie Forest. I repeated her name to myself, like a mantra, or as if to give her a little reality, a little flesh. Her name hadn't appeared to me for years, and seemed to appear from a previous life. Emilie Forest; a waitress's apprentice who was my neighbor when I was a young student, and who was the first person I knew and dated there for a few weeks before she simply disappeared. I wondered if she was okay.

Note: as I reread the account of this walk, I thought of Beatrice, wondering why, since she never lived in that neighborhood, and before realizing that it is now at the cemetery up the hill where she lives, or to be more sadly accurate, where the ashes of her body are. I also remember now that I had given her this text to read, since we were talking about meditation, which she practiced assiduously to keep the pain as far away as possible – in addition to the multiple doses of ketamine that she took daily – generally without much success. I told her that walking around in a certain state of mind was a form of meditation; moving forward without thinking, with an empty mind, completely open to perceptions on the one hand, and to ideas and mental images arising by themselves, uncontrolled, in the mind, on the other.

The windy grove

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.

The pleasure of being lost

I arrived in Saint-Dizier after it had been dark for a while. I had an appointment with the girls; they hadn't left yet when I parked in a random car park. It was convenient; I took the opportunity to walk around. On my way in, I had walked along a park overlooking a large medieval wall that hid a more recent castle, and the whole thing looked really incongruous, just past the expressway and the shopping area I had come through. There were few people in the streets. Lots of old stones, decrepit facades, gates and portals, churches and cobbled streets, palm trees that gave, as sometimes in Nancy, the impression of being in a southern town, far away...

I wandered into the city, at random, feeling a bit the same as in Toulouse, the day I had spent a day alone walking in the streets, losing myself in more and more outlying and anonymous neighbourhoods, with an almost voluptuous vertigo, or as every time I was in a similar situation: the pleasure of getting lost, of discovering places – streets and alleys, squares, backyards, gardens – and of moving forward unceasingly, at random, open to any eventuality, any emergence of the unknown...