New Middle Age

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.

New relationship

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.

Secret apartment

I was at the fair, the night before yesterday; it was a beautiful summer evening, warm, pleasant, all filled with the smell of vegetation. I met my colleague, E.. We strolled together between the attractions and the candy stands. She seemed very relaxed, friendly; I myself, while the day had been awful, was breathing easier and not thinking about the countless issues of discontent that had dotted my day. It was the place that did it. Not the village itself, perfectly banal and typical of the region with its endless main street, almost a single street (the fair itself being held on the soccer stadium of the commune, almost at the edge of the forest), but its geographical situation, lost in the hollow of this blurred area between Lunéville and Blâmont, where clearly nobody ever goes, apart from the people who live there, since there is nothing to do, almost no economic or industrial activity. This kind of area fascinates me. I imagine them (obviously wrongly) as places apart, almost without State, without police, without crime, without permanent media and commercial propaganda, without anyone who can find you there; places where you can hide indefinitely, in safety and peace, out of reach. I imagined myself not moving here but renting an apartment, which nobody would know about, a place to hide and recharge if I needed to, on a whim, in the middle of the night.

Living in the ruins

This afternoon I was chased out of my house by the racket upstairs. Once again. So I went for a drive in a rage and ended up in Cirey.

I wandered around all afternoon in a state of growing amazement and excitement, realizing that the whole town was little more than a huge industrial wasteland, landscaped and inhabited. With whole streets of buildings visibly unoccupied, uninhabited, threatening ruin. The greyness, the bare stones, the abandoned gardens. Vegetation proliferates, lending a peaceful atmosphere to the disaster. Only a few suburban streets, similar to those in every other commune in France, looked new and healthy, growing in all directions on the outskirts of the city, as if avoiding its center of accursed ruins.

I've never had such an impression of an environment after the end of the world – and on a local scale, this really is the case; the little town had an industrial heyday of which nothing remains today, and its inhabitants live among the ruins, quite literally.

I saw a woman open the door of an abandoned warehouse that apparently served as her garage, perhaps even a living room, who knows, in an abandoned factory adjoining her house.

I saw a wooden shack built on a former industrial wasteland. Residents had planted gardens there.

I wandered through fields of rubble, dotted with ruined houses and warehouses that looked as if they'd been bombed.

A more distant past was also hinted at; passing through a desolate alleyway where I didn't expect to find anything, I saw the extremely elaborate lintel of what appeared to be a very old and luxurious house; an inhabitant, sitting on the steps of her own house, adjoining the other, told me that all this had once constituted a veritable castle. A sign a few yards away confirmed this. Opposite the "château", small barns made of agglos and wood were threatening to fall into ruin. So, here too, the locals lived in the ruins of a glorious past.

Come to think of it, my excitement was just one more instance of that unhealthy, abnormal state I manage to plunge myself into when I explore new places that turn out to be old, dilapidated, deserted. I should prefer life, beauty, animation, but no, it's entropy that obviously attracts me.

In the mountains

I went to mass in T... this morning. It was the first time I'd been there, and to tell the truth, even the first time I'd stopped in this village instead of just driving through it. The church was beautiful, and I regretted not having the opportunity to take photos; bright, with a beautiful wooden high altar, obviously very old. I felt unusually good. This was due to something very specific to the place itself, which I eventually managed to put into words: I had the feeling of being "in the mountains". I was far from my depressing city, far from the concrete, the grime, the noise, far from the degenerates, far from the decadence, ugliness and death that the city in general has come to symbolize for me; There I was, on a sunny Sunday morning in this peaceful village, nestled deep in the mountains, surrounded by other equally peaceful villages, true refuges, and it was like being at the other end of the world, in a magical, protected, inviolable zone, where everything was still intact.

Intimate hells

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.

I MUST move home

I have to leave the city, which is killing me. Physically, morally, spiritually.

A simpler, slower world

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...

Wandering

Over the past few months, I've returned several times, day and night, to the places where I studied at university, where I spent my student life... An obsessive, sad, anguished wandering through these places of my youth that have become dead, silent, frightening. There's literally nothing to see there and yet I return again and again, in disgust, perhaps precisely to experience this disgust, to convince myself that there's nothing left to see there, to come to terms with this fact once and for all, to mourn, as the cooks say. Or perhaps it's the other way round, perhaps I'm not nostalgic for more lively times, richer in events and encounters; perhaps I return to these places to see them dead at last, empty at last, stripped of all the dusty theatrics we call a life. In their naked truth, the truth of nothingness.

The canal (2)

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.