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.

Far from the machine

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.

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...

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.