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.