Dead zone

From time to time I like to lull myself with the idea that I am going to explore my region to discover places, people, things. But so far I only have an impression, each time the same, whether I am in a random village that I explore, or at the edge of the canal, or in the forest.

The reality is the road, the streets, the suburban districts, the commercial zones. The countryside, including its inhabited areas, is nothing but an empty scenery, in no way a place of life and activity. I would like to be wrong and hope to be one day disproved as I walk around, but it is an extremely powerful impression; more than an impression, an observation, even if I cannot exclude that it is different elsewhere in France.

The corollary to all this is that if the countryside is nothing more than a dead zone that no longer belongs to reality, then walking in it is like walking in a dream, meeting oneself, one's own representations and fantasies.

Dog club

Stopping, in my car, to take a picture of a more or less abandoned dog club that always fascinated me when I drove along it, all under a blazing sun, I realize that I would have been better off never stopping and settling for the fantasy.

For a few weeks I had the project of exploring my region, on a basis that was both methodical (study of the map, etc.) and left to intuition, to chance; noting names of localities, or precise places (the sawmill at the exit of such and such a village) as I drove along. I stopped that after a few photo sessions. An inexplicable uneasiness, a sadness. I understood some time later that these places only had charm, mystery, as long as they remained elements of a potential story, in my head. As soon as I go there to take a picture of them, their nothingness jumps out at me. They are places that have nothing to tell me, that have no place in my life. I have nothing to do there.

Paradise

The countryside is decidedly uninteresting, unattractive, a purely utilitarian space in reality, and sometimes, incidentally and accidentally, beautiful. Paradise is not "the countryside", but a garden, that is to say nature staged, arranged, humanized.

Just a decor

I 'm walking between a long hedge on my left, and, on my right, a fence that separates me from the railroad.

Beyond the rails: other groves, fields, forests, endlessly it seems. But I can't go there.

On this path, as everywhere else, I am blocked, a prisoner of marked paths; simple corridors from which I cannot leave and which reduce the essence of the landscape, the essence of the world, to just a decor.

Explorer

I walk with my "explorer's notebook" towards the Rehtal, where I take some pictures. A beekeeper, in his orchard with other people, glances at me suspiciously from time to time, and then, like every time I walk somewhere, comes to ask me who I am, what I am doing and why. I send him away, politely and he whines. Then I go through the inclined plane. I drive along the water, slowly because there was a motorcycle accident. I go up to Garrebourg where I photograph the shooting club. I explore the village by car and get lost.

Death, nothingness, insignificance

There is a topos of the hero who goes wandering in snowy and photogenic forests to forget an intimate drama, and who finds himself there or loses himself there definitively.

All this obviously does not exist in reality. In reality, in real life, when one goes alone in the forest, whether in summer or in winter, whether to forget or to remember, one finds only breathlessness, the banality of nature and boredom. There is no wandering or poetic or saving perdition.

*

When I was younger I liked to walk in nature. But, to my painful discovery, the more time passes the more unbearable it is for me.

When I walk on a country road, along a canal, or on a forest path, I don't feel in nature; I just feel nowhere. This feeling is even more distressing when I go deep into the real wilderness.

I realized over time that I like landscapes where you can see the human presence, landscapes shaped by man; the garden rather than the forest. In the wilderness I feel like a stranger lost in a landscape that has nothing to tell me and where I have nothing to do. I assimilate it more and more to death, to nothingness, to insignificance.