Small party at the airfield

Yesterday I went for a walk, as I often do, on the heights of the city, in the fields, near the airfield. I was shocked, more shocked, I mean, than just astonished, to see that the airfield was so crowded – it was obviously an open house or something like that. Whole families were wandering the runways, hangars and various barracks – including, of course, the airfield's absolutely packed bistro. Under the beautiful afternoon sun, it was an almost dreamlike scene, so unexpected was it; I have never seen the airfield as deserted, only the continuous roar of the engines in the sky, which accompanied my entire childhood, suggesting that it is still in activity. I entered the bistro, there were people chatting, drinking, laughing, even in the kitchens and even in the toilets - and I came face to face, one after the other, with my father, whom I hadn't seen for a while, and with Pierre and his mother, already a bit tipsy. I accepted a glass of cheap Champagne, offered by one of the waitresses who was walking around, painfully, with a tray. The impression of dreaming did not dissipate, on the contrary it was stronger and stronger.

While writing all this I think back to the reflection I had made to myself one day while hiking in the forest in the Northern Vosges: what if, at the end of this path, of this hard climb, on which I find myself alone, in the half-light of the forest, surrounded by fir trees and immense sandstone rocks, I came upon an inn, a bright, joyful, welcoming, noisy place, rather than on other kilometers of forest, dark, silent, indifferent, inhuman? The irruption of life, of light, of celebration, in a setting usually deserted and « dead », provokes something that goes beyond, as I said, simple astonishment. It is as if the world - which naturally goes towards death, silence, darkness, emptiness – suddenly reversed its tendency and that life reappeared in all its strength. And when, in addition, one finds relatives and friends there, in the midst of laughter and libations, it is like a glimpse of Heaven.

Hinterland

Yesterday I thought about a school trip I took when I was about sixteen or seventeen. I was in high school. We went by bus as usual. I can't remember what we were going to visit or where exactly; it was some kind of eco-museum in Germany. Near Freiburg perhaps? I know I visited that town at the time, although I can't remember what it was.

We drove through a huge, endless forest; it seems to me now that we spent hours there. It was as if this forest was the end of the world and a border with... something else.

Then there were fields; a straight plain, which seemed equally endless. The eco-museum stood there, a group of about ten wooden houses, obviously centuries old, which could be visited and where everyday objects from the old days were displayed. Naturally, no one lived there any more. It seemed to me a huge waste: why not take advantage of such a living environment and settle there?

I left the place a bit mixed, happy to have seen beautiful things but frustrated to know that I would never live in such a setting, and that no one here would either. Contemporary architecture, functionalist and rejecting the very idea of Beauty, has always repulsed me. The visit was over, my comrades and I had free time to buy postcards and other goods in the souvenir shop; with a friend I had decided to go away and explore the surroundings. The fields continued up to a very steep drop, I won't call it a ravine, as it wasn't a steep drop, but you had to take metal stairs embedded in the rock to get down.

The path led to a small wood of widely spaced birch trees which in turn, after a hundred metres or so, led to another village, exactly the same as the first, except that it was inhabited. It looked like those ridiculous folklore shows on German television, which we used to watch in my parents' house, as we lived near the border. The typical clothes, the rural setting, the general impression of being in an eternal, archetypal Germany, where time has stopped... 

Discovering this hidden, unsuspected human community, this living Hinterland, which secretly survives away from the modern world, which does everything the opposite of what seems reasonable and desirable for ordinary people, was an extremely strong, extremely moving experience for me. I also realised that what is sometimes taken for an absolute exception and a vestige (the ecomuseum) turns out to be only one element of an unsuspected, very real and very alive whole.

14th of July

I remember one July 14th, a long time ago; I was between 20 and 23 years old, since it was when I was in university. I was spending my summer vacations driving around the region, alone, running away or on the contrary looking for something I would have been able to name. But on that July 14th, I wasn't driving at random; I had an appointment with my parents, who had invited me to a meal with them at the home of people I didn't know at all and who lived in a lost village in the Meuse; the kind of village you have no chance to hear about if you have nothing to do there. It was, as is often the case in Lorraine villages, a single street, lined with old, low, adjoining farmhouses. An impression of dilapidation and poverty emanated from it. There was absolutely no car traffic – it was half past noon – and not a single passer-by could be seen in the street. Towards the end of the commune, for a few hundred meters, the old houses gave way to more recent pavilions, more spaced out, separated by lawns and hedges or fences. There too, no sign of life. No noise, no movement. The whole village, I had noted in passing, was given over to the harsh rays of the sun, since no trees were planted along the road. There was no forest in the distance either, nor any pleasant or picturesque scenery; only the plain, quite flat, and endless. All this gave a depressing impression of nakedness. I had forgotten the address where I was supposed to go, and after parking at random, I had spent a good twenty minutes walking through the village from beginning to end, two or three times – until my mother, probably seeing me through a window, came out of a house. That house was nicely decorated, warm, and had a family that was obviously quite well-to-do, but not a "nouveau riche" family. Many other inhabitants of the village were there; obviously, here, the notion of community was still a reality, it was not at all a dormitory village. I had been quickly slipped a glass of champagne in my hand (but who really celebrates the 14th of July, by the way? who were these people for whom all this still makes sense?) and I had finally spent a pleasant day, telling myself that if nature likes to hide, so does social life, community life; the countryside is perhaps not as dead and anonymous as one thinks when one crosses it as a stranger. They simply protect themselves from us.

Ruins garden

Last night's dream: I visit some ruins with a man I was supposed to work with on a building site or something.

He was probably the surveyor from the land registry with whom I had worked for a month as a young man to earn some money. I've forgotten his name, and to tell the truth, his face too. We spent our days in the car, going from building site to building site, in all the suburban areas under construction that were gradually encircling my town. We spoke very little, we just took measurements. We didn't believe anyone. It was a peaceful job, quite physical but restful for the mind.

In this dream, then, we arrive at the place where we have to work and I point out some old and abandoned houses, telling him that it drives me crazy to see these houses, once inhabited by the first citizens of this place (which place? I don't remember), now in this state. As you go on, there are only ruins, more and more gigantic – partly broken domes, remains of multi-storey walls, etc. Or, on the other hand, we see below us, in the incredibly deep foundations of future buildings, the underground floors of ancient buildings that have now been uncovered - remains of swimming pools, assemblies and arenas, terraced gardens. It's stunning and dizzying.

There's not much difference, in the mind's eye, I suppose, between a construction site and a garden of ruins – apart from some scaffolding.

Sinister joy

I remember a bike ride with my family when I was a teenager in strange, dark autumn weather. The kind of weather that should be depressing but actually produces the opposite effect; a kind of sinister joy. My father and I had stopped at a village pub to wait for my mother and sister, who were lost on the way. The silence was almost total. No one was passing by. I was fascinated by this silence and this peace, under this heavy and grey sky, which appeared to me then as the sky that suited our region, our "race", for reasons that I was still unable to formulate.

*

Over the years, I have travelled a lot through the same valley, following the river and the villages that lived on its banks. Sometimes on foot, but most often on bicycle. I dreamt a lot about it, too - and the places, and the bikes. Sometimes in my dreams we were large groups of cyclists, a real community, going further and further into this forgotten, peaceful, unspoilt rural area, at the very end of which was and still is a Gallo-Roman thermal town whose ruins can be visited. So it was a journey through space and time; leaving the town behind, pedalling with all one's might towards the past, towards the origins, under a grey, stormy sky, electric like a brain buzzing with memories that want to come to the surface of the consciousness.

Night routes

For a few months, when I was about thirty years old, I had a curious habit, born from anxiety, insomnia and loneliness; that of making many trips by car, at night, driving at random in the countryside, with a destination chosen at random but always far away and still unknown, with the very precise aim of feeling lost, of feeling far away, of feeling in the middle of nowhere, alone, in the darkness and the cold light of the moon, driving towards a place where nobody was waiting for me and where I had nothing to do.

Now that I think about it, maybe it was a way to act out what was my situation in life in general, and in a way to mimic it: being alone, being lost, being in the dark. Moving towards an unknown and hazardous goal, which I knew in advance I would not find.

Meyerbach

When I was about thirty years old, not long before I lost my mother, I had undertaken with my sister and her a visit of the places where our family originated, on her side. A farm, an uninteresting village on the side of the road... But there was also a day in this town near Paris where she took us to a large white house, rather decrepit, which reminded me of the few more or less abandoned houses belonging to the army on Avenue Joffre in my own town – a legacy of the German occupation after 1871. She explained that the house was called "Meyerbach".

It had become a kind of orphanage or home for troubled teenagers and young adults. We had an ancestor who had lived there when it was a mansion. Was he the master in question or an employee, I'll never know. The moment was quite moving; I was eager to enter this building to explore it, to discover it – whereas I had never wondered about the very existence of such a house, and would have passed by without paying the slightest attention to it if my mother had not pointed it out to us, I now felt the need to make it part of my life, to make it mine, or to make myself part of it, of its history, even of its present life, preparing, after all, to become an orphan myself, soon, and to wander through life like the young people who lived there.

Post tenebras lux

As a teenager, I once broke into a house. It was at the bottom of my street and bordered a square, or more precisely a plot of land half concreted, the other half with a few trees and tall grass. This square was bounded by an old wall on three sides and surrounded by houses and private gardens. One of these houses was particularly old, half-timbered, and had been called "the executioner's house" since time immemorial. Legend has it that it was the house of Joan of Arc's executioner.

It seemed vaguely abandoned; it wasn't in ruins at all, but there was something silent, still, asleep, like a holiday home, perhaps.

I entered it one summer afternoon with a schoolmate, Julia, with whom I had kept some distant relations. We knew (I can't tell you now how) that a door at the back, leading to the kitchen, was never locked.

My heart was pounding with the feeling that I was committing a transgression greater than a simple break-in. A moral, even metaphysical transgression, which I was unable to articulate precisely at my young age. Perhaps I was simply drawn to committing a forbidden act, drawn to the very idea of crime, of breaking and entering, of voyeurism. Not with the aim of harming anyone, but with the idea, again unstated, that at the end of the transgression awaited me revelations, a richness and depth of existence that a well-regulated, honest, law-abiding daily life did not allow.

The house was not abandoned at all. It was richly furnished and full of fascinating objects, clean and welcoming, warm and woody. I was not at all surprised; on the contrary, it was like finding myself in front of an obvious setting, a spectacle, that I knew obscurely I had to meet one day. A necessary step in my life, an archetypal house that I had to explore soon or later. I wandered with Julia through the rooms, taking my time, stopping on each knick-knack or old piece of furniture, fascinated.

I remember a long wooden table, a fireplace, a kitchen with ochre tiles and copper pans, well framed paintings on the walls, a thick dark leather sofa; I remember exposed beams, thick stone walls, fabric cushions, succulents and old books, I remember the fruit baskets, the first floor with its cosy bedrooms (there were three, obviously a family lived there, the parents and from the decoration, two teenagers, boy and girl).

An Amstrad CPC 6128, old cupboards, a wooden staircase, immemorial. The centuries seemed to cohabit here in peace.

It wasn't dark, strictly speaking, in the house, but the daylight came in soft, golden, lazy rays; it seemed slowed down, muted, respectful of the privacy, the tranquillity, the peace of the occupants, whose lives I wondered what they might look like and what kind of life they might lead in this place. Their existence, at the same time, seemed to me a little incongruous, almost theoretical and implausible; the house seemed made to remain silent, motionless, like a pure décor, a pure idea of a domestic paradise that should not be defiled by its presence. Perhaps the inhabitants avoided going home after having felt the same way I did?

On the way out we came face to face with a woman on a bicycle; the owner of the place. Julia ran away. But the woman was smiling, she seemed amused that she had caught us in the act and that she owned a house capable of producing such an attraction. I told her without any reluctance or shyness about my exploration of her intimate domain. It was like telling her how I would have made love to her – I was unable to consciously make that comparison at my young age, but the situation disturbed me in the same way. The landlady, who must have been in her forties, seemed to understand this, with intelligence and indulgence.

I don't know how long we had been in the house, but as I spoke to this smiling, almost entirely silent woman, who encouraged me to continue my confession with her simple smile, still riding her bicycle with one foot on the ground, I realised that dusk was falling; a warm, intense twilight, which gilded everything in a golden light, an idyllic light which further accentuated the attraction I felt for this older woman with whom I had just established a more intimate bond than I could have hoped for; a heavenly or Luciferian light, I don't know, but which secretly meant, for me alone, that my quest was a success.

Memory of very early childhood

I am in the courtyard behind the building where we live, on this street just outside the city, overlooking seemingly endless fields and forests. I see men walking towards the field and the orchards behind the building. Perhaps they are in disguise. Or dressed in a strange way, unusual for the child that I am. I feel that a kind of game is being prepared, a very serious game; something warlike is coming out of all this; that's the feeling that comes over me anyway. I want to join them.

Boarding house

Memory of my twenty, twenty-one years. I am alone and arrive in a kind of boarding house, in the Paris region. I had booked for three days. There is no one there except the owner. The establishment is tiny, but with an incredible number of rooms, small corridors and staircases. Everything is warm, wooded, with lots of little knick-knacks. A real doll's house, and a family house at the same time – a family house such as I have never known in my life and probably never will. The idea strikes me. Once in the room, I start to cry, without really knowing why; both with sadness and relief to finally be in such a place.

The first man and woman

I thought of an episode from my youth, when I arrived at the chalet on Saturday night to spend the weekend with my partner. I won't go into the nitty-gritty details, but I once spent the night at the cottage with a much older woman (she was probably in her 50s, maybe a little older) when I was about 25 or 26. She was clearly a wife and mother, although I had not met any of her relatives. As luck would have it, we were the only occupants of the refuge – which is open to all members of the sports association that owns it – until the next day. We had had dinner, each at his own table, in the living room, exchanging a few words, more out of politeness than anything else, then I had gone upstairs to bed.

She had entered the dormitory where I was sleeping, to lie down there, a little later, unaware of my presence since she had not turned on the light. When she finally realized it, she had a strange little laugh, and we had quickly moved closer to each other. I'm sure she wasn't used to it, and that my charm had little to do with it. I am also sure that this would not have happened if the same situation had occurred in a different place. It was the chalet itself. The solitude in the middle of the mountain, the endless forests, the absolute darkness inside the chalet and outside. The wooded, ancient décor and the rustic, almost primitive life it hosted. We were like the first man and woman, naturally and irresistibly drawn to each other.

Announcement

This blog will start again soon because I have a little more time to myself again. But its name and URL will change and become PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF NOTHINGNESS. I realize that my relationship to landscapes and space is as much, if not more, in the realm of fiction, night dreaming, imagination, memories... as it is in the realm of daytime life and the physical, conscious exploration of rural or urban places. Fiction, dreams and company, that is to say nothingness... but to which answers an even greater nothingness, that of the outside world, which behind the facades of theatrical scenery that it offers us day after day, hides a terrifying, despairing emptiness.