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.
Walks along the canal. I park my car on the gravel parking of the marina. It is still cold – a film of frost, almost imperceptible, still covers the landscape and the things.
A sheep's carcass, or an animal I can't identify, on the frozen water. At the same time atrocious and atrociously photogenic.
I walk along the water, towards the farm where E... and I have been a few times, and continue on beyond.
I take pictures that look like post-apocalyptic, Chernobyl-like landscapes, mixing tall grass, rocks, blackened walls, drainpipes coming from who knows where.
I am in a strange mental state. Following this river, in absolute solitude, sometimes punctuated by a dilapidated barn, a brick warehouse or a bare metal structure, on a winter morning, gives a curious sensation of spiritual, religious experience, a kind of local equivalent of the Ganges revised by Tarkovski.
I lead a minimalist, routine, cramped, minimalist life. I need to escape, to explore, to see something else. The world can't be so poor, so reduced to a restricted series of utilitarian places, ugly areas where nothing is possible. There must be something to see, something to do. There must be territories still hidden, where everything is untouched. There has to be.
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.
Stroll on the heights of Neunkirch, this afternoon – as often these days. When I turned off, after the airfield, to go to the forest, along these endless and inextricable thickets permanently flown over, it seems, by whole nations of crows, I noticed a strange grove. By some chance or necessity, it was exactly on a corridor. It seemed as if a strong draught was coming out of it. And there was something cheerful and lively about this draught, which, I don't know why, evoked adventure, travel, novelty.
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.
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.
