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.

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.

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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.