Tuesday 11 March 2014

...of desertion

Surprising that I've never been stricken by panic here, isolated as I am, without weapons, nor any hope for help. I'd shout myself hoarse to no purpose, nobody would come running, they'd step slowly closer, surround me, a real death trap.
A simple matter to climb to the windows if you're not afraid of nettles, the door itself, despite its two bolts... But no, I fall asleep peacefully, naked under the sheet as always, often threw it off lately, until the storm.
Daylight rims the curtains, awakens me, I often spend a long moment scrutinising the space of the room, verifying its qualities, the space of the dream that has just ended endures and disturbs it, and the mournful voices inhabiting it.
I don't like staying in bed, once my eyes are opened; as soon as I'm up, everything falls back into place, marks and points of reference, the planned agenda, the state of things, of my ideas on the question, if I may be so bold.
Big fears in the past, sudden, insurmountable, I barricaded myself in, ran from one window to another, certain that the prowler had already slipped inside the house, threaded his way up the stairs, was lying in ambush behind an upstairs door or crouched in the attic, biding his time.
A harmless noise triggered the alarm, those cracks and bangs that can be heard at all times, the alarm arises from a meeting, between noise and intimate voice, between voice and intimate voice, between traces of places, faraway and with no point in common, drawing toward each other in the darkness of their dwelling and brushing close, then steering clear of one another.
That I experience nothing more of the sort can be ascribed to the cramped space, I believe, to its simplicity, to this regrouping of all functions on one level, or else something has really transformed itself in the distribution and preservation of traces, or the majority of traces are erased, become inoffensive, devitalised in a way.
I may well have lost my emotivity, my sensibility perhaps. Like those people in the village? Overcome like them by apathy, without noticing? Is this a flash of insight, burst of lucidity, reprieve or warning?
What suave, underhand work on the subject, in order to make it compatible - nerves and muscles, gaze, understanding, elocution - with the new order?
Silence. Great silence all around, the silence of men, birds, everywhere weeds, sunken lanes become footpaths, dismantled fences, livestock evacuated a long while ago, slaughtered no doubt, or dead of hunger, carcasses in the meadows, scrap metal of cars abandoned there, frames of skeletons rising in the scrub, farms and barns in ruins, or else incinerated, pillaged.

[Disconnection, Ollier, C.]

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