Unfaithful

 
“Gentleness, though… A gentleness that cannot be measured, that cannot be reduced to any idea, to any feeling. A gentleness that words have not taught me, that paintings, films, musical airs, rhythms have not been able to restore to me. It is there, the supreme softness, at this instant, so evident, so pure, so disturbing that I would like to tear myself away from the ghost of my body and plunge into it, merge with it, swim in this sea, float, wander, dissolve!It happened to me, it was given to me, to me who asked for nothing, who hoped for nothing! It burst forth, immensely bursting forth from everywhere at once, appearing miraculously, continuously, over the spectacle of reality. Before it, there was nothing. Or rather, there was the room, with its walls covered in yellowish paper, its wooden furniture, its paper books, its windows, its door, its rugs and blankets, its stained ceiling, its bare electric bulb at the end of the twisted wire. And then, all at once, as I was looking at it, reality became covered in crystal. Nothing shattered, nothing sparkled; transparent light settled upon the world, so beautiful that I could no longer understand. Everything, absolutely everything, was there; at once strange and familiar, distant and very near, magical and calm. The air was like fire. The walls were like fire. The scattered, motionless objects stood upright by themselves like flames. In the closed room, the electric light burst from the bulb with a fierce brilliance. Sounds, smells, sensations of distance or hardness, presence—all of this merged with vision. Everything became an unfolded spectacle, a spectacle that I did more than see, that I was, that I was. Delicate, chiselled, minute in the smallest detail, the miracle was constructed without moving. It was in itself, settled into its own life, and it could no longer disappear. With my eyes, stretched out before me like tentacles, I touched the layers of air. I passed through them while vibrating, and I went far beyond the walls of the room. Like a race through black and icy emptiness, the movement of my sight and my senses advanced through the midst of existence. The naked objects, as if placed on pedestals, were erected and became statues. Glass, metal, granular plastic matter, beige, ochre, yellow, white, grey colours were spread everywhere. Each pose was at once armoured, hermetically enclosed in its impenetrable and fierce shell, and at the same time livid, transparent, slippery—one ventured into it as into a drop of water.”

J. M. G. Le Clézio, The Material Ecstasy, Folio Essays

Anatole’s Journal

Around me, language circulates with ease. Exchanges happen quickly. Words find their place. I perceive this movement. At times, I accompany it. But when I try to bring into it what I feel, something contracts. The chosen word does not hold. It lets the essential slip away. It freezes what, within me, remains alive, mobile, still in formation.

I then understand that the language I use is not the language of my experience. It belongs to the common world, to its usages, to its necessities. It does not matter which one: it always presupposes a prior reduction. Yet what passes through me resists this operation. It overflows. It exceeds the available frames. To speak, I must constantly translate. I must look for equivalents or, at the very least, accept approximations that seem unfaithful to me.

This inner labour is constant. It exhausts me. What reaches others arrives diminished, sometimes awkward… and even, most often, if not opaque, then at least complicated. The gap becomes visible. My silence is interpreted as emptiness. My slowness is taken for a lack. People think I do not grasp, when in fact I grasp too much. I am seen as dreamy, distracted, elsewhere, as if withdrawn from the world, when in truth I am immersed in it without any filter.