Existence (english version)

“I therefore declare that the oneirocritic* must be well equipped with his own inner resources and make use of his own judgment, and not rely solely on books; for whoever believes that he must become a perfect oneirocritic through art alone, without natural aptitude, will remain imperfect and will not succeed, and this all the more so the more he is practiced in the art: for if one has erred from the outset, the further one advances, the further one goes astray.”

Artemidorus of Daldis, Oneirocritica

The elsewhere of the Moon Child and his companions, Pinocchio the Other, Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, and a few others, is not a geographical place, but a space of meaning that opens or closes according to encounters. Existence is this incessant crossing of unpredictable spaces, where each step engages the whole of being.
I often say that existence is a holding oneself outside of. But this “outside of” is not a simple distancing. It is a clearing. I hold myself outside my habits and my securities. And yet, I hold firm. There is here a fundamental tension: I do not collapse, but I do not rest upon anything stable. Existence is this holding without support.
That is why it is inseparable from time. Not measurable time, but lived time, the time that opens when something happens. In the event, you see, time ceases to be a succession. It becomes depth. The instant is no longer a point; it is a field where the past is reconfigured and where the future takes shape without being predictable. To exist is to inhabit this temporal depth.
I also discover that existence cannot be proven. It cannot be demonstrated conceptually. It is verified in ordeal. Where nothing happens, where everything functions according to established rules, existence withdraws. It reappears when the world becomes problematic, when it demands from me a transformation of my way of being present.
Thus, to exist is not to survive, nor is it merely to endure. To exist is to respond to what comes without recourse to a prior model. It is to consent to openness, even when it is vertiginous. And if I speak of existence, it is never to define it, but to bear witness to this fragile and decisive experience in which, suddenly, something makes world—and in the same movement, I become other than I was.

*
The word oneirocritic comes from ancient Greek oneiros (ὄνειρος), “dream,” and krinein (κρίνειν), “to judge, to discern, to interpret.” The oneirocritic is therefore, originally, the one who distinguishes within the dream, who performs a sorting, a reading, a decision. He does not merely receive the nocturnal image: he judges it, in the ancient sense of the term—he draws out its possible meaning, he tests its scope.