A
collection of phrases
by Jean-Michel
MAULPOIX
Translated from the original
French by Catherine Wieder
I suffer from a strange
disease : my body is full of phrases. Worn into holes
with words and eaten by worms, it is now moved but by
those greedy creatures slowly emptying it from its
substance. Words prosper over my ignorance, swallow as
they think it, feel and experience what pleases them.
They exist in my place. I perceive less and less the
light of the day. I hardly ever live in that very world
still. My heart is no longer mine. I am a collection of
phrases.
I don't know any longer
wherefrom they come, or to whom they may belong. It is
impossible for me to make out between those I had read in
the past and those I personally wrote. My own books are
even difficult for me to understand. I speak with the
words of others. I am no longer a person, but some kind
of catalogue of formulas and faces. The other person is
closer to me than my own self. I have no thoughts left,
only assumed music.
I got used to that illness.
I even delight in it in some way. I am such a trivial
thing. Depossession is its good fortune. « Hello
», « Goodnight », « How are you ?
», « I love you so much my love » : the
other person's words are familiar and willing to help. I
am grateful to phrases and sentences to take care of my
good fortune. Far from closing in onto solid certainties,
they remain ajar, they shiver of their being an enigma,
they offer up an inducement.
Would their muffled tone be
so clear, would they be so swift as to settle forever in
one's mind, weren't they to express but their pathetic
truth which living day after day inflicts upon us those
very discrepancies ? These words do something else : they
sing. Without even noticing it, they protect one from
dying. They do not voice what forever should be, thay
draw gardens, invent a completely new day or sleep within
the blue.
I do not wish to tell
stories. I wish to hear on the page ordinary voices of
men and women appealing and shouting at a vast silence.
Hesitating or fearful voices, but voices in tune indeed
as those which in the old days one heard singing in
churches, and which may have thought had some kind of
knowledge. Voices through which gods were passing, where
death itself could be worded despite its broken
bones.
Such voices rarely rise. One
hardly hears them. Love displays but a dull sound. One's
heart beats without any fuss, one must prick up one's ear
to become aware of its murmur. But there remains quite a
few beaches, quite a few subburbs wherefrom people come
home late and gardens after the shower of rain. Enough to
survive quite a while, far less lonely than it seems,
bent over white pages or turned towards the window,
trying to stare at the blue.
Undoubtedly, will I never
know who I am nor where I am. Surely will I never be sure
of having ever been someone. All the words I learn behind
me seem to remember the man dreamt by the child I once
were. Here I am standing in them like a shadow, close to
my true face, no longer trying to coat myself in it, only
soothed by watching it as if it were someone
else's.
The ink wanders away with
the days tracing its lines, turning the pages over,
keeping the obscure dim by itself, trying as much as
possible not to mention it, repeating ceaselessly that
one will be bound to die and that living is but holding
back one's tears, letting one loose only a little, then
adjusting on to time, fitting love to dying, and pulling
oneself back again, speaking aptly in the uncertain,
waiting and leaving as words wait and let themselves go
in order to break the habit of being nothing.
Still loving and forever
more that which carries us away and undoes us, since such
is our good. Those adventureless days, those identical
gestures, such a lost time and the giving up of false
hope and the softness of an evening after a shower of
rain ; all these children which one won't have, all that
love that one won't make, the cross, the bag and the lid
with woven flowers, badly contained cries and wet
handkerchieves.
We write books that last
longer than we do. Such is our pain increased. I repeat
to myself on the page the very small triviality of my
being. The fairer the phrase, the more it brings despair,
the more accurate it thus becomes. What it says is far
less important than that to which it measures itself. It
may be a gesture for nothing's sake, one of those which
sometimes one delineates in the night towards one's
fellow creatures when no one remains. An anxious gesture
of love, both huge and objectless.
