Leçons de Ténèbres

« Beginnings are always to be done again. So you have to begin again. Go right back to the start. From this same sentiment. Always the same. Begin again unceasingly, write the same things, write them again, try to make yourself understood, try to make yourself heard even if the adventure is in vain and even if it must obey the rules. You have to believe in it anyway. Never let anything go, hang onto the words, don’t lose any of them. Pick up the one that falls. And if it seems lost, let yourself be obsessed by it until it goes back into its rightful place, until it finds the rhythm of the clock and the order of the clouds. Never let anything go until the body says that there is nothing more to be said. Because it is only then that something of the soul appears. Because it is only then that breath becomes perfume and the note becomes a fugue. »

Extasy of Emptiness

“A spectral body crying out truths that it is impossible to say, thwarting every story, linking end to end that which can never be sung. A body of spoken words which right from the start, knows that « beginnings must always be redone », that the force of impulsion is quickly exhausted, but that this is no reason to give up. « Never give up until the body says that it has nothing more to say. Because it is only at that point that something of the soul appears».

An infernal spiral of words that go round in rings, where words that you know come back and where one tries to say the unspeakable. Something like the impossible X-ray of non-existence. An occurrence of echos, a mixture of calls, asides, secrets and failures, which would try to put to music the first bars of a polyphony that tears apart death and desire without stopping. An outbreak of fierceness and helplessness to say « I can no-longer put up with having thousands of books which have already been burned, stuck at the back of my throat. ».

Fallen tension, mistakes, breathing the impossible, rythmed, rolling round itself before being abolished.

Writing in aqua-fortis, picking up on the pureness of the blades of a knife as much as on the giddiness that makes you go mad. « The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, to measure it, to probe it and to go down there ». And there is effectively the descent into hell, in these Lessons of Darkness, because of an actor with a predestined name, examining the sensual night and the depths of the being under the mysteries of what is poetic, and a writing whose niggling efforts to find shape and beauty, comes from the desire to exorcise anguish from the unspeakable.”

Richard Blin, Le Matricule des Anges, June 2006.