A Thing Moving Slowly
A metronome regularity. The only one. The rest — no. Quite irregular. Erratic, maybe. As if it were extracted, that regularity, like metal from a hill. Not gold. Let’s not get carried away. Something duller. Tin, at best.
That regularity, thank God, clips his wings. Or tries to. If you want it medical : the only thing in him that isn’t soft. That doesn’t give way. He writes. Every day. From four to eight. Writes. What ? God knows. He won’t say. Shows nothing. Better that way, perhaps. If he’d been a genius, someone would’ve noticed by now.
Slept badly. Woke up early. Right away, the word mesh pressed in. Then to mesh. Then mallet. Three words. No sense. Stuck from the dream maybe.
Drank lukewarm coffee. Watched the table catch the morning light. Thought of articles. Linking them. How ? Take disappearance. Only one match. Not a hundred and eighty. And what for ? What sense in linking a hundred and eighty texts to that ? None. It wouldn’t read. It would collapse.
Best reduce. Boil down. Just a few. A handful around disappearance. The rest — let it vanish.
Ran a query for body. Three hundred forty-seven. Could make a file, yes. Markdown. ID. Title. A sentence. But who cares. Cold work. Not fun. Not even useful. Just... worth thinking about.
Then mallet again. Back again. Wouldn’t leave. As if hitting mesh. A blow. Word on word.
The more the absurd closes in, the more he digs in. Is it out there, though ? That absurd ? One wonders. Might just be a show. A match. Boxing or wrestling. Makes no difference. Outside like inside. Just as absurd.
Sometimes it brushes him. The solution. A flicker. Tear down the wall. Between in and out. Fall into immanence.
But how do you breathe there. In immanence. Air’s got to go in. Carbon out. The living are subject to it. Contingency. Even that’s absurd.
What hides in disappearance ? A last desire ? A whisper of hope ? Return, perhaps. Resurrection. Catholic, that. A remnant. Formatting that never took. He’s thought of reformatting his brain. More than once, these past days. Better : no brain at all. Just sensation. The body alive. Everything erased to make room for the little self. That petty I. Always talking. Yapping.
The body wouldn’t say I. It would say the body. Third person. A third again. Always a third. One, two, three. Always three. Until no more sound. Nothing comes out the mouth.
It’s already far along. He hardly speaks now. The body’s terse. The gesture — minimal.
Yesterday. The short walk to the bakery. The body and the pavement, one. Step after step. That was it.
Up there, the martins screamed. Sliced what was left of thought. It was okay. Not good. Not bad. It was.
The body, if it can be said, became aware. Of itself. Too late. No celebration. No need. No musicians called. No speeches made.
The wind flicked the glasses cord. A whisper. Sounded like tinnitus, at first. Then you knew. Outside. Then the body became a thing. A slow mountain. Moving.
What was felt came from far. From stillness. From crystal. From flint.
Pour continuer
Carnets | mai 2025
31 mai 2025
Mai s'achève sur un constat bancal. Trop de code, pas assez de mots. Encore moins de couleurs sur la toile. L'équation ne tient pas. Ce qui frappe, c'est cette solitude technique. Personne à qui demander. Alors on cherche, on bricole, on plante, on recommence. Peut-être que l'argent n'explique pas tout. Peut-être que j'aime buter contre les choses, m'y cogner le crâne jusqu'à l'éclatement. Ça vaut pour tout : le bricolage du dimanche, l'administratif qui colle aux doigts comme une mélasse hostile, les recettes ratées, le développement qui résiste, les cartes routières qui mentent, les livres qui refusent l'ordre qu'on voudrait leur imposer. Et derrière cette résistance du monde, cette inertie des choses, plane toujours le fantasme du définitif. Le résultat final, immuable, parfait. Sauf que seule la mort tient ses promesses. Le reste flotte, instable, perpétuellement. Cette instabilité ne m'effraie plus vraiment. Je crois y avoir toujours baigné, comme dans un liquide amniotique qui n'aurait jamais voulu se rompre. Ni joie ni plainte. Juste cet état de fait. Mes rêves de grandeur ? Évaporés ou presque. Grand peintre, grand écrivain, grand photographe, grand quelque chose – tout ça s'est dilué. Pourtant, il suffit parfois de s'illusionner suffisamment pour le devenir, grand. Ça demande une naïveté d'enfant, du premier degré pur. Puis vient l'autre naïveté, celle du second degré, qui surgit après les années de lucidité supposée. C'est elle qui me pousse à écrire exactement ce que je viens d'écrire. May ends on a lopsided assessment. Too much code, not enough words. Even fewer colors on canvas. The equation doesn't hold. What strikes me is this technical solitude. No one to ask. So you search, you tinker, you crash, you start over. Maybe money doesn't explain everything. Maybe I like bumping against things, banging my skull against them until it cracks. This applies to everything : Sunday DIY projects, administrative tasks that stick to your fingers like hostile molasses, failed recipes, resistant development, lying road maps, books that refuse the order you'd like to impose on them. And behind this resistance of the world, this inertia of things, always looms the fantasy of the definitive. The final result, immutable, perfect. Except only death keeps its promises. Everything else floats, unstable, perpetually. This instability doesn't really frighten me anymore. I think I've always bathed in it, like in amniotic fluid that never wanted to break. Neither joy nor complaint. Just this state of fact. My dreams of greatness ? Evaporated or almost. Great painter, great writer, great photographer, great something – all of that has dissolved. Yet sometimes it's enough to delude yourself sufficiently to become it, great. It requires a child's naïveté, pure first degree. Then comes the other naïveté, that of the second degree, which emerges after years of supposed lucidity. It's the one that pushes me to write exactly what I just wrote.|couper{180}
Carnets | mai 2025
30 mai 2025
Installer une IA locale. Pourquoi pas. Elle trierait, classerait, rangerait mes dossiers dans un ordre plus logique que celui que j’ai jamais eu. Elle serait discrète, rapide, et sourde au reste du monde. Un petit employé modèle, dans mon HP Pavilion 23 qui fatigue. J’y ai cru. Un peu. J’ai fini par installer Mistral, 4,1 Go, via Ollama. Avant lui, un modèle plus léger, plus bête aussi. Presque analphabète. PHY, peut-être. Il fallait Docker. Il fallait WebUI. Il fallait de la place. J’en manquais. J’ai forcé. Évidemment, ça n’a pas marché comme prévu. Le plan : reprendre mes dossiers Obsidian, leur demander de m’expliquer ce qu’ils faisaient là, trouver un fil, des liens, une cohérence. J’aurais dû me méfier. Chaque outil exigeait un autre outil, comme si tout s’appelait en cascade. Python, GPU, base vectorielle, boucles d’espoir. Je me complique la vie. C’est une habitude. Ou une manière d’organiser ma déception. Elle arrive toujours vite, elle connaît le chemin. Chez moi, elle n’a même pas besoin de frapper. Le pompon : le RAG local. Rien qu’un nom comme ça, déjà, ça sent le problème. Pour faire tourner un script, il fallait une cargaison de dépendances. J’ai tout installé. J’ai tout supprimé. Plus de place. Ce temps que j’y passe, je ne sais pas. C’est beaucoup. C’est sans doute de l’évitement. Mais éviter quoi ? Réussir quelque chose ? Finir ? Ce serait fâcheux. Finir, c’est enterrer. On appelle ça un aboutissement. On met une nappe blanche, un plat chaud, on dit quelques mots, et voilà. Je m’entraîne. C’est un exercice. Une répétition. Pour la suite. Pour ce qui ne se répète pas. La fatigue est là, le reste aussi. Et pourtant, ça continue. Avec moi. Sans moi. Installing a local AI. Why not. It would sort things out, put files in order, make sense of the mess. Quiet, efficient, blind to the world. A small clerk in my old HP Pavilion, wheezing. I believed it. A little. Mistral, 4.1 GB, via Ollama. Before that, a smaller model. Illiterate, almost. PHY, I think. Needed Docker. Needed WebUI. Needed space. I didn’t have it. I forced it. It failed, of course. The idea was simple. Reopen all Obsidian notes. Ask them to explain themselves. Find threads. Patterns. Meaning. Foolish. Every tool needed another tool. Python, GPU, vector base, the whole lot. Hope called hope, called hope again. I must enjoy this. Making it hard. Or just the rhythm : hope, then fall. Fall faster. I know the way. Disappointment does too. She lives here. RAG. Local. Just a script, they said. Before the script, dependencies. Before dependencies, more. Installed. Deleted. No more room. The time I spend. Absurd. I know. A diversion. From what ? Still no clue. From doing something ? From finishing ? That would be worse. Finishing means flowers. Means speeches. A plate of food. The end. So I train. I rehearse. For what won’t rehearse. Fatigue, yes. Disgust too. Still, it goes on. With me. Without me.|couper{180}
Carnets | mai 2025
29 mai 2025
Tais-toi, me dit-elle — non comme un reproche, mais comme si mon silence lui-même bavardait, et ce bavardage ne naissait pas du silence qui est nécessaire. Bien que, ce qui est nécessaire, peut-être, c'est que rien ne soit nécessaire du tout. Puis elle entra. Dans ses bras, des gerbes de fleurs. Des glaïeuls, peut-être. Cela aurait pu être trop — trop éclatant, trop cruel. Tais-toi encore. Écoute — comme il n'y a rien à dire. Et je la désirais en cet instant exactement comme elle était — simple, absolument simple. Si simple que toutes mes complexités superposées, toujours construites pour ne pas la voir, s'effondrèrent. Je la vis. Je m'étais assis sur le lit. Elle trouva un vase quelque part parmi le bric-à-brac et commença à arranger les fleurs. La tâche semblait exiger toute son attention — à tel point que je me demandai : était-elle venue ici par erreur ? Cette visite était-elle faite dans la distraction ? C'était un test, encore — comment dépasser cette possibilité. Qu'elle puisse être si distraite qu'il me faudrait mobiliser toutes les fibres de mon attention seulement pour la suivre, pour la retrouver à nouveau. La lumière s'infiltrait dans la pièce, lentement. Et avec elle, les contours des choses commencèrent à se dissoudre. Ce qui nous entourait ne portait plus de définition — ce n'était ni plaisant ni déplaisant. C'était. Un silence d'un autre ordre — au-delà de ce que j'appelais autrefois silence, qui, je le vois maintenant, n'était que du bruit. Maintenant les fleurs se dressaient dans le vase, le vase sur la table, et c'était tout ce que je pouvais voir dans la pièce. Elle, même elle, avait disparu. Par la fenêtre ouverte montaient et entraient les bruits de la rue. Ils semblaient les seules choses vivantes. Tout ce qui avait été, et tout ce qui viendrait, n'était que silence — un espace blanc entre deux mots. Facing the Simple Be silent, she said to me—not as a reprimand, but as if my silence itself were chattering, and that chatter not born of the silence that is needed. Although, what is needed, perhaps, is that nothing be needed at all. Then she entered. In her arms, sprays of flowers. Gladiolus, perhaps. It could have been too much—too bright, too cruel. Be silent still. Listen— to how there is nothing to say. And I desired her in that moment exactly as she was—simple, utterly simple. So simple that all my layered complexities, always built to unsee her, collapsed. I saw her. I had sat down on the bed. She found a vase somewhere among the bric-a-brac and began to arrange the flowers. The task seemed to demand her full attention—so much so that I wondered : had she come here by mistake ? Was this a visit made in distraction ? It was a test, again—how to surpass that possibility. That she might be so distracted I would need to summon all the fibres of my attention only to follow her, to meet her again. Light seeped into the room, slowly. And with it, the outlines of things began to dissolve. What surrounded us no longer bore definition—it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was. A silence of another order—beyond what I once called silence, which, I now see, was only noise. Now the flowers stood in the vase, the vase upon the table, and that was all I could see in the room. She, even she, had vanished. From the open window the street sounds rose and entered. They seemed the only living things. Everything that had been, and all that would come, was only silence—a white space between two words.|couper{180}
