Nowhere left to go, no way out. One finds oneself there, deep within the cave, having slid through galleries increasingly narrow. Turning back is simply not an option. The gaze falls upon a vast chamber, blocked at its far end by a lake whose waters, dark as onyx, offer little invitation to cross. The ceiling, an immense vault, loses itself in a gloom where only the eyes, by now accustomed, perceive the limestone strata, the rock beds, and the hanging concretions, silent menaces. Fissures weep, leaving a slick patina on the millennia-sculpted walls.
One sits down, utterly spent, on the clayey, rocky ground. The notebook is there, in a pocket. No need for light. In this penumbra, everything somehow clarifies. One remembers the heroes of Homer, Ulysses, Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, figures from school textbooks. And one observes, with an almost cruel clarity : it was all a lie. The truth being by no means the least of those deceptions. This very realisation, no doubt, had propelled one into this chasm, down to the water table, into the unfathomable depths. Each step of the descent into the earth’s entrails, through diaclases and natural chimneys, unravelled another illusion. Having arrived here, before this black lake, this ultimate siphon, one knows the goal has finally been reached. The bottom has been touched ; the idea of turning back or pushing further is no longer relevant. One sits, and one makes a note of it, driven by a dog-like fidelity to some imaginary master.
It’s the only thing that comes to mind this morning. This embryonic story. As if one simply couldn’t help it, this ineluctable compulsion to narrate. It is the end. The end of the world, that announced annihilation ; the end of everything, that abyssal vacuity ; one’s own end, that dissolution. Yet, there’s nothing else to do but tell stories, over and over, until the sheer disgust that the merest fiction, the slightest fabrication, now imposes.
Then, the scene shifts. Without warning. A dizzying leap, from the cave’s depths to the quotidian. The heat is less oppressive this morning. The swifts’ cries tear the air, a nearly tangible rip in the morning quiet. A solution has been found for the cat’s pâté sachets : half in the morning, half in the evening, the rest in the fridge. If she’s still hungry, there’s always dry food nearby. These past few days, the visceral suffering of bodies—beast and human—had been a binding agent, the only tangible connection. A primal empathy, born of generalized weariness. It vanishes with the returning coolness. No pity for this large insect struggling to right itself. A shoe. The concrete. The broom. The drain, an abyss more insignificant, yet just as definitive.
One attempts to recall. How did one cope before ? Faced with raw absurdity, with unspeakable horror ? Observation was a blade to be sharpened day after day, hour after hour. Observation allowed one to gain purchase on something tangible, concrete. To assess situations, to relativize them, to gain a minimum of distance, of salutary perspective. Often, this constant vigilance would conclude in biting irony, sometimes in a corrosive cynicism. It was also a form of descent, towards the arsehole of the world. Once arrived at the climax, the terminus, perhaps something would finally happen. A decisive choice between stalactite and stalagmite. Between devastating cynicism and redemptive love.
And there it is, the desk. A canvas, yes, but a primal sketch, the inaugural stratum of a work in progress. The modus operandi remains intuitive, a deliberate quest without a clear roadmap. One proceeds by random impulses on the canvas, or on the page. Here, a voluminous figure emerges ; there, a more discreet silhouette takes shape ; elsewhere, faint notes take form. The stakes : discovering an unprecedented way of inhabiting pictorial space, because one still doesn’t quite grasp how to occupy it, what its intrinsic correlation with oneself might be, what fundamental reason justifies their coexistence.
The very act of employing a distinct vocabulary amuses. There’s a profound seriousness in this amusement. It’s a movement to escape a habitual tongue, to attempt entry into another, still unknown. To try translating the same thing with different words. Is this not the very same approach as taking tubes of primary colours and extracting new mixtures, ideally those one isn’t accustomed to using, unprecedented shades ?
Justness, it turns out, isn’t a static perfection, but a fragile equilibrium born from imbalance itself. It holds nothing moral ; it’s a purely aesthetic harmony, resonating first in the ear. It is never an end-point, but the force that relentlessly pushes one to seek the « more precise » word, when what one thought one meant fades to make way for the unspeakable. It manifests not by erasing imperfection, but by embracing it to reach what vibrates most profoundly.
This desk is an extension, a kind of tangible metaphor for one’s website. An assumed chaos. Hundreds of texts deposited there since 2018, without apparent order, like accumulated layers of sediment. The same disarray, the same impossibility of knowing where one is going, or how one got there. This conversation itself, which began in a cul-de-sac, with the interrogation of inner necessity, the detailed description of this desk where one fears losing oneself, and the realisation that the website is its mirror. A subject, some might say, self-indulgent ?
But intimacy, as we know, is merely a door. A narrow door, certainly, but one that opens onto the universal. The justness of a voice, one’s own, that invisible koíranos, lies precisely there : in its ability to traverse the ranks, not to impose, but to probe, to connect the minute details of the desk to the vast questions of the end, of absurdity, and of that ineluctable impulse to try and say, again and again, even what cannot truly be said, with the force of a raw truth that does not fear its own chaos.
