The Time of Writing

the time of writing

I find it difficult to say exactly what I’ve learned from the writing workshops I’ve attended since 2022. And perhaps it isn’t even necessary to make a list. So many things, and so many ways of looking at the same things. And at the same time, strangely, the sense that I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know — more or less.

That, in itself, confirms what I believe about any form of real pedagogy : we don’t teach — we help people remember. To become aware of what they already carry within them, if only faintly. To gain confidence in that awareness.

It’s often so fleeting that one might mistake it for an illusion or a fantasy. But it isn’t. What we absorb when reading a book, visiting an exhibition, going to the cinema or the theatre — we can’t measure its unconscious impact, but it’s there, undeniably. The art of teaching lies in building bridges between our constrained, conditioned consciousness and that wider reservoir of unprocessed, felt experience.

Writing is a way of teaching myself these things. It is being both the student and the teacher. And in the act of writing, time changes shape. Past, present and future collapse into a single space-time — often indeterminate, hard to locate from within.

I often look up from the screen, astonished at the time, because the experience of writing seems to belong to another rhythm altogether.

The time of writing is not the time of the world — and entering that time carries a certain risk. Since 2019, I’ve noticed how much more I’ve withdrawn into it. Maybe because that date marks, for many, a kind of shift : the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, the quiet collapse of one version of reality into another.

But I could just as easily mention 2008 and the financial crisis, or 1973–74 and the oil shocks. These ruptures shape our era. What they bring to light is a kind of collective time — punctuated by successive shocks, which affirm its presence, or its fragility.

Writing might begin within this shared time, but it quickly moves beyond it. You come to see that these events — far from being definitive — are merely portals : entry points into deeper layers of perception, of the world, of the self. Layers far more complex than what general information allows us to imagine or believe.

Yesterday, I was listening to the writer Pierre Jovanovic speaking about his latest book, 2008, while putting some order back into the studio. Lately I’ve been training myself to listen to podcasts or recordings while doing tasks that require little attention.

In that state, my attention is neither fixed nor scattered. It floats. I’m not absorbed by what I hear, nor by what I do. My focus is suspended — vacant but receptive, hovering somewhere in between.

It’s what I call floating attention.

I have the feeling that, in this mode, more information sinks in. Not in the usual way, but as if differently tagged. Each piece comes with a faint trace of awareness — a filament — which makes it easier to retrieve later, should I ever need it.

I had read Jovanovic long ago, probably in one of those red J’ai Lu paperbacks on the supernatural. An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels. I didn’t retain much from it. I was fifteen, maybe. I quickly moved on to Robert Charroux’s books — in the same genre but more substantial, or so they seemed to me then.

That was the time — adolescence — when everything wobbles : the world, reality, and of course, oneself. My interest in the supernatural matched that moment of doubt, that passage beneath the Caudine Forks, when something from childhood has to be surrendered — the sense of omnipotence, the security of certainties — in order to step, however awkwardly, into what is called adulthood.

But to pass through, one must first yield. One must be humbled. One must recognise that the world is not made in our image. Perhaps that’s what those early readings were for : to test the boundaries of what I thought was real, to peer over the edge of belief, before accepting that nothing holds — or rather, that everything holds only through the stories we choose to inhabit.

And so I was surprised to find Jovanovic again, years later, in a series of interviews now branded “conspiratorial,” talking about the 2008 crash. But what struck me wasn’t the label. It was a question. Listening to him, I found myself asking : what was I doing in 2008 ?

I remembered only in fragments — how I lived through that crisis with people around me. While tidying the studio, I came across some old drawings and paintings from that period. Things I had never thought worth showing. But in them, something persisted. The chaos, the disorder — it returned me to that moment.

The drawings remembered. But me ? Not really. I couldn’t retrieve the texture of my life back then. Everything blurred. I hadn’t kept a journal. I had no way to locate those micro-events buried in the shadow of History — all the tiny, lived details that are the real substance of a life.

So I thought about the notebooks I keep today. About what I put in them. About what I leave out. And I wondered : ten years from now, if I reread them, will they help me recover what I’m living now ?

I’m not sure.

visual : Prague 2008

français