Epiphanies du quotidien, 2017
As if there wasn’t enough reality, that abominable reality…
Henri Michaux
It’s been 20 years now. Why do you keep coming back to it? It’s not an easy question. I get it a lot. Sometimes it just hangs between my footsteps and I get caught up in it. In response, the first few lines of speeches talk about youth, its somewhat sorry energy, its smiling resignation, but nothing conclusive. Disorder.
But if I retained for a moment this word “disorder” and questioned it, I would notice a certain adequacy between my disorder and the disorder governing these towns and villages and this entire territory. This territory that does not know emptiness, where the few acres left untouched by the secular frenzy have been erected with stelae – and that calms me.
Getting out of the airport on every return trip, in the taxi, heckled by the traffic jam, the din, the inane driving, the nitrogen and nitrates, I simply sink into a world where I was already there, rocked in the shadow of its chaos. A world where I feel recognized. A look, a dog, rags on the wall, a wash-house, a ladybug on the half-lowered window of a car, a butcher’s shop on the pavement, the convulsion of a bus, the burning of tea… I receive them like dictams. Death, violence, fever, air dripping with dust and metals, the overload of space: nothing offends me. The question of time at last has received a cyclical explanation, finding itself radically exhausted, and resting! I am in the right place. A place that seeks its balance between order and disorder, between fiction and reality.
There, by dwelling on what is hidden in the half-light, just next to the facts, or underneath, or behind, or god knows where in their vicinity, in abandonment to their most tenuous glimmers, it would be possible to aggregate the beginning of an answer to this question: “why Nepal? »
Frédéric Lecloux