Franketienne - Ready to Burst

Dying Man: I haven’t even finished my day and here you are calling for me. All these unfinished tasks and aborted dreams I’ll leave behind me!

Death: Don’t worry yourself over such small things. It’s time for you to rest. After so many years on stage. Life is a theater in the round where the actors remain standing. For the entire time. Since the curtain never lowers, it’s quite a responsibility I’ve taken on — making exhausted actors lie down.

Dying Man: No. I’m far from exhausted. I’ve still got plenty of lines on the tip of my tongue. Let me get in a few more tirades. And then I’ll retire my role.

Death: Alas! It’s far too late for that. What have you done with your life, from your birth to this day … pitiful mortal?

Dying Man: I’ve been looking for myself.

Death: Did you find yourself?

Dying Man: Life slipped through my fingers. I was never able to get ahold of it.

Death: Because you only ever thought of yourself. Because others didn’t exist for you. Say! What happened to your friends? Your parents?

Dying Man: My parents are dead.

Death: I know.

Dying Man: My defunct mother, a naïve peasant impregnated by my defunct father. A rich industrialist. Possessed by the demon of eroticism. Violently subjugated by sexual passion. A misogynist of the worst order, he always said, in true macho style, that all women are females. He got into the pants of half a dozen every day.

Death: Sad record!

Dying Man: That was his battlefield. His field of honor. His personal war. His sickness. His favorite game — until that fatal heart attack. He died of it one night. Having left this earth voluptuously in a final burst of sperm.

Death: Glory be to him, that valiant cavalier of horizontal confrontations!

Dying Man: Well before his death, he’d stopped taking care of me. I grew up quickly. Torn between the pity I felt for my mother and the hatred I felt for everyone else around me. The taste for solitude took root in me.

Death: But solitude is no more than an escape. Vain flight. Often an impasse.

Dying Man: Yet I never gave up the fight. To get out of the impasse was the challenge I’d given to myself.

Death: You were too attached to your unhappy past. Did you ever break the infernal circle of the “I” in order to enter into the luminous round that is the “we?” Did you for even one day try to break through the triangle of limitation? Did you really acknowledge your weaknesses? What have you done with your life?

Dying Man: My whole life I’ve owned up to both my strengths and my weaknesses. I’ve never claimed to be an angel. Nor a saint either. I was born in the dust of an uncertain dawn. Obstacles, unexpectedness, spontaneity, pain, bursts of sorrow and joy fill my travel journal from my long journey to unknown lands.

Death: You never knew the itinerary. You didn’t even make an effort to figure out the point of the journey.

Dying Man: I tried. Looked. Stumbled. The journey is peopled with nightmares. Each time I glimpse the light, a wave of mist rises up. A thick fog immediately covers my eyelids. And then, fearing exile on the edge of this darkness, I run tirelessly into closed doors. Barely does a bit of light begin to flutter than the breath of evil snuffs out all hope at its roots.

Death: So you give up, having neither the courage nor the patience to handle impossibility during difficult times. What would you do if I left and didn’t take you? How would you choose to live the newest scenes of this great drama?

Dying Man: I wouldn’t hesitate. I would still choose to be a man. And not a saint. I would be reborn with the same weaknesses. I would make the same mistakes that led to me remaining a man — that is, a being who seeks himself in the cries of blood in the darkness.

Eyes wild, and inspired by Paulin’s feverishly related imaginary dialogue, Raynand presses him further:

— Paulin, I think that’s all you need to put in your work. Write a novel drawn from the fodder of your own life. And that just might end up being worth something. Because it will be the lived history of a man. Sending out a luminous band into the night while waiting to discover the very heart of the day. Moving from the differential to the integral. That’s the miracle you could achieve in using the most central facts of your own life.

— You’ve got that absolutely right, Raynand. In the tracing of the spiral, I’ve written pages that recall somehow the journal of a traveler who’s set off to follow a series of overlapping and fleeting paths.

— How so? Tell me what you mean.

— These pages, despite their autobiographical nature, distinguish themselves from a private journal. They’re not burdened by any chronology. They’re more like a tangled film. The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life. In these pages, the essential for me was to give free rein to my imagination as it rides memories that, paradoxically, belong at once to the past, the present, and even prolong my life into a formless future. Spiralist writing mixes up time and space. It’s an aesthetic approach that emerges from both relativity and quantum theory.

— This sounds like a promising experience — one that I’d like to follow closely. Would you allow me to read a few pages?

— I have no objection to that. I’ll give them to you right now, if you’d like. You can read them this evening, at your place. These pages are poetic, written in the style of the Total Genre. The Spiralist genre, which embraces at once the novel, poetry, the folktale, theater … In an impressive liaison. The whole thing harmonized in a single architectural ensemble. In order to reconcile art and life.

— Okay, you can give me a few pages. I’ll read them tonight.

Paulin gets up from his worktable. He opens the right-hand drawer of a pine desk and takes out a stack of marked-up papers to give to Raynand.

Back in his modest room, Raynand readies himself to read the pages Paulin has written. Ten o’clock. The night is calm. So he’ll be able to read without being disturbed. Savoring the first lines, he lights a cigarette. As he reads, fragments of thoughts and images emerge. Form arabesques. Then disappear. With certain passages, an entire inner world opens up. A world that’s nearly ungraspable. Pure cry. Poetic vision. Will-o’-the-wisps of a fermenting brain. Is the point to try and capture some glimmer? One would have to use a new writing technique, then — one capable of following the uneven and intermittent unfolding of the inner panorama. And of capturing the concentric ideas, the parallel or divergent beams, the vanishing waves. A sort of quest within the subconscious that would call for the sheet of paper to be split into two columns: on the left, the writer’s text; on the right, in the form of annotations, the resonances provoked in the reader. Or better still, the left page would be used for the bursts of writing of a fictional nature. And the right page would be for the whirling of the interior monologue and the subtext.

How and when am I going to die? Moment of contact with the hereafter. Crime doesn’t take the weekend off. It takes a lot more effort to come back from a bad dream than to get tangled up in sleep. Forgetting. Branch by branch. Stone by stone. Flesh bitten by the knife. Strike of fangs. Spurting of fresh blood. Liquefaction happens incessantly. I become an accomplice to the wind that separates out the dirt and the poisonous fillings.