(My old reflexes set in again on this page, I’m not working well, in fact, I don’t feel well, as I’m writing I want to cry and that’s not normal. I’d promised Léonore we’d go see Kirikou and the Sorceress today, Sunday, at eleven. Marie-Christine came and rang the doorbell in the night, I’d just fallen asleep, to tell me she wanted to stay together. I said no. Maybe I’ll add the intermediate phases later. After Kirikou. I told her no. I repeated it. She asked her question again several times. I said “you woke me up” in any case the answer is no. It’s not a question of whether I want to or not, it’s that I don’t want to. She left at a run, she ran away, her dog running behind her, not even on a leash. She’d tried to choke me before. She got down on all fours above me, I was lying down, I was in bed in my nightshirt. She was fully dressed, in the outfit she wore to that dinner and her leather jacket. She straddled me, she took my throat, my neck, in her hands and pushed with all the strength in her arms. I grabbed her wrists to make her stop, she could have killed me. She sat on the ground next to the bed and started squeezing my arm very tight and shaking it. I let my arm go limp, completely, I let it go. I was exhausted. Of course I still am. She slammed the door and stumbled down the stairs, running down the street to disappear from my sight as quickly as possible, I was at the window, I was calling to her, I think I’d have liked her to come back, complete nonsense, ridiculous, overdone, disproportionate, again I took the usual dose before going to bed. This morning my tongue is swollen, doughy, I’m thirsty, nothing matters anymore.)
The cinema with Léonore, Sunday morning, 6 December
We’re on time, but the line extends to the wall across the way, people are wondering if they’ll get a seat, there are children, adults. Everyone is standing on line. I go to the end of the line with Léonore, it’s not a straight line, it’s hard to tell who’s in front and who’s behind, it’s not obvious. Unless you’d gotten there first and watched the order in which everyone arrived. I take my place in line and move forward as the line advances. Some guy, thirty, tall, brown-haired, with a mixed-race wife and a young child, says to me, very confidently, “so you want to cut in front of me, is that it? You know perfectly well I’m ahead of you.” No, I’m moving forward, that’s all, I’m not trying to take his place, not at all. I’ve got other things on my mind. The line moves forward again, again he gives me a sidelong glance, bending down because he’s very tall, and a lot heftier than I am, “you’re in a hurry, what’s your problem?” I’m already upset enough by the night I just spent, but I finally say to him “if you don’t like the way I walk, that’s too bad, I’m sorry.” Again he accuses me of trying to cut in front of him, he was first. At that point, I grab him. The whole street can hear, I yell, I grab his arm by the sleeve of his anorak. I push him in front of me, shoving him so he’s well in front, completely and fully in front. “You’re ridiculous,” he tells me. The crowd is silent, people look away when I meet their eyes, their mouths are busy with other things, their eyes too. I tell Léonore that the guy was bugging me, I hope it didn’t bother her. She said no.
(The film was good.)
When I got home, there was a long message.
“I don’t know if you’re there or if you’re screening your calls. I’d like to see you today, so we can give each other something before we break off completely or get back together. I don’t want us to forget, but to forgive. What we had together was beautiful.” She wasn’t home, I called her cell phone, she was on the tennis court. She was happy when she heard it ring.
That’s fine, but everything that happened before this is not going to just disappear. The trigger on November 25th can’t be overcome. I was talking about causes, profound causes. To go into that, stir it all up? What good would that do? Will it make the book more interesting? No. It won’t make the book more interesting. And most of all, it’s not very polite. It’s not essential, essential, I’m perverse, just consider the way I engage in mental torture. To the point where some people, made crazy by things I’d said to them, these people around me, close to me, were driven to beat me, to insult me, sometimes very harshly (bitch, disgusting, perverse, whore, that all happened), to strangle me (two times, once in Bordeaux, and once right here in Montpellier), to shake me, to beat me, insult me. But always, pushed to the limit, I trust them when they say, at their limit, that they know me, they know me well, they’ve seen me, they’ve heard me, pushed to their limit by a mechanism inside me, a verbal mechanism, extremely effective, extremely destructive, extremely sly, above all extremely sadistic, at all times evoking elements from reality, fitting, wounding, in a kind of ferocious machinery that no one can stop, certainly not me. Except death one day. Or another trigger, in the other direction. But it would all come down to the same thing. My motto could have been ‘everything can always be twisted around’ and ‘everything can always be mashed together’ so it’s logical. I went to see my homeopathic doctor yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d last seen her, she gave me mercurius, mercury, quicksilver, quoting the corresponding phrase: “wanting to break social conventions or to see them only as the instrument of human relations, he ended up breaking human bonds themselves,” it’s logical. I need logic. I’m getting there, others understand that I say what I think. In Sujet Angot, there’s a passage in which Claude says as a compliment: “your writing is so unbelievable, intelligent, muddled, but always luminous, accessible, direct, physical. Your readers don’t understand a thing and they understand everything. It’s intimate, personal, shameless, autobiographical, and universal. You are touching without using gimmicks, without being emotional, you make people think with bits and bobs, a miracle of logical disorganization. Freedom without chaos, openness without drift.” That’s very kind, but he doesn’t get it. It wasn’t freedom without chaos anymore, but the opposite, nor was it openness without drift, but the opposite. I couldn’t take it anymore. With my muddled bits and bobs. I have a critical apparatus, there, a rather solid one. Roudinesco’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, I’m happy with it. At my level. As they say, by the way, people who say “at my level” put themselves down, I don’t claim to be a specialist either, I’ve got my limitations, I’m a failure, I try to be logical, simple, and to make myself understood by most people. If everyone did the same, we wouldn’t have all this shit. A lot of writers think they’re hot shit, that’s not very polite.
Valda candy
What is a substratum? It comes from substernere, underlay. That which serves as a foundation for another existence, without which a reality (conceived of as accidental) could not subsist. Without which the trigger would not have had all these consequences. It’s the substance, the essence, the base. On which an action is carried out. Queneau, “a solid substratum for the development of the actions which he might conceive,” Renan, “the earth provides the substratum, the field of battle and of work, but man provides the soul.” The earth, that element upon which lies a geological layer. Linguistically, the Gallic substratum in France. The substratum. What are the zones? What is the terrain? Upon what does it grow?