The March waters arrived as early as February this year. In the woods next door, stripped of all its white, we try to enjoy the break, as a family, through the smells of humus which already perfume the air-drizzle, which would remind me of my Brittany, if that. were it not for all the asphalt that replaces the sea and its spray in the marriage of the senses. It’s not just the soil that decomposes; our ideas of winter too. But we are family. We carry our children into tomorrow as best we can, accepting more and more that nothing will ever be the same again. The future moves forward, that’s its thing.
We have given up on giving up, still seeking new ways of inhabiting what seems to settle for a long time; a short winter, a winter which freezes the asphalt, cracks it without covering it with this whiteness which nevertheless makes everything brighter. We have given up giving up for them, the children, who are pushed towards tomorrow, with this mixture of denial and hope which characterizes almost all parents of my generation.
I don’t know what to worry about them anymore, there are so many different reasons in my newspaper and my radio, so I sometimes let the news slide on me. Nikki who is withdrawing, children from the DPJ who are placed in rooms without windows but with bars, and the massacre of flour slide down my cheeks in tears of helplessness which I mix with the rain, while I walk to the office after leave. It seems to me that there is no other possible disposition to what I receive from the world, other than this gray but realistic mood, similar to the sky which welcomes the beginning of March.
It allows me to survive without cutting me off from my sensitivity, otherwise I would go from gray to black, where I have the impression of finding so many people as soon as I open the office. February was heavier than in past years, it seems to me. I wonder if my colleagues would say like me, if they had to make pacts not to take action, if they had to “hold the fort” for people who no longer saw what they could relate to. to take the step which would follow the previous one, if they had to receive a sound of distress more strident than usual, they too.
Are we collectively arriving at reality, in a more brutal way? Are we only more fragile than before, as so many people who survived the century tell us, with in their tone, this little contempt characteristic of Laius who refuse to give way to youth? Or are we all just a little lost in this vast loss of meaning that so many intellectuals talk to us about?
Obviously, I lean more towards the latter hypothesis. I see us trying to tell a story that holds together, linked to a meaning that we must throw out into the open, into a void that would have replaced a common mythology, whether religious, political or just community. We lack “together,” which leaves us too alone, too quickly, too young. Sometimes I imagine that our cries of alarm that disguise themselves as mental health symptoms are the song we now sing together, just to be together. I see us chanting our exhaustions, our anxiety-depressive symptoms and all their variations and I perceive the song of a suffering horde, almost of a community. And the chorus, as in those tragedies from which we thought we were spared by progress, would regularly repeat something like “what is the meaning?” “.
Like Truman arriving at the end of the film, touching the edges of what had constituted his universe of meaning, I see us believing in it less and less, at spring break festivals, at trips to the South, at outings to restaurants, to days that disguise themselves as everyday life. I hear you tell me that, however, planes are even fuller than before the pandemic, restaurants too, and that, despite inflation, people are consuming as much as before, if not more.
But, I don’t know if it’s just me, with my psychologist-who-thinks-she-is-an-artist look. I don’t know if it’s because of the March waters that have been flowing through my office since January, if it’s the extent of the mental health problems of everyone, of all our “industries”. I don’t know if it’s me who just always tends to read everything in reverse, as if I always saw the shadow that is revealed by the most powerful of suns, the negative of the photo, I don’t know. What I know is that I perceive these behaviors as frantic outbursts, a sort of compulsion to escape established as normality, just to avoid touching the cardboard decorations of what we have always taken for granted. . Snow, skiing, the South, broccoli, Mediterranean yogurt, even if it’s $9.50, we buy it because we feel that we are gradually losing all our self-esteem.
The specter of the pandemic has perhaps only thrown us into a big “ rebound » similar to when we accumulate conquests after this rupture which would have saw us in two. So I’m waiting for the fall. I am already picking it up, in fact, this return to the asphalt of reality, which has already entered our offices, through our courageous symptoms which say for us what we have difficulty embracing in full consciousness.
Like Truman at the end of the film, I only wish us to take the little door that leads to somewhere else, even if we have no idea of what we will find, beyond our cherished habits. I wish us to have the courage to see the meaning that we could give to our existence outside of our need to consume it, to feel alive, connected to each other and to the mystery.
As Georges Moustaki sings, “It’s a trunk that’s rotting. / It’s the snow that melts, / The deep mystery, / The promise of life. »