April 1994. I am 14 years old. Spring hits the bus windows without restraint, heating the leather of the benches, filling the cabin with a half-acrid, half-sweet smell. I take a lock of my hair and place it under my nostrils to breathe something else, to take refuge in the smell of home, this perfume that I still find today on my hair after sleeping a night in my parents’ house.
I keep the CD player placed flat on my lap, to avoid the skips that cut off the songs at each pothole I encounter. It’s a long drive from home to my high school. I take care to check every morning that the batteries are full, that I certainly don’t lack music to endure my age, otherwise I seem to sink into a despair that I perceive as being very real.
Every month, I order records from the Columbia catalog, five at a time, for $5.99 per album. All the little money I have is devoted to what seems vital to me, like a second skin, similar to the one I try to put on in these years when I never really know who I am, constantly changing, always surprised by the selfhood of this otherness discovered in me. My music resembles my identity: scattered, somewhere between the roots of childhood and the projected future of this woman who already appears, through irruptions, through moments of grace where she inhabits for a few seconds an existence that contains her.
From my last order I get in the ears Siamese Dream, Dookie, Under the Pink and this one : Live Through This, from Hole. At the same time, with my lover, I listen on repeat The last humans, of Desjardins, and the Nocturnes by Chopin. At home, I listen to my mother’s entire repertoire of French songs too loudly for her, even when it’s Barbara. I love music like everything else: too loud, without any protection, without limits. I take it from the inside, making the lines of my skin disappear to blend into the sound, to no longer be me, for a few delicious moments, to no longer carry the weight of my being.
The disappearance of oneself is part of molting, it is well known. Perhaps the whole adolescence boils down to this; to this ability to survive multiple extinctions of oneself, without disappearing for good.
At home, there is also my father’s vinyl collection, which represents, for him and me, the only possible common ground between the two of us, who do not know what to do with our bond, during all these years when I become a woman about whom he understands nothing, while he slowly loses himself around his forties. Some balmy mornings, we spend several hours discussing Crimson, Cream or Genesis, listening mostly to Pink Floyd. Lying on the brown long-pile carpet in the living room, we delight in One of These Days so loudly that my mother leaves the house, leaving us to believe in the feeling that we are finally getting along.
The rest of the time, my father represents for me the authority to circumvent, the limit to cross, the end of childhood, the anchor point for all my necessary disobediences. I’ll never really know if I loved Courtney Love even more specifically because he hated her.
On my bedroom wall — still lilac, despite my repeated requests to paint it black, so that I could draw the triangle of The Dark Side of the Moon —, a huge poster of Courtney takes pride of place. She displays her face with a thousand and one paradoxes, both melancholic and wild, tragic and Dionysian. Lace and violence coexist on her body, following her child’s dress with collars, revealing her bare arms on which we can make out the bruises of the needles. Courtney self-destructs, and the album Live Through This appears a few weeks after Kurt’s suicide, making her the black widow par excellence for our minds seeking tragedy as a response to what we experience at every moment of our lives, even though they are so stable.
Every time my father opens the door to speak to me, he stumbles upon her, and his whole being is revulsed. I’m a little triumphant, inside.
I wear my dress on purpose, a little too short for school regulations, the black one, which I slip over cream tights before putting on my black heeled ballet flats. To top it off, I put on my pink heart-shaped sunglasses. He rolls his eyes every time he passes me before the bus. I escape from it with this feeling of living stronger, while spring awaits me, with its arms made of freedom.
I am her.
I embrace the violence that is part of my gender, turning it on itself, becoming both complicit and turned against it, thinking myself immensely powerful, while I scream with it: “ You should learn how to say no! »
Anger is embodied in the feminine. With Courtney, then with Björk, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos or Kim Deal.
But the more we hate Courtney, who presents something decidedly more broken than the others, the more I love her.
Like many “parent-child” couples, my father and I embody in this moment of our lives, in an almost literal way, the archetypal encounter between the rebel (the stink) and the resistant to change (the senex). In analytical psychology, the archetypal tensions conspicuous in personal relational theaters are thought of on the assumption that one never exists without the other. Very often, the psychic task then consists of integrating the part projected onto the other in order to transform ourselves in a way that makes us more mature, and less confined to a single pole of the conversation. My father also had a rebel in him, facing an authority thirty years older than him.
Thirty years later, while spring knocks more timidly, in the windows of my car, I find myself putting Purple too loud in the morning on my way to work.
I then find within myself the raw material of this perpetual desire to exist outside of all the frameworks that people try to put on me. I return to the origin of a cry, which I sometimes find so childish, while I myself am the mother of a teenager who now also lives with an earphone fixed in his ear.
Do I now inhabit the other pole of the conversation? Already ?
I wonder if we really stop being that person we dared to be, somewhere between 14 and 17, in a more or less happy way.
IM asking you.