Love. It suffices that we release the word in the public space so that we automatically try to bring us back more or less gently to order, invoking the prevalence of law, politics and serious measures on all the other dimensions of the social tragedy we are going through.
“A little serious, you don’t change people with love, come on! It’s too late to talk about love, Madame! »
Too late to talk about love.
Yet I wrote it out in full, this word which, for some reason that escapes me, has this tendency to cause our whole discourse to be reduced to some sentimentalist swelling, disconnected from reality, even ridiculous.
Yes, I wrote it, even daring to suggest that it could constitute a key in changing the ethical postures of the beings with whom we are linked by blood, cohabitation, friendship, eros or even for the better and for the worse.
I launched it from where I stand, from my sole expertise, from this telescope that understands the world from the intimate, from this word collected, implied, shouted or just let out on the couch or all the disappointments that people have come to tell me about over the years.
I found it in the hollow of all those stories told to the “I” that you still sent me, daring to defy the law of 280 characters and other comments on a news feed, giving the exercise its meaning close to the sacred.
I felt it breaking, tearing itself apart within you and between you, in those handwritten letters that you even left in my mailbox, playing the game of past centuries, those where we took the time necessary to throw, in ink on paper, “the words to say it”.
« Quartered
To want to reconcile
The bridge can’t hold
That if the foundations
Are on both shores”
wrote my neighbor M. to me on a torn page from a notebook. These are his words to express his great sorrow to go through an era which tears the members of his family apart and which kills the hopes of possible dialogues.
I picked it up, this word, like the salt floating in the basins of Guérande, after the long work of the salt worker, which helps the delicate process of crystallization of sea salt to offer us its flower, the tastiest and the most most precious parcel of flavor.
I found it in memories in all the stories of these humans stranded on the morning of their professional exhaustion — executives, workers, nurses, doctors and other carers — who, long before the pandemic, found themselves crushed by a system that asked them precisely to renounce conjugating the verbs to care for and to love. Neglecting “sentimental” issues such as the need for meaning, investment in connections, belonging or recognition has “serious” political and social consequences.
In fact, it has long been “too late for love” in this system to which we have applied for years a dehumanizing managerial logic from the industrial domain, leading to the current consequences. The DD Carignan, a retired medical specialist, also uses this word “love”, pointing out some of the aberrations she has had to face in her career.
“My heart tells me”, released the incandescent Antigone in the so successful adaptation of Sophie Deraspe which, by a curious intermediary of chance, is precisely under the magnifying glass of the Ciné-moi team of the Festival Cinéma du monde de Sherbrooke , this month. Hosted by the psychologist and so eloquent thinker of living together Rachida Azdouz, this activity which combines cinema and mental health will receive me as a guest on Saturday January 29, for a discussion on the couch and with the public around psychological issues. carried by the film. I therefore had the myth in mind all this week, at the same time as I read your tugs of war corresponding in all respects to what could be called the “codes of tragedy”. There are Antigones on all sides of this schism that we are trying to maintain between us.
Honoring one’s principles is an intimate matter, which is always rooted in issues related to love.
Among the conspirators, how many stories of lives marked by breaches of the bond of trust with the system, episodes of social disqualification, accumulated epistemic violence?
And among the unvaccinated who occupy beds (insufficient anyway), how many are marginalized, fallen between the meshes of a social net which continues to grow in our societies centered on the individual? Sometimes they don’t even have the luxury of having convictions, as this article from the Duty.
Helping to stir up the hatred of those who do not think like us stems from good political management of the crisis, the Creons of this world will say. For all the Antigones who inhabit us, ethical postures soaked in love are developed which, in the long term, could prove to be otherwise more honorable.
For information on the Ciné-moi, it’s here.