“What are we, indeed, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived since our birth” – Henri Bergson
You will excuse me, I hope, for this further step towards a December with nostalgic overtones. The Christmas lights, the fir trees, the hints of childhood that cling everywhere to the windows, but especially the airport, make me sensitive to this notion of “duration”, quite Bergsonian; to this thread stretched from the beginning towards the future, to this form of the relationship to intimate time, renewed by our memory which says something about our deep, continuous being, embedded in its line of time.
While waiting for the flight that will bring me home, Brian Eno as a tradition in the ears, filled with the reading of your magnificent stories about your grandparents or your grandchildren, moved to also continue this dialogue between your memory and mine, I let myself write you a chronicle in daydreams, which could certainly be projected on super 8 images.
I had to leave my copy of The Arab of the future 6 which I was so proud to bring back ahead of its release in Quebec, because I had to make room for something much more precious. No matter how much I sat on my suitcase, crushing the shortbread, the caramels and the fleur de sel, there was no more room: a classic. In Brittany, we kiss each other three times when parting, “to leave a jealous cheek”, as they say. I have always liked this image of a cheek carrying an absence, which would tirelessly claim its share of due. In my child’s head, an ocean took shape, like the one that separated me from my family, on my cheek, an ocean that took a whole year, sometimes even two, before resolving into reunion.
This Lacanian idea of the void as the generator of a desire was thus so close to its incarnation, on my cheek, but it also found its place in my suitcase. However, I never learned to leave an empty space on the outward journey, in order to be able to bring home what will be full of our “inseparable distances” (borrowed from the title of the very beautiful collection of poetry by Mélanie Noël). No, I never learned. However, all these years, there was something absurd, but essential to bring back. Every time. My mother did bring back her father’s ashes in her suitcase in 2011. “Nothing to declare? “No, one person, one human life, reduced to ashes, that’s all.” »
This time, it wasn’t raining in Nantes, but it was just like: December, wet and gray. I passed by the Île des machines, the Jardin des Plantes as far as Landreau before going out towards the street that I knew by heart, the wheels of my suitcases echoing in the small passage opening onto a version of my seventh birthday, my twelve, sixteen, twenty-five years, on all these “I” who had passed so often by here. The door opened on beloved people who had grown old: my uncle Marco and my aunt Mimi, whom I had not seen since the illness. We were happy already, just to be there, as if our eyes were telling each other that we had a narrow escape again, for the moment.
We talked about the children growing up, we looked at the photos, then talked about their holidays in the Gers. My aunt, always so kind to me, told me: “You are strong, you say, with what you have been through, you are strong, my dear. And I took it, because there’s only her, perhaps, not to irritate me by calling me strong. “Yes, you’re somewhat right, Mimi…”
The house was unchanged, the cupboards with our children’s photos on them: the cousins, my sister and me, in all the variations of summer, the sibling splits nonexistent on those moments before the crises of adult life that sometimes lead us to distance ourselves from those with whom we have nevertheless shared everything, the beautiful as well as the ugly of our family dynamics necessarily always a little unbalanced.
I am still looking, after twenty years of practice and all the literature consumed, for a “normal” family such as it seems erected in the ideals of so many people. You will tell me that I am not looking in the right place, that happy people do not make the news. I would be tempted to think that it is not because we do not hear them that they do not cry in the pillow, too, between two Christmas meals, at the reading of the will in which they understand that the inequality felt as a child persists until the end, or even at the award ceremony for the eldest, in the car on their way home, on their feeling of having always been “less than”, in the indentation of the days that still keep “apart from”, “responsible for” or even, above all, “guilty of”.
“Hey, Marco, do you remember that super 8 film, your trip to Quebec in 1981? You projected it to us when I was seven. It ends with images of the sky filmed through the porthole. You talk about this sky between you and your sister, with sad music. I was crying all the tears in my body at the end of the screening. You know, I think that’s the first emotion, let’s say “artistic”, that I’ve felt in my whole life: those images of clouds passing by at the end of your film. »
We don’t know what we pass on to our nephews, nieces and other godchildren, in all those moments when we are just living our adult life, not knowing that the children receive everything from us, are already building themselves clinging to a host of details. He got up, went to get me the box.
I had to leave my copy of The Arab of the future 6. Instead, I brought back the summer of my first birthday, in super 8, to transfer to a USB key.
It will be our jealous cheek this time. We have to meet again, so that I can bring him the film, the key, once again.