There are those, anxiety-provoking, who refer to the numerical frameworks that dictate the proper functioning of the adults in my society: taxes, fees, accounts and other important forms that make us responsible citizens. I maintain a relationship with them that speaks of my relationship to the rules. I’ll let you guess how it happens then. Years of psychoanalysis have allowed me a slight detachment from this quasi-obligation to oppose, allowing a form of maturity, at best, of renunciation, at worst, of not conforming. Like a redrawing of the territory of opposition, I am now trying to throw into my pen or into my office all my desire to resist the norms that penetrate so many layers of our existence. Adulthood continues to exert a form of pressure on my relationship with time that gives me the feeling of never really being at the same time as the rest of the world. August is coming and I am already preparing to do my children’s school shopping at the last minute. Like a ritual that requires not starting too far in advance, as if to stretch out the vacation time before the big squeeze.
Then there are these other delays, appointments, meetings and other imperatives, which tell of my distorted relationship with time, probably justifiable, from now on, by neurological support, as evidenced by this study published in the journal Nature. Researcher Howard Eichenbaum was able to link the lateness habits of some people to the functioning of certain cells in the hippocampus, acting as “time cells” responsible for memory and the perception of time. If I rely on his findings, mine would tend to constantly underestimate the time needed for any action. So I would be late by cellular habits. Not my fault, my hippocampus’s fault! Thanks to neuroscience for allowing me to exonerate myself from all my lateness to the library, too. I would have preferred to explain my lateness by taking the beautiful interpretation that Jean-Philippe Pleau delivers in his essay Rue Duplessis. My little darkness which I finally read, late, of course. For him, the tendency to exceed the loan dates of library books was linked to his desire to possess something of his own, something that, in a certain way, already led him to set foot outside his world, his class, as if he were already beginning to exist in an elsewhere that would make him, later, this “internal immigrant”, a class defector. I am not a class defector, having grown up in the privilege of the love of literature, transmitted by my mother. But I still took refuge in the elementary school library all those lunchtimes when, as the daughter of immigrants, I suffered the pangs of intimidation based on jokes about last names, and on the denigration of this uncontrollable tendency to raise my hand when the teacher asked questions to which I knew the answer. It took me a long time to understand, well behind my classmates, that sometimes it was necessary to hide things that were considered strengths, in order to exist socially. The library, the imagination, the place outside the schoolyard, the sidewalks of notebooks much more than the sidewalks of the city became absolute refuges. I still arrive late everywhere, often, because I read.
The seahorse hypothesis nevertheless appeals to me for its poetic aspect, obviously, while it allows me to recognize in myself this relationship to time that exists in a place outside of reality, this place where I love to sit down so much to imagine my life, everything that wants to be said, that does not yet exist, this place “before-things” that I prefer, very often, to things themselves. The expression comes to me from this children’s album by Vincent Delerm, Leonardo has a left-wing sensibility (Actes Sud), which I listened to on repeat with my son when he was 4 years old. He is 13 today, but we still know by heart the dialogues between young Léo and his “Grand-Pierre”, played by a Jean Rochefort who is still so alive. The “left-wing sensitivity” explained to the child is linked to this attraction to the time “before-things”, when we inflate balloons before a party, then to this love also for the time “after-things”, while we pick up the objects forgotten by our guests and we feel this sweet melancholy of what is already over. Seahorse or not, I feel much more often that my delays are due to this installation of my existence somewhere outside of a reality that always goes too fast for me. Deep in the limbo of my anticipation, then of memory, I have to constantly make an effort to remind myself that another time exists and that I have an appointment with someone there, in, oh, 10 minutes. Already?
In the beloved slowdown of summer, I was also able to catch up on the most beautiful list of delays there is, that of reading all those books accumulated on the bedside table. After Pleau, I also finally read Élise Turcotte, as one savors one by one the most delicious bites for the soul. Her Self-portrait of another (Alto) has been with me since June, like a ghost whose presence we would like to feel, because it speaks to us the language of love, of the memory that we must keep of someone we miss even though we barely knew them. This book is poetry from beginning to end. It deposits in us frescoes drawn from the quest for oneself, which goes back to the origins of dramas, cracks that mark those who have gone before us, in the lineage. I also finished the essential essay by child psychiatrist Céline Lamy The drama of perfect childrenpublished by Atelier 10, in which she so accurately describes the major deviations that mark the contemporary way we treat childhood. I also cried abundantly while reading Every wound is a promise (Heliotrope), by Simon Brousseau, recommended by my friend Vincent Brault, whose work I had also loved so much Familiar Shadows.
So here we are on August 12, the day when “we buy a Quebec book” and, for once, I am just in time.