(Excerpt from "Texts in seeds" at Editions de l'Harmattan) by Thierry Aymès. 

 

“What occasion was it? I don't remember exactly. It was late, very late. More precisely should I say that it was very early in the morning; 3h30 approximately. I was walking alone in the town where a party had just ended. I didn't want to go home. I was little more than intoxicated. My legs were both heavy and light, paradoxical. I remember thinking that a metaphysician would have loved them at that precise moment. They were the sign of another body, another gait, another life. Alone, inches from my eyes, they defied logic and yet guided me without shaking where I needed to go. The light from the streetlamps reached me after being dressed in a twinkle which I had imagined only Christmas could be the magician. I was wandering around in the middle of August. Joë Bousquet came to mind; a very short phrase from the poet. Where had I read it? In the gold panning mess of my adolescence, I had delicately torn it out of a context that hadn't seemed to support it; my heart had recognized her as an orphan, detached from her textual landscape; he had liked her sovereign bearing, her extraordinary banality. I said to myself: “How attentive and present does one have to be to write such a thing! “For the poet, it was not a question of writing, but more simply of welcoming, of transforming the dazzling reality into words. He had achieved the miracle of a conversion without waste, of a transposition without betrayal. This sentence read: “This year, summer comes by night! " Wonderful ! He had been very close to the world to experience its slightest convulsions. Summer had then appeared to me like a gigantic spaceship whose stealth a few rare crickets and late cicadas had undertaken to underline. I had said to him: “Thank you Joe! for this lesson that I was re-reading today.

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In the street where I was wandering, I had slowed down; I had only to speak to the trees, to the sleeping grass. A few cans were strewn on the ground and I felt like stopping to learn obedience. They seemed to consent to the few gusts of wind that led their dance much more staggering than mine, much more erratic. I had continued to advance like that in the night, "fists in my pockets" which had been "punctured", but which my mother had expressly patched up without knowing the harm she was doing to my love of poetry; "my T-shirt was also becoming ideal" and I had secretly planned to hide it from his obsession. There are things that cannot be repaired if one wants to know bohemianism.

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Suddenly, in the round part of a bend leading to a “Phoenix” housing estate, I saw a dog trotting towards me. It was from his soaked coat that I understood that the rain had begun to fall. I then felt a shiver that was barely mine. The animal was of good size, and rather ugly; of these canids which we guess smell bad as soon as we see them. Formerly the aftertaste of a bad wine had reminded me of its smell. The round muzzle stretched in my direction, a meter away from me, he seemed to wonder what I was doing there. We stopped. A big storm had finally broken out, but it wasn't raining. Squatting on the macadam, I looked at him and he looked at me. Time no longer existed; neither time nor water. It was his eyes that delighted me, his gaze that broke into me. No offense to Antisthenes or Spinoza, that dog did not bark, but he was not a concept. I had suddenly joined him where he had perhaps always been, on the other side of the word which was supposed to designate the class to which he belonged. He was… With me, as one is alive, without a shadow of a doubt, point blank. I saw it, therefore I am… Again. Nothing, nothing more. Not even silence. A smile on my face or his. Then we resumed our journey, and a sentence came to me that I carry in my heart as one carries the invisible trace of a kiss that we were hoping for.

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“I grew up from a passing dog”.

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That's how I received it, beautifully lame and fearsomely precise, just above grammar.

While I am writing, my “friend of existence” passes by again and forever. Bergson had been right to write that usually  » we do not see the things themselves; we confine ourselves, most often, to reading the labels pasted on them” Sartre, in Nausea, did he not introduce Roquentin to this same experience when faced with the root of a chestnut tree? Its unnamable nodosity, its inertia at the same time as "[...] its color, its form [...]" did they not appear to him   "below any explanation", any rationality, of any language? And did not Siddharta Gautama in his time experience similar enlightenment? Did he not have a vision of THAT which is as It is?

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No disgust, rather a clearing, in the darkness of a hamlet that our sudden “presence” had “absent”. No dissonance, no absurdity, rather a grace; the blissful awareness of existing on this side of the lie; the mute joy of experiencing the reunion of things and the end of the idea. Long before this miracle, Yves Bonnefoy had given me that taste, and his anti-Platonism had secretly led me to this meeting… It was certain.

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No, it wasn't raining that night. It was dark and the sun was shining...

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Since that year, much more than before, I never ceased to be on the lookout for the smallest breakthroughs of the Being (of God?) in the smallest corners of my life. I had seen, for a few seconds… But the loot is rare where I am still looking for it, and for those who want to make a fortune in this area, it is better to give up or try to build themselves somehow on the basis of the only spangle of gold which was miraculously offered to him. How many times have I returned empty-handed from my daily quest? How many days without bread? I had to learn to suffer the austerity of the desert, the sadism of emptiness, the mechanicalness of vain. Other spangles came however to be added to this one which was already not the very first. I should consider myself lucky.

Even today, reality offers itself to me in fits and starts, like a lazy stroboscope, and lets me guess that the concepts, if they are effective and practical, distance us from the world by making us believe that they give us power over him. No… No power, but an exile; no power, but a rupture. The re-presentation is a spiel that é-monde us, while claiming to carry us to stay. It is the sign of our original diversion.

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Not "a" dog then, but that dog, one certain evening, who will have been enough to denounce the imposture of any seizure, and I intend to keep myself as close as possible to what he I learned, in the light of his presence that a summer day offered me… around 3:30. »

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