We do what we can, with what we can. Some end up clicking hours in an insurer, and from there they get scary books, which leave you lying to you, like Kafka’s. Faulkner also managed as he could, being a postman, a painter of a fat brush, library dependent, brothel goalkeeper, a host of little mounting trades, all of them watered with enough bottles, to pass the bad drink.
Others become great reporters, they wield the camera, they go from one war to another, and from there they take novels, such as the American Hemingway. The Irish Beckett, who rubbed shoulders with Joyce, as secretary, said that life is chaos between two silences. That there are only two certainties: one is to know that you have been born and, the second, to know that you have to die. And so we go aimlessly, caught between two silences, so we go from one vacuum to another.
Sometimes a vagabon crosses through, as happened to Beckett, there on Montparnasse Avenue, and nails, without reason, an absurd knife that goes to a few centimeters from the heart, also without reason, to end the life of a surname or a genealogy. Destiny has fun, taking out the knife, playing with the metal and a sopeton leaves you, in the midst of a kiss, or a phrase, or a street.
There is no formula, there are no rules. The king, as Michon writes, comes when he wants. And then, one day, hopefully, the old age falls on you. You transform into a being of remoteness, away from everyone, from all, while fright rises like water in a well. You are sunk in that solitude of the bull when it bursts into the ring. The big difference with the animal is that you know what awaits you there. But you are the same as him. When you stop and look into the eyes of the chamber, the lines, and what shines there is gold. Because, until the end, you want to burst the cape, nail the blades in the stars, that’s why the tail, smoke.
And so, already bordering the abyss, you write something impossible, a joy, a javelin, that plants in the heart of oblivion. From a blow to death. This is what Pierre Michon has just done with I write the iliad (I write the Iliad). He does it with the joy of the one who knows that there is no going back, that you can, you have to burn all the ships, that this is the last assault, with the helmet on, with the shield made, the raised sword. You know it, there is no other than throwing against the wall, there is no other than to give everything, dance, write to the blood.
And there you have it by giving a last brush to his legend, in a cheerful, erotic farewell, without tap. He has no mercy on anything or anyone. Even that venerated author who is himself. It is dotted with that figure of the author, of the work. Each page is the style, overwhelming, a bustle of verbs, of phrases that leave you lying, and lift you to the next stumble. The jubilation reaches its cusp when, already in the last chapters, all the books he has loved, who have done what he has become. Without a doubt, one of the strongest writers who have given the last decades.
Scripture is not an exercise of stuffed animals, nor a fun for caniches. It is something wild, that it should, when it is literature, put the hair of end, that crushes you, leaves you purple. We should always do it erect, such as the one that gives the assault, such as the one that is tied, against the trunk, the bagpipe, the javelin, the shield, whatever so that life does not stay still, what it kills, what saves. This is what the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad has just done in the Collège de France, in Paris, with a handful of lessons that leave you speechless. This is what Caravaggio has just done in the year of Jubileo, in a retrospective in Rome that brings together almost all his works.
To lie to death you do not need an armed or a whole fleet of ships. You need a book, a novel, a tragedy, or a canvas, just a handful of pages, just a corner, some fabric. And there you have it bleeding through the mountain, with the tail between the legs. True, she will return, she doesn’t give up that easy. But not today. Not as long as we are alive. No, while we paint, we write. And art is what it does. He keeps us alive. It hugs our neck, we get in our eyes, by mouth, like a kiss, like a sky, we get into us everywhere like the Canicle of the Word Amar.