Dessin : C. Anton
Dessin : C. Anton
IN CLOUDS BEGINS RESPONSIBILITY
The sky is at war. One breakthrough lets an unruly beam of light peer out through the aerial wall. Clouds hide the mountains, they have stolen the high daunting ridges away. You are walking, suspended between earth and sky. Thoughts poised between physical and spiritual longings. Clouds hanging over you like cruel gods. Like cruel thoughts in the mental landscaped that will not go away. Relentless, stubborn, indomitable. Thoughts that will continue to conceal the beauty beyond. Invisible but present, if you could only see it! But happy are those who can believe without seeing.
It seems like you are sitting above the clouds. Striding right into them. Yet distracted by a pale pinkish slip in the far away distance, harbinger of hope and truth, reminder of the all-powerful presence of the sun. Of God. You looked up just on time to see it.
Remembering A Voice for Earth: American Writers Respond to the Earth Charter (2008).
“April is the cruelest month” T.S. Eliot
Recent natural catastrophes might come as a cruel nemesis about the urgent call to (re)consider ecology. Not just in April, on Earth Day. But every day.
De tous les incipit théâtraux, celui du Roi Lear (Shakespeare, 1606) présente vraisemblablement la dramaturgie la plus resserrée. En une centaine de vers et quelques minutes, Lear divise le royaume de Grande-Bretagne, marie ses deux filles ainées aux ducs d’Albany et de Cornouailles et maudit sa cadette, Cordélia, coupable de n’avoir pas su démontrer par les mots la force de son amour filial. Bien que courtisée par le roi de France et le duc Bourgogne, elle est violemment répudiée par son père et doit fuir la cour avec France.
Rares sont les chutes d’une ampleur et d’une intensité de celle subie par Cordélia en quelques instants. Vers 86, elle est encore « notre joie, bien que notre cadette et la plus petite, toi dont les vins de France et le lait de Bourgogne se disputent le jeune amour », avant que la malédiction de Lear ne l’évacue bien au-delà du cercle de l’humanité : « le Scythe barbare, ou celui qui fait cuire ses enfants pour assouvir sa faim, trouveront en moi autant de sympathie, de pitié ou d’accueil que toi, qui fus ma fille » (124).
Entre la princesse et l’exilée, l’amour et la damnation, la raison ou la folie, le génie de Shakespeare nous démontre qu’il n’y a que le langage pour frontière, et qu’un sort suffit pour rompre toute barrière.
The gothic model reflects on the present by conjuring up a dead past—often through the figure of the ghost. The Road begets a number of ghosts—dead or alive. McCarthy revisits some national obsessions and “curses” to use William Faulkner’s image, in particular abuses connected to the occupation of the territory and slavery. At one point, the father and the son come across a camping scene: some people have left in a hurry, abandoning the food they were getting ready to eat: “They had taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him … What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (The Road 198).
Wim Wenders’s movies bespeak his fascination for the American Wilderness. In such films as Paris, Texas and Don’t Come Knocking, however, the Western hero is prevented from walking away into the sunshine: he is trapped in a past that just will not go away.
Une révolution est en marche, à grand renfort de marketing et de publicité, à notre poignet gauche, dans nos salons, nos cuisines et nos buanderies. De nombreux objets, jusque là tout à fait muets, suivent la voie qu’ont ouverte devant eux les terminaux de communication (téléphone, ordinateur, smartphones) en accédant (le plus souvent par wi-fi) à internet. Ces objets connectés, dont on prédit qu’ils vont rapidement envahir notre environnement, redéfinissent à la fois leur fonction, les relations que nous pouvons établir avec eux, le monde et notre intimité. Ils ouvrent la voie à la dématérialisation de tout ce qui rend nos logements familiers. Dix mille ans après le début de la sédentarisation de l’humanité, les objets connectés font basculer notre habitat dans l’ère du nomadisme « in the cloud ».
Is the stage, for the actor, what the arena is for the bullfighter? The reference to Hemingway early in the film provides unusual grist for the theatrical mill. Like the torero, the actor has to deal with “grace under pressure” and keep his “purity of line” in the face of adversity. For him, adversity means “losing it” to bad memory, fatigue and aging. The public might embody the bulls he has to face throughout his career: he cannot turn his back on them for fear of undergoing symbolic death—becoming a “freak” or a fraud. Yet, the fiercest bull is his own self roaming on the secret stage of his expectations and delusions.
(Keeping in mind Keats’s poem “ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”)
After twenty days, you feel ready to face the glacier and come to terms with your own barrenness and harshness. At that altitude, no flowers, no birds to comfort you and release you from your existential angst. You must bring enough life in you to stand up to the surrounding desert. Bracing up for an expected fight between darkness and light, fullness and emptiness; your resilience will be tested by a full space of emptiness and void. By your fear of heights, your fear of the fog, your fear of the truthfulness and exposure involved in such an experience.
The sun is gone, now just a faint yellow blemish in the horizon. The moon is left alone as stage manager.
Piercing eye through the curtain of green.
White moon sitting on top of a snow-capped mountain like some giant Host offering itself to the world.
Pink stage, yellow and orange wings, deep blue proscenium. Then the pink gives way to a darker shade. Orgasmic light over snow shielded peaks. Knights in full armor of beauty and nobility. Spotless sky, pristine evening.
Every night a different show. A miracle of life offered anew to the beholder. Au veilleur.
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