You are currently viewing Rien à offrir (hormis ton beau mensonge)
Asleep in my beautiful lie | Image © David Noir from photo © Philippe Savoir

Nothing to offer (except your beautiful lie)

Think about your lie

The human being is only true through the lie of what he plays, the superb bluff of his characters' lives.

Nothing to offer, just a tailor-made lie

My name is Bonnie... Liar

The story I'm going to tell you blah blah blah... is a sad one. I know sadder ones, less sad ones, dramatic ones. This one is just sad. You either won't care or you'll probably want to understand this story, because most people want to understand and be able to follow the story. Me, I hate stories. At best, I don't care about them.

I only like the characters; I don't want to know the details of what happens to them; just look at how beautiful they are sometimes, when I find them so. I like the myths better and exclusively their souls at the expense of what happens to them. And over and over again the same thing happens to them - to us; that's the strength of their supposed stories; there's no need to tell them. They fade away in favour of a character, a destiny. It doesn't matter why it has come to this; it's just the way it is; there's no other way.

So to get back to the details that make the sad story I want, not tellWhat an ugly word, good for La Cartoucherie, but portrayed here, I will give you the details as an eternal prologue so as not to come back to it. It will be done like that and you will only have to refer to it, to remember it if it still interests you during the pages which, fatally, will not follow. I might as well tell you that I don't like to be held in suspense by the plot of a well-crafted novel, nor by the art of the pure granite scenario.

That's why I have sympathy for video games where we get lost; amazing art that often takes over from poetry and truly abstract art that is overdue to open the windows of those suffocating in the novels and cinema of weak writers.

Real lies; not false stories

That's what the theatre was for, but it's outlived its usefulness. Maybe just a way of presenting things. I'll stop this digression. This one only, because you'll have digressions; you'll only have that. If you don't want it, you have to go somewhere else. But here, for this prologue, to give a little thread to those who are pleased, I'm going to discipline myself just once, despite the disgust I have for it. After that, hooray for fine art and clever twists that are sometimes mistaken for talent. The clever ones are poets in technician's clothing; Hitchcock for example. I really don't give a shit about his screenplay art, but he's a poet, despite himself; despite his thirst to please; so we can dream over the packaging.

But we'll talk about everything that stinks of school and commercial artists and poor poets who wish they were commercial.

Well, we'll talk about that later, but I don't have time for that - about those and all the others. But don't think I've chosen to be a hermit. My ambition today is tobe a stranger.

The artist's art seems to me to be the least interesting thing of the moment - it is never as surprising as the art of chance - with the rare exception of some who know how to courteously invite it within their rigid walls of arid creations. Thank you Kubrick. But we count them on one finger.

Lie of a sleeping character © David Noir 2011 from photo © Philippe Savoir 2005 (Rehearsal of "Cabaret Carton" by Sophie Renauld)
Lie of a sleeping character © David Noir 2011 from photo © Philippe Savoir 2005 (Rehearsal of " Cabaret Carton " by Sophie Renauld)

 

What plagues the creators ...

Unlike many others, my art is shit in the true sense of the word - non-moral, non-adult, non-deprecating; just an expulsion of the necessary surplus...

As a result, I often like people who are hateful; who have the intelligence and know-how to manipulate the world, to not be fooled by it - they have chosen their sides - I'm not talking here about the fools in power, but about the players; the small and the big.

To end up as an author would be the most bitter failure for me; I who would like to be only a body. I fantasize my inner self all the time and that's the best I can do.

Writing hasn't been useful to me for a long time. It's just a natural function. An obligatory defecation of the soul. While shitting my prose, I look at the passers-by through my telescope.

Well, here's one of those undemanding guys; one of those who betray the childish world.

Surely he's going to have children if he hasn't kept anything. But, no, he sold everything cheap in the first half of his life. "What do you mean, no children? You want the end of humanity then! "

When we see your face, we can only wish for the end of humanity. The meaning, your meanings, your single meaning, makes me hate you.

Hey, they like hierarchy; they call it choice, having a choice, choosing; "I prefer you to anyone else"; pluses and minuses; that's their vision of life to these small traders. I don't know; I've known betrayal of my values all day long; lies and denigration as a way of operating. "I'm going to die, you understand, so it's a bit urgent. Hand out and then knife in the back, why not? So we turn to culture, to the novel; always more stupid; always more stupid; with the chosen word; well chosen, as in the school of literature; that of the right word. The right adjective; the right verb, the jerks; they like it; they have the impression that we've made an effort, the jerks. It's meritorious.

And then those who profess to think, to love or hate; to have tastes; to exist. They surely have the conviction of having an opinion; I don't have one; just reactions with no basis other than my emotionality. I would like to make a work out of this jumble of moods because it is a work in itself; by nature. Nothing to prove; nothing to achieve. No love affair; certainly not; at best repair; tinkering to make it hold. New is always a rip-off; everything is destined to decay; that's how it is; as soon as it comes out of the nice bag in the nice shop.

And now, a page of advertising:

By dint of secrets, the rape of the intimate is brought to the public square.

Having parents from a very young age inevitably accentuates the spontaneous propensity to be fucked.

They lie, always; throughout their lives, they will lie. Because they will never stop envying youth as soon as they understand that theirs is gone. The young also envy youth; it is less obvious; they desire it among themselves. It is the only valuable asset. All that will be said afterwards is a real beautiful lie intended to justify that our life lasts only half of itself.

Scam, scam; burning lie; the vigor of the body, and by far, dominates all the wisdom of the old.

Wisdom, common sense, invention of the poor, the miserable who have lost their lives but refuse to admit it. There is nothing to do in life but to catch the tail of the Mickey at the right moment and live on it. Otherwise it's a different story; that of death. It is a little more interesting than the others, but also less golden to our eyes fogged with the Walt Disney sauce. However, it seems to me that most of us have chosen death as a way of life.

To choose life would have required conscience, unconsciousness, courage and cruelty. Animals choose life. There is no civilization; there is only the culture of death. Life does not need culture; it is predatory and devours as long as it has the resources. Life's only function is to sustain itself and to be. It does not exist as an idea.

Nature has no idea of life and life has no plan; only the dead do, and they let us know this by deciding for us many years later.

The only projects I know of are intended to dress up, to disguise the process of death as a dynamic of life. Because it looks better; because the gods of death are not popular since life is a value, since we have chosen it as an absolute value.

That's where the problem lies, because life has no intelligence and doesn't care to have any. It only has bio-logic; it is not distinct from survival. The human even more imbecile than the others who distinguished survival from life is surely the same idiot art critic, the same hypocritical and stupidly bourgeois spectator, who would like a distinction between pornography and eroticism; just because it hurts his ass - his ass's ideas, to be irrelevant.

Basically, I am more marked by a modest idea that crosses my mind than by a film of a worker with all his hours of work. The accumulation of work time works against efficiency.

On a certain path; on a certain path. On second thought, for lack of a better word, I'm finally in favor of preserving the bullshit of the human race. Parents, after giving birth, commit suicide. "Well my colon," he will reply, sitting on his shitter.
Come on, don't be like that. You're out of the picture, Dad. And so, because I tell you words, you think I'm telling you the truth. But yes, I like you.

The feeling of work - The "toil" indicator - The focus on one's freedom

What do you want to do with it? - What don't you want to do with it? - Everything is good. Everything is good that will end one day soon. Perhaps the worst alienation is having parents who love you. Their love is a syrupy poison that glues your wings together and makes you obey. Can I still save myself? Where? Love as a bargaining chip prevents you from living.

I understand so much that we get drunk with greatness and beautiful feelings, but then, let us be alone. That one doesn't piss off others with one's condition. So give free alcohol, cheap drugs, affection without morals. Give without thinking, without calculation. You will see afterwards what you have lost in the wreckage. There are treasures more beautiful than playful success.

Hey pixel mush, you who receive my serious, virtual and ridiculous words, here is the program of my human day:

I have to: fill my stomach, empty my balls, empty my bowels, let my head go, sometimes stretch my hands.

David Noir

David Noir, performer, actor, author, director, singer, visual artist, video maker, sound designer, teacher... carries his polymorphous nudity and his costumed childhood under the eyes and ears of anyone who wants to see and hear.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Fraggle Punk

    Let's saw the words saw

    Behind my v(i)olet, I open my mouth a little to ventilate.
    Fire Born.
    I love nothing more than life.
    Why it's all the time I forget I don't know.

    I love few other beings.
    Really.
    Of these three, there can be
    You're in it.

    My day's schedule: Huh?

  2. La Strada

    Friday 29 April: a surreal day

    Today a princess marries a prince charming! Poor thing, we forgot to tell her that princes often become toads again.

    For me today the media is curtain, I boycott.

    Rather normal working morning.
    12:00 noon, back home, little walk on the Internet.
    12:30 while answering questions from Christina who comes in to do some Friday morning cleaning, I attempt to analyze Monsieur Noir's morning moods. (Nothing to offer)
    Despite my rather evasive answers Christina insists, she has firmly decided to make conversation with me today. I persist in my reading:
    Reading: Having parents from a very young age inevitably accentuates the spontaneous propensity to be fucked...
    Christina: "And Hadrien (my son), how is his job at McDonald's?
    Reading: There's nothing in life like catching the tail of the Mickey at the right moment and living on your wits.
    Christina: "Friday I cleaned the fridge
    Reading: I have to fill my stomach, empty my balls, empty my bowels, let my head go and sometimes reach out.

    Strange Cocktail, finally quite fitting!

    1:30 pm visit to a school. The headmistress comes up to me with a wide smile and asks me "So did you see her dress? I think to myself that it is a coded message. No, no, it's Kate's dress.
    Sorry, ma'am, but I'm curtained off today.

    2:00 p.m. big meeting: all the staff was convened by elected officials and our dearest personnel officer.
    It's a festival of lies and doublespeak.
    I laugh: "Chouchou, you're really too bad, go take acting lessons.
    I'm taking the liberty of pointing out the main contradiction in the most elegant way possible, just to show them that we shouldn't take God's children for wild ducks, or more precisely, to stop taking us for fools.

    4pm: I'm in an office with two deputy mayors, two very preppy ladies, we are joined by a third, the deputy mayor for finance. This gentleman makes a loud entrance: "So you saw the kiss?" It takes me another second to land, I can't believe my ears and eyes.
    New entrance, I am now in the company of 4 sexagenarians all excited, their eyes shining, their smile blissful.
    Comments on the hats, the beauty of the Princess, and blah blah blah and blah blah.....
    I'm trying to break the mood a bit, but it's no use. They are really too cute.

    I have a little thought for Thursday night and I tell myself that I am lucky not to wait for a reincarnation to live several lives!
    In spite of myself, I am won over by a whiff of lightness, as if there had been a general distribution of joints today.

  3. THEATRICAL LURE

    In the artistic field, I have noticed that approximations, confusions, frank clumsinesses, flagrant literary dishonesty, and even perfect pseudo-poetic nonsense were admitted with disconcerting ease through the suspicious approval of a distracted or undemanding public, which was itself influenced and fooled by the support of a certain intelligentsia that endorsed these works according to criteria that belonged to it alone...

    Due to the natural laziness of the public, which does not detect these inconsistencies or simply does not dare to point them out and confront them with the authors, foolishly impressed as it is by the supposed aura of the work, as well as by guilty laziness or negligence on the part of the critics, incomprehensible, shaky, imbecilic theatrical, literary and poetic works pass into posterity.

    From then on, any negative appreciation of these works becomes subversion, gratuitous provocation, bad faith in the eyes of their creators and above all in the eyes of the "cultured" people of the artistic milieu who legitimized them.

    In the theatre, for example, the privileged place of many post-contemporary artistic experiments, poetic abuses and literary nullities of all kinds, artistic imposture is even easier. There, the (clumsy) works supported with such efficiency by the most varied scenic devices become miraculously much more digestible... In the normal order of things in art it is the text that should support the stage and not the other way around.

    I was dismayed to learn that you could make any hermetic, complex, or prodigiously boring work look good as long as it was presented in theatrical form (with its faux artistic flourishes) and still be sure to get a lot of applause! And this, even if no one really understood anything about the play or appreciated it for its substance. The work, mediocre at first, then gets lost in the clever smoke, subtle plays of lights of the theatre and its fake magic, adorns itself with the artificial nobility conferred by the flattering masks and capes of the stage and, underhandedly, the form takes the upper hand over the substance.

    And that's it!

    Suddenly - and involuntarily - given a new dimension by the technical contributions and stage tricks of the theatre, the work, however vile it may be, is accepted by the critics - and even more so by the public - duped, seduced by the avant-garde pomp or the superficial breath with which the dull original text (which is the basis of the work) has been wrapped up.

    To the mundane lies of this pretentious theatre I oppose the simplicity, clarity and sharp humour of primary theatre. So with Guignol, no intellectual trickery! I appreciate the closeness, the frankness and the crudity of this healthy show, accessible to all.

    Contemporary theatre is a kind of pantheon that is both popular and elitist, where almost any work is automatically officialized, falsely sacralized by the simple fact that it has been put on the stage and that, touched by their adulterated echoes, it resonates for a long time in the air of time. Perhaps because the floor of the theatre is ultimately much more hollow than one might think... In short, it is recognition through appearance. Here, visual effects serve literary turnips wonderfully. I compare the theatre to a balloon that inflates the tiniest texts by simply spreading words on its surface.

    Let's face it: who has ever heard whistling at the end of a performance in a provincial theatre? Obviously, almost no one! In the theatre there is a treacherous and implacable collective psychological process of not getting out of the rut, regardless of whether the play is brilliant or lousy.

    You don't go to the theatre to make a literary fuss, to make yourself look bad in front of other people who have come to enjoy a pleasant evening... The theatre is not the place to show honesty, independence of thought, or analytical spirit. It's simply a place to be festive and friendly.

    And false thinking, in my opinion.

    In short, it is out of pure gregarious mimicry, social convenience or simple courtesy towards the actors that people applaud.

    Or even, much more distressingly, for the simple reason that they paid to go and applaud a show, as if their applause justified the sometimes high price of the ticket.

    Who in a theatre would dare, alone in his corner and in front of all the reproachful audience, to whistle, boo the actors, and boo the author of the play once the performance is over? Similarly, have you ever seen a bad street singer get tomatoes thrown in his face? In real life people are obviously more diplomatic! What theatre-goers take for a discreet adherence to the play is sometimes, if not often, only a polite silence of disappointment and hypocrisy.

    Or indifference.

    The vast majority of disappointed viewers keep their opinions to themselves, thus maintaining the misunderstanding.

    In the end, thanks to a certain general complacency on the part of the public and the "officials" with regard to these writings staged on the stage, it is easy to pass on to posterity insignificant works that any honest and normally constituted reader would disown without hesitation if he or she read them in the text instead of being subjected to them indiscriminately in the theatre.

    The theatre with its emphasis and solemnity -oppressive or ridiculous- leaves neither room nor time for the spirit of protest to manifest itself, unlike the naked text that the reader faces alone in his room.

    This text was written in reaction to the play "MY FATHER, MY WAR" which I recently attended. Its author having taken note of my reflections and believing that I spoke exclusively about his work through this article showed me his astonishment. It thus seems to me useful to add this in complement to my article:

    Through my article above I was obviously not talking about the play "MY FATHER, MY WAR" in particular but about a part of contemporary literary production in general, including that which is intended to be performed on theatrical stages.

    It is true that this article was directly inspired by the play "MY FATHER, MY WAR", but my speech through this article is not limited to this work specifically. Let us say that the play was a trigger after an accumulation of annoyances towards certain artistic and literary abuses.

    The qualifiers used here do not necessarily all apply to the work "MY FATHER, MY WAR" but to the current literary production in general of "post-modernist" inspiration, as they say.

    Whether I like or dislike the play "MY FATHER, MY WAR" has nothing to do with my judgment, which is purely intellectual, made with the greatest possible honesty, independently of my cultural tastes or emotional appreciations.

    Here I simply go to the end of the process consisting in seizing the work in its entirety, to submit it to the test of the spectator. I'm talking about the authentic spectator here, not the simple quidam without any particular requirements, looking for a fleeting and confused distraction devoid of analysis, a distraction that he will have forgotten once he has passed the theatre exit door...

    I want you to understand one thing: I am not here to have fun sterilely denigrating a cause, but to show honesty and courage in the face of the works presented to me.

    To applaud blandly is very easy, it is even a kind of gregarious reflex difficult to control and within the reach of all the audiences in the world. Admitting, against all odds, that one is perplexed and dissatisfied with a work that one has perceived as hermetic, complex and improbable, and preferring to make the choice of an in-depth approach to reflection, is, in my opinion, an act of true freedom as a spectator. Instead of undergoing a work and adhering to it by cowardly mimicry, I decide on the contrary to oppose it with a sovereignly lucid look.

    By going to see the play "MY FATHER, MY WAR" I made the choice to go to see this work with an open mind, without prejudice, with a healthy heart.

    But since its supposed subtleties have totally escaped me, I confront this work with the weapons of an honest and uncompromising reflection. I have no particular pleasure in decrying an author, a work, a system. My true satisfaction is to defend art in its accuracy, its truth, its authenticity.

    Moreover, the real culprits of the cultural "mediocrisation" and the prevailing literary pretentiousness are not the authors themselves but their publishers, those who give them this official ticket to recognition. It is not essentially towards the creators that my reproaches go, far from it, but towards the cultural decision-makers who make appalling choices.

    The lack of insight, of willingness to go deeper into things, to go to the end of a process of aesthetic, artistic, literary analysis on the part of the majority of the public contributes to a regrettable misunderstanding in the cultural and intellectual field. A good part of the "psychological factor" also influences (in the wrong direction) and consequently distorts judgments, anaesthetizes good wills in this process consisting in apprehending a work with the maximum of honesty.

    In short, in the course of these reflections, confrontations with authors (mainly authors of literature), studies of the different psychologies of both authors and their public, careful examinations of "contentious" texts, exercises of my sensitivity in relation to certain works -a personal undertaking that has nothing idle about it- the obvious becomes more and more evident: authentic literature is clear water and not a turbid wave, not a smoky atmosphere, not a cloud of inextricable balls of symbols... Simplicity, clarity, elegance, such are, in my opinion, the chaste, humble, sober and beautiful finery of authentic literature.

    To sum up, a true author does not write for himself but for others.

    I intend to give a more general echo to these reflections in a second phase.

    Raphaël Zacharie de IZARRA

  4. Fraggle Punk

    Well, Raphaël Zacharie, may the last one close the door!
    When is the "more general echo to your thoughts" coming?
    Right my shrimp?
    When is the second time that your authentic literature with its chaste, humble and sober finery will flow "with simplicity, clarity and elegance"? No, because we've been waiting for almost a year for this...
    Did you choke on your thesaurus or did you succumb to an apoplexy on your way to another show responsible for cultural mediocrity:
    MY MOTHER, MY GIRDLE?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.