Strange tribute in the form of a landscape

Here is a text born of a strange feeling after the news of the earthquake that shook Japan this morning and the express viewing of some terrible videos of amateurs, witnesses of the earthquake on the spot, interviewed via the tweets or facebook pages of these unknown people.

Faced with these jolting shots, an emotion and an attachment of an unsuspected level assail me towards this population that I know very little about, apart from a few Tokyo faces, a few memories of discussions in the lobby of the Juyoh hotelI had a few fantastic late-night sake binges, gibbering anything in more than broken English. I hardly existed then for those I was talking to during those few hours, not much less than I exist here most of the time, but there, in Tokyo, I felt, despite my transparency, better alive than ever. It was, however, a strong and dense feeling that shook me at this announcement.

Post-earthquake landscape © David Noir 2011

Despite the sincerity of my sadness at these images of devastation, of a horror that is easy to extrapolate, my feeling must have meant something else too to hit me like this, but what?

The loneliness of the briefly expatriated holidaymaker is not the same as the loneliness you feel at home, when you are in your daily life but not far from your loved ones. It is more authentic and healthier. It does not make the loner tell himself that he is not lonely. Loneliness away from home belongs entirely to the person who feels it. He or she masters it all the better and suffers infinitely less from its least acceptable part, despair.

Not because we would have to do it anyway, but because we are spared the lie of the family concept. I'm not talking about the family of blood, which is a simple reality with its good and less good sides, but about the family of friends; the one we invent for ourselves by believing in it.

Alone in a foreign country, no close friends; no time to make any in the all-too-short holiday period. So, despite some of the brutalities that one sometimes has to deal with when travelling, life goes on without it being possible to delude oneself about the meaning of words that one understands too poorly to give them any definitive meaning. Relationships are reduced to their most functional part. Feelings die almost as soon as they are born to make room for others, in favour of a single, vast overall impression, a landscape, a conglomeration of the traces of these feelings and the ramblings that emerge from them.

I only find this particular apprehension of the world of others on curious porn sites such as Cam4recently discovered on the indication of my friend Jérôme. Alone, in couples or sexual groups, men and women from all over the world exhibit their masturbations, their lovemaking. The webcams are for the moment freely accessible to Internet voyeurs; only the written dialogue and a sort of auction system allowing precise requests require payment.

Surfing among these hundreds of genders and individuals to which they belong, I feel the same free solitude of the traveller stripped of his identity.

Something healthy like the feeling of creation. The opposite of belonging to a family.

From now on I only know individuals; that is how my reality is. Bonds only have meaning for what they are really worth, in moments, gifts, thefts, rapes and surrendered intimacy. They constitute a landscape.

It was the image of this landscape that came strongly to replace in my mind this morning the dying notion of a family of friends, which had been dying for nearly six years. A terribly rotten carrion was poisoning my air and my conscience. The Japanese tremor shook me as much as it shook the shores of the archipelago violently. A rupture followed which caused the putrid family and its procession of emotional lures to sink permanently into the waves.

In its place appeared this notion of human landscape; mine; the one that surrounds me and changes more or less in depth during each shared or simply lived moment. It will wither or turn green according to the seasons, change colour. Some trees, mountains, valleys will have more or less importance. Some will disappear, fade away where others will be born. What is certain is that in the same ten seconds that it takes for seismic forces to shatter a building, the sticky sentimental links that wanted to bind me ad vitam aeternam to deep loves whose roots cannot be seen, to friendships that are always acquired and whose proof is hard to find, have just been released on my own island.

A clean slate for civilised fantasies; a well-ordered jungle begins at home.

This raw emotion that guides my mood, I suddenly receive intact but bruised through the virtual channel of worldly realities. For Tokyo in danger, which I glimpse as wonderfully prudish as it is pornographic, for Sendai, ravaged by this morning's tsunami, which I have only known through the most treacherous of my lost loves, thank you to the exhibitionists of cam4 who, without knowing it, still give price to my real.

The one that I offer, without their knowledge, to those who will never know me, to those who will not want it, to those whose lives have been taken away and who paint my landscape today in spite of themselves.

"...and it is not enough to live well for oneself" | Arsinoe | The Misanthrope | Molière | Act III | Scene IV