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The world of warlike childhood | Chocolate revolver made for "La Toison dort" © David Noir

Dawn and Foresight

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4am; spontaneously I open my eyes. I get up immediately to live as if I were discovering this world.

I have a sense of urgency to do so. A little too much. I would like it to calm down a bit. In fact, everything irritates me, everything assaults me, most of our daily life distresses me, but deep down, in the maze of my projects, of my future, everything enchants me.
And getting up in this way, granting myself life in full consciousness, is part of it. Sadly I take news of the world and of my fellow earthlings whom psychic illness ravages even more than physical torment. Murder, rape, abuse, assassination, torture of body and soul; violence to the flesh; lives randomly shattered by dramas that suddenly change their course. It has always been so, only today I know better than yesterday. Evolution of the world, evolution in age, mourning to do...

It is therefore a question of living in the shadow of this incredible massacre of hope that is life, so much so that living within this closed reserve that is the world is anxiety-provoking. And when I say the world, I should say worlds, because there are as many worlds for each of us as there are scales for measuring our existence in them.

I'm talking about the one that appeals to the Western lambda; the one in the media, in the news, on television. And drama is all about scale. A long time ago, from a distance, this world seemed to me to be barely tangible, figures and statistics, abstractions. That was "before". Today, the world, "this" world of distant and diffuse anguish, is with us every day like a big, purring beast that you can never be sure is completely benevolent. This world is all the more palpable as disasters and tragedies seem to become commonplace, as the powerful show their limits in solving our problems, as the scale of this world has become that of a model which the mind can quickly tour by simply clicking on a few links. The progressive novelty in this ancient perception of 'being informed' is that isolation is becoming more prevalent. The 'self' in the world is on the lookout for us as soon as we wake up, as it is undoubtedly the case for the animal, on the alert throughout its life. Therefore, the common feeling of solidarity generated by the great televised debates of the past, not so long ago, seems to us very naive today. Not so long ago, that is, until the mid-1980s, before social life began its real dematerialisation, when we still rode in our heads, in carts, while dreaming of the future and teleportation.

I date the feeling of palpable dematerialisation from the first wave of TV channel multiplication. With a few more independent entertainment programmes, an alternative to the tedious childhood around the family table was opened up. Video clips and entertainment culture were introduced and freed us from having a common experience of mass information and entertainment. Until then, the year before, we had all seen more or less the same programme the day before and gathered our ideas and points of view on the subject in the morning at school, college or at work. Gone were the days when every social issue concerned everyone and was debated within the family. Everyone could, from a very young age, develop his or her own individual popular culture, far beyond the records or novels that had been the case in the decades before.

The current benefit of this forced and favoured individualism where we are today, is the development of a certain creativity, the liberation of generalism via the great platforms of information such as "screen files" which would appear to us today as kolkhozian dinosaurs of communism, the contagion of the "geek" culture which encourages the individual to equip himself with the infinite tools of computing and its possibilities. It is therefore ultimately through the same new channels that bring me incessant flows of vertigo and anguish, terrors and phantasmagorical projections, that I can find a remedy.
Today, new virgin sites are being approached in this sense, and social networks are recreating mini-worlds in close correlation, perhaps even in mutual surveillance, with the larger one, which they now view with distrust and vis-à-vis which they impose themselves as its satellites. More than a counter-culture, this time it may be a counter-society altogether, increasingly indistinguishable from the general normative and self-centred matrix. Cultural marginality has disappeared in favour of independent, informed, specialised, competent and interrelated fibres. If we so wish, we each represent and nurture one or more of these fibres, which, like climbing vines, will come to closely entwine with the mesh of states and great powers. Slowly, surely, if we do not tire of weaving exchange, information, creation and even a certain amount of trade, we will take control of this still archaic and totalitarian management that makes up our current universe. A control such that it will not belong to any of us and cannot be guided by any of us; a flow finding a natural balance through the forces that constitute it without any brutal and thoughtless will to influence its course too much.

To understand a new world, a new epoch from which one does not originate, is to adapt the course of one's mental images to new speeds and scales relative to this new world.

Discovering "a new era from which one does not originate" also means tackling the new time of ageing.

Less exalted and lost than an hour ago, I prepare my dawn according to a new revolution. Every day, it will be a matter of changing my course infinitesimally, to better appreciate the landscape, the elements, "the world", the vision of the stars and to arrive in the morning in a good port, without having to suddenly turn my rudder because one day, in panic, I would no longer read the maps or decipher my daily life.

5.30 am, in the corner of my window, the moon seems to be smiling; this is good.

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.

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