Thinking of oneself as an artistic enterprise rather than as an artist is a complex process.
I like digging and mining. That's why, I guess, I now live at the foot of a quarry. But here, everything has already been revealed, brought to light, and it is rather feared that it will collapse. The cavities that are no longer useful for prospecting are still beautiful, however. Here I always hear "nose down". I tell myself that it is because of the image of the Egyptian sphinx that everyone has in mind. Why write? What could be more useless? Sometimes raging, sometimes listless and as if anaesthetised. Maybe just to get the words in the air that my mind is teeming with. It's so exhausting to be. Who will read? And here again, what for? Maybe just to get the flows to cross, for our rivers to flow into each other. Perhaps only to feed this movement of things that cross. I am impatient and nothing happens. So to distract myself and also out of necessity for the illusion of earning a living, I make characters and make them sing, sometimes say certain things. It's not important and that's what delights me the most. Anything else that is more useful would bore me. Writing is easy, singing is easy, acting is easy. Why is that? Simply because being is easy. You just have to do things the way you do them and lead your life languidly, the way you are. The difficulty lies elsewhere. It is not to do or to go anywhere. The difficulty, if there is one, once all the pseudo-fears that inhabit us have been dealt with - by which I mean not the rare fears that have reason to exist, but those that lead us to fear being devoured by a shark when we live in the middle of the earth - the difficulty would be more and strictly in the incoherence of the guidance, the disorientation. Where to? Everything is so vast.
The process of an artistic enterprise is sometimes also dependent on chance and luck.
Here, this bumblebee came into the frame of my lens while I was photographing the thistle flower. I caught it in flight at the right time and in the right place by a stroke of luck.
The aesthetics of this cliché, worthy of a magazine for which the author (me in this case) has almost nothing to do with it, leaves one wondering.
Forgotten notes are my compost. I accumulate words, sentences, thoughts and I pack them tightly in the bottom of a box to better forget them. When I take them out again, sometimes years later, I realise that they have changed. Even though I sometimes remember that I produced them, most of the time I have no idea why. The compost is ready, the maceration has worked, my ideas have rotted. And so they are the best and most fertile. When I take them back, each one of them releases in me a euphoric gas saturated with a mysterious energy that pushes me to write without my knowing why. And above all, without my having shown the slightest desire to do so a moment before. As a result, my forgotten ideas free me because they are no longer ideas. They have lost the sour acidity that corrodes my mind when I think they are useful. They thus give back to my uselessness all its strength because I know that one is only free once one admits that one is useless. It is a natural and formidable force, capable of putting the immense majority of surface problems at a distance. However, feeling free is not enough. This is regrettable because it is already a considerable achievement for which social life does not prepare us. But we need something else. There is one ingredient missing in my mixture of existence for it to leave me completely at peace and fully happy to be so. What is it? Surely a rare commodity or some precious metal to make it so elusive and difficult to define. I search through the jumble of my incoherence and there, spontaneously, emerging like a fast-growing flower from the dung heap, a simple thought appears. Disguised as a question, it says to me: "Why does man value his cruelty so much?
Imagining opponents in order to finally destroy them, to make their throats drop, to reduce them to nothing, is a game that goes back to childhood. It is a supreme need that relieves all the pain, all the frustrations. A perfect balm. And it is not enough to annihilate, you have to be cruel, to slaughter without mercy what stands before you. Good or bad, it doesn't matter what comes our way, we must emerge victorious from something, even if it's a situation that we ourselves have created. To emerge victorious is the paradox that undermines our quest for peace, or at least the idea that we like to have of it. For in order to become this victor, there must be a war, and this peace, which is so long awaited, only matters to us after we have won it. To become a victor, yes, but of what when the enemies finally become rare by dint of having chased them out of one's physical environment as well as one's head? Because the monsters that dare to challenge us and face us are most often essentially virtual. As we grow older, the cloud of illusion of life fades and shows that there is no value that is not correlated to its defect. No more enemies, or as many as one could find in oneself. There is nothing really worth fighting for in a world, the world of creation, which has no hold on the singularity of one's own thought or expression. If you close the door to the artist, he will go out the window. The whole point of feeling like an artist is to hold on to nothing, because for his type of individual, everything turns out to be good for everything.
Oto is not an artist. In fact, he is the exact opposite. For Oto, not only is nothing good for anything, but above all, everything is particularly useless. And this nothing that he enjoys is his whole world. This nothingness comforts him.
