You are currently viewing Journal des Parques J-17
The Shipwreck of Appearances | "Two Years of Vacation" | Series adapted from the novel by Jules Verne, directed by Gilles Grangier and Sergiu Nicolaescu (1974)

Journal des Parques J-17

PARKS - INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE - part 5

3 phases for the first group of dates. Phase 3:

24 April : THE FAIR OF CONSCIENCES

I have indicated on the site:

Orientation of the improvisations, choice of texts : resolutions, results, neither successes nor failures, taking a path, not regretting anything

Well, we sang, we fucked, we drank, we laughed. We had a great time unmasking ourselves. Bof! Are you leaving? What about consistency? Who will you be tomorrow when you meet me in real life? 

Drifting of continents | Shipwreck of appearances

Appearance exists, I have encountered it. At all times, in all places, at all times of my life. Friends, lovers, partners, acquaintances, family... appearance is a thin and translucent mask that slips between the skin and the soul in order to blur the identity tracks and disorientate the radars of passing interlocutors.

A real microsurgery operated with care and skill, the result of which is truly bluffing. Here we are in the upper echelons of the masquerade, far from the crude facelifts. It is no longer the epidermis that is tightened, it is an invisible shield that unfolds its wings in a convex and hermetic umbrella to all intrusive communication. Undetectable at first sight, it is the absolute defensive weapon that protects a personality from being too dissected, questioned, discovered, suspected of emotional malpractice or even simply touched in the heart.

I don't know of any effective response. It's a vain cry for truth, a vain plea for even a tiny opening to the other's sincerity. No loophole.

When it gets going, the mechanism of denial of love is unstoppable.

Its surface is then hard as a rock. No matter how much we thought we were loved, or at least appreciated for what we were; no matter how much we were persuaded to feel in tune, in agreement on points of view, everything that made the supposed link is swept away by the closing, without any possible return, of the walls of the mask of appearance. The locking is instantaneous and one understands that it has been programmed for a long time. The access to the body, the touch, the deep exchange, the proximity of the views, the complicity of the heart... the whole arsenal of the relationship is declared non grata at the very moment. Angered and desperate, we then lose ourselves in conjecture without managing to grasp the end of the thread which, if we were to pull on it, would trigger the return to the moment before that which we were crying out for. The process is so well-tried that there is no room for anger, which may be legitimate, or for emotional expression of the event that would explain or provide the keys to such a reversal. Everything is done 'smoothly'.

Once the moment of panic has passed, one realises, sheepishly and helplessly, that the struggle is lost, that one must swallow one's hopes of any fundamental reconciliation forever. There is a logical reason for this unfortunate breakdown: we had been wrong all along.

Of course, we are at fault. Such things don't just happen, without reason. Flattered ego, self-fuelled expectations, obvious misdirection, unforgivable self-persuasion, one only had to be vigilant; one only had to be unwilling to believe so much in the unconditional nature of friendship, of love, of any kind of affect, on the simple assumption of mutual sympathy. This is because we had failed to fully consider a condition that often proves fatal to all bonds: the context. Few exchanges are able to withstand this decisive factor against all odds. The context contains the genetic code of the encounter; it can be fatal to forget it. Game over.

Feeling the sense of injustice and the childish rage of despair rising, we will be gently rebuked, in a gesture of warmth that is at best paternalistic, at worst condescending. We will be reminded that we should not have gotten so carried away; that we must take into account the mobile nature of feelings that is at work in the seduction of a moment and that, after all, life is only the fruit of these successive moments. No argument, however sincere, can withstand the invocation of temporal fragmentation. This handy little pocket deity makes it possible to say everything and its opposite, and ensures that one can go back on one's commitment without bruising.

Appearance is there, oiling its muted mechanism, ready to be embodied in place of the pleasant face whose image one carried in one's heart.

Woe betide the naive culprit who carelessly places the small package of his trust in others in the same basket as the one containing his future.

No one is anyone's future, contrary to what some smug asshole poet may have said to enhance the egocentricity of his verses.

The only future of an individual lies in the guard of his sword and the grip he develops to hold it. This is not to deny the strength of the vision, the relevance of the projects that guide the path of each individual. It is just useful to remember that their intersection with those of others is only fortuitous and ephemeral. And if their itinerant community progresses happily for a while, prudence demands that they regularly take a step back to better anticipate the forks in the road ahead. Straight and meticulously tarmacked roads do not exist in nature, nor in human nature. There are no straight and clear highways connecting the hearts of men. Are we all being deceitful?

At the risk of flaying a certain idea of the sacred, I believe that the answer is "yes". Fear, the arrangement with one's own conscience, one's flexible morality, one's bouts of bitterness make the human being an animal without constancy, unpredictable and dangerous because of this very unpredictability. The lie has its function and its utility in order to spare oneself the wear and tear of too daily struggles, arising at the turn of every honest statement that is confronted with another. Too tiring, too demanding; perhaps we cannot ask so much of ourselves, in addition to the preoccupation with our material survival. Does this not mean that traitors do not exist?

Justice often takes years to judge war criminals whose fate would be quickly dispatched if they were left to popular vindication. Years to understand the famous context in which the events occurred. One would like to reassure the species about itself by revealing reasons other than innate weakness, inconsistency, gratuitous hatred and bestial violence. In the end, the world's justice system would so much like to deal only with the innocent.

But only what one decides one day to no longer control is free. One releases the dogs of one's own vengeance.

In love, as in other events or in the great conflicts of this world, we cannot blame traitors or murderers for taking revenge, because there is always something in us, somewhere, that remains from the founding disappointments of childhood or, later on, of life being fulfilled askew. The trials, therefore, excite, as blood excites sharks. We can all sense from afar the cold or hysterical feverishness of those who have 'cracked' and given free rein to their inner demons.

From then on, the appearance is no more. The mask bursts. We want to see what is behind it. We fear to discover the banal face of a common woman or man. We are naturally afraid of recognising ourselves too much. So it's all the better if the monster enjoys his role, if he continues to wave his puppet puppet claiming all the vices. Phew! So much the better, all were gathered there. A good net in the trap of horrors. We hardly believe it because we all know that neither hate nor violence can be caught like a virus. Does this mean we can forgive?

No. The crimes are too atrocious to be erased with a magnanimous backhand. What would become of morality if we were to say: "You have raped, massacred, betrayed; too bad. What you have done is terrible, irreparable. Yes, it is the irreparable that you have perpetrated, and by that very fact, there is nothing more we can do about it. Apologise. Repent from the depths of your being. Go home. Don't do it again"?

The victims, the social body, all would cry out for vengeance. Let justice be done! means Let vengeance be exacted!

Punishment does not create awareness and the desire to make people aware is in itself a tactical error. There are certainly biochemical factors, mental illnesses - to put it quickly - which favour, as they say, without always hearing the depth of the meaning of the expression,  the acting on it.

These are extreme cases and the violence of the relationship does not need to be called upon in these terrifying examples to show that it exists. Depth because this simple article 'the' in place of 'a' in front of acting on itThis fateful name, used in everyday language, teaches us that the act is ready, in everyone, to potentially exist. It is not a question of questioning it. It is an egg that civilisation has learned not to let hatch, not to let come to term, and that its hideous creature, unrecognisable to us who harbour it, is released.

Yes, the act, the killing, the lower-than-earth degradation, as we know, takes place daily. The secret of its molecular composition is undeniably for me, barely hidden in the texture of this fine second skin that makes up our daytime make-up. The appearance, a banal hypocrisy that is applied directly to the body in the morning, makes its little serum penetrate our fibres, ready to swell up at the slightest sign of a slight aggression. Because if the mask knows how to make itself hermetic to any attempt at external penetration, it offers an extreme porosity on its reverse side. With a simple flick, inflection, vexation, narcissistic micro-pain, we activate the switch and human cybernetics is ready to take over the movements of the heart, of natural tenderness, of emotional intelligence. The traitors are in battle order and Metropolis is launched. It's going to be a beautiful day.

Maybe we'll even meet someone! Mirror, my beautiful mirror, tell me who you protect best?

I do not expect, in this Conscience fair, The Fates will postpone the smooth weaving of our lives, even if only for a few hours together. Nothing will break the course of the spindles according to the norm of our polite relationships. The show, with the deepest ambitions, can be nothing but a distraction. But distraction has its value, because, if we are well conditioned, it is possible that we will escape, through the omission of vigilance, the frightened distrust that the reflection in the one-way mirror of our fellow men inspires in us. It is not a question of apetizing the child or of believing in a stupid naivety, which are all dead ends where bad actors get lost.

Playing well is not pretending in a more or less credible way.

It is in the sense of a chess game with oneself that it must first be understood, before approaching the encounter and the confrontation for laughs, whether it has the appearance of sincerity or the theatricality of the Grand Guignol.

The game will certainly not be won or lost, because we will take up our lives again and will not repeat the challenge. But it is possible that a mood will emerge, without our being quite aware of it, which will evaporate from the whole. The comings and goings of the visitors will constantly change the temperature and form. If we manage, without excessive voluntarism, to maintain the sky of this new atmosphere above our heads and let it descend until it bathes in it completely, an aquarium of different species may be created, in which predation will no longer be the only spearhead.

In these abysses, I hope that darkness will gradually be created so that, having become blind to our atavisms of all kinds, we can move by the beat of fins that have suddenly appeared. Let the individual not be erased, otherwise we will be reduced to a school of mackerels.

In the great belly of the Generator whaleWe will then see, little by little accustomed to evolving in the light of other lights, if our Pinocchio destinies are capable of anything other than looking for their old parents with their baggage of values, stranded on a piece of wreckage. Sorry for them, but let them stay there alone for a while longer.

I have better things to do to stop lying to my life, than to assist my eternal memories, anchored like rafts in the abyss of my flesh.

The stomach of the great cetacean is at ease, once it has rid itself of its preconceived ideas, clothes too heavy to not hinder the walk. Growing up again? No, thanks; I've already done that. The full intelligenceThis is the stage that requires not growth, but disembodiment of what we think of as "ourselves", the stage that ties together body, sensibility, mind and behaviour into a single ball of synapses. Leaving one's post should not be confused with astral travel, which I hardly believe in.

Simply as much as with difficulty, the proposed objective invites us to forget for a while the importance we attach to ourselves, taking care not to abandon anything of our person in the cloakroom. Neither denial nor unbridled oblivion of reality, it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from such concepts that one should be able to undertake a dive without any accident. The invisible comes to light, but our bodies must not disappear behind this new entity. In this case, what is the point of so much effort in calming the rhythm of our breaths of air.

Gills? Why not if the mutation turns out to be so profoundly organic. It's a holiday and the showmen haven't yet packed up their gear. A nice attribute of the scene: with a few strokes of the flippers, an ocean exists. It is up to us to ensure that it is not polluted, as soon as it appears, by superficial mawkishness.

All these years I have thrown the rotting pieces of my own history into the brackish waves of my harbour, only to use them as rafts in this performance one day. If you don't retch at their touch, cling to them and reach the open sea. I cannot promise you that you will come across driftwood, whose strange and poetic shape, in our eyes like those of the clouds, concerns you. To the most daring, go and see.

Through the execution of this chaotic symphony with dozens of hands, I just believe that it is possible to rewrite and make people hear, during these hours, a slightly different moral, to close the tales, in our opinion, in fact.

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.

Leave a Reply

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