From the ordinary hatred of persistent childhood

As the silhouette of a rock whose particular and familiar shape emerges, indicating to me that we are entering the littoral zone, the symbolic cape of the ten days separating us from the end of the journey has just been passed.

The end of the crossing was announced, to begin the story on dry land, the time to disembark for a few days, before it continues its convolutions in my head and perhaps in the memory of the performers and a few spectators who will have attended or taken part in our passage.

So things are getting busy, not so much materially despite the dozens of actions still to be accomplished, but in my mind. The completion of an itinerary is both an opening onto the unknown and the compilation of past events.

Attraction parksWhat will it be?

An anecdote as well as a result. I made sure to distribute the cards so that each one could play the game according to what he/she could bet. Nothing will have been repeated between my partners and me, except for these lines that are constantly repeated from day to day, constituting in my eyes a staging path, a geographical map of the moods that constitute me and that I push to favour in others.

The voluntary malleability of bodies and minds is the right pass to access the commands. As I said, I give everything as long as I am understood. I have no control over the execution of orders. It's not a matter of trust, but of reality. The trust is there at the beginning, in the commitment that I propose. All that remains is to pass the test.

There is no jury for this contest. A broken mirror that has fallen to the ground, whose pieces anyone can pick up, will suffice to hold this job. The pivot of the great psyche has given way under its own weight and too many rotations around its axis. My debris is not fit to be recycled into glassware. Too sharp, too small, they are just what they are. Reflections of fragmented images, which must be skilfully tilted in the light to read any drawing. Their number is not a problem. There are enough for everyone and more. Each person will see if he or she can find a suitable place for each piece of the puzzle, in the areas where the glass is missing and where the geometrically uneven limits of the space can accommodate it, within the frame of his or her own cracked glass. The mosaic that results in fine is the role.

With this composite image as his only guide, he will set off on an adventure and try to momentarily disengage from his spinning wheel, the thread of his existence to the benefit of the scenes that pass within his reach. This is what is commonly known as "playing the game".

Don't worry, as it is said, it is only a loan. Your men's and women's suits, untouched, with unsearched pockets, will be waiting for you in the cloakroom.

Life in disguiseAlthough demanding, it does not require the sacrifice of your skins.

It imposes only the candor of the glance. I have had the opportunity to discuss the subject and I repeat, candor, according to my vision, is not the same as naivety. It is a disposition of the spirit reforming the original channel of perception, where the second is only satisfied stupidity waiting to be enlightened by the light of intelligence. In spite of ourselves, we are overflowing with enough of its matter stored on the surface like bad fat, not to stop at its common texture and go instead to draw from the limbo. Once these few efforts have been made, there is nothing left to do but to let the hybrid animal, sutured by Mary Shelley's soul, move and ride on its shoulders, from the top of what must be kept of consciousness for the story to happen. This is how I create and write; this is how I propose that you join this visit of a few hours in epic territory, by inhabiting the body of your own centaur.

The Fates of Attraction or Life in Disguise

I struggled to get my last childhood costume at the age of eleven. Bought in a hurry on my birthday, it was a Davy Crockett outfit.

I remember the context and the object as if it were yesterday. The large cardboard box, open at the front, displayed its contents through a transparent plastic film, as was natural for toys of this type at the time. It must have been ten minutes to seven on February 17, 1974, and the store was about to close. This factor added to the difficult atmosphere of the early evening and added to the pressure as the last few minutes counted down. I had been in the grip of tears and hysteria for a few hours already. In a serious and unusually solemn tone, my embarrassed parents had come to announce to me at the end of the afternoon that, being now "grown up", I would have to give up choosing a disguise as a present and put an end to a custom that had become ritualistic, in order to opt for a toy of my choice of a more educational.

Hearing the verdict immediately triggered a memorable crisis, at least for me, who was the subject of it.

By dint of their pedagogical concerns, my parents, who would probably have made the matter better by trying to present things to me as an extension of my playful universe, had inadvertently put their foot in it by talking about education. Noticing the crude maneuver, I went into a rage as well as a torrent of pleas as if my life depended on it. I was not mistaken. It was necessary to defend my achievements stubbornly.

What did this horror of educational concern have to do with the private pleasure of my birthday?

What were they doing, they, who were supposed to protect me, throwing such a heavy paving stone in the pond of my childhood, which would find itself the day, the most adequate season, to overflow in a river towards adulthood? I was stunned, flabbergasted, angry more than I could say, and above all, suffering horribly as if I had been told ex abruptly that I was entering an orphanage.

I stood my ground, screaming, and rolling on the floor, banging my head against the legs of the bed in my room, where the news had come. Berenice hearing from Titus that he was resolved to part with her in the name of state reason could not have made a better show.

"But it is no longer a question of living, it is necessary to reign" my father seemed to tell me.

About whom, about what, what for? I did not understand anything to these reasonings which clamoured me to leave the asylum of my childhood and did not want to hear anything of it. Tired and without any more cartridges, my parents gave up the game. I had fought well. But the clock was ticking and we only had time to get in the car and drive to town before it was too late. I was too exhausted to yell "Faster, driver, faster! "to my father, as in a dramatic ending to a romance, where a fraction of a second lost can permanently lose the chance to seize happiness, but I gritted my teeth at every turn, not understanding why the road had not been made straighter. Finally, we arrived. The lights were still on inside the shop and the doors of this Ali Baba's cave opened to us without needing a sesame. I was saved for this time, but I doubted that I would be able to win the predictable confrontation of the following year. Indeed, I knew that I was contemplating there, all bathed in light, the ultimate matador's costume that I would put on to face the chimeras of my imagination, until their killing, a hundred times renewed.

With time running out, a quick look around made me choose the brave trapper's clothes right away. I had discovered the battle of the Alamo a few days before, through the John Wayne film on television. Was it there that I first met Bowie, played by Richard Widmark, in the guise of the colonel famous for his use of the knife and who inspired the singer's name? I don't remember, but it is certainly the case, since he is a notorious hero of the film and of the siege of this fort which he defended and where he lost his life, like all the Texans trapped in these walls, that day of March 1836, facing the Mexicans. What I do remember, however, is that the film made a strong impression on me, a mixture of terror of the fighting and admiration for the warriors.

More trivially, I thought that this magnificent faux suede outfit, complete with fur hat and full armament, including a replica of the famous Bowie knife, would fit me perfectly. The name of the character it illustrated sounded halfway between a future David not yet adopted and the crunchy food of a boxer, pushed out of my life by my mother's good care and whose mourning was just beginning. He agreed with me too. Just one more check for my father to sign, who finally seemed happier to please me than to emerge victorious from his role as tutor, and the deal was in the box.

I'll skip over the newfound contentment, the thanks and the fittings, alone with myself and the figure of the man whose song from the TV series of the same name was ringing in my ears and whose verses and refrain I was cheerfully repeating:

« There was a man named Davy, he was born in Tennessee So brave that when he was a boy he killed a bear with his first shot. Davy, Davy Crockett, the man who was never afraid »

Magic of disguises, it was enough to pass one; as long as one believed in the role, one inherited the qualities of the character it was supposed to dress up.

And to think that they had wanted to deprive me of such defences? Something told me that sooner or later I would have to use the protective advantages of living in someone else's skin again. For the time being, I never left the beautifully reproduced fur hat with its raccoon tail, even for dinner.

Those who have made the official choice to abandon the garments of childhood find it difficult to swallow the fact that, when they grow up, they want to keep their assets. Panic and even anger sometimes seize them suddenly in front of the obstinacy not to give in to the arguments of the social responsibility. The crisis has changed sides. Old children know how to keep a cool head in the face of the grotesque outbursts of belligerent adults. There are some in whom the uncontrolled rage reflex becomes a punch thrown without prior warning.

I met one of them, one day in May 1985, on the Croisette, at noon, during the Cannes festival. There were in fact three of them arriving in opposite directions. But it was the one whose closed fist hit me in the face that I still remember the features and the look. Tall and gangly, wearing bombers and a cap on the back of his skinhead. His smoky gaze caught mine, about ten metres ahead. I could read the hatred forging itself in his pupil at this great distance and from then on, a tense, unbreakable thread linked us.

As if each of us had been drawn by the movement of a fishing rod that had hooked us, we were attracted to each other, magnetized by this invisible link, solid as nylon. I saw the arm bend backwards to prepare for the trigger and the shot went off with the amplified fulgurating of a cinema slow motion, tracing its trajectory in the heart of the city that was its temple. No memory of the impact. I went backwards, projected on the ground, in front of the festival-goers having lunch on the terrace.

Change of scenery. I am only vaguely aware of the rest of the sequence when I find myself on all fours on the median separating the two lanes of the boulevard. I saw the two companions of the stile coming towards me. And then nothing. No clear memory until I found myself depressed and shocked in the cinema where my friend and I had originally intended to go. I think we saw "Les enfants", a very beautiful film, out of competition, by Marguerite Duras, but I'm not sure if it was that day. What I do know is that my friend, Rania, stood up to the three jerks who attacked me. She got a slap in the face, but she didn't let it stop her from insulting them. It is probably to her that I owe the fact that the situation did not get any worse. I am, to this day, still grateful to her. Not only that she spared me a massacre, but that she had the spontaneous gesture of interfering, as a natural reaction to the injustice of the situation. Was it her Lebanese origin and the history of her country that fostered this courage in her? I wondered, but apart from a certain concrete relationship to the notion of combat, experienced from the inside, it was in any case her own temperament and her qualities of audacity that made her act so lucidly. I had there a fine example of bravery to seize which had been lacking in my education, too preoccupied with wanting to incite me to a rational development by making me abandon what made me dream, rather than awakening me to the realities of the world by presenting me in addition to, and not instead of, the tools proper to ensure my defense.

The jerk and his cronies had attacked me on impulse, ulcerated by my appearance. Carefully made up, hair dyed, as elegantly dressed as I could be, as was my habit in those days, my appearance and my look had not returned to them.

In addition to the blow, an interjection from the mouth of the apparently frightened assailant: "What is that? "had informed me of the problem of identification that I was posing to him.

"What was I and what answer could he and his limited imagination give? The only answer he could give was to let his violent impulse express itself. No doubt he had been deprived, even earlier than me, of being able to search for who he was by means of untimely fittings. I believed for a long time, as did he perhaps, that these were the apparent signs of an ambivalent sexuality to which he had felt obliged to react as if to a provocation to his intention or worse still, as if to a disastrous reflection of his own image. This is indeed the easiest analysis to provide and everyone - in fact personI'm not sure I'd have been able to explain it, because, apart from Rania who had lived through it, no one in the small group of film buffs that we were seemed to understand the seriousness of what had happened to us - no one, therefore, tried to be satisfied with any other explanation than that of an unfortunately widespread homo-bi-phobia. The case was thus closed. I let myself be convinced and had to live with it, willy-nilly, for the next few years.

Today, I know that behind the homophobic pretext, just like that of violence against women or any other primary racism as they all are, lies the hatred of persistent childhood.

It contains the visceral detestation of anything that can be superficially considered non-phallic and thus doomed to submission to the power of displays of force. This feeling is in fact widely shared, even among the most innocuous flirtatious and powerful people of the most microscopic administration. The presumed "submissive" belongs when he or she can be dominated without compensation, when he or she obeys the injunctions without asserting his or her refusal to conform to the dominant values of the moment. Even further than homophobia, misogyny, paedophilia, abuse and violence committed against the disabled - would I add the rejection inspired by a certain category of artists that contains all the characteristics that are condemned in the previous examples? - which are constantly in the news,

In the primitive core of all fundamental hatred, there is the will to eradicate or to put out of state of spontaneous expression the child that has lasted too long, in oneself and in others.

From adolescence onwards, the children themselves, in the midst of their transformation, find themselves caught up in this syndrome which forces them to define themselves on one side or the other of the barricade. No one escapes it and we find representatives of all the types mentioned, on both sides of this imaginary border. In the minds of the troubled, the archetypes of what we need to be so as not to be assimilated to that "race" of inferiors to which those who do not choose the only sinister disguise to which they refuse a hanger in their wardrobe belong.

Curious detail considering the violence of the blow, I never had any physical trace of my aggression. I use a possessive adjective, because it is indeed to me that the privilege of having been the target. I say this without humour, but not without regret as to whether the rest of my life would have been different if fate had spared me this nasty confrontation. Still, and I say this to my aggressors, if by an extraordinary chance, fruit of evolution and learning to read, one of them recognized himself in this description, my make-up, although having disappeared from my daily life, has held up as a protective shield of my being. If my identity changed, it was not by the blow, but by the observation of the primitive status of human reality.

Nothing is allowed outside the lines marked out on the ground or in space, and many are holding out to keep it that way. One cannot live free and unprotected on all fronts as long as one has too few artillery pieces ready to fire from the walls of one's fortress. The important thing is to concentrate one's forces in a specific area in order to gain a few decisive liberties, which will later deliver the assets that make up larger conquests. In the meantime, as all work deserves to be paid, but being limited in money, I invite each one, as a good barbarian of the origins, to pay on the beast, the time of an adventurous detour in the country of the fanciful imagery.