The ambivalent love of a father

Parents, don't forget your children's immanent candor

Do not crush with your bitter boots the naive freshness of barely sprouted shoots which, remember, have not had the opportunity to ask for or not to be born.

Life is not given, it is imposed.

It does not seem obscene, outrageous, or untrue to me to say that I have begun to live - I mean live with a sense of increased inner freedom - since my father died. Correction: since he began his decay within my memory, since his image began to fade in shreds drifting towards the distant and anonymous skies of past existences and more into my own limbo.

Nothing in his behaviour appeared, to those who did not seek to see it, to be symptomatic of the attitudes of a monster. He didn't rape me, he didn't beat me; he even taught me French properly, unlike Arnaud Fleurent-Didier's mentioned in his song "France Culture". No, he taught me theoretical and practical things; he was attentive to my knowledge and kept an eye on my references.

I am only now, more than two years after his physical demise, extricating myself from under his gaze. I walk free but limping, embarrassed by too much light when I leave my prison, stumbling on a too untested musculature between the six walls, ceiling and floor of my inner confinement; sometimes crawling on the ground, clutching like a bat forced to a tedious, clumsy displacement to reach its flight point. All this is nothing; all this is just the life of ordinary education.

At the heart of a touching and often expressed tenderness, he has just a little, sometimes, punctually, like one stakes out a path with tiny milestones, made a profession of denigrating my essentiality, of mowing down the little rebellious shoots at its base, like locks in the wind that one wants to discipline; like one prunes a rosebush that one loves, to make it more beautiful, more decorative.
Not being made of such good wood as would have fulfilled his expectations, I began to grow sideways; without a clear will to escape the "size"; without any expressed violence; just out of an instinctive feeling of not liking being shaped. Such are the qualities of mediocre students, permeable to learning, but bent on formatting.
So I became a discarded bonsai; irreparably shaped by years of tending, but unsaleable on the market; not standard enough to have the desire to shine in society.

His sceptical pout and his sometimes torpid gaze in response to my naively expressed desires, began to irreparably mow down any hope for me to be another. The body of the one I could potentially have been remained partly crushed under the thick heaviness of his then contempt. Few outbursts against me, much disdain, a few disproportionate rewards and sudden declarations of admiration; one had to be clever or be nothing. No questions about my doubts, my 'soul', my inner feelings and my possible difficulties in feeling my life. What answers could he have given, he who seemed to have only been around his own life from a distance?

For the father he represented, sometimes an accomplice in my younger years, then an authoritarian mentor later on, his little facial inflections were a calligraphy perfectly decipherable in my eyes, but without any explanation of what founded them; a little red book whose every character was printed in my mind, without any other argumentation than its undeniable logic made of apparent demonstrations, of a chain of false evidence affirmed with conviction.

An early Sarkozysm. The ordinary authoritarianism of parental education and populist governments.

Thus, from negations to rewards, the Pavlovian child should have continued to build himself. Innumerable little concrete walls stood in front of my most banal ideas, those of a child heading towards adolescence, like so many defensive partitions in anticipation of a generational war to come, which my father, I imagine, intended to spare himself by taking precautions of this kind. No enemies, only allies.

But it didn't happen like that. A manufacturing defect in my constitution, a lack of the exceptional character that I had expected, made me a poor admirer of great things, of great beings and of my "great" abilities. A few years later, the creature with a few fragments of autonomy realised that he did not like the beautiful qualities that had been developed in him. Little consideration for genuine talent and a prodigious lack of admiration for individuals who try to surpass themselves, with a clear preference for the poets of the rational who work for their comfort.

If I didn't admire the saints, I liked the realists.

And in their ordinary practices of everyday things, I began to discover the precise and teeming detail of a world that could only be understood on foot and not through lyrically poetic broad strokes. A world whose performances only made sense in the first place as exits to oneself and not as simple convivial moments intended to attract the goodwill of others.