Today, I’m standing up there myself. I woke up a few times during the night with back pain and, after I had pondered whether I was seriously ill or just a little self-pitying, somebody told me it helped to move. So I’m moving, stepping onto just such a device behind the glass; it’s called a cross-trainer, and I push and pull on it. The sky is grey. I don’t listen to any music because I still reject the idea of a gym for aesthetic reasons, out of laziness, and somehow also because of capitalism. I’ve decided to make the most of my time here, so I listen to French-language podcasts—Histoire vivante, Le masque et la plume, France 24—and it takes a few weeks before I realize that my French is much worse than I thought, and I actually have no idea what the podcasts are about. But instead of going home out of frustration as usual, I decide to listen to something simpler, something familiar, a story I already know. I open my iPhone and look for fairy tales first, French versions of the Brothers Grimm, find “Hansel and Gretel” and listen for a while, until I realize that I actually don’t know the story very well. I try it again with the book of Genesis, au début était la Parole, then just let it go. At this exact moment, honestly, I spot a bird of prey circling over the social housing through the glass in front of my cross-trainer and notice the sun illuminating the leaves of the birch trees between the road and the railway bridge in golden light. And even though I have not stored any music on my phone and deactivated iCloud a long time ago, Love by Lana Del Rey comes on, and the bird of prey plunges out of the sky, and a train shoots out from under the bridge, and I smile and lower the resistance and run faster to the rhythm of Lana’s voice, it doesn’t matter ’cause it’s enough, and I want to tell the people around me that I find them alright, somehow, all of them slugging dumbbells in front of the mirror with their teeth bared or doing crunches on the Total Abdominal machine, stepping continuously on stair climbers, rowing on the rowing machines, or running on treadmills, with neatly combed hair and tattoos and hoods and huge upper arms and technical-looking lines on perfectly fitted stretchy garments, and then my gaze lands on one of the screens above the window, where there are usually snowboarders falling from helicopters onto the powdery slopes of the Caucasus, or training tips, or protein preparations, or hair removal technologies, but today on this flat screen on the left there’s an old Hollywood movie where people in medieval costumes are fighting each other with lances, swords, and axes, and in the middle of the fray there’s a man without any armour, wearing a kind of cowl and holding up a book admonishingly; he is brutally slain, the book left lying in the blood, and I think, oh, what a coincidence, and then, why did I think that in English? and then, why not? and then that Don DeLillo once said: “We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music,” and, “We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation,” and I find that I actually believe every word he says, until it occurs to me that the role of the opposition against the economy, the state, and the whole apparatus of assimilation has itself been assimilated by brands, politicians, and corporations, and sometimes it seems to me that, alongside the writers, everyone else has taken up and expanded on their role in the resistance against reason and moderation, environmental protection and traffic rules, taxes, and other individual sacrifices for the benefit of the greater good, against listening, thinking, talking to one another.
I’m aware that the yearning for affirmation and community doesn’t produce original political ideas or radical aesthetic principles. But, while the present degree of fragmentation in people’s experiences brings all the new ideas and forms of market criticism “into the market,” it makes me wonder if there isn’t something older to say about the whole thing, something that criticizes the atomization of reality into smaller, more and more individually mediated and marketable splinters, without dividing everything further by negating it or fuelling it at the same time, some forgotten good news, and then I have to think of that Jesus movie by Zeffirelli, the one that we always used to watch at Christmas (or was it Easter?) and of that phrase Love thy neighbour as thyself, but nowadays I find it simpler to imagine a universe that has been expanding ever since the Big Bang than to think about the exact mechanisms that have made that particular phrase more or less unusable for me since my not-so-faraway childhood, although when I try to imagine what he might have meant, I can’t even begin to grasp it, and perhaps the sentence itself is also a universe expanding at the speed of light since its first manifestation, and each of the words that it contains—Love, for example—is too, and the many billions of times they were each said and written, by children, marketers, and criminals, the meaning written in stone, layer by layer, and I wonder—if there is, indeed, any true task for writers—perhaps it’s to pick up words like stones from the ground and to look at them, to try to figure out from their form and whereabouts what they once contained, or still do, and to reassemble the same old stories in different ways.
If there is a task for readers, then, maybe it is to never stop trying to understand why something was written, and for whom. And I wonder if this is, perhaps, the only religion I need: the belief in a universally accessible semiotic system to encode the sounds we utter in the hope of establishing fellowship—with every word we say or write, we make the collective assumption that we’re all the same: machines that feel the need to be moved now and again in order to avoid pain.
