Aurélien Louis

Dear Aurélien,

Yes, walking among the trees or in the city it makes no difference. What matters is walking. The best vision of this world is found in our feet (some would even say from our feet). We cannot escape them. We cannot escape our feet. It is enough to remember our own childhood. Thus the point of view of Sirius is but an illusion, a mental construction that propels us into the air but at the cost of severing us from our feet. And then comes a rain, a storm of feet upon the earth. It is a carnage of feet and the hemorrhaging of the world is already underway leading to its drowning. So yes, walking within our feet.

With the one who listens

To read is to place writing back into the mouth. To take it again where it was left and set it firmly back into the mouth, hoping the audience will do the same. We want to relive and to revive what was written. Thus in reading I discover, through attentive listening or not, new interpretations and new correspondences. At times between the listeners and myself I stumble upon words as dead as paper. In reading the audience reflects back what they hear of the text. And I myself can hear the text again, at best for the very first time. When I leave the page, when I breathe outside the words, I can see and sense on each listener’s face the unique reception of my reading. This confirms both my solitude and my belonging to the words of all. It confirms that my language, strangely, is not my neighbor’s. What we share in common are only its profound silences, alloys of all possibilities. For we are all foreigners to our own tongue which is always the language of the other. To read we must recover the very first feeling, that particular state, which once urged us to write. At times one perceives in this exchange the confirmation of the writing’s recovered time. Then the mouth writes. With the one who listens.

Excerpt from a correspondence with Joël Bastard, October 2003