coeur de papier

du papier & ben du coeur

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Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that I ordinarily can't imagine saying them to the people to whom I'm closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (2013), p. 64

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What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (2013), p. 3

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Dans toute forêt. Tant qu'il y a une bête et un songe. C'est une très vieille histoire. Elle arrive avant le rêve. Les mains sales, la bouche sale. Elle descend la rivière.

Laurence Leduc-Primeau, Zoologies (2018), p. 99

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I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.

Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club (1995: 2005), p. 124

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En sortant du palais de justice pour monter dans la voiture, j'ai reconnu un court instant l'odeur et la couleur du soir d'été. Dans l'obscurité de ma prison roulante, j'ai retrouvé un à un, comme du fond de ma fatigue, tous les bruits familiers d'une ville que j'aimais et d'une certaine heure où il m'arrivait de me sentir content. Le cri des vendeurs de journaux dans l'air déjà détendu, les derniers oiseaux dans le square, l'appel des marchands de sandwiches, la plainte des tramways dans les hauts tournants de la ville et cette rumeur du ciel avant que la nuit bascule sur le port, tout cela recomposait pour moi un itinéraire d'aveugle, que je connaissais bien avant d'entrer en prison. Oui, c'était l'heure où, il y avait bien longtemps, je me sentais content. Ce qui m'attendait alors, c'était toujours un sommeil léger et sans rêves. Et pourtant quelque chose étant changé puisque, avec l'attente du lendemain, c'est ma cellule que j'ai retrouvée. Comme si les chemins familiers tracés dans les ciels d'été pouvaient mener aussi bien aux prisons qu'aux sommeils innocents.

Albert Camus, L’étranger (1942: 2002), p. 148-149

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So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), p. 162

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There are so many things that art can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life, it can't mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other's lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016), p. 280

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He had two lives: an apparent one, seen and known by all who needed it, filled with conventional truth and conventional deceit, which perfectly resembled the lives of his acquaintances and friends, and another that went on in secret. And by some strange coincidence, perhaps an accidental one, everything that he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, which constituted the core of his life, occurred in secret from others, while everything that made up his lie, his shell, in which he hid in order to conceal the truth -- for instance, his work at the bank, his arguments at the club, his "inferior race", his attending official celebrations with his wife -- all this was in full view. And he judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always supposed that every man led his own real and very interesting life under the cover of secrecy, as under the cover of night. Every personal existence was upheld by a secret, and it was perhaps partly for that reason that every cultivated man took such anxious care that his personal secret should be respected.

Anton Chekhov, “The Lady With the Little Dog” dans Stories (2000), traduction de Richard Pevear et Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 374

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[...] j'étais ébahie en songeant : quelqu'un m'a aimée. Quelqu'un m'a aimée à ce point-là. Ça ressemblait à un fantasme, mais c'était la vérité. On pouvait remonter dans le temps, perle par perle, et prouver que ce n'avait pas été un rêve - du moins, que ce n'avait pas été de ces rêves qui, le matin venu, semblent décousus et ridicules. Jess m'avait aimée dans le monde tel qu'il est. Et maintenant, j'allais continuer à vivre.

Stéfanie Clermont, “Ottawa” dans Le jeu de la musique (2017), p. 331

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Je pense au temps que je n'ai plus. À l'époque où j'en avais toujours trop ou pas assez, où je pouvais le quantifier, le sentier passer. Je tenais ça pour acquis. Le temps. Je disais que le temps était une invention idiote des humains, je ne portais pas de montre, je lisais la nuit. Mais j'allais à mes cours. Je me souvenais des anniversaires. Je voyageais en été. Je visitais ma famille à Noël. Je sortais le soir. Je chuchotais la nuit. Dans ton oreille.

Stéfanie Clermont, “Le portrait” dans Le jeu de la musique (2017), p. 263

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Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don't. Often I watch myself gravitating toward the bad idea, as if the final girl in a horror movie, albeit one sitting in a Tuff Shed at a desk sticky with milk. But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015), p. 123

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Lumière naturelle & ben des électrons.

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Whenever I see the vixen or her cubs I stop whatever I am doing and I watch. I think unabashedly of love. I love them for their gift of wildness and for bringing it to the city, to me in my garden, for the determination with which they face the challenge of survival. For their beauty. I like the way they ruffle the surface of life in the city. A plastic bag floating on a still lake is the sullying fingerprint of man on nature. A fox in the city is nature’s act resistance.

Aminatta Forna, “Wilder Things: Modern Life Among the Foxes and Coyotes” dans Literary Hub (2018)

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tu te demandes souvent pourquoi tu t'écorches encore les mains à cueillir des fougères pourquoi tu t'entêtes à parler avec la gorge enflée par l'usnée pourquoi tu tolères le sumac grimpant qui a suivi ta croissance le bois de chienne ne se coupe pas il se déterre

Noémie Pomerleau-Cloutier, Brasser le varech (2017), p. 74

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J'imagine Thom réciter son poème. Il fera frissonner une foule qui ne demande pas mieux. Les énumérations fonctionnent à tout coup, créent un rythme qui s'aligne avec le battement du coeur et la vibration des atomes. Les gens se font une idée du génie et c'est pour eux un homme qui fait battre leur coeur en lisant un poème de 40 pages. Pourtant des fois, il ne faut dire que quatre mots, il faut dire : te quitter, trop difficile.

Daphné B., Delete (2017), p. 54

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Les mots utilisés à tort et à travers par des gens abîmés ne veulent plus rien dire. L'amour, c'est quoi ça. Je tiens le verbe "aimer" au creux de ma paume et il ressemble à une personne qui a le hoquet. Il faudrait qu'elle retienne son souffle et compte jusqu'à 10, cale un verre d'eau, une cuillère appuyée sur le front. Quand j'ai dit que je t'aimais, c'est ce que je ne savais pas quoi dire.

Daphné B., Delete (2017), p. 45

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All paths lead to here, my mother had always told me, but now that I was here, in this storied corner of the continent, I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power -- local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic -- on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn't make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they'd placed the monument.

Zadie Smith, Swing Time (2016), p. 316)