March 29, 2013

I stand motionless on a roof terrace in New York, observing a motionless man too, in whom I think I recognize Maurice Ravel. He is quite far from me. In the first part of the dream, silhouettes crowd around my immediate perimeter, a clamor and loud noises are heard lower down in the half-light of the street, large objects (perhaps cars) fall into the water, shouts. Maurice Ravel, yes. With folded hands, I look at him, regretting that I am not by his side, but it is like this: I am not allowed to change places. I send him absurd little signs (judged as such at the time) ... Later, I am against him, so close  

March 27, 2013  

Piet Mondrian. This perpendicular painting interests me little, freezes me, uncompromising. Piet Mondrian will fall out with another painter, a friend who shares his visions, will fall out because the other introduces the diagonal in his painting, no but oh! Good, but Mondrian himself interests me because he was born into a pure and hard Calvinist family, and he ogled for a moment elsewhere, to finally drive the rigorous, ascetic nail of his origins perpendicular. Like Piet I will probably not escape my Calvinist education, at least not tonight, we'll see that tomorrow. Anyway there are diagonals in my painting.  

March 15, 2013  

I am in a winter garden with a stranger, he is dressed to the nines, I would like to know his identity, nothing attests to the smallest answer, and I feel unable to ask any question. There is a set of rattan seats buried under the vegetation. Outside, the branches of a cedar graze the exterior of the glass walls. We sit on either side of a coffee table, put our cups side by side on the edge of the board, make sure not to disturb the cards of a game of crappie in progress, carry on a conversation started at the inside the house, made up of generalities that we put together haphazardly, which initially saddens me, and ends up arousing in me a feeling of familiarity. We each grab a magazine from the pile on the floor next to the table, and finally shut up. When I wake up, it's 3:44 am. I feel infinitely good, I write down this dream and immediately go back to sleep. Just before my alarm clock rings at 8:30 am, I dream again of this same winter garden, exactly the same, but without the presence of the unknown, nor in me the simple awareness of him, and invaded by an immense and incomprehensible grief. Still in a half-sleep after the alarm clock rings, and thinking about this last dream (before rereading my notes concerning the first, then completely forgotten), I do not explain this sorrow. When I reread the notes from the first dream, I understand that, perhaps, I was missing the unknown in the second, without my realizing it.  

March 7, 2013  

I am on board an old liner. Everything is dilapidated, abandoned, deserted. I am told that there are still passengers. At the beginning of the dream, I am in what at the time was the large dining room for the first classes. What overwhelms me, to tears, is to have seen this ship often at the time of its splendor in the port of Le Havre, without ever being on board. Now that I'm here, it's all over, empty, rusty. [uncertain continuation ...] A woman is in front of me (she pretends to be my mother but has the features of Erroll Garner, the hair smooth, plated, slicked back). We are on an outside deck of the liner. She is accompanied by a double bass player and a drummer, herself seated at a broken upright piano, from which she tries to release sounds, in vain. His face expresses disappointment at not being able to comfort me. She then grabs the double bass and performs Mood Indigo on the E string ... When I wake up, I am still shaking with emotion.  

March 1st, 2013  

Today I fell asleep at Dr. K.'s, on the couch, and I had this dream: I am facing Stalin. He questions me in the form of short questions, which relate to areas so disparate that from one to the other I cannot concentrate. I can feel it: my answers have no consistency, which I am not worried about (I conclude that he is having an experiment). It is arched behind a piece of furniture that looks like a chest of drawers to me, large drawers occupy the entire width, which I could open. Stalin seems to me stuck between this chest of drawers and a wall. The top of the cabinet is at eye level. I'm listening to it. I have a hunch that, given his awkward position, his voice will weaken, and die off. He ends up being silent. And I wake up. I then told this dream to Doctor K., who for his part noted down the words I said during my sleep, more or less intelligible gibberish, he said to me, strewn with technical terms specific to the world of aeronautics. . Is that so.  

February 22, 2013  

Dream of that night: I am sitting in an all-white auditorium in Paris, rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, a hall adjoining another, larger hall, in which a play by Jean-Paul Sartre is being performed. In my room nothing happens. I get up, with the intention of going to see the play by Jean-Paul Sartre. But I walk along endless corridors, discovering a space made up entirely of boxes and cluttered backstage. It seems to me that I spent my childhood here. I remember a happy childhood, strewn with manifestations that others did not hear, as if I was being addressed from afar under the ground of this place: songs which took on different meanings from day to day. I remember that a coat belonging to Jean-Paul Sartre was once hung in one of these boxes, a phosphorescent coat bearing the inscription "Le Havre". I find the lodge, but the coat is no longer there. I walk over to the window, wave at a man hanging laundry outside (it turns out he's hanging padlock keys on a clothesline). Since he cannot see me, I activate a sort of foghorn which produces a sound whose echoes reverberate endlessly, as in the mountains. I am leaning. And I fall. Jean-Paul Sartre welcomes me downstairs, wearing Ferragamo ballet flats, which we spend hours admiring while walking together along Boulevard Haussmann.  

February 6, 2013  

I hear on the radio the first bars of a concerto by Arcangelo Corelli, number eight in G minor (fatto per la notte di Natale, for Christmas night). What I see: the sky of Paris resembles the skies of the Normandy coasts, the clouds spin towards the south, loaded with swell, with loneliness. The window is open, the cold wind circulates in the workshop, mixing the scent of coffee with the scent of turpentine that preceded them. Oh oh oh! I said to the person who interrupts the music to announce the time it takes to get from the Porte d'Auteuil to the Porte de Bercy, fifty-two minutes, no, but no kidding, we have to stop with this nonsense (people all the same).  

January 31, 2013  

Sky low in Paris, yesterday, very weak light, around 4 pm it clears up while I am lying on my relaxed armchair, unable until then to choose a title for my canvas, I hesitate between "Bishop in diving gear" and "Solange aux hortensias". I come out of my torpor, rush to the large bookstore, in search of an idea for a title: purchase of a lot of thirty copies of the Brothers Karamazov where I discover the staging of a sibling in the throes of the desire to kill the father, huge disappointment therefore, I give up the books in a neighborhood real estate agency. I will later opt for The Death of Sardanapalus, always preferable to titles like André Gide dans son bain or Fausse moped.  

January 23, 2013  

Score for these very first weeks of the New Year at the workshop: 12/20. Mixed satisfaction especially because of a dark blue T-shirt that I had not worn for years and whose effects I rediscovered too late. Result: a painful sensation throughout the sessions of last week, painful execution of a painting representing André Gide disguised as a Swiss Guard and hitting a young Tunisian with a leg of lamb. On Friday I swapped this T-shirt for a tweed jacket, scratched my canvas and tried to paint another subject, without conviction: a still life with a frozen monkey. Good. This week, normal sessions in a plaid blouse. On the phone, Martine tried to reassure me by telling me about pajamas from Agnès B. which would produce interesting effects. To have.  

January 12, 2013  

Recurring dream. I walk on a beach in the summer wearing a coat. A man pretending to be Maurice Ravel walks towards me, reproaches me for not being in a bathing suit, then tries to put applesauce in my ears. In last night's version of this dream, this behavior bothers me but does not surprise me. And when the man walks away, like the previous times I say: "You are not Maurice Ravel". But this time he turns around: I recognize my father.  

January 10, 2013

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This portrait of a mother and child, in pastel, is hung in a museum, and in this dream it is about a famous woman who, I am told in the audio guide, was my mother "at a certain time". I had to fight to cut through the crowd gathered there, a crowd kept at a distance from the painting behind a cordon of guards. I am alone in the middle of this crowd, and I do not understand the reasons for such a rush, because this painting is signed by a stranger, it is the voice of the audio guide who specifies it and who insists on this detail. . Mom, who accompanied me earlier to this museum, I feel her far away, in another wing of the building, or even outside, in the wind. I look for it in the direction of the painting, from which I await an answer. But it is not the same table at  

January 4, 2013  

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Before others have the same idea as him, Maurice Ravel walks onto the balcony, settles down next to his mother, Marie Delouart. They look through the pine forest at the sky in the direction where the sun is about to disappear, the French Alps on the other side of the lake, the pink spot of Mont-Blanc. Then he observes his mother, the gesture of his fingers shaking the ashes of her cigarette, the position of her hand, quiet. He brings his lips to her shoulder, kisses her, (she closes her eyes), tells her we're really good, there, eh. Yes, she replies. She ended up turning to him, saying that she would drink something and lay her forearm on Maurice's head. This gesture arouses in him the impression of rediscovering something already experienced (for example in early childhood): a person must have placed a forearm on his head, or a leg, and perhaps uttered a word that s 'is then printed on the memory of this gesture. Today he has lost that person, lost that word. All that remains is the gesture, which despite everything is only a supposed memory.  

December 29, 2012  

I find that the Flore is not what it used to be, the overwhelming comparison with the panache of the post-war years has undermined the morale of the owner, who little by little has let the quality of the myth fall into disrepair, it's lamentable, and the literary world surely has a part of the responsibility in this sad picture, too many images in the books, Sartre is dead, the writers are now surfing, in the video, investing in Dubai or start plastic surgery, they no longer have the same priorities. At Les Deux Magots, the waiters work on roller blades, organize bets and speed dating evenings, actors pour buckets of bechamel sauce on passers-by on Boulevard Saint-Germain, shoot hidden cameras, a tax-free zone and a fast food service are offered. indoors. Even at Lipp's opposite, we let go.  

December 21, 2012  

Dreams of that night, located on the Esplanade du Trocadéro. Two dreams. In the first, I am sitting at the top of the steps leading down to the fountains. A person accompanies me, a woman, whom I do not identify, I feel her behind me, a few meters away, herself accompanied and receiving confidences concerning the areas to which I am sensitive. I hear talk without quite understanding. It's mom, I recognize her voice. In the second dream, it is an esplanade supposed to be that of the Trocadero, from which it differs in that it looks like the quay of a port, not at all like an esplanade, but I feel on this esplanade from the Trocadero. The buildings that surround it in reality are here very far away, barely visible. Since her death, Mum has lived in one of these buildings, made up of two bodies separated by the esplanade, identical, in an arc. I am told that it looks a lot like the Palais de Chaillot. The esplanade overlooks something beautiful. I like to be there. A heavy wrought iron lantern is suspended from a cable several kilometers long which connects the two parts of the palace. She is slowly swaying in the wind. When mom approaches me, in a soft voice she asks me to smile. I smile, closing my eyes. She says: "With open eyes" [...] We compare the color of our clothes.  

December 15, 2012  

I saw Dr. B. three times in a week and yet I do not feel any particular effect, at least none of those supposed to be produced by this kind of treatment. Three times Doctor B. remained silent in his armchair, sticking from time to time to a few reflections devoid of any relation to the content of the session, relaunching me for example on old questions such as knowing what explains the absence of a moped in my painting, and why my characters are never motorized, questions to which in this case I have no answer, he knows it. This morning, as I was emptying tubes of toothpaste in a saucepan in front of him, he abruptly repeated to me that there was no frozen monkey on my webs either ... His sentence remained in suspense and we have of course burst out laughing, as usual, but I did not know exactly what he had in mind, moreover the pan being too small I could not empty the fifty tubes, j must have squeezed the last ones over the trash can in his office, which made us laugh again. This afternoon I took the metro to Pasteur, like that, to take a walk. I like this gray Paris in the rain.  

December 7, 2012  

I found this note in a notebook that I filled out at the age of twenty-two: "The habit of relying on mum's prayers is perhaps absurd. One should not think that it is incumbent on the only prayer has the mission of satisfying you, because it is only human if I may say so, at least it is not divine. Do you have to pray yourself? To pray is to admit your fate and, in a way, to immerse yourself in it more. the idea that the cases where prayer is in vain and not when it works are manifest. Mum will die, and forever stop praying, only then will I know if prayer is working. " Fuck what you can be stupid and bombastic at twenty-two!  

November 29, 2012  

I am in my dining room, in Paris (the dream reproduces the room exactly). I walk around the table with a man who claims to be Stan Getz, but I don't believe him. I hear notes played on the tenor saxophone, then distinctly the title But beautiful, as if a musician were in the room. We take a kind of tunnel that goes under the table and enter a recess (located at the location of the fireplace), where the musician seems to be. I am overwhelmed by the quality of this music. The man from earlier is no longer there. I touch a soft, mud-like material. Someone is there and tells me they have a secret. I then let myself slide without shame in this hot material, looking for this person with my hands, I do not find him strictly speaking. It turns out that our flesh and this mud merge into an equal consistency, that parts of our bodies are everywhere at the same time [more uncertain ...] I am told that the man earlier was well and truly Stan Getz.  

November 21, 2012  

I walk along the endless platform of Gambetta station on line 3 (in the dream, this station belonged to my family). I enter a house whose entrance is located far away, at the other end of the quay, a house made up entirely of rooms. I remember having lived there a worried, troubled childhood even, strewn with demonstrations that others did not hear, as if one addressed to me from afar under the earth's crust: rumblings which took on different meanings according to each other. frequencies. I also remember that an original score by Maurice Ravel was once hung in one of these rooms, a score composed of phosphorescent signs and bearing at the bottom right the inscription "For Denis". I find the room, but the score is no longer there.  

November 6, 2012  

Earlier in Notre-Dame, Bach, Toccata and fugue in D minor BWV 538, called Dorian so as not to confuse it with the other, the BWV 565, much better known. Wonderful, there is no other word, and the constant hubbub of the cathedral (people from all over the world come and go everywhere, take pictures ...) gives the music a somewhat special dimension, a mixture of sacred and not sacred at all, personally I find my account there, without knowing exactly why, yes, people trigger big flashes in your face, talk to you behind your back, we are immersed in a huge bath of History, grandiose things of all kinds and other bullshit of today, it is basically what we are looking for in these circumstances, that especially the world continues to revolve around us, good if it was about 'listen to Daphnis and Chloe, I'm not saying, but this Toccata and fugue ...  

October 28, 2012  

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My works in water on paper are now a few years old. I used acrylic ink for some, watercolor for others. In general, water-based painting is quite restrictive, in my eyes at least: even if the results obtained can sometimes seem satisfactory, we confusedly keep the feeling of having been dominated by water. Here, my birthplace on the heights of Le Havre. I first took a picture one summer morning and remembered the winters of the fifties in Siberia. We were going down this rue Félix-Faure on a sledge. I wonder where this watercolor hangs today. And how are the people looking at her.  

October 2, 2012  

Doctor B. will never say to me: "The hardest thing in my office is to have to constantly curb the nonsense that goes through my head, to have to contain, to play psychiatrist, and this comedy forces me to go to bed at night. nine o'clock in the evening, invades my mind, I could speak of a ridiculous farce, I see myself in Sempé's drawings, entangled in the clichés of psychoanalysis. To each patient corresponds a particular universe in which it is necessary to enter, to which it is necessary to stick immediately, this passage is madness. About ten patients a day, over eight hours. If I only listened to one, even for eight hours, that would be a piece of cake. A long eight-hour session, with breaks to eat and stretch your legs. The GP sees more people every day, but has no such problem. The patient only gives him his body, and going from a boil to a coryza is all the same less ... The body is an object ... Even though I always have my patient's file under my nose, it I happen to make mistakes in the first names of the husband, the children, the cousins or the grandmother, to invert the dates. I happened to be taken back because at the previous session I forgot to note that the mother had dipped her son's head in a basin of water at the age of five, and not when I was five. 'age fifteen as I thought. This is why the psychiatrist speaks so little. The goal is not to be silent, no, it is not to make mistakes. It's comedy: seeming to know. Don't listen to my evil spirit, Denis, I think I have a little layer of grime, you know, and I should be a little careful talking to you. " (but no but no).  

September 25, 2012  

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A blue 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. I daydreamed a little inside. There was a pleasant smell there, not quite an old smell, but something that had to do with the past, as in those Romanesque churches that one visits in the summer to find freshness, and a mysterious tranquility. I dropped onto the bench. There was a book in the glove compartment, of which I read a few pages in a low voice: the description of a rainy day and a wedding in an old Norman abbey surrounded by a wood. And when I was driving later on the waterfront, towards Juan, my thoughts were full of this damp wood. I stopped along the pine forest, in the shade. It was noon. No one around the pool. No noise. I was on this huge bench, stretched out my full length. The solitude of this place filled me with old dreams. I adjusted the rearview mirror so that I could see the sky without twisting. In this shadow, I could make out the black tops of the trees, their backs to me. They had made each other long braids while I was riding.  

September 18, 2012  

A very short manuscript (one sentence) attributed to Anaïs Nin has just been sold for 91,000 dollars: "Vostre verge elle es belle, name of a pipe, cute, I want her". Christie's justifies its decision to put on sale this sublime text written by the novelist for the two Nobel Prize winners, by describing it as one of the most beautiful prose in the world. In a crowded room, more than a hundred manuscripts of all origins are also on sale, including one attributed to Anaïs Nin's father (sold for $ 82 with the seller's commission). That of Anaïs Nin, lot 63, was disputed between bidders on the phone, on the internet, behind the scenes and in the room. The winner is behind the scenes where, at the start of the dream, I find myself. This winner, a small man with glasses, is immediately protected from journalists by the handling staff. "He bid on behalf of a Balinese dancer," a spokesperson for Christie's told reporters. Just before waking up, I leave Christie's and I walk on the sidewalk of avenue Matignon in the company of a person that I believe to be Anaïs Nin, she tries to confuse me by circling around me. I realize that it is his father. He walks away over there, waves me a little farewell ...  

August 24, 2012  

I take part as a guest in a television or radio show, at least that's the impression I have: but no camera, no microphone, no technician, no particular decor, the place is like an amphitheater, and there are hundreds of us standing there for what the person standing on the platform calls a "live." This person is a man in white at the start of the dream, then the same man in yellow ... Large loudspeakers broadcast the very low sound of this man's voice, which echoes questions which the participants must take turns answering. role. As I feel my turn coming I realize with relief that the only answer formulated by the people around me is: I don't know. When finally a question is addressed to me I answer that I do not know, the faces then turn in my direction and one smiles at me from all sides [uncertain continuation] ... I am among a group of people on the ground floor of the establishment, we walk at a rapid pace towards a room where the audience results of the show will be announced, everyone is dressed in shorts and light shirts ... As we are we arrive in this room, the announcement of excellent results triggers an immense and joyful scramble, in the middle of which I end up finding myself pressed against my older brother (I had not seen him until then), who, holding on to the Using a tape measure, try to measure the exact distance between my right eye and my left knee, then introduce WD-40 silicone-free penetrating oil into my left ear (alarm clock).  

Aug 2, 2012  

Soon fifteen days that I hang out in the plush corridors of my hotel, that I look for the exit to go at least to the beach, it seems that it is magnificent, water at twenty-nine degrees, the people crossed also talk to me about 'a swimming pool somewhere surrounded by a lush palm grove, well, and it seems that Florida is a region that is worth it, soaking up the sun, its golf courses, its marinas, its typical housing estates, its amusement parks ... Every now and then I sit down on the sofas to read some Fitzgerald news, and it won't be long before I tackle the spa's price list, which I was apparently very close to last night before succumbing to fatigue and to fall asleep on the floor ($ 840 to have my stomach rubbed with ketchup).  

July 10, 2012  

Today I brought to Doctor B a drawing of Gandhi on the trumpet, which he examined very carefully, in silence ... Then he said that it was interesting, that in addition he saw there something other than art, perhaps a form located at the borders of the thought ... Well, I did not see what he meant but I answered that thank you that touched me a lot, that I was trying to escape my compulsive attitudes towards subjects, that the idea of Gandhi on the trumpet appealed to me, that thus I broke a little with my "background" ... that I had perhaps found a way to formulate my thought differently, well that Gandhi on the trumpet pleased me what, that it was obvious ... "Yes, he continued, it is obvious ..." And he held out his right hand to me above his office, as if to say goodbye to me. I squeezed it. And we were silent for a long time. So, staring at me, he ended up whispering: "Well, that will be one hundred and sixty euros". And I left the office in tears.  

June 30, 2012  

Emil Cioran had brought a complete Mickey Mouse disguise, of which I only put on the mask, he spoke to me by tapping me on the top of my head with a small rubber mallet, his voice white, the tone monotonous, probably not right. he soon told me that my eyelids were heavy, that I was going to fall asleep at his signal ... no, I was on the contrary wide awake, and while I could have expected from him to a skeptical and acerbic speech, the content was on the contrary close to an inner infantile appeal, and I slipped into a state of delicious abandonment ... He suddenly told me to put on the entire disguise, it was a Order, I got up, then shouting we hit each other with cushions ... A small bell then rang, indicating the end of this session. And I left the writer's apartment covered with feathers because one of the cushions had exploded (dreams all the same).  

June 25, 2012  

Good week overall (12/20), except Sunday: while strutting in the Russian church on rue Daru I stumbled on the edge of a small platform, one of the yogurts always present in my inner pockets exploded, and in the evening I soaked my chicken sandwich in maple syrup (terrible).  

May 31, 2012  

An art gallery now occupies the ground floor and the first floor of the building where I lived in a small two-room apartment on this first floor as a student. The porch has not changed, to the right. I push open the door between the two windows, walk towards a spiral staircase, go up. Up there, three large green armchairs surround a table in the center of the exhibition hall. I sit down to think. All the partitions have been knocked down. It is difficult for me now to situate myself in my little two-room apartment of the past. I am on the site of one of these partitions, between my bedroom and the bathroom where I took endless hot showers. You want something ? a man asks me. He comes from below, no doubt saw me go up, joins me, is standing in front of me. I question him. No, he replies, he did not know the floor divided into two small apartments, no, when he bought, this first floor was the apartment of a Chilean businessman, who himself , he believes, had bought it from a couple of restaurateurs, and, as we speak, I get up, turn around: my big green armchair is actually on the spot where my dressing room occupied, and no, like I first believed it, straddling the partition that separated my bedroom from the bathroom, my error being explained as follows: I had not taken into account the space taken by the toilets, which have now been removed. Do you have a toilet? The man indicates to me a door at the back of the room, which I quickly open to take a look and close immediately (a toilet indeed). Thank you, I tell him, going back down the spiral staircase. Once outside on the sidewalk, turning around, noting that he is watching me perplexed from inside his gallery, I give him a small smile (no, but who is this con? Could we read in his house).  

May 22, 2012  

An airy place, a warm light spread everywhere, except the area where my father is standing, who is waiting by a glass door, holding a construction shovel in his hand. I slowly back away without taking my eyes off him, two or three more steps, and I'll soon be seated safely inside what appears to be a phone booth, which I can't see right now. A sufficient distance separates me now from him, I sit down on a parapet, in the absence of this telephone booth which remains nowhere to be found. And then everything becomes cloudy: as through a misty window I see him advancing towards me, he is suddenly so close that I have to raise my eyes to look at him, his face appears to me like a mass of modeled earth towering over me . I get up horrified: he is lying on the ground. I feel guilty. Terror seizes me. What happened next would seem like another dream if it weren't for this detail: I remember a murder during which I was guided by a feeling of solemnity, by a mind that understood me (contradiction with the terror felt in front of the body lying on the ground, terror which explains a half awakening). In the farthest distance that my gaze now carries, it is a pine forest that I meet, where I see myself once running in the company of my father, in a happy, distant past, a carpet of pine needles stretches as far as the eye can see. , I feel to tears the nostalgia for the time when I lived in this pine forest with him. I remember that together we waited for the night, lying on still warm sand, in silence, that when the first stars arrived we felt the sun, the sea, the wind present on us, that it manifested itself at his place. by unusual coloring of the skin and the appearance of shiny particles.  

May 15, 2012  

Doctor B. came and went in the corridor at the pleasure of two patients, their conversation reached me in snatches, a fairly great calm reigned in the office. One of the two patients came to sit with me in the waiting room: black hair, remained close to adolescence, provided with a general harmony a little soft, an expression both ceremonial and lost . "There is no dried toad," he told me almost immediately. Good. I then noticed a detail to which I had not immediately given importance: he held a small wooden mallet in his left hand. He got up, pushed open a door, I followed him, he was walking in the half-light, groping, striking the mallet around him. I froze. I was surrounded by recognizable shapes shone by the stream of light released from the back by the half-open door. The others were chatting there. We stood thus in the dark, motionless, silent. A long moment passed and then he said, "Notice, I like chocolate." He laughed, and I heard a long series of mallet hits on a metal object. We were very close to each other now, touching each other. But after one last round of mallet blows he said goodbye to me and left, I heard him running away, banging everywhere, it seemed to me that the noise would never end. Probably one could understand this man. I, who only suffers from a mild disorder of sharing Jimi Hendrix videos on Facebook, couldn't (people though).  

April 29, 2012  

Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff's Etude-Tableau number five opus thirty-nine is my favorite, I said straight away to Doctor B., which for once leaves him unmoved. Pedestrians, he told me. Because today we are installed, not as usual in his office, but on the terrace of a brasserie in the rue du Vieux-Colombier. I am therefore content to comment on the flow of pedestrians on the sidewalk. He listens to me in silence, a flute of champagne in front of him, it's extremely exotic. He finally orders a mille-feuilles and I will have to pay the bill, it seems that this type of session is widespread in large American cities, that it is practiced in large restaurants at four hundred dollars for two, I I'm not there yet, thirty-eight euros anyway and I only drink one coffee (but we stay together for almost an hour). Detail: as I take it upon myself to pass judgment on the somewhat dreary atmosphere which reigns at the two tables which are on the edge of the terrace between us and the sidewalk, he immediately interrupts me in an icy tone: "The pedestrians only".  

April 22, 2012  

Of all the characters of Antiquity, Diogenes is the most absent from my painting, sorry to him, then. Palpable absence, however. Haunting absence, shit!  

April 3, 2012  

It was an evening in my childhood, summer, on the beach. At some distance from me (I could not understand what he was saying to himself), a man addressed my mother a few words, handing her an object. I moved a little closer. She was shaking her head. With both hands, she even made a sign of refusal, added that no, really, thank you, she was leaving the table, before turning in my direction and asking if I wanted a donut, me. No, thank you, same. The man (he had a brown, hairy patch on his forehead) took me aside and oddly explained what these donuts were called, listed the ingredients. Sometimes the dates are badly pitted, you have to be careful, he told me (I was wondering if this plate was soft or hard). His conversation, then, seemed never to dry up when he undertook a monologue: he had known my mother's grandfather, with whom he had distinguished himself before independence (what independence?) As an advisor. He had taken part in the command of the French forces which remained there, was wounded in an enemy attack, and, after the evacuation of the base, he and his wife had returned to France, then returned to settle here for years. late, retired (I didn't understand anything anymore). The poor thing has left us, he said to me and, pointing to the elderly lady who was accompanying him, he confessed to me that he had remarried (what bothered me, deep down, was the question of to know why my mother cowardly abandoned me to talk to others there).  

March 27, 2012  

Dream. Although having the exact appearance of Duke Ellington, the man who enters my studio introduces himself under the name of the Duke of Lautréamont, and advances as if he had already been in this workshop, as if there had his habits. I show him canvases, some, not all, which he examines without speaking, running my right hand through his hair. I notice that he is carrying a small piano on his back, like a backpack. I wonder if he is talking about me to the musicians in his orchestra, I think so, a stealthy phrase mixed in with the conversation, a phrase none have heard. But maybe this idea of coming to my studio was advised to him by Johnny Hodges a quarter of an hour before, maybe he gave in to a sudden impulse from his saxophonist, it's very possible. After all I don't know anything about him, he's a stranger. I realize that I have never seen him standing, as I can see him just now, from a distance. In my memory, either he is sitting at his piano, or he precedes me in the dark, a meter away, and walking fast. I approach the wall, and stand next to him. I am so close to him that our shoulders brush against each other. I approach again, until obtaining a frank contact between us, between our shoulders. He does nothing to prevent it. He stares at me. And if I asked him to play the piano, yes, all of a sudden. Maybe he came for that. He must want to. Yes, that's it, he came to play me Solitude, a burning desire anime. But no, he walks towards the half-light at the end of the studio and sits down on a chair, there, alone. I hear him talking to himself. The sentences come to me in snatches. Then he is silent. Later, he pushes a cellar door (which does not exist in reality). I'm. The half-light and the smell of this junk attracted him. He sits on the arm of an old club chair which is losing its feathers. The back door lets in a trickle of light, which makes the shapes around us shine. "Our last concert surprised me, Denis, I wanted to tell you ... this riff in A minor, all this nostalgia ... I said to myself that you are forcing your nature. You were forcing her, weren't you? He checks his watch. He opens his little piano (like a bag), takes out a bottle of old cognac and, with his fingertips, places a few drops on the top of my right hand. And I wake up with the unprecedented impression that this dream has spanned several nights since my childhood.  

March 22, 2012  

Basically, I think my recipe for marshmallows stuffed with anchovy is a dead end, maybe I will have to give up the game, I don't know ... Replace the anchovy with country ham? no, I don't believe it ... I am aware of what is at stake, and I think back to my chimpanzees flambéed with armagnac, or my frogs crushed in chocolate, what successes! But I'm still hopeful, and I'm not giving up my bacon cookies anyway.  

March 12, 2012  

Several similar dreams last night. I come in like an intruder and no one takes care of me. There is a large reception hall made up of two wings, one of which is plunged into a chiaroscuro which makes one think of a church. People are talking under their breaths, standing. Ladies in black dresses and white aprons circulate between them with trays, we weave our way through a maze of inlaid furniture, sofas, medallion armchairs, we tread on huge old rugs, we breathe the odors of wax and fire. 'grass. A sort of enormous piece of furniture surrounded by vegetation is placed in the center of a room like a bandstand, it looks like a public garden: volutes of large palms are held there by nylon threads in pleasant positions. eye. I arrive in this room, I look for solitary places, I am going to sit apart on deep armchairs. The rustling of trees in a park is heard through the half-open windows. At the beginning of these moments I feel good, but I quickly have the impression of breaking a protocol. To realize, finally, that everyone in these rooms is each seated in an individual bumper car with the Apple brand on the front cover. They circulate slowly, without colliding. So the shepherdess I'm sitting on turns out to be a bumper car, too. But Fleury Michon brand.  

February 28, 2012  

In this dream, I break into Doctor B.'s office and search his office. The two drawers on the right are equipped with filing cabinets. I discovered the files, of unequal thickness, suspended in alphabetical order, the names clearly written on the edges. I find mine at the bottom of the top drawer. It is the thinnest file. I open it in front of me, on the desk. Only three numbered sheets, covered with scattered, muddled, nervous notes, most of them very brief, which I read to the end. No allusion to any therapy. These words and bits of sentences relate only to my physical appearance: my clothes, the complexion of my face, the condition of my shoes, my hands, the cleanliness of my hair ... I open another file, very thick: Lise Pontaux, forty-two years old, married, three children, domiciled at 87 rue Saint-Dominique, etc. However, the start of the treatment only dates back to less than two months, but this file includes about sixty numbered sheets, dozens of photos, newspaper clippings, a large pocket filled with postcards from the Biarritz region, several reproductions. from Rembrandt's Night Watch, and red chalk drawings of the face of the same girl. I consult other files. Here again, all of them have many and varied elements, which are always added to the same loose sheets on which Doctor B. records his notes. These files, I count them: one hundred and thirty-seven. I close the two drawers and put the key away in a round box of La Vosgienne candies.  

February 4, 2012  

Dream. I am with a man named Montieux in front of an old fresco, probably from the 16th century. An elderly man joins us and tells this Montieux that I am a painter. Where do you work ? the elderly man asks me, heading to another place in this undefined space. I follow suit, gratifying him with a smile. He ends up asking me if I am in Paris, to which I answer yes. It seems to satisfy him. We enter his studio, a room with a very high ceiling, crowded with a lot of things of all kinds, where I find Montieux (whom I thought I had left behind), seated in the company of several people he seems to know and to whom I am introduced. The painter that I am attracts questions (to which I give evasive answers). What do you see there? asks me a man, who points to a painting signed Matisse whose style has nothing to do with the real Matisse (in the dream it does not matter). Mimosa, Montieux breathes me, putting his hand on my shoulder. Mimosa, I repeat to this man. Ah good ? he tells me. You, what did you see? I ask him, but he hasn't seen much yet judging by the expression on his face (which then comes alive). He declares to see a character with a mustache. Ah not at all, I conclude, and I go out onto a balcony, from which you can see a few meters below the rails of a funicular, and below the beach of Mimosas, at least that's what it is. 'they whisper in my ear ...  

Jan. 7, 2012  

Earlier in the Woods, a woman gets out of her car with something in her arms, a small beige dog of the young mastiff type which, seeing me, jumps to the ground, barks and I can already see myself in the emergency room. Ambroise Paré hospital. Jason, Jason, Jason, says the woman, motionless (she addresses the animal, which drools on my legs, phew). Come here, come here, she said finally. She walks over to me, picks up the animal with a wave of her arm, legs bent, tells him in English that next time it will be bad for him, and, still in English, to me, that she is terribly sorry. . Never mind, I say to use my little school English, thinking you fucking piss off shit.  

Saturday, December 31, 2011

In this dream, I stole a toiletry bag from Galeries Lafayette. A judge ushered me into an office and explained to me how the reconstruction was going to take place. He got no response when he asked me to admit the facts. I was seated between two gentlemen in the back of a car and we drove slowly to the store on Boulevard Haussmann. 

There was a crowd, to whom the police cordon ordered them to calm down, and the judge walked towards the entrance of the store, opened it with a key which the clerk held out to him, made people enter a to one, staring at them, then ordered the door to be closed immediately on the crowd, which we continued to hear. He made me remove the handcuffs and surround me with two policemen. 

Do you still deny the facts? he called out to me. I answered yes, with a nod of my head. He called to him a very young policeman in uniform, informed him of the task which was going to fall to him: to carry out in my place the gestures which the witnesses would indicate to him. Another policeman was busy around a fake plastic toiletry bag with stylized shapes, he placed it on a counter at the end of which I stood, while each witness in turn stood in a place that the clerk noted. It seemed to me to last a century. 

Ladies and gentlemen please, exclaimed the judge. He announced the first witness: M. Saint-Gray, there, standing beside him, whose shoulder he held. There was a meeting between the two of them first, then, on the instructions of Mr. Saint-Gray, the young policeman in charge of carrying out the gestures in my place went to stand about twenty yards away. Go ahead, said the judge to him, and the young policeman leapt up with great strides, popped up a revolver in his hand (DIY polystyrene), rushed for the toilet bag, grabbed it by sticking the gun on it and left with it. she on the sidewalk, where he finally stopped, turned in our direction, had to lean down to see us about twenty yards away in the semi-darkness of the store. Mr. Saint-Gray, calmly (he had returned without waiting for his place around the counter), said no, from his seat he had not been able to see what had happened outside on the sidewalk, that it had been too fast.

Well, concludes the judge, and he turns  

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Visit of an apartment, today, like that for nothing, passing for a possible buyer. We got in, this gentleman from the agency clean on him and me. In the living room, I approached the television, the remote control in my hand, turned it on, changed the channel, tried them all. These people did not have Canal Plus. Do they watch TV a lot? I asked. I don't know, he said, though interested in what I was watching (bullshit). Then I had crossed the reception room, the dining room, and was now trying to see through the hatch what was in the kitchen. I walked around, entered (the other followed me), examined the room with a single glance, stared for a moment at the two sinks and the stainless steel bench, pointed out that everything was very clean. Nothing was lying around, no, no bowl, no cutlery, no crumbs (the housekeeper must have spent the morning here and the people eating outside), only a plate thawed on three mushroom pies, already obviously soft, that I touched , they were soft, yes (people all the same).  

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

In this dream, Harpo Marx lit a cigarette, let himself fall back, inhaled a puff with a vague gaze, released the smoke without blowing it, very sybarite, seemed to think about what he was going to say, his head on one hand , did not say anything in the end, closed my eyes as I passed the back of my hand, my arm, over his skull, which slipped over his hair, causing a harp sound (he had now turned around and wanted me to massage him back there). I placed myself astride the top of her thighs. I rubbed his back there, following the directions he was moaning trying to send me with his face partly buried in the pillow, his cigarette in my hand (not there, he said, not there, not there. the). Ouch, he cried. But a harp music emanated from him, of which I did not feel the author ...  

Thursday, November 24, 2011

I once again stopped taking my magnesium, for a week, probably unconsciously to check its effectiveness again, and the result is that indeed without this molecule I'm just good to walk in the woods, I do not fix it, each his specialties, I am decidedly not autonomous in terms of magnesium, I still think I am, but no, and I am not, moreover, not in pajamas either, I have to regularly restock me, you have to be humble on these issues.  

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

I'm writing, I tell him. From a napkin on my knees I extract a manuscript, of which I hand her the first two pages, which she grabs, leaning towards me. These pages, she seems to show some interest in them, finally raises her eyes and looks at me, like a sadness flush around her mouth, but maybe it is an appearance. As she walks away, then, in the room, goes to the windows, leans against one of them, and looks at me, I close my towel and get up, put on a cap. I precede her on a staircase. It's snowing again, I said, reaching the bottom. Through a window, in fact, we see it together mom and I, side by side, flakes descend so slowly in the stillness of the air that they never seem to have reached the ground. Yes, she said. She contracts her shoulders, embraces the torso with her two arms. She has very beautiful hair [... suite uncertain, awakening swimming].  

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Today I brought to Doctor B. a canvas on which I had pasted a photo of him. He examined it with great attention, in silence ... Then he said that it was interesting, that moreover he saw there something other than painting, perhaps a form situated at the borders of thought. ... Well, I didn't see what he meant, but I replied that thank you that touched me a lot, that I was trying to escape my compulsive attitudes in matters of subjects, that the idea of this portrait liked, that in this way I broke a little with my painting ... that I had perhaps found a way to formulate my thought differently, well that this portrait pleased me what, that it was obvious ... "Yes, he continued, it's obvious ... "He held out his right hand to me above his desk, as if to say goodbye to me. I squeezed it. And we were silent for a long time. So, staring at me, he ended up whispering: "... And that will be a hundred and sixty euros" (people all the same).  

Saturday, October 8, 2011

This morning, I bought faucets in a small hardware store on Avenue Mozart, about 40kg, immediately abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the store. This obsessive-compulsive disorder is, I am told, exceptional among artists, especially widespread in sport, tennis in particular, and in air transport. I have read that Roger Federer would devote a third of his income to the purchase of various valves (about four thousand tons per year), that in the sixties certain hostesses of American companies which have now disappeared went so far as to squander the three quarters of their salary. The artists, no, are apparently not affected by this kind of disturbance, at least not those that I know. I would be an exception, but no study to my knowledge has been done on this subject (to be deepened anyway).  

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Doubtless to be closer to me, Doctor B. often speaks to me about colors, proceeds by analogy to color, and that tenses me up, I dare not tell him. But on Friday he said to me: Suppose a person is made of four colors, suppose we respond intensely to a color in them, the timbre of their voice or the expression of their gaze, we will continue to respond to that color. particular rather than an entire personality palette, we have a continuous response to fragments ... Good. It is nice to use this we, I guess it is for me. The point is that only analysis will explore my automatic responses and modify my reduced circuit, reveal its mechanical character, open all the circuits to include a total vision of the other, open me completely to new impressions, to a total receptivity. I still have a hell of a lot of goodwill, shit, don't I?

Monday, September 26, 2011

During my early childhood, an incident destroyed my self-confidence. My nanny was the person I loved the most in the world, she adored me, pampered me, made Paris-Brest béchamel cheese all the time, which I ate with great pleasure. But she left home to get married. I then erased her from my memory, I didn't want her name to be mentioned. And now I refused to eat béchamel. Recently, at the beginning of September, while crossing the Trocadéro gardens, I saw a lady give a Paris-Brest to a little boy, a spectacle which reminded me of all the circumstances of the incident, filled me with joy. and relieved me of a great secret weight. However, Doctor B. today blames this abandonment of the past responsible for my repugnance for bechamel.  

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Parpaillot. It's funny how this word suddenly emerges, it's maybe twenty years since I said or wrote it, it's another life, I left these words of my education, of my childhood, and suddenly it resurfaces. It's strange. Parpaillot comes from the Occitan word parpailhol which means butterfly: the white clothes of the Calvinists were somewhat reminiscent of butterflies. These first colonies of Calvinists lived in the south of France, their little white silhouettes that frolic in the countryside evoked butterflies to the locals (people all the same).  

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Total idleness today. Rain over Paris. Finally, I turn off the television to read a collection of speeches by Vincent Auriol. I love the one pronounced on February 22, 1951 in front of the local elected officials of Finistère on the occasion of Mardi- Gras.  

Tuesday July 5, 2011

Extract from Journal du outside by Annie Ernaux: "At the Leclerc hypermarket, in the middle of shopping, I hear Travel. I wonder if my emotion, my pleasure, this anxiety that the song is ending, have something in common with the violent impression made on me by books like The Beautiful Summer of Pavese, or Sanctuary. record three, five, ten times in a row, waiting for something that never happened). There is more release in a book, escape, resolution of desire. the lyrics count very little, only the melody, so I understood nothing of the Platters, the Beatles). No places, no scenes, no people, nothing but yourself and your desire. Yet it is this brutality and this poverty which allow me, perhaps, to make flow a whole period of my life and the girl that I was on hearing, thirty years later, I'm just another dancing partner. Whereas the richness and the beauty of the Beautiful summer, of the Search for lost time, reread twice, never give me back my life. "  

Saturday May 28, 2011

Dream: Mom and I are walking on a beach, dressed in coats. A man pretending to be Maurice Ravel walks towards us and tries to put mashed potatoes in our ears. When the man walks away, mom says: "You are not Maurice Ravel". So we enter the water fully dressed. The first bars of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun echo in the distance, some flute notes ... [uncertain continuation]. She and I observe her yellow and orange sandals resting on the sand of the beach. We know that if the man had been Maurice Ravel he would not have tried to convince us with mashed potatoes. This certainty fills us with a deep feeling of respect for Maurice Ravel.

Friday, May 6, 2011

In order not to accumulate too much fatigue during the periods leading up to the summer vacation, I eliminate certain activities, I sort of make dead ends, which I try to dose judiciously, a delicate task which I accomplished with more or less happiness in the past. For example, stopping work during the four months before going on vacation was excessive and led me to cancel the vacation for lack of money. No, this year, in anticipation of my vacation in August, I simply refused to eat lobster claws since the beginning of April, and to buy my metro tickets from the vending machines. And for ten days I have not waxed my shoes.  

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

I could not vote for a candidate who would have a big mustache, who knows why ... No more than I could vote for a candidate who would often refer to the idea of "coat" ... As for the one who does not would not know how to pronounce the name "Vaughan" and who would iron only the front of his shirts, then there, even less, it is clear!