Marie-Hélène Tessier

Cachée dans la forêt...

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME CACHEE DANS LA FORÊT, curated by Gregory Betts, forOpen Letter, A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, October 2011 Winter issue, 16 000 words. Accompanied by a performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, August 2011, visitng the exhibition titled The Surealist Revolution in Art, under the influence...  

La Forêt (An excerpt edited and published by Karl Jirgens for Rampike, 2013 from the original text for Surrealist Issue of Open Letter, 2011)

 

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 “Back to normal” is a strange expression. Unfriendly to dissipation, it has to relate to conservatism. Sunday strollers. It defines the time after crisis, small or big. After the uncanny, we keep falling back on what we know. After the rainstorm, after a cry, a fight, after riots and strikes, after a vacation or a revolution, after a concert or a bad dream. This “back to normal” business is not to be trusted. During an argument with my son, I bit his hand. He was so shocked, he laughed. I was perched over a delicate task of sticking down the third and bottom part of an exquisite corpse composed of one ostrich leg, wearing hound's-tooth pantyhose, revealing a grotesque Jurassic claw, standing onto the middle tip of a broken record player; a commissioned piece about the media in general. In French, instead of hound's tooth, we say pied de poule. While one relates to a dog's teeth, the other is about the chicken's foot. The second leg of my collage was made out of a series of vacuum cleaners vacuuming a vacuuming cleaner vacuuming a vacuum cleaner vacuuming a vacuum…for CBC-Radio-Canada for an exhibition themed Un Monde médiatisé / A Mediated World, for a silent auction, to raise funds through the Red Cross Drought Program, for the Horn of Africa.  An exquisite corpse for people dying of hunger. Africa never ends to dry up. Wine and cheese between six and seven, by invitations only. Space limited. Cocktail attire.  My architect was speaking to me about how a slight curve changes everything. How architectural details can reach acute political statements about high and low. He was linking Modernism to Gothicism and Post-modernism to the Beaux-arts tradition, taken up by the Philadelphia school, against the International Style. History runs its course like an unconscious flow of ideas we spend time connecting after the traces have manifested themselves. An artist cut a big tri-dimensional circle into a country house. The ripples of that piece are vast and cosmic. I relate to the gesture in a new way. I bit his hand because my own were full of glue and scissors and after I asked him a hundred times to leave a lot of space around my body so I can concentrate over the delicate operation over the legs of my corpse, he put his precious little paw right on my mouth to shut me up. My mouth. A black hole is a region of space-time from which nothing, not even light completely absorbed, can escape. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return. In research, it is important to leave what you are doing, forget how and why, and trust the itinerary in real time, without a clear purpose. Artists, repressed with current discourses of various guilt productions, are cut off from unconscious desires which should drive their impetus. A certain independence from the initial intention is of essence. In a labyrinth, to get lost is a prerequisite to finding your way. In work, there is the word œuvre. Œ is a rare combination of vowels found also in œuf which means egg. In the word œil, the eye. Also in Cœur, which means heart. Eye. Heart. Egg. Œuvre. One's life's work. Attached in an embrace, they are mystically connected. Writing is all about getting lost in the forest of the alphabet. Max Ernst thought that the forest never goes to sleep early. “She awaits official and proud cutters who are looking for midnight at x hour”. In Minautore no 5, May 1934, he says that the best season for the forest is the future. “The future was the past when the nightingale was friends with mystery.” A Minotaur is a Greek figure part man/part bull. “What is imagination? It is a woman who cuts down trees”, Ernst cries, while describing the forest as a maker of matches which we give to children as toys. The forest was his favorite subject; an apt symbol of the recesses of human psyche. Places where people can become lost and reason bewildered, to finally understand the other side of existence. Where I live, in the summer, forest fires are always a threat, latent, probable, included in the concept <forest>. Wilderness is fabulous, but not for too long. It is best to leave it before it captures you, before nature takes over culture. I knew talented artists who casually started to garden only to eventually tragically abandon art altogether in favour of labouring the land. Only a slice of nature. A cloud of milk. A sliver of reality. A tiny piece of the calendar. Who cares which day A is sitting on a fence. I remember someone took me down a path in Ashdown Forest, in the thin tunnels of trees serpenting the British countryside, giving the false impression of being deep in the forest. The first time I saw red mushrooms with white polka dots. There was a kissing gate. We did not kiss. He was from Stuttgart. He took me under a fantastic tree where we spoke in English, a language neither of us knew how to speak. We also spoke about philosophy; a language both of us wanted to learn, so we tried to describe the feeling at the end of the day, just before sundown, the colour of all endings.  There is a philosopher who puts together as a related series of signs, the roman number five (V); five o'clock sunset; the position of a woman during lovemaking and the inversed spelling of Venus, lurking in the evening sun. We were passed by British nymphs wearing tweeds on gentle horses and then we arrived to another gate, overlooking a vast meadow and we both laughed at how British the whole scene was. So many films I need to see again, especially the ones where I cannot recall any specific characters or any particular denouement. I was at the cabin. It was a dry and sunny afternoon. The sun was too high, too loud, a garish hour, I was preoccupied by petty things I carried with me despite the multiple ferries taken to get there. Irritable at large, I had not slept much and the light hurt my eyes. When I am in rhino mode, I make bitter tea and soap breaks in my hands and I cannot find my keys anywhere, usually because somebody stole them along with my rings, my lipstick, my leather gloves and my phone. I also provoke the rain and nothing is happening but vertiginous casualties. I spend my life in damage control and chronic apologies. I must do something about that. To help erase the negativity I was subjecting myself to, I looked into the cabin's library, which contains a collection of odd reads, some books I never dared to open. An illustrated field guide to Western Birds; Sandpipers, Eared Owls, Loons in flights, vultures, eagles, hawks and falcons in kites. The Wordsworth Manual of Ornament; An historical compendium of applied and decorative art. The Moon Handbook; a 21st century Travel Guide. Life is a long long short convalescence. We seem to never recover fully from the accident of birth. I took out Ovid's Metamorphoses and a very small, hard cover olive green dictionary of synonyms published in Edinburgh in 1929. In defense of the use of his humble compilation, the author insists on its high minded purpose, not for seeking elegant variety but about the secret of good writing in knowing one's thought, finding les mots justes, the right and only words wherewith to express it. Taking a slight offense to foreign influences, the preface is replete with comparisons between English and French brought through the Normans. Because of its condensed format, one word keeps referring to another. For the word reality for example, you have to refer to dream; for sound, look for silence, for death, see life, for opposite think similar, enigma in forest, smile for ruin, and so on. I picked up a fifties English translation of Nadja, published with Evergreen Books. Shakespeare's Sonnets translated into French, published with Mille-et-une-nuits. Maximes et réflexions diverses from La Rochefoucauld; about good and bad manners in various social contexts. He says that there is an air which matches the figure and talents of each of us and that we always lose a lot when we leave it, to borrow another. He suggests finding our natural air and perfecting it as much as possible. In the window facing the bookshelf, I saw the woods. Books are felled trees. Sometimes windows are see-through mirrors; libraries are barren forests, deserted cemeteries, and books, wooden coffins awaiting disinterment by the simple and solemn gesture of opening their concealed cover; allowing the dead to breathe out life. The word book comes from German and it means block of wood. In French, livre comes from the Latin and relates directly to liberté as well as to vivre which means 'to live'. Reading is to have a liberated life. Free. Trees. Wind. Books. Voices. Obscure image of the Arcades after demolition with scholars salvaging human knowledge amongst ruins, like every couple should when they break up. Salvaging the best is the human condition, every day. The manuscript for the Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin had been entrusted to his friend Georges Bataille before he fled Paris under Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, carefully hid the manuscript in a closed archive where it was eventually discovered after the war. The fragmented style of his life's work as a collection of unfinished reflections, a meticulously constructed monumental ruin, written between 1927 and 1940, edited only later, is often considered to be a forerunner to postmodernism. I hear a boat siren, accompanied by a vague brass section. Baritones and base clarinets, but I have no idea where they come from. A mixture of the outside traffic and inner noise. A copy of Les champs magnétiques. The charmed experimental game to converse only in images. Life is all about telling each other stories, including the ones we are telling ourselves. I took out Maldoror, published with Clair Obscure, but I was not convinced. I was not in good form for edgy encounters. I think that friends should be friendly. Chopin is always there when I need him and knows to say the right things. His understanding echoes his generosity. His œuvre is a complete repertoire on tenderness, the infinitely delicate. A disintegrated blue and black cover copy coming from the sea: Maurice Blanchot's Espace littéraire, an approach to obscurity. British Columbia; a Complete Hiker's Guide. Native sites and fire ecology with trail descriptions showing route difficulties, elevation gain and loss. A splendid illustrated version of Through the Looking Glass. And last, from the higher shelf, I noticed a decaying map sticking out of a rotting travel guide for Roughing it in the Ham Face: a Manual for Emigrants Entering the Other Side. It was hard to read as it was almost all erased and fragile in its multifold, but the essential seemed to have survived. It was a mix of humid perspectives and moist topographical renderings in line drawings, with touches of pastel, geological signage and a clear set of instructions written in sixties beatnik woodsy font. Some handwriting in parenthesis, which reminded me of Tanguy's drawings; the ones which include the titles within. Walter Benjamin says that “there are perhaps paths that lead us again and again to people who have one and the same function for us: passageways that always, in the most diverse periods of our life, guide us to the friend, the betrayer, the beloved, the pupil or the master. Forests are not only to be found in forests. It would be a mistake to think that The Sonnets are addressed to a woman. It would be an equal misunderstanding to presume they are not, and that Nadja is only a crazy homeless woman, a femme-enfant or a mere account of an artist running after an ever fleeing melody, praying for its return. The term fugue derives from the French which relates to fugere in Latin, which means to flee, as well as fugare, which means to chase, so that the fugue is included in the chase and the chase in the fugue. Music serves to reveal the essential within us. La sonate de Vinteuil. There is not such a thing as silence. I hear the laughter of children in the garden. One is skateboarding on the roof of the tree house, while another is playing with electricity in the rain. A third one is running bare foot brandishing a piece of broken glass in her hand. “Children Three that nestle near, eager eye and willing ear, pleased a simple tale to hear, echoes fade and memories die, Autumn frosts have slain July, lovingly shall nestle near, in a wonderland they lie”. Sitting in a congee house, my friend asks me: “What do you think a femme fatale is?'' “It depends what you like” I answered. “For some people, it could be a very wealthy woman with the power to make you famous. Others could find the fatal in a very talented woman but she would also have to be beautiful. Or just painfully hip. Talent is overrated. Too beautiful to desire could be fatal. I don't know, why do you ask?” I was quite off. “I think it has something to do with power”, I continued. “Political power is not very sexy. Style goes a long way. I would like to think that it is someone who has perfected her misgivings”. In a Korean film noir, The House Maid, the original version thriller directed by Kim Ki-young, known for his psychosexual and melodramatic horror films, often focusing on the psychology of their female characters, tells the story of a family's destruction by the introduction of a sexually predatory housekeeper into their home. Every character in the captive family gains in higher degrees of latent propensities whether it is passivity, victimization, masochism and other similar noble qualities. I suppose that horror defines itself by forfeiture, through the accentuation and flourishing of pre-existing untamed negative forces. The concept of femme fatale requires danger, risk taking, the possibility of loss. Mata Hari, a Dutch exotic dancer from the turn of the century and convicted spy, accused of espionage for the Germans during World War 1, executed by a firing squad in France, is an archetype of femme-fatale, alongside Eve, Mohini, Lilith, Delilah, Salomé, Aphrodite, Medea, Cleopatra, Clytemnestra; all those who madden their lovers and lead them to their doom. After execution at the age of forty-one, Mata Hari's body remained unclaimed and was consequently used for medical study. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris, but very recently, archivists discovered that the head had disappeared, possibly as early as 1954, when the Museum had been relocated. Records dating from 1918 show that the museum also received the rest of the body, but none of the remains could later be accounted for. At her execution, she wore an Amazon style tailored suit, specially made for the occasion and a pair of new white gloves. She refused to be blindfolded and looked directly at her executioners, her head held up until the very end. Finishing our soup, my friend tells me that a femme fatale is a woman to whom nobody tells what to do. I thought to myself (“you mean, a woman who stops believing in you?”). ''Some people would call that 'a woman with balls' I replied before handing him the bill. I do not live close to the airport but I do hear the sound corridors that airplanes draw in the distance. Take-offs and landings are a recurrent motif in the fragments of the tapestries I am weaving. Sometimes, I can hear them for an indeterminate number of minutes, outside time. Sound is all about memory. Spiders use different gland types to produce different silks; sticky silk for trapping prey or fine silk for wrapping it. The tensile strength of a spider's silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity. Its microstructure is under investigation for potential applications in industry, including bullet proof vests. In an installation film loop, a British artist asks his ten year old daughter several questions about time and space and about identity and existence. You have to sit through and follow the thread of thoughts until the very end which is looped. It was about thinking of space and time, separately. About time not being subordinated to space, past and future colliding into the present.  I need to see it again. Eyes and ears. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was never called the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was called the Book of Listening. I doubt I will ever read it. Listening is just as painful as trying to read things from very far. The more you stretch your ear, the more you hear things from inside yourself. That is why the rabbit is wise but he is also always late and never where he wants to be. Time flies and some days being courageous just means cleaning the pile of dishes, doing multiple loads of laundry, cooking a decent meal while trying to become immortal. There is a pretense in humility. Modesty is most often false. While going to art school I used to work in a bookshop called Black Sheep and there were all these weirdoes who came to talk to me. Once, a chubby asexual individual dressed with a mat brown monk cloak carrying a wooden walking stick showed up. He had a very thin and sparse blond beard pinned on his baby face. I was still getting used to West Coast surrealism, which differs from the Mexican magic realism which in turn distinguishes itself from its European manifestations. Less subtle in tones, not always broad in character but often lush and foxy, woody, with a paranoid finish. The nice thing about the Wild West is that everything can only get better. Another book browser gave me all these bootlegged Scriabin discs. He is the one who told me that Henry Miller said that listening to Scriabin is like taking an iced bath on cocaine. It is true that cocaine relates to the Alps more than to the warm desert. I kept opening the bookshop later and later, sometimes I was five hours late so it finally went bankrupt. The truth is that I could not have saved it, had I arrived on time. It only sold contemporary poetry for which I had no time for as I was a bit narrow minded in those years; I was exclusively interested in Cinema and French philosophy. But the truth of the matter is, I did not understand a word.  There were poetry readings once a week which I liked to miss because I could not identify with the style; the disproportionate purple tones right next to cold blacks; too many accessories, like big hat with big earrings with big glasses with big scarf on the same human body. I thought, how could they produce anything remotely subtly interesting. Also, I found it distasteful, or uncomfortable to share profound encounters with meaning, in public. That is why I could never belong to a book club, the disgrace. After an intense concert, I would rather be alone. I heard such a quantity of poetry said to me today, all about fishes. I guess when an artist emerges, like a salmon jumping out of the river against the current, it just means that he arrives somewhere above the line of the horizon, towards a possible immortality. According to Judeo-Christian mythology, celestial hierarchy counts nine different levels. Late Renaissance Italian painters, Botticini in particular, depicted them vividly. Religion clearly invented surrealism and systemized it. Frog rain, walking on water, parting seas, turning rods into serpents, making the blind see, waking up the dead, ascending virgins giving birth to all-encompassing kings, and all sorts of great magic shows. Most people are walking around all day not knowing who they are so they make busy, looking for people to have coffee with and discuss the lives of others, until it is time to pick up the kids. They breathe in and out of make busy as we cry and laugh, in and out of make belief. I think that being exceptional is perhaps better than being exquisite. Being rare is probably best, while disinterested generosity, in proportion and well-appointed is also very important. I now understand these old folkloric European dances where men and women weave in and out from one person to the other, resuming interrupted fragmented conversations, some started the week before; it must have been exhilarating to have something rare or exquisite or exceptional or enigmatic or sexy to say, with your eyes, to different partners in and out of an original thought, the time of a song. On our way to the island, the ferry was called Queen of Oak Bay. Upon our return to the continent, it was called Queen of Cowichan. The Cowichan tribe which was forced to amalgamate several tribes is the largest band government in British Columbia.  My tribe is the best tribe. I was shocked to learn that the African Queen was not the role of Catherine Hepburn but the name of the boat she was sitting in. A Queen does not say: “I would prefer this, or I would have preferred that” my friend repeated to me like a knight. At departure time, the recorded voice of a woman stating the emergency exits and safety procedures in case of a disaster - I thought it would sound very nice in an empty art gallery. In a family gathering, most of the times I like to sit with the eldest or with the youngest. I sat with my friend's mother. Alice was her name. Her daughters were eternally fighting as they never accepted that they were both the inverse image of each other. One was very rational and dry with no airs whatsoever, which gave her a certain power in stillness. The other was all fire, as lively as a song, she was all about movement. They will never get along. They shared, down to great details, the exact dynamic operating between my mother and her sister. We think we are unique but in fact, we are mere synchronized swimmers in different pools emulating kaleidoscopic eternal archetypal compositions. I woke up and went back to that map to make sure I did not dream it, because, in the light of the night, I was maybe starting to make sense of it. There was something tribal, Oceanic or perhaps Mexican, if Japanese, definitely aboriginal. I went back to it because, except for time, I had nothing to lose, in a Pascalian manner, and I was supposed to be there to rest. The instructions went on with more and more authority…Carve images of gods…Conceive by the most distorted imagination…Represent in a sitting attitude, the eagle's claws…Form his hands; rest upon his knees, his legs, in lion's paws…Face a strange compound of beast and bird and part with feathers...In bold characters it said: Lower long weapon. Lower long weapon and join high friends found lying upon the bookshelf…Communicate the important discovery…Belong to a fierce people who live over the Great Salt Lake...Not Christians, it said…Before battle, pray your own hands and highly amused pass the sword to the other…In spite of outward demonstrations of contempt, perceive circumstance a great value…In their eyes regard with awe…For several days continue to visit the house, bringing along some fresh companion…: Look at god until vexed and annoyed by light…And the very last commandment: Manifest the sight of the eagle and gratify curiosity by producing again. Producing again. Some of us are busy with climbing summits in our head trying to achieve something more than decent, perhaps exceptional, at least rare, while others are climbing actual real mountains and it is confusing which one is the metaphor for the other. At the end, it is all about the feeling of accomplishment, whether it is making art, baking or climbing. In a black and white film from the Yugoslavian nouvelle vague, a sensual woman, perhaps an Eastern European version of Monica Vitti, prepares a traditional dish. The eggs, in luminescent white, are hand beaten and as they get lighter and lighter, higher and higher, inevitably turning into snowy peaks. She spreads the snow onto a table, the only surface available in this improvised bachelor's kitchen.  It is clear that she made love all night as she is so relaxed and happy to bake. If you borrow a woman, make sure to return her in better condition than you found her. She mixes the egg whites with dry ingredients which form a tender white mass. At table level, she blows slowly on the white blob with deep concentration and lightness of being, so the paste gets filled with air while thinning out just before breaking, in all evidences a delicate enterprise. Looking at her accomplishment, she smiles to herself because she has the certitude of having surpassed herself. White flour, egg whites, white sugar, a pinch of salt, magic powder, baking soda, icing sugar; summits. Baking is about climbing the Alps, while writing is connected to aimless wanderings in the desert. It was a film about desire, about the staircase which goes up and down. The Assassinated Operator by Dusan Makavejev. A film about love as a deep well from which we can quench our thirst or fatally drown. We were walking along the sea but from a very high point. As she took chocolate from the pocket of her oversized fashionable parka, I noticed the Swiss mountains on the royal blue package, which looked exactly the same as the mountain with snowy peaks behind us, our permanent backdrop. Then, I saw a bright white canoe (I have never seen a white canoe before) with two people ever gently paddling, ever gently tearing the perfectly calm mirror waters of the bay (I had never seen the bay so even and tranquil before). Row row row your boat gently down the stream. Canoes are Native commas in the Canadian history of conflicts. It was after I gave her a splendid bouquet of white peonies in guise of our new beginnings. We had not spoken in years out of the most stupid misunderstanding which came up to be the most serious argument. Feminism will happen when women learn to shine from each other’s light; embrace each other’s beauty. Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream. Aragon favored collage as an ethical process in which there is a negation of the real from the merveilleux, thus proving that the merveilleux is always the materialization of a moral symbol in violent opposition to the morale of the world it springs from. That is why the poetic power of surrealism becomes political, as it positions itself against the forces of order. Before I entered the Surrealists exhibition titled The Colours of my Dreams, outside the art museum I saw a gigantic eagle in sitting attitude, his claws, his hands, his knees, a painting from Edith Rimmington, The Oneiroscopist, and down the dramatic stone staircase of the art institution, which in fact used to be the Law Court, there were two lions on each side of the entrance. Before passing the entrance, two young judges in black togas passed me on my right, while on my left; twin Asian photographers were shooting a white wall. I entered the first room of the exhibition, which felt like a vestibule. For an instant which I tried to later reproduce in vain, I felt the integral meaning of being a guest at the Cabaret du ciel. On my right, there was a very tall painted cedar figure called Speaking Through Post, where an honored guest would conceal himself and project his voice from behind the figure, positioned just inside the door of the Long House, to announce the arrival of other imminent guests as they stepped from the mundane world into the realm beyond time. During winter ceremonies, this commanding presence in the house was meant to represent venerable ancestors, palpably present and far more powerful than the living. On my left, a peace dance headdress, also to welcome dignitaries, and usually worn by the highest ranking dancer, first to appear in traditional regalia ceremonies. Finely carved figures representing family crests are attached to a head ring made out of mountain goat fur. A long train decorated with ermine skins descends from the back, symbolizing the wealth of the chief. Crowned with a cage of sea-lion whiskers surrounding eagle down, which then floats out in the air as the dancer bobs his head. This exact headdress sat on André Breton's desk for years, facing him. In La Révolution sur Paris, no.1 December 1924, we can read that the Prophets conduct blindly the forces of the night towards the future; the aurora speaking through their mouth and the world, seized, is terrified or congratulates itself. It goes on as saying that the speed of light conducts in their brains the wonderful sponge of deflowered gold. Everything is whispers and coincidences… silence and the spark ravish their own revelations…the tree loaded with meat cropping up from between the cobblestones is only supernatural in our astonishment, but the time to close our eyes, it is awaiting the inauguration. In the second Surrealist manifesto, we can read that everything led them to believe that there is a certain point in the spirit where life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the non-communicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as opposites. In that space, destruction and construction cease to be represented against each other, and the manifesto also adds that in this mental space, which we can only undertake by ourselves, a perilous but supreme recognition of the general enigma happens. It is out of the question to attach the slightest importance to the ones who arrive and to the ones who are leaving. Suddenly, the crowd's murmurs in the museum sounded like a Latin prayer, an incantation of a sort. Walter Benjamin read Nadja and while he resented the limits of its social context to explain mystical reassurances in profane illuminations, a few days later however, he finds himself in a hotel in Moscow and notices that all the doors of the rooms on his floor were left ajar. At first he thought it was accidental but then he found out that in these rooms lived members of a religious order, who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. They were Tibetan monks. The friend who just left for Nepal to semi climb Mount Everest with Tibetan Monks never locks the doors of his house. I am not looking for keys, but humans are pattern seekers and this last innocuous fact draws a loop of sorts in the semiotics of my limited world, the limits of my language. The machinery I presently hear from outside has a Hindu chanting quality. The way it holds a note for a while and abruptly starts the next one, lower, to meet again at the same level, even though they are just vacuuming tree leaves from the ground. In the exhibition, a black and white short film showed all of the police uniforms throughout history telling us to recognize them as they represent law, rationality, order; all things against dreams and freedom. It was gripping. The myth of Orphée tells me to neither look too high nor too low, but straight ahead, with a healthy peripheral view which is sufficient to gain whatever knowledge you are ready to see and hear at a given time. That horizontal disposition gives the advantage of never getting burnt or wet. Breton somehow tells to listen to the fools without becoming one. I was listening to the kind of music that gives you the feeling of landing for hours in a landing tunnel. After a concert, the real sounds become an empty dark comedy. When silence drops, you feel you have gained and lost something precious. Time is what we do not have. It relates to the left side of Kay Sage's painting titled The Upper Side of the Sky, which reminds me of a piece another friend made, perhaps his best piece ever. In a hotel with two communicating rooms, he placed objects in the exact mirror image. Pants on bed, ashtray with a cigarette smoking itself, a few books and all elements repeated in an exact copy on each side of the wall. The two rooms were separated by a pitch black corridor which made the transition more effective. The sinks in each room, were turned into fountains, water running endlessly. Time is running into Les Vases communicants. Despite unmet deadlines, I accepted the invitation for a short escapade because I knew that a journey, especially a condensed one, can be like a dream, rich in presents, the present being filled with hard to find gifts. Traveling has the optimal conditions to get into that generous space of receiving, a superior mode of existence. As in the studio, you know when the magic has escaped. There is not much you can do about that. I also thought that it could be an opportunity to salvage the best between us, but truly, it was to celebrate the end of a long friendship. That collaboration was a total bankruptcy. He took me to Tofino which for me means Total Finale. Tout fini. He kept repeating to me that the one who wins is the one who sees. “To win is to see” he kept hammering like a prophet preaching upside down from a scissor lift into a megaphone. His work was about the slow death of cinema wearing trench coats for the funeral of sublunary picnics spread over nothingness, shared with zombies marching towards vanishing points, making holes in fields of lost wars, freeing the living-dead advancing onto the screen of general stupidity while reminiscing over banquets of cannibalistic eulogy, with the blind leading the blind control of the masses towards the secret agent of chainsaw documentaries, and so on. He was so certain about the angle he chose to look at things; there was no space for critique. His cultivated and fertilized La Fabrique revolutionary concepts, paired with a sense of self importance from waking the dead and making the blind see, created a pâte filo around his heart. I knew he had passed away several times and that he was very experienced with death, quite a specialist in fact, and of course that is impressive in itself, and that perhaps he could accompany me into the darkness of things, in a friendly way. But there is nothing friendly about death and orange life savers are nowhere to be found when you need them, even though they seem to be floating nearby. Putting on good music in the car can have a very powerful effect on the things you see and feel on the road, but that was too much affect for him, he was against it. I cannot believe I am friend with someone who dismisses candle light or dimmers as too mannered. So young yet so repressed. The ride started out on a high caliber of abstract rhetoric about art and we spoke only in abstract terms which I liked as it allowed for the propensity of a trans-like thinking where you open your mouth only to utter something grand or at least funny. His obsession with his own work was redundant and nauseating with everything relating to his own neurosis. It is very good as a method of research but not for conversation. He read to me on the ferries, quoting himself in the car, on the beach, quoting himself again by my bed side; he was in my face at all times. I let him be his own excessive self because I knew it was the last hours I was spending with him. We talked in semi-precious codes the entire time, which allowed me to re-enter the death zone I forgot I was already into for a few weeks now. The death zone in mountain climbing is when you have to go to the summit and back as fast as you can in order to survive. It starts right after the coffee stand on your left, right passed the gift shop selling miniature Everest mountain top candle sticks, erasers, pencil sharpeners and snow globes. Entering that post tourist space, one starts the process of a slow death because of the lack of oxygen that comes with altitude. Every conversation relates to that process. In every thought there is the ruin of a smile.  Someone else picks up from where we left. Another friend of mine decided to climb Everest as a performance piece. He has physicality in his art work where he undertakes very challenging tasks which always imply deadly and exhilarating risks. He is a neo-romantic Dutch artist and his work contains the whole art history of the Netherlands. One of my favorite pieces is where he walks on an ice float, ten meters in front of a huge ice breaker. Non-Romantic people always think that he photo-shopped himself or used some green screen effect. After we pass away, each of us starts to walk into this intermediary zone. I heard it takes forty-nine days for Tibetans. It is perhaps useful to read the Bardo Thodol which guides the late one to the road of rebirth. But what happens when the dead do not listen and prefer to stay in this intermediary zone? What happens when amongst mystics mingle fools, retarded revolutionaries, imbeciles and animals? In another piece, my Dutch neo-Romantic friend walks against the rotation movement of the earth on the exact axis around the planet to find himself standing for twenty-four hours on the very tip of the North Pole. During that trajectory around the earth, counter clockwise, he was also, in a parallel manner, playing chess with an old Russian Jew in a chess shop in Manhattan, where I happened to spend several hours years before. He composed a piano piece for the entire design of the game explaining to me that the eight squares were easy to transpose onto octaves. Yesterday I got a print for a dollar from an artist I never met. It says in big blue letters: DEPROFFESSIONALIZE. I should frame it to protect it but I cannot decide on the type of frame. This whole professionalization of art can be a real embarrassment which is enhanced when the product is not good while the pretense persists. On our way back from the island, the landscape was furnished with huge billboards which prove Ray Bradbury right; announcing a great civilization a few kilometers in advance to make sure not to miss the apocalypse. We stopped in a mixed use mall-village-settlement-spread-parking-lot, to look for a decent coffee, much needed, like aspirin. I parked in the middle of vast asphalt nothingness filled with cars in a city which was named Parksville. Sitting in the car, I was surrounded by Wal-Mart and Winners on the north side; Dollarama on the south; the eastbound being delimited by Best Buy while the western perspective was bound by a drive-through Starbucks. There was no possibility for escape. Non-plus, we were forced to surrender. Still resisting the plastic burnt coffee of the west frontier, I asked an obvious local if there was a café nearby, she pointed out to the Tim Horton's behind us. It must have been in my blind spot. In French, we do not say blind spot, but angle mort (dead angle). It is more polite for the blind and the dead do not mind. The colour blind are not called ''colour blind'' anymore but colour sensitive and they are very sensitive about it. I told the obvious local that I heard on the news that some radicals were bombing all the Tim Horton's and Starbucks in the vicinity. She looked puzzled as to why. I told her that the report mentioned something about acculturation and lack of civic poetry. The Pacific waves were never big enough to meet the violence my friend needed, to feel alive. He was looking for high emotions, hill tops, he was looking for the Festival of Ocean Storms. Life is one festival after another; fun, but exhausting and hard to keep up with. As much as he was seeking the infinite open horizon of the bright sea, he was also interested in trying to penetrate the closed and dark density of the rainforest, only to find out that it was actually impenetrable, tightly packed, overcrowded; a green saturation of trees everywhere, all piled on top of each other, sleeping like cubs under the green moss carpet that covered absolutely everything, forming a powdery green scrim veil. We might be all bi-polar, but we do have to take sides; say you have two minutes to choose between life and death, between good and evil. In front of my work, I had been lost in forests and labyrinths so many times and my unresolved thought process prevented me to know where to begin and where to end, so the presence of Arachnea, who works from the middle, was bringing me both empowerment and humility. There was a spider making a web right in front of me, dividing the entire space in two. We were working side by side. Even if I am bored of it, black always suits me best and it has the advantage of absorbing all the light so I can reflect it back from the inside, through my eyes, in the way I look at things. In French we say, le regard, the gaze, and le regard is something we carry with us and we rest it upon everything we ponder; situations, people, the world. Le regard is about an angle, a posture; an internal one. Queens see the best in the worst, the beauty in the ugly, la lumière dans la nuit. They sit on the side of life without making a big deal about it. The spider is still there. She gives me strength to finish this text. Spider webs have existed for at least 140 million years. In 1973, aboard the rocket Skylab, a science experiment took two spiders named Arabella and Anita, to spin in low earth orbit to see if they would spin webs in space, and, if so, whether these webs would be the same as those produced on earth. Both spiders took a while to get accustomed to their new weightless existence both still produced some works. The scientists studied the webs to discover that space webs were finer than earth ones; and although the patterns of the webs were not totally dissimilar, space webs had variations in thickness in places. This was very unusual because on earth, webs have been observed to have uniform thickness. Science can be so stupid and completely useless. If I were a conceptual poet, I would make a list of science experiments which push rationality to a point beyond irrationality, reaching plain absurdity, landing inside poetry. Like the astrophysicists I met in Banff who are applying the capitalist concept of Too Big To Fail to the threat of big stars falling and ending our meal abruptly. Both spiders died of dehydration during their mission. I woke up and Arachnea and her binary logic had disappeared.  She ate her web and fled. I walked into the garden, it was around noon. I looked at the small tree we planted last year, after the storm that destroyed our century old tree which had the fantastic shape of a lyre, a trident or the letter psi, whatever you fancy. In the process of the implosion, the huge left and right branches of the candelabra fell to reveal a third middle branch in the shape of a crazy black serpent erected towards the sky. We decided to build a tree house around the dead tree which was still offering a very imposing garden feature in its abandoned stump. In my chronic neurosis, I still believe I provoked that storm, that I am responsible for the decimation of the forests because that night, I went to sleep very angry at all the mother figures in the world. Now, on each side of the new palnted tree, below the black snake, two spiders of the same colour had built a web, dividing the garden between life and death. I think I spent too much time alone and meaning was controlling me in the Surrealist House, I was starting to hallucinate reality, which brought me to another plane, for another text. For another forest. Less virgin this time. Max Ernst describes the forest as impenetrable, black, reddish, extravagant, secular, full of aunts, diametric, negligent, ferocious, fervent and friendly, without yesterday nor tomorrow, from one island to the other, over the volcanoes, as she plays cards with messed up decks, naked with majesty and dressed in mystery. The forest is everywhere in the city, in my head, in my sleep, in the studio and moreover, where I expect it least. It is not overruling the field of my consciousness as much as we are in constant negotiations, taming each other's terrains; obviously I need her more than she needs me. It is when the forest is not invited that she delights to surprise you, and the ravishing experience of her peculiar charms become so clear and distinct, enough to know that even if you dreamt it, it does not mean that nothing happened. Like the Wild West, it has no past and no future...