My reunion with France has a taste of shambles.
It's when I leave Japan that I understand one of the many riddles I went through without really realizing it. I realize that what has just been played for me is diametrically opposed to the silhouettes of the French about to embark on the return flight. I then put my finger on the strange strangeness that accompanied me the last weeks. Because the bodies that suddenly arise are like poorly greased puppets, beings moved by a language that I do not understand any more and which, literally, hurts my eyes.
I know that they offer me the mirror of what I am, but I resist at first to confuse myself with this uninhibited clumsiness that raises in me as a kind of tenderness for these beings in search. Unspoken search for an accuracy that escapes because the body tells its own will, often dissociating itself from the word that is heard too late. I watch, frightened, this decadent spectacle. The bodies say all the intranquility, the incompleteness of a desire that pushes from all sides without clear direction into a confusion fed by disorganized, arrhythmic gestures.
The Japanese had calmed my vision by compactness, uniqueness, linearity in their intentions that each movement came to confirm, from head to toe.
No movement had seemed disordered, unstructured, incongruous, nothing that caught my attention, nothing heckling, neither left nor right. There seemed to be only one center of gravity commanding the slender silhouettes while I feel ourselves agitated by a thousand contractions that restlessly seek the center we have lost.
In Japan everything converges. The world finds its center in its island, the flag contracts in a circle where all the distances are equalized and the Japanese themselves are concentrated to an invisible point which tames the choreography of the bodies. In rhythm and with grace. All beings form a harmonious and solid whole.
What had initially rejoiced in my eyes when I arrived, had become accustomed and gradually bored as the goldfish who turn to become crazy on some prints got bored. The music of the bodies had been recorded in me with disconcerting simplicity. My gaze had then landed deep in his heart, confident, going to other enigmatic visual hunts since the bodies would not betray their inhabitants except to say the weight of traditions that weigh on the imperturbable bodies from all their millennia. Tuned silhouettes, corked (but that's another story).
My eyes quickly became deeper. As usual I was exorbitant, literally projected outside myself, ready for all visual offenses. Because now I know it, my West is offensive. He begins the serenity and transforms without warning any situation in arena where the unexpected is given in spectacle. Everything threatens to turn away, to diverge, to break, to laugh out loud, to turn around, to swoon, to blush, to smile, to scream, to struggle because there is no common partition or at least nobody seems to be paying attention. A tense body may have to do to an exalted body and neither will yield despite the moments of reflex mimicry.
The bodies are seen through the mirror neurons that greet each other and try to understand each other by simulating the mechanics of the opponent. It is precisely this resonance of dissonance, on the way to harmony, that touches me, much more than the harmony itself. This is what happens when the orchestra, before the concert, has not yet agreed. A few moments when the instruments seek each other in the most exciting tumult.
Just sitting on the plane, and now there are the thick voices of those who want to make their singular relationship in Japan known by extolling their adventures. Those who moan, complain of a delay or impose their telephone conversation to all. I would like to cry out, gut them, but I hold back because I want to remain a little Japanese and not give in so easily to the Mediterranean that is in me.
Then my volcano, peaceful on the surface but boiling inside, will wait for us to fly over this region where my ancestors have tinkered with me this fiery character.
Alignment question. It is necessary to reassure the attitude with altitude.
- in reference to the wonderful book by Nicolas Bouvier, Chronique Japonaise.