I published a dozen books, written hundreds of articles, written here more than a thousand chronicles, so many compositions that did not give me any pleasure except that of having completed them. I do not know what is wrong with me, a genetic malformation, a grandiloquent sense of the tragic, a propensity for misfortune, the heritage of a castrating mother … But the exercise of writing, yesterday as today, has always been related to a learning of pain.
I don’t write in joy. Never. The very idea of going to my office, in order to sleep a few thoughts, immerses me in unfathomable anxieties, so that I always give the time of confrontation. When finally, pressed by time and the requirement to move forward in my work, I sit at my table, I seem to be a tale of a death row, on the way to the scaffold.
I am convinced that I do not get there, an irrational fear that twists my stomach. I see myself falling from my pedestal, being reduced to living a life of misery, far from what constitutes the very essence of my existence, the love of words and sentences. It is like a despair that would rely on me, a fight between my reason prompt to remember that this circus has lasted for more than thirty years – never translates into real helplessness – and the conviction that, this time, magic will not operate.
Painfully, like a convict that would seek to extract from the mine a considerable charge, I manage to form the beginning of a sentence, a few words thrown into the air, like a bottle in the sea. It looks like nothing, I have the impression of writing in a foreign language of which I would not have the use. Everything is vague, uncertain, rough. I feel nervous like a lobster trapped with a saucepan full of boiling water. And while in the afternoon settles in the office, I cursed the destiny of having given birth to me so signed and bewildered.
Nothing is ever easy or given for granted, but always won of high struggle, in this relentlessness of the will which refuses to give in to the desire to abandon everything and to live another life than that.
Finally, by dint of self -denial, my thought clears, becomes clearer. My tongue is unlocked, something gives in my mind, anxiety decreases. I enter my story, my chronicle. Peace then descends on me. I am as close as possible to the essence of my being, in perfect osmosis with the depths of my soul. It is not pleasure, it is even something else, a certain form of fullness, of a total abandonment to writing. For a moment, I feel invincible, behind the world and its hellish rumor.
It lasts a few minutes, an hour at most, the time necessary to arrive at the end of my business. When the end point intervenes, I feel immense relief, a deliverance of having accomplished what seemed to me to be a titanic task. I then realize how much, during all the time when I fought with the words, I had remained tense, feverish, sure of nothing. Even at the height of my concentration, when I tasted a certain congratulations, the concern had not left me, it had just got back, without ever disappearing completely.
For over thirty years, I have been living in this way. By and for writing. I did not choose this kind of existence, it imposed itself on me as obvious, the certainty that my life could not take place without being told, dissected by me. It is obviously a burden and a blessing, a priesthood at all times where I need, day after day, fight with myself. Nothing is ever easy or given for granted, but always won of high struggle, in this relentlessness of the will which refuses to give in to the desire to abandon everything and to live another life than that.
I have no pleasure in writing, apart from having written. I say it without affecty. The doubt that I had in my early days is always the same, it has not varied an iota. When a writing day ends, spent this brief moment of euphoria to have gone to the end of myself, immediately, in the minute itself, arises the question of whether, tomorrow, I will be able to do the same. Who assures me that I’m not going to wake up, stupid like a bourricot? That the blank page will remain so until the end of my days? That today, without even knowing it, by finishing this column, I also concluded my life as a writer?
Mom, help!
