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Notre Monde Notre Monde (2013, 119') un film de Thomas Lacoste
Rassemblant plus de 35 intervenants, philosophes, sociologues, économistes, magistrats, médecins, universitaires et écrivains, Notre Monde propose un espace d’expression pour travailler, comme nous y enjoint Jean–Luc Nancy à « une pensée commune ». Plus encore qu’un libre espace de parole, Notre Monde s’appuie sur un ensemble foisonnant de propositions concrètes pour agir comme un rappel essentiel, individuel et collectif : « faites de la politique » et de préférence autrement.
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© Passant n°49
By Marc Atkins
The Journey to an Empty Room

At night the desert is water beneath my feet.
So I journeyed towards an empty room, a place of futures lying in wait, a drowning chamber.
This desert is life, calm and baron to the starry eye while skin scratching with endless movement below the surface, where, in its freezing stillness thoughts dissolve like burning plastic into the sand. I look across the plane, staring at the cool rays of the horizon to where the desert ends, darkness shimmers and the void begins.

It is to The Limbo Room I go now. Here, the door to the left that never opens is always ajar, as the window, to the right, is forever nailed closed. The blood stained wood beside the doorframe from which a long spike sticks out is no longer there. I stand in the room, while my body is melting across the desert floor. Lifting off the ceiling and stepping out into the blue-grey city, the night is warm and the monochrome sky is motionless, as though the storm has passed. Alone here in this myriad place I see myself doubled by the wet streets, clouds billow from some windows, orange lights from others and the end of the street falls away into the void.
The wonderful void.
I sink.

There on the settee, lounging to the sound of noiseless music while reading a book of photographs, the woman is. I've never known her name and she has rarely spoken to me, but has always smiled in a distracted sort of way whenever I've kissed her. She has always been in the room, as she is now, with her obligatory white face, dark around the eyes and deep red lips. It is cold and I love her. Speaking as she does with a thirty-something accent and wearing a thirties-something dress, tears run down my face and form into the figurines I curiously once threw away. I am here, in an anonymous room, with a woman who is standing with her face close to my face, starring into my eyes. Her name I do not know.

The pages of the book lying on the floor near the slightly open window rustle. My attention turned from watching the silent traffic on the road far below me, to the book that did not move again, as it lay in the moonlight half shadowed by the blinds. Looking back to the thing here in my hands, I watch it falling apart, its scar covered form of rotting flesh and tender new buds has been dying and crumbling away now for many nights, and though hardly aware, I see I have carried it all my life. The lights are falling from the sky as its shape deforms. From what I can see of its insides, where it was once swirling in vivid colour, it is now sluggish and pastel. Fading it gains weight, this thing that once shone, almost floating from my hands in its eagerness to reach out and touch all that surrounded it. I am told it is possible to unstitch it from my hands, put it down and walk away.

I slide down the wall to the once wet warped floorboards. Sitting then within stillness of this dark dry dusty room I watch the undulation of shadows measure a final journey across the rotting floor. I understand now, these are the only four hours of the life long day worth living in, these last hours of dark dreams and fearful wonderings.

Here then I sit, with the final turning on of the dark, cold amongst the blackness. I feel it, an object of nothingness, cling to my skin, its senseless weight burying me in its mock grain, flecks of light spark from its friction against my eyes. Tasteless it clogs my mouth, breaths of solid air petrify my unstretched lungs, as I am frozen in its glare. It murmurs in my ears, speaking low borderless phrases of lawless intentions while the fingers of blank forms pick away my dreams. In a lost mind, songs of desperation whine that I am in the wrong place, pushing free against my will, attacked on all sides by things that cannot move. I lay oppressed, sucked dry of the memory of light. But I remembered the split second twilight just as the dark came, but now even that warm blue-grey only faintly echoes in the memory.

I want light, razor sharp lightness, to float through pure light, let it scratch and claw my skin, draw translucent blood from each vein, pale my muscles to venison flesh, bleach my bones and my mind, burn out all memory of dark.

Moths draw to me, flittering against my face sensing my vague thoughts of light, their single desire to eat, devour, smother the maddening glare. The weight of darkness presses me down; with all effort I lift myself, pushing against congealed air, its form as recognised and untouchable as the mirrors reflection. Now only a fantasy of fleshed desires lies in front of me, a place of reconstructed corridors, rooms of ghosts, theatres of the isolated dream. I move on, pacing time by my pulse, watching new figures appear before me then pass by in staccato motions like the low beats in my head. The future, an unfocussed pattern, weaves before my eyes, an invisible shape groped towards, the false hope of an even darker mass than the one I now endure.

I sit, my self a warm inferred body, an unseen unrecognised form, a vessel containing the surrounding air and the voices of an eternity of ghosts. My life is the dark, a part of its eternal state. All the weight of infinity has gently seeped into me, dissolving my body.

I am atomised, become nothing.

Marc Atkins

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