FOUL WEATHER


Offshore it's foul weather.

I climbed down the stone steps of my two-storey tower to reach the shore. Anthracite. The steps are slow and precise; those of a new life apprehending itself in its fresh descent. I used to be a composer: 142 pieces of varying length mourn my career. Mostly for string quartet. I tried orchestrating percussion with tuba. To no avail. No albums, but individual pieces, yes, pieces that bled the contradictions of the world through sketches of bronze angels. I tried to compose it as well as I could: every day I'd add a new note, the next day I'd remove it. In this gap, between adding and removing, lay the beauty of the music. This is how I managed to compose the 142 pieces that today resonate in the belly of every betrayed.





Where was my mother when I was presenting these pieces to the world? In the emotion or indifference of the sound meadows? My mother, who bequeathed me her heart defect as an inheritance, all the better to avoid me? The heart I now have, — transplanted from a pig, whose vena cava is slightly smaller in diameter than the human average — leaving me gasping for breath when I climb the surrounding mountains? She sent me just one letter, too short, in which she told me she had gone to hear one of my pieces, the performance of which lasted 4 hours and 13 minutes, in Budapest: “Dear Pascalin, your piece performed at the Bela Bartok National Concert Hall reminds me of the day you were born, when we parted. This made me cry a little. I'm not being facetious, it's the truth. Suddenly your life appeared to me, in the music, as a morsel of forgotten evidence. Kisses. Madeleine.”

The rising air is pure.

As I reached the shore, I gave my hatred of music to the seagulls, which squawked at the shrill of my footsteps shuffling across the polished stones. Their music is close to mine, I thought. A great wind of a new day carried their polyphony to the storms of the open sea. Cantatas, arias and requiems, all at once, in the undulating rage of the horizon. This time I’m in is nasty, isn't it? Living with these seagulls that sing for no one. My pig’s heart is beginning to beat faster. This heart inside me that isn’t mine but makes me live. I take a metal chair that had been lying on the shore since last summer, and I sit on it. Look over there, she says. I pick up an abandoned driftwood branch, washed by the sea’s salt, and wave it in the air, signaling the rain’s slow arrival. A morsel of forgotten evidence, I silently think.

Lately, good foul weather to compose anew.



(Texte commandé par Racine, pour le livret de l’album « Boue » publié par Gin & Platonic en mars 2024. Traduit du français par l’auteur.)