Jean-Louis Poitevin
ON LIGHT AND MUD
Dirt, Hyakutake Editions, 2018, ISBN 979-12-200-3305-3, translated by Charlotte Mandell

Something obsesses us, indefinable, elusive, haunting, as violent as a lightning bolt streaking across the nighttime skies, as futile as a gaze going off to die in the sun. We know what it’s about because, obviously, we all flee from the revelation this obsession would bring us if we did manage to face it. It speaks of an almost infinite happiness that’s torn to shreds by the claws of an unrelenting panic.
To live on earth is always to expect this revelation made of mud and light.
Madness of humans that urges them to race, collide, compete. Madness of a body that dreams of itself as “visionary,” madness that leads people to imagine whatever eludes them and to ignore what sinks into their eyes. Constantly, in them, aimless lines cross that cling to their feet as well as their wheels.
But to race is to end up spinning in circles around the vortex of the eye. To pause even for an instant to look is to offer oneself to ghosts.
Some, who spin in circles in the night of mud, hollow out an upside-down sky and splatter the chaos that spurts up from the invisible mental dirt with particles close to nothingness. Others scrutinize the interstices of oblivion, hoping to find in them the path that could lead them away from the futile earth, that extreme limit of the mental landscape, to the murderous sun.
Some have turned the circle into the circular saw that cuts up dreams into blood-streaked slices. Others try to make what reveals itself naked sweat through the pores of night: a jagged desert. Some wear out the impossible on the burning metal of a sick wheel and bang their inner hammers on iridescent sheet metal. Others inscribe on the living the law of sharing out that may not end.
Together, they rip silence apart. In vain.
These imaginary silhouettes that reach us here in the sublime precision of decisive images make us hear the secret voice of a burning truth: the eternal wheel, sun neck cut and endless line, curve of dream inside the eyelids; these silhouettes also bear in them the possibility of living. Here, dance of death and lifeline balance out their madness, passing through our eyes.