context: The text moves through three suspended nightly moments—a departure hall, a drive, a single night. Thoughtful and tinted with a sense of not belonging, each stretches perception, until the ordinary meets something unforgettable.

The photographs extend this play of perception into space: city grids—To Be Looked at with One Eye: where squarish forms tilt, stretch and draft. Patterns tease the gaze as an architecture of perception, where straight lines wobble.

***

damask.

In the departure hall of Charles de Gaulle Airport, many years ago. It is a vast grid. The image is still very clear.

On the ceiling of the hall, a large dark red carpet, and browns. A lot of browns. Some browns of coats, browns of bags, browns of suitcases, browns of shoes and of coiffed heads. On the ceiling, a grid of steel, a vault of glass tiles that seems to try to gather all these anonymous figures into multiple small doubled reflections. One sees too blurred to make out any outline there, but the silhouettes of those who are waiting sink into this shimmering evening depth.
Somewhere just above me, a white oval, a small face suspended in the mirror. It must be mine. No one else looks at the ceiling. What is there to see? It’s an airports departure hall. This small face wants to remain in its pale light encircled on the ceiling, to see this tableau that the others do not notice. The small face remains as white as white, as white as being white can be, wrapped in purple. Coat, jacket, scarf then carpet become garments in this mottled tapestry. The small face observes the flashes of the screens reflected in the vault. Those that prick, those that cross, those that thread through the other people who look downwards. The frozen mass of waiting bodies barely moves. There are simple gestures, a hand that reaches out to grab a packet of crisps, children who melt onto the floor from their seat, passers-by on wheels who shoot straight ahead. Seen from ground level, it is difficult to perceive these movements, everything is too focused at the same levels. No, in this waiting hall, life is drawn above. Only the small face thinks it perceives it. It is the only white circle, luminous and hairless of thoughts, the only form clearly detached from the colours, sharp like an incomplete moon that spreads from the tip of the index finger across a navy-blue night.

Another evening, years later, observing the vault of an Italian sky through the car window. On the way to the airport. It is the same grid, astral this time.

That day, the light of the sky was so beautiful that it made me nauseous. I forgave time for its mistakes.

“ But time makes no mistakes! ”
Time slips by, delights in the grace of its arrays, mocks me when I look at the sky. There will always be this small face. Even though it does not see its oval in the sky, it knows. And it trades with the clouds a look, a wink, a small dark-brown comma. It waves to those who know which colours will be given to time. And under this Italian sky pricked with stars, the small face would like to know more, to perceive further. Like the knowledgeable clouds trace in the sky, draw all these forms being born within thoughts. A design that grows too fast, words that rush too fiercely, like the branches of a tree overwatered with greenery. Words are mirages to be grasped in the evening, when everything settles back down. When, like a cloak, time closes over the shoulders to wrap in its spell, it is a chalky wax head that is reflected in the surfaces.

A world that arose

By the resolute fingers.

Perhaps it is nearer,

That you must come?

Shaped beneath the nails,

Pealed away without shame.

Epidermis of my defence,

The orange in its hollow,

Rolls across the faïence.

The years have passed.

Fore something of life, to peel here.

***

Upon the collapsing night

A little insomnia is not useless for appreciating sleep, for casting some light into that night. Never did I have such a pleasant suffering as with the sensation of sleep pelting my body, eager to install its pale softness, to numb my soul fragmented by the light of the preceding day, preventing the night from engulfing the living fragments from outside that seek to penetrate my inner spaces. This white, heavy ache made me turn and twist the sheets, push away the union of my closed eyes with their pink eyelids. I blended the walls traced with hooked shadows swaying across the surface, feeling luminescences pierce my insomniac limbs. A little insomnia hooks the thread of thoughts onto easy paths that prolong life, for every action of the mind is effortless if it is not subjected to reality. The act of sleeping and living within one’s dreams remains suspended in a kind of reality that does not belong to the world of the living. Any gesture undertaken in a drowsy dream cannot submit to the difficulties of this outer life. By contrast, every thought born during insomnia remains within reach of being lived, which is why for hours I stayed in bed, embracing the sheets coiling around my body. The sensation of salivating thoughts moistening the thick eiderdown against skin comes with the risk, for the one who inhabits that skin—who is not yet asleep and seeks sleep as a deliverance without truly wishing to reach it—of being coddled by the abyss of a sleep that would come to fish, to tear away living thoughts and offer them to the ease of a life endowed with sleep and rest, thus depriving one of an accessible real. When, before sleeping, I felt the shroud of insomnia cover my forehead, arms, and legs, insinuate itself beneath the nails of my toes, I became mad with life, I saw everything. There were the night-shadowed walls of a grey room on a winter night, the pearled vapours of a summer night. The memory of all the other nights spent and all the rooms in which I had not slept filled my body with infernal voluptuousness. Sleep that does not come suspends its promises of dreams, and so one must create it oneself. In a night that does not welcome sleep, the devil’s hands can dance without trembling. Those I encountered made the stone glimmers shine on the façades outside his window.

That night, crumpling with silence, he swept away my purity. With his black fingers, he tried to align the stars. I felt a dull, slow pressure behind my back, like a presence. A dark future drifted among the vapours of a sleep that could not come, pushed back by threadbare sheets of a bed that was not mine. A steaming scent. His tangled black fingers forced my delicate palm. He gutted me. The rough mattress flattened onto a yellow, fluffy foam that, powdering the floor, traced small bordered flecks through the grooves of the floorboards. I was cold and alone, entwined by the devil’s abuses, whose face had taken on the peculiar hue of an angular, slack waltz. Sleep could not have come, for someone else had taken its place. The green halo offered by the street through the window soaked into the contours of my face, which had left my body. It pierced my gaze which, trying to escape the jerks, to break through toward the outside, to remove my stone body from pain, struck with a golden thunder its single pupil that was free to the side, casting through vegetal insomnia some of its lights. I tried to fold myself beneath that taut neck which did not dissolve the shadows but amplified them, made them swell with dead greenery, crushing my frail body with its brutal weight. As long as that night was, at no moment did sleep come to detach me. Never did it allow me to withdraw from that exhausting reality. Relentlessly, the room grew, swelled like a dark, supple gut. I stared at the curtains as they billowed, pierced by their rod, and I thought of becoming a curtain, of dissolving into fabric and making my hems foam to drive away the dust. Thus I would stand against the wall, folding back its advances to open the light of day or cover the glimmers of night. Delivering at dawn the torn fabric of my body, that night, so forceful, altered the flavour of all those that followed. It is from that room, where I spent only a few hours, that the heavy insomnias were born, those that leave to rest only an image of a rope so loose it slips through the fingers. After that, I sank into the oppressions of sleep, from which sleeping did not cure me.