The flight of Jacques Vandenschrick, a 79-year-old Belgian author, teacher and literary critic, begins with an introductory remark, as if not to lose the reader. “We must flee”, he orders, but “to flee is not to wander”. Aware of the ephemeral passage of our lives, “wasting their shards, exhausting their gleams, memory and books will fade”, he sees life as a crossing, “when one enters the black shiver of the world”. Like the fugitive whose heart «se trouble», we are beings of nothing who we are looking for. The poet’s writing, in this sense, seems to grope.
In small numbered blocks of prose, like snippets of unfinished stories, the author outlines a path, not a runaway: “Does everyone therefore seek their own border within themselves?”
“The guides walk ahead, always looking for the wells, watching for the water in the song of a bird.” The elements are invoked and accompany this foggy existential quest, “our bogged down journeys”this leak “mute” : them «torrents» spring up, the «vent» console, we run in the “mountains”.
Jacques Vandenschrick’s poetry is tinged with melancholy and nostalgia. It evokes “the quiver of memories, daydreams that ravage the heart”, “our indecipherable debt”. We are “children of the enigma”, wounded, struggling, somehow, on the thread of our days.
The extract
Like us, pilgrims of what means nothing, who dream of what does not exist, who throw salt on the pages, did the unjust master know what tears agree to confess? Sorrows know little what they think. They look like the February snow which always speaks of something else in its apocryphal sweetness…