The fear of the dark is a common fear, yet Virginie Poitrasson is probably not afraid of the dark, she who wrote about Pierre Soulages and Pierrette Bloch. But maybe to overcome the fear, you have to put it flat, list it, pin it down, put it into words – in the end, what remains so frightening? After the body in The not-as-if of things (Waiting, 2018) and thought in A position which is a position which is another (Lanskine, 2019), the poet born in 1975 therefore sets out to “a topology of our inner fears” – a collection “on fear from fear”. And she sticks to it like a collector, sorting through anxieties, terrors and cold sweats, their causes, their consequences and the ways to ward them off. (“Exorcism #1: thinking about the rocks of dread by bringing them to the surface”).
Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes borrows its title from a quote from Thousand Trays philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who opens the book by highlighting: “The ritornello has the three aspects, it makes them simultaneous, or manages them: sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes, chaos is a huge black hole, and we try to fix a fragile point there as the center. Sometimes we organize around the point a “pace” (rather than a form) calm and stable: the black hole has become a home. Sometimes we graft a breakaway on this pace, out of the black hole. So much for the program.
There is then a progression, from the initial tetany to the need to regain control: “To be able to tell it, / it is to have come back from it, / to have come back from this terror, / by having looked at it, / without being petrified” ; “The fear remained there, like a small animal, a baby bird placed under my protection. Now we had to do something about it.” Inventory “terror, our oldest ancestor” in all its forms and under all its masks, to the point of exhausting it, it is also looking for meaning in the mess in which we find ourselves. And offer us escape routes out of the black hole.
The extract
And I am this quarrelsome, this mongrel dog, this looter, this terror, the dilated pupil, the panting chest, the steam exhaling from my mouth, the heart of a viscous deer between the fangs, I am this pack which strips, which survives , inappropriate, I am these smells of animals, purplish entrails, bloody viscera, put to death, like an animal, I am an animal, having no more of my species than fear and rage, nothing left of all that only fear returns, a hundredfold, the fear of the shadows, she is blind, she was born blind but she comes from noise, if you want, you can say that, yes, from this fear of noise, fear of noises , noises of animals, noises of day and night, but above all a single, continuous single noise, day and night, and it is these footsteps that come and go, it is these cries that resound in the distance, it’s these beasts making their way, and it’s the air, just the wild air, and it’s the things, it’s the wild air among the things, at the edge of the landscape, and I hear, it comes back to me, everything comes back to me, I’m looking for this noise, I’m looking for what it could be, this continuous noise, what I’ve been hearing from the start, it comes back to me, and where it comes from, from me, it comes from inside, from inside me, this sound of terror, danger, inner siren, always at bay.