It seemed natural, quite natural, to my generation, during the years terrified by the last world conflict, to start or almost start learning the Latin language, the dead but active basis of our culture, by studying the questions of place. Four key words founded space: Ubi? Quo? Unde? Qua? All words soon echoed in the Greek language, then in mechanics and philosophy. We designated or described places immediately after having conjugated the verb “to love.” I don’t remember having learned any living language with such a connection of love and places.
Ubi? Where are we? How are residence or repose, the immobility of the surrounding horizon, sedentary life to be said? Answers to the question: in Vincennes, in the house, in the countryside, in front of the oven fire, at a central or marginal point serving as a reference or that needs one; answers via locatives that make tenants of us, animals temporarily tethered to stakes.1 Quo? Where are we going? The war prevented our rare travels or forced us to flee; we therefore asked ourselves the question about life, fate, salvation. Where are we? Here. Say more. Here in relation to what? And based on what? Where are we going? To death. And after? Here: and below? Yonder: and beyond?2 Unde? Where do we come from? A literally naïve question posed to parents, and, behind them, to unimaginable forebears, toward the autochthonous point where the genetic tree takes root in chthonic oblivion or memory.
It seems to me that I have known familiarly and then suddenly left an age that summarized its experience by means of the first three questions of place, subterraneously connected to the passion of loving. We neither knew nor could answer the other question because we didn’t know history for not having one, since, tethered again to places, we couldn’t move about. In the evening litanies, we used to pray for travelers and the dying, for only the lost, astray in time and space, without reference, seek with anguish the tatters of an answer to the fourth question: Qua? Through where are we passing?3
Agricultural humanity, which began during the Neolithic era and is drawing to a close at this time, composed of peasants, henceforth eliminated, living in a landscape, now gone, had molded culture and space by referring them to places, to knots that we undo as obstacles to our transportation since we’re passing through space instead of living in sites or places and since we summarize our experience by ceaselessly answering the fourth question, ignoring the first three.
And since we’re speaking Latin, in a time that has gotten out of the habit, we answer the first three questions by pagus, the landscape, hortus, the garden, and locus, the place.4 I have recently spoken at length about the first one, organized around the pagan gods; I leave the last one to its mystery, doubtlessly centered around the body, around the female genitalia and breast; I’ll meditate on the funerary slab around which the garden is formed.
Stage right, stage left: these expressions, stemming from the house or the theater, oppose two places that language, however, puts into the same category.5 For a single Indo-European word—ghorto—engenders a family, Latin and Germanic, even Slavic: on the Latin side, the hortus of horticulture contributes to forming the cohort, that military group stationed in a division of the Roman camp, enclosed by ditches, towers, and stakes and divided into quarters. The word cour derives from there, just like the high and low courts, judicial or agricultural, and cortege, courtesy, as well as the verbal phrase “to pay court.”6 The word “garden” comes to us from the Germanic or even the Slavic side, where place names ending in grad derive from the same enclosure. Stalingrad, Stalin’s Garden, is a bit surprising as a cousin of the courts of love. The English “yard” signifies, once again, the entire family: courtyard, enclosure, garden, soon cemetery. Spaces enclosed with bushes or walls divide town and country or associate in a composite tissue the fields of the landscape and the frameworks of the city. In this sense, the garden or the yard can pass for the element, urban and rural, of space such as our Indo-European culture perceives or produces it: its basic unit.
The origin of the words that cross the pseudo-barrier of the languages in Europe, from the south to the north, from Kierkegaard to hortensia, and from east to west, fortifies or confirms our memories of closing. The city fortifies itself, the military camp closes itself off, the farm is enclosed on itself, the ploughed field is surrounded with defenses: the interpretation of this cordon varies a lot, while repeating a common theme, sacred or religious, defensive, strategic, judicial, and sanitaire.7 It protects the interior that it outlines from aggressions of all types, flora from weeds, parasitical and rapacious fauna, corruption or diseases roving the foreign expanse, enemy armies, pillagers and pirates, external desecrations; it defines cleanliness, the right to property, even more, it constructs definition itself in practice and in theory.8 No doubt the enclosure or fence opposed the sedentary farmers and the wandering nomads and imposed yard and garden on our languages as the basic unit of space when the Neolithic revolution invented agriculture.9 Old languages, old divisions of the landscape, archaic social groups, ancient ideas, one hesitates to say what goes furthest back in the forgetfulness and memory of our culture, the word “garden,” the thing or the agricultural practices that make the word and think it.
Where are we? Quo? Where are we going? Where do we come from? In the three cases, the “where” designates a locative that wouldn’t be understood without this enclosure or fence. Here does indeed stop somewhere, and if I go there it’s quite certain that at a certain moment it’ll be settled that I’ll be there. The local has no place that’s without limit or boundary. In the three questions, the locative designates closed yards or gardens.
Yet, in the contemporary age, the word “opening,” almost magic, carries a high value, whereas enclosure or closing becomes a vice to be avoided. Bergson recently established this distinction, now evident like a received idea or a prejudice: a closed society ignores its own geniuses or heroes that a society opened by them on the contrary produces and recognizes. Ever since, whether it’s a question of things, systems, thoughts, or persons, the enclosure has been tantamount to sterility, all fecundity passing through a blossoming opening out.10 This reversal of values follows the transformation of space.
Bristling with walls or surrounded by hedges, for the swing-plow and the home, the units that were inhabited or outlined by our labors in yards and gardens are connected now in order to form a simple medium for passages. Qua? Through where are we passing? The localities open up to transit and transportation. Composed of places, by pieces gradually juxtaposed, the landscape comes undone through our connecting works and these clearings of the way. Local, formerly, globalizable, from now on, it no longer answers anything but the fourth question. The roads, rare, went from yard to yard—and traveling took an infinite amount of time—corteges were formed, slow, ceaselessly stumbling over the obstacles that were the octrois that we lifted so as to make a thousand kinds of freeways go better.
Take them, visit the world where you’ll find three kinds of country: those where the places prevent paths, as in China, where the peasantry still digs and isolates the landscape, where the local blocks the global; those, conversely, where passage prohibits the genesis of any singular site, the North American type, where the global destroys the local before it can be born; those lastly where the balance still lasts before pouring from one model into the other, the roads there not yet having quite untied the places but laboring intensely to do so. Visiting even contributes to this untying. For tourism is organizing a literally world war against what remains of places or sites. Globally speaking, hominity seems to evolve from the sedentary model, set up by the Neolithic agrarian revolution, toward the nomad model that appears to dominate today. From the closed to the open, from the habitat to passage, from refuge to wandering. Thus for the thinker, thus for thought.
A garden therefore projects in its figure the state of the world that it forms: an ordinary unit of space, nothing less nothing more than an enclosure or the pagus, an element of the landscape, it divides itself into juxtaposed pieces.11 You went there; you came from there; you stayed there for the afternoon or the day, but today you pass through the Tuileries Garden, letting your tissue paper or your empty pack of cigarettes fall there while hurrying to the station that’s connected to the airports. At the sign that the carnies, without permanent home, had set up their merry-go-rounds and ferris wheels without raising any protests everyone recognized that the old place was becoming a space of passage. The fourth question summarizes our new world: a transition among transits.
The element, unit, atom of space today becomes the interchange. You stay in a place; you go there; you come from it, but you go through a crossroads. Pedestrians pass through the guichets of the Louvre, cluttered with traffic, or transit between the rue de Rivoli and the quays of the Seine through the underground passageway and intersect those who are hurrying from the Carrousel to the Concorde. Singularities populated a compact and dense expanse; interchanges smooth it out. If you want to draw a contemporary garden, think about a supple or undone knot with soft curves in a cloverleaf or about a complex computer chip. The ancient parks accumulated, dissimulating them a little, astonishing differences; don’t forget that the interchange is a desert, a place of the fourth type where we no longer stop.
When Descartes, during the Age of Reason, anxiously wondered about how to traverse a forest, he was describing the places of his time in which the trees hid the whole.12 When space abounds in sites, the traveler always has his nose over a singularity: a clearing, an ancient elm, a mossy trunk, a fork bearing mistletoe, a stag’s antlers appearing amongst the branches. The precept of plotting a straight line in the middle of this jumble assumes that the fourth question has been resolved but couldn’t resolve it except by a pious vow.
We ask ourselves the converse with the same anxiety: how to live in the desert? Descartes boldly asked the fourth question in a world devoted to the first three, since the method imposes that one traverse; we ask the first ones in a world that’s been smoothed out by the fourth and the set of technologies meant to answer it. If interchanges constitute the units of a space in which we now do nothing but pass, how do we live there? Answer: we no longer inhabit. Can you conceive, lay out a garden for wandering?
The desert is what the book of Exodus called the place of transit between Egypt—from which the Hebrew people were coming and leaving and which they called the abode of the dead—and the Promised Land, where they were going and which those who were passing through there would never know, generations of transition. We aren’t coming from Paradise, a sublime garden where milk and honey flow, we’re going there. We’re passing through the desert interchange. Do we live there? Where do we come from? From the land of the dead.
Circumscribed places, defined—yard, garden—agrarian, stable, only exist as founded. We have to dig to establish said foundation. Dig beneath the wall that encloses them or the boundary stone that marks them. Above the trench rises the pedestal or the wall or even the harvest. The secret lies in the hole. A shepherd roaming behind his flock, Gyges, it is said, descended into the chasm opened by the earthquake and founded his kingdom, his fortune and his power on the strange mystery that he discovered there. “Here lies,” invisible, the enigma, the arcanum. No place without landmark or boundary stone. The rain or thieves efface or change the signs that this latter shows; only the ensign-bearing thing remains stable.13 For a long time, philosophers were only interested in the flying marks and looked down on the thing that supported them. No softness without the hardness that holds it up; no gesture without the semaphore body, nor word without object. We come from things before being born of speech; we stem from the inert and tumulary stone, stele or cippus that stops the passer-by before the funereal obstacle.
The garden can be defined as the unit of space, if one analyzes space into its elements; it must now be understood as the mother cell, the originary place from which space is organized and spreads like a living tissue.14 The closed, marked out, designated garden is first defined by the presence beneath the boundary stone of sovereign death. Where are we going? There. Where do we come from? From there. We will therefore live here. Not far from the here made sacred by the repose of the ancestors. A given place above all remains the garden of our first parents. We will never know what historical truth was expressed in Fustel de Coulanges’s The Ancient City, but by establishing the emergence of the original city on the tomb, he translated being-there as “here lies.”15 How is place to be defined, here or there? By the stone or boundary marker beneath which the dead person lies. Cemetery, the first garden; necropolis, the first city.
Where do I want to be buried? I don’t care but propose the question. It concerns less my bones than love for this earth. Formerly I would have answered that the gentle curve of the Garonne and the soft lise that my forefathers turned with the plow, and my brother and father cut with the dredge could alone absorb my mineral sleep and return to nitrogen.16 Since, I’ve planed down the water and air, in which nothing remains, hung a capital letter on the native earth and transposed the patch of land into the globe. I accept resting at Lucca or Volterra, in the Kekova Bay, on the shores of the Yangtze or near Valparaíso, beneath the sand of a creek, facing the cold Pacific, waiting for an earthquake to sweep some lady swimmer near me.
No one can have himself buried in the Earth.
“Here,” the only word written by those who didn’t know how to write: let them bury me here.17 And let them engrave my name or only my initials on the stone, or let them draw them in the dust.
There the generation rises that really wants to die everywhere, losing the place, winning the Earth, standing on the universal—fast languages and soft signs. Their parents set their feet down on the earth and the hard; they had signs in their heads. Where do we have our heads, we who walk on software?18 Has the Bomb turned Hominity upside down?
What are those who, among our nephews, won’t know how to write going to write on the non-place? They scoff at the stone and the medium for written signs. Their flying ashes will occupy space for an instant.
Is it a question of the definitive exit from the heavy or hard, of the second Resurrection?
Neither Paris nor Rome was built without catacombs: from there for centuries the flint stones of the facings, cornices, pedestals, and statues have come out; there the dead themselves descended to the underworld, the early Christians in Rome, the people in Paris. Having become stones, they rest in the cavities from which the stones for the walls above them were extracted. And the temporarily living sleep in the cavities formed by the walls of the stones pulled from there.
To the north of Paris, beneath the Basilica of Saint Denis, the crypt goes down to the foundations, below the ground and into past times toward decomposed bodies, through the labyrinth of royal history. They slept there, lying, one by one, prince after king or prince, corpse after corpse, statue after statue, their two feet leaning against an animal, before being disinterred and thrown into the communal grave. To the south of Paris, beneath the Lion of Denfert, another descent into the underworld brings the indifferent amid the bones, skulls, tibia, piled there by the millions. A true archaic and primitive city, a true living city because primitive and archaic, Paris is rooted in crowds of the multiple, a multiple that’s opposed to the royal individual and mixed with him; bones in the black valley and statues beneath the dazzling light of the stained-glass windows, the remains of the elect returned to the others’ grave, Paris rests and is built on the foundation of skeletons become stones instead of the stones that built the city, the population and kings taking over from the rock. Come and visit the true city, walk along the streets, in the squares, through veritable boulevards where the walls, visibly assembled with a plumb-bob and water level gauge, squared off, are composed of heads, shoulder blades and pelvises, fibulas or clavicles, and think of the relationship between the necropolis below, stable, stock, and the metropolis above, a temporary décor. From what material are those walls made that come out of the ground, walls supported by the strength of such deep foundations? Flesh, calcareous bone or stone? You begin to understand the Scripture: “you are Peter and on this rock, I will build.”19 Here’s the transformation of the Peter-first name, of the stone-flesh into stone material or the transubstantiation of the inert into life and of life into sign or again the substitution of institution for substance; we’re approaching the word “statue.” Put differently, from what flesh have the stone bodies been sculpted that suddenly shoot up here and there on the pedestals, at the crossroads and detours of our gardens? Dead men, stand up!20 What superstition in the literal sense causes architectural cities to rise above necropoles, gardens above cemeteries, and sculptural works above bodies? From what transmutations of flesh substance into inert substance and from the former into a substantive can these vocal transformations around the statue and stability come? Substitutions, substances, institutions, everything comes out of death.
A rich plowman, sensing his impending death, had his children come and spoke to them without witnesses: “Beware of selling your inheritance,” he tells them, “A treasure is hidden within it. But I don’t know where: search for it.”
From this fable, the unremarkable lesson is drawn that one must work: since the content or the mass isn’t much lacking, take trouble with the form. Certainly. By turning mother-earth, the harvest will surpass the promise of the treasure. Very good.
They plow to search for the place. Where? Where does the treasure lie? In this “here.” The family property refers to this precious “there.” The father lied, just like the grandfather and, going back up the genealogical tree or series, each tricked his successors who, their entire lives, turned the soil in order to find the treasure. Aesop lied to La Fontaine, who deceived his readers. We must rewrite and search. The inheritance follows the succession of this lie: the moral of work.
Where did the sons bury their ancestor? Where did the latter deposit the remains of his father and so on for as long as you please? The deceived children or successors, by turning the field—hither and thither, everywhere—must have stumbled at some point across the funerary remains and, with the passing generations, across the complete genealogy of their forefathers interred there.
He who was speaking of treasure was and was not lying, for he was or founded the treasure. For how are we to define the legacy or inheritance other than by the place and the mass of earth that rhythmically passes from hand to hand with time? The earth is in the hand, and the hand comes out of the earth. The fable that is speaking behind the plowman who speaks says the autochthonous succession of the peasants born of the dust and returning to the dust, only speaking up at the point of return. Where? Here. But who are you, moreover? A fragment of earth or mass from here. Where do you come from? From there, from those who are decomposing there and transforming into the there. Where are you going? To rejoin them. An inestimable treasure is the transubstantiation of flesh into earth, of cultivated soil into body, of lineage into place. The first three questions cadence the eternal return of those who remain strangers to history but enter into the stone or mass and come out of there. History, for its part, goes, disperses, and squanders this treasure.
This is Being and that is Time.
These are the statues, mobile and immobile, hands full of earth in an earth that’s full of hands, enveloped or implicated in the cycle of place; those are the signs that fly off and develop randomly. This is the hard, that the soft. No one lied: work lapidates, is related to stone and doesn’t squander anything in vain and deceptive languages.21
A country or city sometimes allows several strata of history to be seen, the oldest of which are still living after a strange fashion. Unwinding its wide or narrow green band along the Nile, in the middle of the naked desert, Egypt shows the ancient pharaonic stratum, thick with forty centuries, the Coptic bed, the most archaic of the Christian era, the Muslim one that gives the dominant language and customs, and the contemporary one, cars, radios, noise, and machines. Thus you will see or have seen Cairo, a city of six thousand years or several months, fantastically living and dead.
But while arriving or before leaving, between the airport and the center of the capital, stop at the cemetery; go and walk there for a few hours; all of Egypt is summarized there. I don’t know when, or who was ruling, but a severe and sudden economic crisis, following years of relative prosperity, drove a poor and numerous population, without work or housing, into the large cities; the influx hasn’t yet stopped. Now during those years, this starving, hungry, and unsheltered populace suddenly invaded the necropolis. Like everywhere in the world in these still inegalitarian places, there were rich tombs shaped like houses with doors and courtyards, roofs or domes, and little gardens, giving shade to putrefaction of consequence, next to humble stones marking remains of a more common sort, though of the same biochemical formula. The wave of the lumpenproletariat flooded the graves: the grandiose tombs were opened, and people began to camp in them; they got organized, life quickly asserts its rights; small wood fires for the billycan, clotheslines for the washing, pallets in the corners, basins, utensils, a pile of scattered garbage, a true city, strange and ordinary, was born in short order. Today it’s called The City of the Dead, juxtaposed to the others, a city counting more than a million inhabitants, in which the shades mix with the bodies. The kids, like elsewhere, play soccer in little squares with broken ground, the goalie stopping the balls between the cippi; their parents cobbled together doors and built little walls; each took a recess, and when a gate opens in front of you, a family is eating, seated on a slab, watching you. They scribbled the name and address of the living man over the engraving where the titles of the dead man were attempting to perpetuate themselves. Life is bustling about above the motionless stone just like when, long ago, one’s ancestor used to be buried at home. I went through there as though in a place I’d known forever, elsewhere but at home, as though I had never ceased living in that truth.
A contemporary, social, common truth that hopes for, explains and foresees the coming revolts: economic injustice, here at its height, drives people to extremities of indignation. This very height serves as an example and tells a historical truth: the damned of the earth are founded on those who sleep below and are going to come back with them to wake the affluent individuals and peoples from their tranquil dreams. Here’s the burning volcano. Truth in its rigorous form, implacable, more than perfect: the poor live like the dead and with them; they pushed open the gates of Hell when they entered there and will be risen tomorrow from the tomb, now already standing.
I opened them halfway; I went through and learned from the poor and their shadowy mouth history, the future and archaeology, an exact and living anthropology. A de facto state that’s now accepted by means of its strength and numbers, the city of the dead even displays surfaced avenues so that certain transports and the police can get through. Here and there, some façade can let it be mixed up with any ordinary city of the living, but in a good many deserted places, behind, where the walls narrow, where the stones remain on the ground, death, tangible, survives life. Who would venture there at night? But this accentuates again the resemblance between the necropolis and the metropolis. This place of hell, through these transitions, becomes one of our commonplace purgatories. Death keeps watch in our living cities.
An ancient truth dozes and worries there. Beyond the green band that was formerly watered and enriched at the drop in the level of the Nile, the desert extends its immovable law. To this desert went the ancestors who repose—pharaohs—under some pyramid, who sleep—notable—under mastabas, who decompose—ordinary—beneath the stones. The Egyptians of four thousand years ago called this passage the Journey to the West, and all their work, industry, economy, art, and all their culture was devoted to tombs as places, mummified dead bodies as objects, and finally the exit toward the light of day as objective. The poor survived by tens of thousands among the necropoles under construction in the desert valleys, their cities, the first cities. What am I saying? Rich and poor, powerful or enslaved—all lived there, frozen, yoked to the age-old task of wanting to tame death. That’s not only the ancient City but Antiquity in general.22 Did that interminable work, work so heavy that it occupied all their strength, result in delivering us from it?
He who no longer has anything lives in the place where death and life border each other, where being begins. The most destitute of today’s Egyptians, driven by poverty to that border, have stepped across it the way their ancestors went through the desert long ago, in the abode of the dead; they rediscover an eternal law and recommence their history and our culture. Everything is erased and starts again from scratch.
The well-to-do or heedless tourist and the scholarly archeologist search for a beginning along the Nile’s riverbank, the cradle of their civilization, a transition between prehistory without state or writing and our science that was born in Greece or our conception of time which doubtlessly came from Israel, and seek them in the excavations and stones, in the digs and through the museums, in the temple ruins, whereas the origin is produced there, before their eyes, in the filth, dust, and children’s games of the City of the Dead where, on the marble and the corpses, the poor are reconstructing the Valley of the Kings.
I don’t know any place in the world better than the central cemetery of Montreal, Quebec, not far from the Côte-des-Neiges and the Saint Joseph’s Oratory. For several years, during the long months of winter, I walked there every day for two hours between two white cliffs, slipping on the ice, wading through the powder snow or jumping from puddle to puddle. In large cities made infernal by the motors and the crowds, only cemeteries give peace, silence, and a space where one can prepare one’s thoughts. I went there seeking calm and work. Generally, I arrived in Canada during the harshest time of the cold season, and the snow had transformed the vast necropolis into an immaculate park, tranquil and soft, the way in Paris, sometimes, severe winters transformed the gardens into solitary cemeteries, black and white. Gradually, very slowly, the year brought back that spring that’s so brief in those latitudes that only three seasons are celebrated there: the wondrous autumn, the eternal winter, and the humid and detestable terror of summer. So the snow was continuously lowering in level, despite the gusts and drifting snow which suddenly brought the level back to its highest, and this ebb, irregular but irreversible, was slowly freeing the steles and statues: an end of an angel’s wing was poking through the ice, a marble lock of hair, a weeping head was meditating all alone on the white plain, elsewhere bare shoulders, almost erotic on the smooth sheet, were arousing the austere landscape; when the Flood receded, the Ark’s sailors must have had the same perception of the world—one of resurrection or renaissance. Or conversely, I remember having pulled from the water the wreckage of a boat: it came back up dripping wet, detail after detail, from its drowsy submersion.
In short, the names came back above the mute expanse. The columns, steles, slabs of marble. At the end of March, sometimes, you could begin to read the lists of the departed, among the scattered statues, having finally emerged. I never arrive in a place I don’t know without first going and consulting this dictionary, in the open air. You learn right away the two or three dominant names of the village, and in American cities you can estimate the waves of immigration by masses: German, Polish, Czech, Sicilian, Irish, or Turkish patronymics, come from afar to give their letters and ashes to an earth that wouldn’t reject them. Casualties of wars over race, trade, religions, ideals, castaways who sought to drop anchor and grow roots elsewhere, thus changing elsewhere into here. This is truly the new world resurrecting beneath the melted snow of the flesh and signs of the old one. A temporary stop for the wandering. The great conquests never come from a large aggressive army but from the troops of those excluded by their brutal brothers.
After the month of February, terrifying, a mild March followed. The ceiling-floor of snow collapsed. I entered that morning like any other through the gate framed with two brick pilasters, and I went directly toward the hill, alone. Not a single bird was to be heard, only the rubbing of velvet on wool, pants against coat, and the opaque breathing from the effort. Hat pulled down to the eyebrows, a violent wind, head buried in some thought, therefore head lowered I ran into the first vertical cippus freed from the snowdrift by the thaw: it bore my name! Which grandparent wandering over the water, come from the country of the serres, had transplanted there? Behind, in line with my body, petrified with amazement, and the stele bearing that signature of mine, another marble slab whose inscription announced the name of the little town of my birth, distant by a quarter of the equator, was emerging from the snow. On the white page my shield was appearing.
Where was I? A short-circuit between here and yonder. Where was I going? Where have I come from? I thought I was passing through the space of wandering, leaving no more trace than on a desert of sand during a storm, a flying Hermes observing the dead from outside my heritage, and here I was a ghost.23 Here I was one of the phantoms gotten up from one of these tombs, and the snowflakes that now covered my coat were transforming it into a shroud: I in turn was disappearing into this place as though I had never left the land of my ancestors. My being was melting into the there. The four questions, intersecting like a crossroads, exchanging their places between themselves, were trapping me here, with my feet thrust into the tumulary earth.
The skew-surfaced snow was slowly falling like an immense sheet of white drawing paper that would come to a landing, from above, hovering all the while, and on which at each level a new garden stemming from the cemetery would be marked. Lifting my eyes, I saw the sketch now signed by me, since my epitaph or signature had just made a hole in the page by marking my place of habitat on it.24
The irregular interlacing of the hemmed-in paths tracing their stains of black mud on the naïve, impeccable isotropy surrounded the tall statues gradually resurrecting from the end of last autumn, when the squall had drowned them. Standing stones, menhirs, in a prehistoric landscape. Dead men, stand up! As they appeared, the snowdrop steles formed rooms, courtyards, enclosures, basins, passageways, an entire map being born on the white plain, with the steles indicating the scale or the low-water mark along their statuary skeletons which were emerging from the descending level: a thousand gardens changed by degrees.25
When you’re writing or drawing at a desk under the flat light of a lamp, make the page of snow fall over the domain of the dead, the founders or keepers of all the secrets of places; evoke them, help along their return to the sun’s blue brilliance. Neither the drawing nor the writing is worth anything if it doesn’t reveal those who are veiled beneath this shroud. Their heads bore through the sheet. Without this resurrection, no sign nor language, which come from the sheet and the dead.
One garden marks one state of the cemetery, the first place or donor of places. That state depends on the level of the white sheet of paper, of the snow floor, of the earth in relation to the soaring of the dead. The statues, tall, fly over the columns or, over the low pedestals, hardly seem to tear themselves away from their tombs. Each garden marks an epoch in the dawn of history, when the unknown forefathers of our forgotten ancestors were sowing space with menhirs, betyls, cromlechs, or cairns, megaliths that defined its singularities which were occupied for the first time by an animal recognizing at once its world and its dead. The corpses turn into stones or boundary markers and these latter into statuary in which no one any longer recognizes the spirit of places, one’s kin.
A garden is organized or born around its statues, the boundary stones and roots of its site.
Whether you draw or write, imagine that you’re sailing on the Ark—a box that’s full like the horse bound for Troy or the rocket pointed at the Moon—in the company of the old patriarch who was the inventor of wine and a collector of species, and imagine that the declining Flood is resurrecting islands on the liquid surface: then you see coming towards you, through the gentle lowering of the water level, steeples, summits, treetops, roofs, towers, and heads whose tips are setting about piercing the paper. They are forming into groups of archipelagos, and the returned world is forming all alone its first variable gardens, which aren’t lacking in ponds, basins, or in brooks.
The flood, inundation, or transgression no doubt signifies the greatest social violence, war that vitrifies the planet and covers it with a smooth and desert surface, a blank sheet before all drawing, a white unwritten page, whereas the drop in level brings back peace, leniency; write in serenity or kindness, the world is beginning. It begins again, as is the custom, with paradise, with the first garden. There’s no garden without this dawn of the earth at the top of Mount Ararat, where it’s reported that the Ark had moored.
We’re holding neither quill nor drawing pen; the object itself attracts their points from behind or beneath the sheet. The statues puncture it while it descends toward them. The method is to come to a landing.
The more time and age advance, the more the work increases and the more the landing takes place. The things themselves—concrete, carnal, full, inert, complete, beautiful, present—close neighbors, come there. Their dense, incalculable number pierces the paper so multiply that one has to write frantically, even though nothing more remains of it than tatters, as tiny as confetti. Abstract, youth loves to devote itself to a violent and rare geometry or theory; maturity, more earthly and calmed, rejoices at plurality, welcoming the droves of detail of the local.
While maturity is becoming enriched, the page itself is crumbling and becoming null; thus one thinks, at given moment, one is writing or drawing one’s finger in the sand or on the soil as God must have done on the morning of the first day, a divine temptation, but one that’s brief since the author, then, in turn enters into the earth in order to seek or increase the treasure and take over from the old lineage that’s getting out of breath from propagating the spirit of places through the provining that runs from country to page.26 And takes, at that moment, his authentic and proper place, that of the object, the true site of things, the locality of the world that, piercing the sheet of the piece of writing or the drawing, is their sole author.
One only dies from an excess of love for the place. One only writes from an excess of love.
The signature comes from beyond the grave.