2. ELEVEN NOVEMBER 2008
That night the wind was blowing above the ferns. The
sky had fallen like a metal shutter.
The scene was almost invisible and mute. One could
hear footsteps.
*
… knocking over, bit by bit, all the obstacles
… making each sentence into a fire stand
“the folly of an order”
On eleven November at 5 a.m. the police cross Toy-Viam with dogs.
The five access roads to the village of Tarnac are blocked.
The village is sealed.
A helicopter surveys the zone.
150 policemen
60 from the sdat (sous-direction de l’antiterrorisme)
50 from the dcri ( direction centrale du renseignement intérieur)
40 from the police judiciare in Limoges
The house searches begin.
They find
neither weapons, nor explosives, nor incendiary bombs, nor steel rein-
forcement bars, nor metal hooks.
Stretches of ferns, hedges of ferns, banks and beds of ferns.
A mask with fixed eyes gulps down the head of a bird.
Three men and two women are arrested, placed under
police custody and transferred to Levallois.
One of them is imprisoned Charged with Indicted for
no evidence
no material evidence fact or proof
no implement
for criminal conspiracy for in relation
with relation
in the forest
(someone will answer that there is only continual forest, night and
rain, music)
or terrorist
of terror under high trees under wood under cover
one or several cabins and electrical sabotage a
terrorist enterprise
He will be remanded into custody.
Remanded
far from the river.
After his [three three three] demands to be released are rejected
in February the fourth month
in April the sixth month
but with no police record
degradations degradations
no material evidence no implement
no dna trace no blood no salvia
no trace nor prints Thousands
of ferns.
4. ANARCHY
Anarchy is represented in the figure of a
woman whose entire posture, body, eyes,
mouth announce fury. Her eyes are blind-
folded, her eyelids tremble, her hands are
wet, her tufted hair tousled and her cloth-
ing torn. She tramples over the book of
the law and a bundle of sticks. She bran-
dishes a knife and in the ohter hand a lit
torch. On the ground at her sides lie a
cracked scepter, a broken yoke, a prayer
rug, a pearl necklace, a silk scarf and foam.
Around her there is clotted blood, motor
parts, nails, screws and puddles of urine.
Or again in the figure of a serpent that vomits and
slobbers.
5. STATIC SHOTS
12. CAUGHT IN THE WATER
Marat, Marat’s smile. He said that nothing frightens timid citizens as much
as popular uprisings: they tend to destroy their happiness in bringing about
a new order of things; they speak only of pacifying the people; they have
powerful reasons for this, for to what do we owe freedom if not to popular
uprisings? It was a popular uprising that brought down the Bastille, it was a
popular uprising that aborted the aristocratic conspiracy, the National As-
sembly took office only thanks to popular uprising, it is to popular uprisings
that we owe everything, arise, arise!
reject your illusions prepare for the struggle reject your illusions prepare for the
Snakes frighten those that do not know them.
Whence study, our passion for study. Inquiry.
In the first image a peasant was speaking to children. They listened with
heads bowed. He said: “In the guerilla warfare zone one needed to be con-
stantly ready to disperse the school and hide the equipment.”
Beneath the second image the caption said: “conduct inquiries to
conform yourselves to reality.”
Mallarmé watched the death of Anatole, the open grave and the thrown
flowers, and the earth.
He cut, tore, piled up pieces of paper.
Scraps, of sentences. He had this strange way of speaking of the earth. It
was almost as if he had earth in his mouth.
Mallarmé says that the body of the son and the body of the father are the
same body. He writes these words on society, he writes that it is furious.
He writes: “vile society that had to crush him, perhaps”
Mallarmé looks at his hands, and writes further:
“What, the thing I am saying / is true—it is / not only /
music – – – / etc.”
In this film an image is said to be “black at the center.”
Mallarmé writes: “death-purging / image in us / purged by / tears— /
remains only / not touching— / but speaking.”
At Flins, the Renault factory had been on strike since the middle of May.
The conflict continued despite the accords signed by the unions. The uni-
versities were taken back by police one by one. Everything was over, every-
thing continued. In the night from the fifth to the sixth of June, knocking
down the Les Mureaux gates at the back of the factory with half-tracks,
machine guns, 3,000 riot police invade the factory. In front of the central
transformer. They cut the electricity. They cut the telephone.
On June tenth a team finds itself at the tip of an island near
the Meulan bridge. At four o’clock.
The dive in.
The one who cried out takes a long time to drown. He disappears. Another
tries to pull him out by his clothes. The fabric tears. He carried off.
This slow motion, that’s war.
The surface of writings is like the mirror of lakes, rivers, streams. It seems
to reflect the uppermost sky, but this uppermost sky is in truth only the
reflection of the sky caught in water.
This story is simple but. Because in reality all stories are made of several
stories and all of these severals do not have the same size or weight. There
are these bits that are together several and climb over and enter under each
other, they form a rough, bumpy terrain, they pile up and jostle, pile up and
gather. As simple as hopscotch or a kite, and like grammar, supple as can
be.
And these several stories are made of one, that of revision at a distance
(whence the fact that I am scrawled in luminous gray when I lean over the
surface):
“I revise the child I am from afar.”
Some dream of a river bank, invisible. Of an invisible bank. Of an invisible
river. A dream in which the only image is the sound without sound of a
slope. The beginning of a gesture in few words. The exercise consists in
finding the instant when the gesture begins, or simply the sound of the
words, or like the memory of voices, of a voice.
A poem is not an island, certainly not.
15. BEYOND VOICE
January 5th. The image of a
“black box” (like those on
airplanes) has remained with
me. Words said in negative,
waiting to be developed in the
dark, Yes, such “blind
objectivity.” In his letter he
tells me that I speak as an
illiterate with a headless
body.
January 7th, “beyond
voice.”
The cross is cloven,
each part hanging. (“and so his
hands and his feet seemed
to be pierced in their centers by
nails whose heads were in the
palms of his hands and the soles
of his feet and the nails protruded
so that one could fit a finger in
the space as into a ring, and the
heads of the nails were round and
black.”)
Night of January 9th to 10th.
Dreamed of Serge Hajlblum,
rising from beyond his death
now confirmed, announced.
Essentially his face, transformed
(which was superimposed on that
of Denis Lavant seen the day
before on a TV screen playing a
man wounded in the head
almost mad). I question him
about that face, its strange
contours, its hardness.
January 29th. Siena with B.
“Psychiatric” parking lot and
Catherine of S., her pillow of
bricks, her finger.
February 14th. Snowed in.
Unreachable. Intense cold, inside.
The wind, feng. Erasure of
lines, the blackboard (of the
trees) completely covered
with chalk. Cloth white with
chalk dust. “Received from B. the pages
entitled “a day of grace.”
February 15th. Received your day
of grace which in fact does not
specify (no doubt cannot
specify) anything of what binds
the experience (merely named, no
more) to its consequences (its
paradoxical consequences). The
only prior justification (“might I
say”) through refusal (NO) of a
sense that contradicts (that is
contradicted by) the practice of
writing caused by and
confronting the absence of
sense or absent sense, and the
senselessness of everything. And
the movement (of things of grace)
from Experience to the
experience of seeing (heightened
relation to the real, etc.) March
2nd. how does this new cavity / a
body falling at a glance, whose? /
or seeing the sky pour
down straight on the eyelids and
gray-black / going down for
obstruction of the frame, curtain
of ferns, falling heavy to prepare
the ground / feng, feng / a moist
and slow ground (stopped).
March 21st. — A tree was hit. —
The ground shook, yes. (that’s
when the gray lake of sky
becomes nearly black, the black
and it’s night, and now the music
starts or starts again, it comes
from the forest, crosses it, and
that’s all) April 2nd. You don’t
start a war, you’re in it. You do
not start, you’re there. Rimbaud:
“I am on strike.” In this regained
obscurity, then
(“I drank, squatted in the heather
Wrapped in a hazel grove By a
fog”) zones of actual autonomy
zones of provisional autonomy
corridors for retreat
if needed to resume elsewhere
further under cover, the
practice of “I am on strike.” /
for a politics of the present of
presence of permanent invention,
gestural gazes,
continuous fabrication of
cabins —
Jean-Marie Gleize. TARNAC, A PREPARATORY ACT
Edited by Joshua Clover, translated by Joshua Clover, Abigail Lang, and Bonnie Roy.
Audiatur 2014 Day 3 11: Jean Marie Gleize from Audiatur on Vimeo.
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 