I’m considering my residency at the Ouessant semaphore as a privileged time to revisit my Mexican travel journals. I have been writing them for nearly 35 years, each time I travel to Mexico. I would like to turn them into a book, a travelogue. I have traveled extensively and kept many journals while reflecting on what traveling means today. But my endeavor is not sociological; it is primarily literary and artistic. In fact, I dedicated an exhibition to the question of travel and its relationship with art and literature, For a Republic of Dreams, which is the third part of what I would gladly call A Poetics of the Imaginary in Motion. The first two installments of this project are The Principle of the Axolotl & Supplements (Actes Sud, 2011) and FINIS TERRAE: Imaginations and Cartographic Imaginaries (Bayard, 2007).
Ouessant appears to me as a place which, due to its location on the edge of France’s inhabited lands, serves as both a platform and a privileged observatory for daydreaming and the imagination of journeys across the oceans. I stayed on this island twenty years ago, and like many others, I was immediately struck by the “wild” character of its western coast. A place that made me want to return, yet where I never did. Thanks to this residency, I could find a moment of solitude and concentration to rework these notebooks accumulated over the years and set in motion a book I had already begun writing in parts, though never with the opportunity to give it true coherence.
This was the brief text that described my project when I applied for the residency in August 2011. During my stay in June 2013, I strictly adhered to this program. I wrote from morning to night, at the top of the Semaphore, in the watch room, transcribing my notebooks and organizing my notes in preparation for writing the book that I fully intend to finish one day. But what I primarily did during that time was decipher and clean up hundreds of pages scribbled in my tiny handwriting, lifting my head every hour or so to look at the sea before me and observe how the sun, at different moments of the day, altered its color. It would take too long to recount the life of a lighthouse keeper with nothing to guard but himself, or a “semaphorist” whose only task is to darken still-virtual pages on his computer.
The only notable events were, first, the visit of two technicians for a routine maintenance check, followed by that of my friends Sophie Kaplan and Stéphane Crémer. I noted in my journal on June 6:
“Bad night. I barely slept due to insomnia—I fell back asleep but still woke up too early this morning. Dazed and with a headache. Two guys came by this morning to check the roof’s waterproofing.
“— So, you’re an artist?
— No, a writer.
— Ah, and what do you write?”
The usual questions. They were rather friendly and curious.
“— Doesn’t it scare you, being alone like this? You know, a bit of a Shining vibe here?”
Hmm… Well, something to think about. Seen from that angle… Didn’t they have anything else to say? After their visit, I spent several hours transcribing my journal, then went to the village for some errands, not without first checking Météo Ciel, as suggested by the thinner of the two visitors. The site is very reliable, according to him. Bad weather expected tomorrow.”
Then came the visit of Sophie Kaplan with the Mahony collective—artists exhibiting at La Criée—whom she had brought to the island for the weekend, and my friend Stéphane Crémer, whose poetry book Compost I had prefaced. Stéphane stayed for two nights, and with him, I took my first walks around the island. I hardly took any more, too anxious about not fulfilling my writing program.
My neighbor, Mathieu, with whom I became friends and who makes weathervanes, invited me to dinner one evening. He advised me to lock up properly when I went out because people tend to wander into the semaphore uninvited. One past resident once found two strangers admiring the view from the watch room, as if it were a public monument. Catherine Elkar and Marcel Dinahet also visited—but they had let me know beforehand—and we went for lunch in the village. That was another of the rare notable outings.
I had brought along many books, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by H.D. Thoreau, from which I noted the following passage:
“One can never surpass reality in storytelling without consequence. There is no such thing as pure invention, as some suppose. Writing a truly authentic work of fiction consists simply of taking the time and liberty to describe things more precisely as they are. A true description of reality constitutes the height of poetry, for common sense only perceives it in haste and superficiality.”
And now, what remains with me is the memory of the sea and its waves, their ceaseless ebb and flow, and the desire to return to the lighthouse to continue a task that, paradoxically, can only be completed by stepping away from it.
