THOSE NOTEBOOKS I WILL NOT BURN

Alice Baude

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In the twenty-eighth summer, I reached an adult height of one meter sixty-seven. While my weight changes all the time, my density remains a matter of writing. Each season unfolds with the slowness and speed that everyone knows. I relive similar experiences, loves begin, end, return, friends arrive.

I dance with my pleasure, with my ecstasy, with my fervor. Each year is deposited in the form of a notebook.

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My writing movement is driven by a desire for absorption. I wish to be absorbed, focused, held. Dense. I want to be contained, all hard, all intense, all black, in a single book. What an ambition. What a strong relationship with trance, with takeoff: writing makes me take off from myself.

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What interests me is the space between my life and the writing of my life. The space that separates and connects. The space that breathes.

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PART 1 / I met myself yesterday and did not recognize anyone.

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20th spring, Avignon, Vaucluse – black lined notebook, spiral binding

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I begin my twentieth year and realize that all I want is to make lace of existence and be a poet. But I can't seem to grasp something. The path seems to be drawn through encounters. I wake up at sunrise to better go back to bed. I have a knot in my guts that crinkles my forehead.

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Last night we ran to the Rocher des Doms park. Too fast for our screaming legs, a sun rose.

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21st autumn, Kathmandu, Nepal – notebook of loose sheets gathered in a thick sheet

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I know who I am. A serpent writhes within me; it is a cobra (nothing can take away this straight and supple backbone like a reed). Now I must relearn everything. Reap dandelions by the petals. Enjoy life again. Illustrate the myths of origins, of my origins, and especially that of the women who spin silence. To write with my fly legs this hunger for life.

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We are bones that speak. I seized a mystery by the tips of its wings. Then I slowly ate an apple that was turning green before my eyes and swallowed the seeds like prayers. Nothing resembles what I have lived before... So why should the future lie within the realm of the known?

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I give birth to myself every second. It is an endless reincarnation, formless. The exemplary solution would be to return quietly to "my house," but I must go into nature. It is obvious, an obligation. I cannot defer it. My family must accept it: I am going to walk, alone. That is my view of the situation. Perhaps they will be afraid. But they must understand. The present is now, is instant.

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I did not realize what my heart was carrying in fruits.

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21st winter, Perpignan, Pyrénées Orientales – notebook bound myself in an old book

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A few crumbs of nothingness on the white page. A few hollow thoughts that steal from my soul. At the peaks, rays of white light. Prisms. I would like to appreciate the sounds of the little things around me.

I would like to accept boredom differently.

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Shame constricts me, and the sun touches me. I know that life radiates from the teeth of happy people.

I have learned that all that matters is the hump we roll, and not the road on which we roll it. I am my own carriage, my own horse.

But they cry together.

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I will go into the sun, read in the sky, and blow my nose in the tree leaves. I do not want such a serious soul; I need beauties to illuminate it.

I know I am on my way and that all my traces create fragments. If I nurture this desire for elsewhere, I protect my soul from all escape.

For a long time, I have lived in frenzy.

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Yesterday someone told me that there is no distinction between the inside and the outside... It seems we are intertwined, that we are part of things.

I like to remind myself that I have a body, that matter is real, tangible, that I am made of veins, skin, flesh, bone.

I touch the stone that surrounds me. I am here.

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PART 2 / I will pour myself out in this filthy notebook.

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22nd spring, Syros, Greece – notebook bought in Amsterdam with a drawn cover

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I rode up here on a moped. Smile from ear to ear, scarf flapping in the air, a rocket in the curves. The donkey enters the alleys, on the white steps, its footsteps clap on the ground. There is so much wind; I have a big sweater, and it doesn't matter, it pierces me. Iassas.

With Maud, we drink thick coffee at Theos and Xara, petting the cats. There are twenty of them. They are two, and they love each other persistently. There is a photo of them young; it looks like a wedding photo, but they are not married. We listen to their stories passionately, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Paris in '68, to the beaches of Syros. After picking lilacs and drinking wine, we decide to return to Stella's with a flower in our nose. We dine like queens. Our salad was picked from a stone wall facing the sea. Maud writes the chocolate brownie, and I write that she writes it.

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And at night in the taverns, the tsípouro flows freely – the songs become stubborn, and open palms beat rhythms on the tables until the cutlery flies off – warmth and faces open in smiles. They invite you to nibble from the dish, refill your glass of wine. They play rebétiko. Tomorrow is a national holiday, but tomorrow is today, an uninterrupted celebration, Mediterranean joy. For the past ten days, I have tanned, walked on the sand, painted and repainted the islands.

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How much time have I spent in recent years worrying about my future?

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23rd summer, Drôme provençale – notebook with pages rubbed in ash, cover made from a torn envelope

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I embody myself.

I embody myself by embracing reality with my gaze. Summer advances without looking back. I played music on the fountain, and my digestion lasts forever.

I am between the trees. I think about my future (about my ambitions) – I insist on keeping the possibility of breathing. I mean, to rid myself of my tensions.

It is here, it is here, everything is here, ardently calmly sensually present.

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It is time to get dirty, to soil writing: this earth that sticks to my feet. I will ruin my letters, the threadbare inks; I will burn my wedding veil. And then I dive into the meanders of sleep. I have put ash on my typewriter, on my hands, on my face

I have put sunlight on my skin by diving back into a sleep both new and old at once.

Night has climbed its rungs. I lie down wondering do we speak to be silent?

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I celebrate the only thing that deserves to be celebrated. I know we are alone. All of us. It goes without saying that we are bored.

I have a sorrow that cracks. In my heart, there are veils. They are fabrics for ships, duvets for sleep, or silk for skin.

I have gathered this paper, this chimera wing. In my heart, there is a tear, a wrinkle, a fold. Sometimes an aurora arises, and the taste of hazelnut.

I reinvent myself by being absent. I have this deep and unnamable yearning for silence. Unalterable. And always, this curious sensation of nudity in front of the blank page. Everything is written incessantly. I am a permanent process. Our union has neither beginning nor end; there is no rupture.

I cannot show you what I have lived with all of us together.

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All that is absent is our spectacle.

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PART 3 / I have chosen enchantment as the principle of reality.

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26th winter, Douarnenez, Brittany – notebook bound myself in cardboard, light denim cover outside and a map of Spain inside

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Feeling of a full belly and an empty heart all at once. I seek to know where to begin (and yet I have already begun). As Nicole would say: who are my mothers, my peers? Of course, I cannot create without creating; of course, poetry saves me from the world, at least me – and if it pleases someone else, all the better. In my abyssal archives, I keep complete honesty, whole, and then I continue to do.

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I lodge in bed to compose a few verses, between gunshots. The armed robberies of serenity enumerate my failures. I stuff a cake, I moan from my knees, I halo with an apostrophe the times when I can take no more, sputtering all I have.

Running, I never liked that.

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The heart in pieces from time to time, restored by duvets, restored by sleep, in my nights, memories and absences cease to molest me. The action becomes intuitive, poetic, a bit crazy, but remains anchored in reality, in a safe haven.

I have chosen enchantment as the principle of reality.

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27th Autumn, Hanover, Germany – Lined notebook brought back from Turkey by friends, quilted blue embroidered cover

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Writing is far from being an obvious act; for me, it’s a real ordeal. I wake up feeling ill.

I feel like I’m only grazing work, and this pains me with idleness. I no longer have that happy idleness, that acquired relaxation. I need to create, to feel stretched toward something, to twist myself a little. To reflect, to move, to stir the air around me and its dust, to create poetry and prose in abundance. I want to immerse myself in my work, drink in all my thirst, and convulse in silence from a literary orgasm.

Like an old couple's dance, I pace back and forth with my memories.

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I’m in this room like a bubble outside of time. My only duty is to compose, to dissect, to open, to bring forth. My wounds still bleed so intensely. No, that's not true. It’s the melancholy that makes me say that. In truth, everything is bittersweet.

Perhaps the idea of creating a book from my journals is misguided: too psychological, not literary enough. Yet, I still want to go through with the experience, to reread them one by one, and to step into my old skins. All of this is a shedding. I wonder what exactly I am looking for. What in me wishes to shine?

By embarking on this time travel, I reawaken areas of my brain where nothing circulated before, and I find such free drawings; I reconsider everything I was. I reread myself. I thought I had been too simple, naive, fragmented, binary, but I rediscover a person so creative, embracing the world without half-measures. No counterpart with who we were:

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Always paying homage, always rubbing against who I was, who I am, who I will be: all together, well together.

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No matter, all of this existed, all of this exists, all of this can still exist.

I could have thought I was articulating new things, radiating new thoughts, but I dive back into these journals and realize I’m not inventing anything. I move myself; I reconnect with friends. I try to correspond through letters, phone calls, and emails. But I must admit that I am alone with my notebooks, and I undervalue myself greatly. I consider these writings to be both infinitely precious, even priceless, and at the same time completely worthless. As if I were only repeating, mumbling my emotional litany.

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28th Spring, Douarnenez, Brittany – Very thick notebook bound by myself in an old book titled Balance, containing sheets of all sizes and colors

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So I am twenty-eight years old. The new age always feels a bit large for the body at first.

This age has a sense of meeting. Poetry everywhere delights and comforts me. I am crumbled by fatigue yet filled with nuggets of joy. The world cradles me and makes me laugh. There’s nothing very serious about all of this. I want to create a typewriter that I can carry like a big drum to write while walking in demonstrations.

Hello, dear thrill, I am not stellar; I’m lost in thought today. All my tears roll down my mauve sweater, and it seems to me that the sea sharpens my sadness.

This person told me, “You can acquire, accumulate, receive all the recognition in the world – if you don’t love what you write, nothing exists.”

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With all the care I give myself, I still taste the bitterness of coffee inside me. I feel a certain urgency: for calming, for comfort, for a key.

She tells me that life is vulnerability. My teeth ache. I am a sponge. A stain forms on my incisors. I exhaust myself trying to be beautiful; I strive to charm the world. I drink intensely flavored violet, I am my own child. It is eight o'clock. The sky is still blue. It feels good to be alone. I am not in the dead end I believe I am in. The world does not need me.

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This morning, the eggs with salted butter on the Ris beach and my friend Gauthier reminding me that we can only be happy in the present. We unfold the little camping table, and I take to the sea. The orb of my spring suggests a circle. A redundant obsession and the opening of the ceiling at a very specific spot. I love renewing the fiction. Why not live in a spiral? A virtuous and open spiral toward the sky.

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I have the right to believe in this. That I am new, a fresh spring, always renewed. A warrior at the beginning of her story.

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PART 4 /

PALIMPSEST, noun, masculine.

A. − Manuscript on parchment of ancient authors that medieval copyists erased to cover it with a second text.

B. − Figuratively.

1. A work whose present state may suggest and reveal traces of earlier versions.
   
    

My first memory of writing is there: I dictate an anecdote to a friend of my mother’s after a meal; she writes it down for me. I don’t know how to write; I am five or six years old. When I learned to write, around the age of eight, I had a whole range of journals adorned with princesses, each with a little lock.

I number them, give them code names, passwords. Then I lose the keys. I kept a poetry notebook around the age of eleven or twelve. I write in very dark, intense ink with a fountain pen, and the ribbon that holds it shut is black and thick. I continued with small spiral notebooks with plastic covers, large graph paper notebooks repurposed from their school use, filled with collage.

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As writing took shape, I moved from a journal hidden under the bed and discovered with regret to travel notebooks shared generously.

I don’t know how the junction was made. I loved reading my notebooks aloud. With Maud, my travel companion in Greece and a free dancer, we write every day while traveling and read passages to each other. These moments of reading unlocked my intimacy and made sharing everyday life precious. Reading one’s intimate writings to a friend is to verbalize dark matter. To deposit it in loving ears. I believe that it is with this movement that I deposit this text: the gesture of wanting to cross intimacies by sharing mine.

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These writings are always me, and already not at all at the same time.

My intimacy remains insurmountable, impossible to transcend (day by day, I carry my little crucible of identity; day by day, my face is different).

So I love to wash my writing, to rewrite over it: to reclaim my intimate language, to create a palimpsest.

I share these intimate writings because they are strangely intimate: no longer really myself, no longer really mine.

I have transformed these words as one transforms memories over time. Everything has shifted by a millimeter.

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Like that, you can read them.