Monthly Archives: November 2012

This old dusk dread, this fear of the no man’s land between day and night, will I ever be free of it? Will I ever surrender to it? The only thing that helps is to be with animals. I let the neighbour’s cat in through the window, let it purr on my lap, go and play with my friend’s excitable dogs. I walk down to the gypsies’ horses with apples. They roam free all year round on a littered field, the poor filthy beasts, they come trotting when they see me, we’re getting to know each other.

— Frenet, Journal

I write to say the same thing over and over, as on a palimpsest. I write to confirm that I have nothing to say, or rather that all I have to say is nothing – that it’s nothing compared to the everyday. The everyday that this journal keeps me from and flirts with. The everyday that’s hidden in the ordinary, somewhere within or beyond ordinary life. Which trumps all. Which has no opinion of me.

— Frenet, Journal

To return to what was here in the beginning, to what’s always been here, patient, indifferent, waiting. That’s what I seek in this journal. To end this journal, so I can begin to live. No: so that life can begin in me. But is this not living? No. This journal was a failure from the beginning, from before it began, it’s enmeshed in failure like a fish thrashing in a net. It should seek its own invisibility, its own never-having-been, as though it were being written in disappearing ink. To return to what was here, to what is here – impossible dream.

– Frenet, Journal

Strange to see the contents of my head strewn about here, as if they’d been dropped from a pocket and lay unnoticed, like obsolete objects. As if I myself were obsolete… If I were the last man on earth, if no one were ever to see these notes, would I go on writing them? But that’s precisely how one should write, as if one were the last person on earth, as if one were obsolete. What makes a wolf howl? What makes him stretch his neck and send his cry through the freezing air? Would he still howl if he were the last wolf on earth?

— Frenet, Journal