I just published Vacationing in a Hospital. Smooth, cool, cozy, funny, and Restful. A hospital is a place where you only have friends and comrades and companions and partners in diseases and healing. And you may fall in love with the place and hope you can stay as long as possible. Yet you look through the window and imagine the wind in the trees and the birds in the air.

2. The unnamed character in this long poem is trying to follow what is
happening in his mind after the accident, after he fell to the ground unconscious
when trying to get back up after tying up his shoe. He is entirely locked up in his
own self and he is even seeing himself from outside himself, he is the watcher,
and the watchee is there lying on the sidewalk and then later on suffering on a
hospital bed.
The trauma is deep and brutal, and he may have lost his own mind at some
time in this descent into pain, the worst pain being that he was no longer the
master of himself, and yet he fought for some revival, some responsibility, for
some modesty if not bashfulness. Suffering from being unable to hide, and
passing water became an ordeal and he had to do it in spite of all.
This unnamed character is trying to follow the strings that are within his
reach, trying to re-emerge from this deep traumatic cesspool in which he is some
kind of floating half-rotten piece of wood that is losing its substance, impregnated
with muddy water as it is. He pulls these strings. They resist. Yet he has to get out
of the soup in which he is dissolving.
In his post-traumatic pain and corrugation, he tries not to get lost in
translation as if he would be transmuted into some vaporous smog in a lightless
empty void, floating fleshlessly and mindlessly. Some recollections resonate in his
brain, torturing his desire to just pass away with the challenge to stand up and
howl at his fear, his angst, his apprehensive revulsion. Going down the road
feeling bad in the midnight hour when pushing the Dreadful Gate open.
Dr. Jacque COULARDEAU

3. Acknowledging Introduction
Je dédie ce poème à tous ceux qui m’ont permis de me relever
du sol le jour de Thanksgiving, Jeudi 22 novembre 2018. Au plus bas
dans mon errance mentale, le troisième jour, un Samaritain, qui
devait être bon, me releva et me rendit l’espoir que je pourrais
encore marcher malgré l’abandon dans lequel je me réfugiais. Le
sixième jour et la sixième nuit virent une aggravation brutale de la
situation qui fut prise en main par le même Samaritain qui me fit
passer l’étape de la sagesse salomonique sans couper le bébé en
deux, puis du septain de l’achèvement qui déboucha la huitième nuit
sur une seconde venue ouvrant la porte et la voie à l’affrontement de
la vie et de Belial le neuvième jour, à la fois le dragon et la bête, de la
vie réelle.
Que tous soient ici remerciés pour ce qui fut pour moi une
apocalypse réussie. Si la juivité de ce discours surprend quelques-
uns des lecteurs, qu’ils pensent en terme de spiritualité bouddhiste
et de trois en trois , de dukkha en anicca et anatta, toute l’équipe de
ce Samaritain dont je parle m’ont remis sur le chemin octogonal qui
mène à nibbana (nirvana en sanskrit). Qu’ils en soient ici remerciés.
French is for me a very cold language. All along these nine days, I
wrote this poem, day after day, in the empathetic light of a whole team
with a few stronger luminaries in their sky. I was hurting in my body but
also because of the noise and of the light. Yet I forced myself to be and
even to read and build abstract constructions on the origin of language
and Maya culture, even though the building of a chain of reasoning hurt in
my brain but I did it not to turn into the worst thing I can think of, a
speaking vegetable that some undertaker would have forgotten to take
away and bury. That’s how I reached the end of this Solomonic wisdom
that I call thought, abstraction, conceptualization, never ceasing to think of
Armand Olivennes who could have rebuilt his poetical language in six
months when he had his cardio-vascular accident that reduced his
linguistic ability by maybe twenty percent. He did not have the chance to
be coached into thinking poetically again and he lost himself in his
rambling amiss in mental isolation. I felt the hurting effort such intellectual
work meant then and the work it means now.

5. In such a distressful tumble-down and incremental uncertain upswing,
even when you try to control that rising energy and desire, to be called by
a name, even a shortening of your name, even if it is not the one you are
used to, is a tremendous relief. To feel the hand of an intern or a nurse on
your shoulder or your arm is often more curative and tonic, healing too
than all the standardized words in the world of medicine or hospital good
manners.
When one goes down into the dark pit of perdition with the two
pendula of the final escape from the traumatic stress of surviving the
swinging and swaying over and under you, the hand of the bedside
personnel, their smiles and kind words are more powerful than the hand or
wing of any celestial being you may imagine or invoke.
I am sorry to write all that in English. French is at best the language of
my formal thinking. But the real language of my heart and my mind is
English. I can say in English things I would not even dream of conceiving,
let alone saying, in French. I love you all.
Jacques, Olliergues, December 1st
, 2018.
Format : Format Kindle
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Editeur : Editions La Dondaine; Édition : 1 (4 décembre 2018)
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