Elusive often comes to mind when reading the short texts of Michel Vachey. Some seem more essay than fiction, while others soar off, their language pure poetry. And with a style by turns brilliantly vivid and veiled, they give readers’ minds space to roam, to link up details that spark stories—in effect, making us co-creators of their worlds. A founder of the group Textruction (whose artists, in the 1970s, “destroyed” text to assert its physicality), Vachey proposed a language freed of given meanings—an art taking aim at bourgeois messaging by worrying its power-rigged codes. Spurning traditional labels, Vachey merged genres and media as he broke down their elements and walls. His artwork—including paintings, collages, and custom-printed book art—estranges normative language and recasts it. Similarly, his multiform writing questions and exploits its own features. As we read, non-narrative elements like words’ forms, arrangements, and sounds add to the experience, coloring it as they give it more layers. Vachey’s methods bridge domains, they make us rethink our assumptions about reading, about how we parse and view, and, as their worlds shimmer in our mind’s eye, make us wonder at the language at work. – S. C. Delaney & Agnès Potier
The Fifth Rupture Between Us, Before Assembling
Yes Claire I sense it too, this taste of chlorine in the bread, all the water of the trees, the heart’s light flutter after crunching the coffee bean atop a minaret of Chantilly cream. And you the speed, the stuffiness of the too-cramped train, poorly air-conditioned, the nauseating sugar of the swayed beer, their odor? Some dare not open their mouths, preferring to croak rather than to change cars, pointless. What they do not feel does not exist, or they decide to unexist so as to no longer feel, for sake of form, their own. If we are deceitful, phony, they are there to reform us, to advise us, we are their figments, their cowards or their crackpots, their X-phobics, their fugitives, the stock of their laughing. Do you detect Claire the scent of paper, this brainwashing in front of the TV’s vacuum tube? We are too careful, it’s clear, we are fussy, we do not abide the prescribing of medicines, the side effects have been specially devised for us, tailored to our social flaws; despite the varied benefits of any orderliness we provide they don’t much appreciate our “small deficiencies,” our funny emotions that can’t shake off the anesthesia. Yes the wind, sometimes the air, the tongue enormous or small, sharp, docile, my warped feeling, your back like a cat’s, mathematical inscrutability, the earth that turns, but yes that also acts on me, the drinking glass atop the stream. What do they know of the stirred, of remanences, of effluvium, of hesitancy, of the small and the ellipse? Are they pretending not to know, are they jealous, are we implicitly the race-object of their craft, their art? Their names fascinate us because they pin us down, it’s true that we fancy the inchoative and the waning, that with all our reptile senses we wallow in the aspectual, the coalescent, the labile and the fuliginous, the delicious fears at the edge of the world yet unborn, the divine freedom of a taste of the great and mad abyss. Yes Claire no need to insist, tell them nothing, we well know their expectations and their method, we’re not ourselves, we embody their vessels of hormones, of neurons, we’d be incredible, time has a scent like old cash. So then, who knows if the van was clean! There exists a great variety of invisible clubs, the members of which are unaware of each other, however joined by an indiscernible frailty, a wild perversion, a rite too close and likely to be perceived by themselves and by anyone else, appetence for the four-o’-clock penumbra; metabolic prescience of rain. And once more I forsake the one who nibbles a fresh meringue while hearing organ music a little slow and graceless, I prefer the small-time dreamer to the wearer of hidden jewels, to haters of green and of redheads, to the ardent fool for Yellow. I love you Claire because we can be ALONE TOGETHER without needing to decide when to talk. Yes Claire this vagabond who could be in his forties, a handsome face, who in truth is always searching for his words only to sometimes find the same ones again, the little blonde girl—when she is blonde—“golden tressed.” Genuine affection (which vaguely frightens smiling mothers), obsession, at the same time the trick. In private, he threatens the imagined aggressor of “such a pretty little girl.” Claire, do they force us to simulate what within us can least lie? No one, the vagabond becomes everyone by dint of will; how then does he manage to compose his voice? Claire, to be a vagabond one need only feel, from the outset our difference constitutes romanticism, our thought the hardest drug. No Claire, I’m not forgetting the Soft Things, the Sweet Things, the stroll along the river, the unhurried street, the pleasure of the newspaper and the eternity of the benches, the color of a film in that of dawn, the wine, the potted meat, the charm of new skirts, the jumping ropes before the row, the words that fly off walls. You know Claire the hards mixed loosely with the softs, that doesn’t give a full account, the timid that the fools take for fools carefully avoid the vapids that the pusillanimous believe are right, and while these menaces prowl about not having the slightest notion of risk, one sees the crowd of fickle scholars capable of anything except this kind of formal fidelity to the uncertain, the innate knowledge of Danger. Claire, I do not want chaos, nor am I innumerable, we live with THEM on some invisible continents, membranous, fluvial; indeed in links of light horrors, we weave through the daily emergence of conversations and designs the impalpable netting of incongruous similarities—our incomparable weaknesses. Claire, who is more alien to me than my child? After so many years I know with the same precision that my upper incisors are false. You see, I want joy, to follow or not follow is not a problem, but why must we dive in? We seek a form that perhaps we’ve found, without particular hope we are able to admire all the admirable forms, without reciprocation. Yes Claire I feel the infinite duplicity of men, the wholesomeness of women, the whole duplicity of the genre I practice. We have form sickness; do you see how we complicate, as if out of mere whim, their most famous tale? Claire, we are not outdone, let’s not give them any ground. Above all they begrudge our seeing without shame how they TOO give up on each other … quite simply, in order to breathe the air in their own way.
The time when friends no longer saw each other, no longer wrote, for whom the telephone could no longer function, restored to its original status as a mysterious new invention, to its intrusive capacity, its avid banality unleashing instrument and emotion—one inside the other—like night through faces. Nothing would be felt, nothing unusual, except at best a loss of poise feigning curiosity. They could grow in lores, in works and adventures, they no longer wanted to learn more about themselves, could no longer bedazzle themselves. In the kingdom of old lovers, frayed at every seam, something seems drab. Naturally we lost our way in life without losing touch with one another, one changed interest, drive, system or memory, one forever sublimated some childish vengeances more and more misplaced and effective—inane and as if still sublime—one zigzagged so as to better charge forth and see nothing, an eye opened in fits, at the wrong time besides, one became more and more profound or richly superficial, one emerged in the strange bosom of their own indifference, while pseudo-unsung, one basked in the joy of being so, strained by subtle aggressions; having wildly but methodically mistaken her white wolf for a tiger, he incomprehensibly reached the brink of metamorphosis, and he—rather tired, happy, nondescript, his mustache uncombed—the last to return from it. At one time or another it no doubt concerned a like individual … which each of them also knew. We were wary but we left time blank, we did not want to conclude, not for prudence’ sake, by way of these lamentable, willful silences (and this negative image of whatever “withdrawal” strikes those on the sidelines tortured by the comeback) but rather for a kind of fidelity that remained forever tacit. Time relieved you of the dear witnesses, you could see yourself as the loveliest of walk-ons, you unburdened yourself of them, you were the dream and the sting, the sweet look that scolds, a bare sky proceeding amongst the others. On a rainy day you take cover in a library, open a magazine at random, read with a negligence excused by the downpour, clouds emerge from the blue and fly past, you’re about to take off, yet you continue to read, in spite of yourself you follow the rails, the line, the cloud, the bland music and the bass pipe, the familiar unknown of the slopes, you saw the film the landscape three days ago three centuries, you see the new faces, you hear the same voice. Horrified, you then wonder if you’ve looked after yours. Words? Less the images than what they convey. Some ideas? No, fit for joes and janes. A manner then, the way, a kind of sort of manner of way … In short the style and tone, the imitable particularity, a rigorous lack of taste. The false innocence, the benign proposition, the naturalness of guileful references, ambition as modest as it is eccentric, made to pass unnoticed so its polish can be noted, art of tying the brief and the lengthy, the invisible to the invincible moving module, which gracefully drags along so as to realize its performance, a thin stroke and then a thick one (one is everywhere among peers, the non-arty excuses the thinker); fang gleaming, not too much, fur, purr, mechanics, the sweet talker gets a-rolling, eye slit, wink, reserve, the shadow of a feint, dodging calls for perfect parry, in the distance a soft bang, we’re in a jam already, held at gunpoint before arriving, we saw nothing, from the first lines we were aware. So melancholically we leaf through backwards, not for some confirmation of simple order but for fear of being right, through grim fortune, and the name is there. We are all alike or all namable, we’ll always be, we will never be the same. This is the fifth rupture, again the first.