Morning of light on Sitaudis by Maxime Morel
Immediate boarding for a subjective machine to go back and advance time (without stopping until the point of arrival).
When I was a child, people often said of me, because I kept moving and couldn't sit still, that I had swallowed a spring . This impossibility of holding still has been reproached to me in other circumstances (Florilège: You move like a worm / You make me seasick )
This perhaps explains why reading Morning of Light, written by Jasmin Limans (Éditions Exopotamie) seemed so thrilling to me. It is a text that never stands still, which leaps and rebounds and takes us into varied territories and meteorologies, through multiple eras and characters.
Morning of light is not made up of a succession of little poems like little trinkets that one would not dare touch for fear of dropping them. No need to be an expert in Wittgenstein or a specialist in grammar to let yourself be carried away by the rhythm of the text and to be captured by the imaginations that unfold there.
On the other hand, this great poem, which is particularly difficult to summarize, has several openings. One of the possible entry points would be to say that Morning of light is made up of memories and fragments of a long journey, a journey which unfolds within plural memories. Individual memories of the author, or at least what can be identified as such, collective memories (war memories, escapes, exiles), or even what would remain on the memory card of an old computer that we would be discovered in 15 years stranded on the beach of Sandwood Bay (Scotland). The eras mingle, overlap and suddenly, Hannibal's elephants appear at the foot of a ski lift:
I'm riding in the Alps between Austria and Italy – elephants won't come anymore – elephants are banned – they cause avalanches – they are dangerous – they damage the snow – they dirty the snow – elephants are is obvious do not bar at the bottom of the chairlifts
These memories are deepened, they meet. Sometimes they disappear, then:
I modify the code
I change the password
I repeat the mistake – I hit it in the screen
They live in I multiple, I without age and without fixed identity:
I travel in the I I go back in time I slice in the sky I connect the language connect the dots addresses and names [85]
This I which seems to have a multitude of bodies, unfolds towards other entities, the I becomes landscapes, objects, meteorological phenomenon, immaterial signal, pure movement:
I am an earthquake a tsunami a typhoon a permutation of syllables an inverted language that overturns reason shatters her and leaves her unconscious
In this crossing, there are beliefs which wander, prayers which are composed, old myths which exist again, then which disappear, there are dives into dreams, dreams which allow us to Walk on stars without dropping them [127]
Among all the geographies that we explore, there are also those of the body – first of all the mouth, in which, sometimes it's night [70] and we enter it, we go through it:
I couldn't stand my language
I hid it in my mouth
I bit it between my teeth
My violent tongue
My tongue of me
My love language
[130]
Among the whole, one passage particularly attracts attention, for the majestic rhythm which unfolds there: a succession of paragraphs with modulated appearances which seem to recount the births and rebirths of this strange entity which is the “I” of Morning of light . Each paragraph begins with For a long time ; gradually these two words disintegrate, replaced by _ which we do not know if they are generated by a creative malfunction of the computer or if it is a way of showing the process of poetic creation at work. In all cases, this discreet evolution of typography generates a very unique tension and play on tempo. The passage ends as follows, after having gone through all the gears:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I diverted it I abandoned it I let the protocol make the universal adapter
The pace gradually slows down, not without one last great journey, not without one last straying, winding paths, roads hidden from view, wanderings in a familiar network without being known.
We close the book almost out of breath, with the feeling of having traveled the earth in all directions, of having taken a subjective machine to go back and accelerate time, with the impression of having slipped into an internet cable and having been wandered around for an indefinable time in a cloud with always the possibility of returning to the beginning, of erasing everything, since everything is ultimately erased:
We will forget you
We will forget the history of the ancients
The man will not be remembered
Nor the bird
Nor horses in the stars
We will forget the name of the sky
It's a beautiful day to forget [165]
Article published on Sitaudis: https://www.sitaudis.fr/Parutions/matin-de-lumiere-de-jasmin-limans-2-1606198659.php
Buy the book online: Morning of Light – Éditions Exopotamie