TO FIGHT AND TO FIGHT

In support of the general strike
 

To fight. And to fight against my unacceptable desire to give everything up, against my selfishness, against my complacency with my own story, against the comfort that surrounds me and keeps watch over me, against abandoning oneself to an unblemished conscience.

On Luxury and Powerlessness, by Jean-Luc Lagarce

And sometimes I feel powerless. Useless, incapable of everything, still, unable to do anything more, unable to do or say anything. Blind, deaf and, even more so, an imbecile, silenced by my own stupidity. Saying nothing more, making no further move. Waiting and enduring my powerlessness. Feeling naked and having to give up. Motionless, unable to raise my voice, to develop an argument, to answer, to say two or three things imagined in my solitude, which I believe to be unanswerable.

Sometimes I feel useless in the face of the world.

Not listening to the rumours, to the ever-present arrogance of gossip, neither understanding nor accepting them, imagining them in another form, knowing that I must, that it is my duty, our duty —to speak this word: “duty”—, knowing that “it is my duty” to say things differently. And never ceasing to hold on to the reflections that may emerge from this.

Not knowing how to show others the way we see everything, and the way we imagine it. Not even knowing how to look at what we do not know how to show, and never losing the secret, while being unable to do anything about it.

To be fragile and helpless in the face of the sounds of War, the terrible and nearby sounds of War, to hear them, to think we hear them, and not know how to translate them. To take them and give them back, to return the exact uncertainty. To be here, unable to tell the truth.

The terrible force of power, its cynical might. Its arrogance, its irony and the quiet seduction with which it crushes us. And to be unable to announce it, write it, show its simple and deafening violence.

And, despite everything, to try to grasp all of this. To fight. And to fight against my unacceptable desire to give everything up, against my selfishness, against my complacency with my own story, against the comfort that surrounds me and keeps watch over me, against abandoning oneself to an unblemished conscience.

Faced with my own powerlessness, my own uprootedness, to seek to convince myself and carry on, and resist, to move forward even when I come up against even greater uprootedness, more painful, more secret, forbidden, things that cannot even be spoken of. To find myself and be here today, in my city, with everyone else, and to be aware of the right to speak, to be proudly conscious of that right and responsible for this capacity. And not to be afraid of my own imbalance or my doubts.

To explain the World, my miserable and tiny, infinitesimal part of the World. The part that falls to me and comes back to me. To write it and put it on stage. To build nothing but, again and again, a spark, a glimmer, a hardness. To speak lucidly of what is evident. To show through theatre the exact force of what sometimes takes hold of us: this is it, exactly this! And men and women as they are, their beauty, and the horror of their exchanges, of their conversations, and the melancholy that overwhelms them when this beauty and this horror are interrupted and lost. How they flee and seek to destroy themselves and one another, terrified by their own demons.

To tell others, to tell them to move forward into the light. And to say once again, over and over, the grace and goodness that hang suspended in an encounter between two people, between two beings.

The precise moment of love, the infinite sweetness of serenity. To try to whisper to them the perfect purity of Death in the play, the rejection of fear, and yet the sudden howl of hatred, the cry of our panic and our anguish rising from the deepest depths of childhood.

And the gesture of hiding one's face in one's hands.

And the weariness of bodies after desire.

And the weariness after suffering.

And the exhaustion that comes after Terror.

Jean-Luc Lagarce