I’m back in New York. I spent a month at Parc Rousseau in Ermenonville, France, a tiny tow
I’m back in New York. I spent a month at Parc Rousseau in Ermenonville, France, a tiny town that lacked a bar, grocery store, or any other sort of social life. It is where Rousseau spent the last couple months of his life, and he was first buried on the Isle of Poplars but at some point in or after the French Revolution they took his remains to Paris. I lived in a 3-bedroom house by a major highway and had internet. When the parc closed at 6pm I would go sit by the lake by myself. One time, after it was already dark, I biked through the forest on my way home and met the pack of wild boars. Ever heard a dozen of something suddenly rustle the leaves in the forest and run away? I screamed but kept biking. The other times I listened to the baby ducklings squawk and watched the river rats paddle around. Nature is loud when the people leave. They say trees can talk to each other? I wish I could hear them. I spent the month reading books and failing to write postcards. Some of those books are: Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century and Europe and the People Without History, the US Army/Marine Corp’s Counter-Insurgency Manual, Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, and Eric Hazan’s A People’s History of the French Revolution. I watched YouTube philosophy for dummies of Heidegger, Hegel, Spinoza, Nietzche, etc. and attempted to start Alexander Galloway’s book on Laruelle and the Digital, but instead started reading Laruelle’s Theory of Victims. The French put their routers in a lockbox. I turned off the wifi a couple times, locked the router and gave away the key. I wrote about 50 pages of nonsense, attempting to circle around something that I don’t know what. One friend likened it to a labyrinth, where you don’t know where you’re going or when you’ll get here; another friend said I was carving marble, that what I have now is the shards on the floor. I went to Paris three times: the first for Bastille Day, the second to visit an artist friend’s open studio, and the third just because. When I came back to Brooklyn, I smiled at people on the street. There’s something about being alone for so long that makes you more sensitive to human company. I hope this doesn’t leave; I don’t like being angry all of the time, and I want to be treated humanely by strangers as well. But also I just walked around without a bra on and some man said something to me so smiling at strangers does not mean I won’t tell people to fuck off if a fuck off is required. -- source link