Everytime it’s the same. You have to fill in papers, to register children in the registers of examinations, schools, you have to tick the right boxes for insurance, statistics, censuses, in short: it is a question of finding your place on the nomenclatures of INSEE and each time, I search, I read, reread and connect, and no, I can’t find. I am not a teacher or a civil servant, although I am agrégé, I do not have a liberal profession, even if I work for myself and I have no boss, I am not in the services, even if I like to be of service to others.
I’m not a craftsman, but almost: I make stuff, prototypes, I tinker, I tinker, I assemble, I plane, I remove and I move, I delete and I add. I cook, I simmer for hours, days, months and years, I ruminate and marinate, I season everything even if I’m not a cook, with what? bits of string, pieces of life, three memories, fragments, the memory of the ancestors and the words of the survivors, the little stories and the big story, traces, my life and the lives of people, imagination and an imagination, cries, screams, traumas, and a bit of know-how, to build a road, a passable path even if I’m not in bridges and roads, to have good driving even if I I don’t work for the SNCF, an infernal discipline and a lot of endurance, even if I’m not athletic.
And what goes through my head, through the material that I work and knead, even if I’m not a baker, is through language. Words intoxicate me and destroy me. I triturate them, I observe them. And this language has an intimate relationship with music, even if I’m not a musician. And also strangely with politics, but I’m not a politician. And more than anything with transmission, but I’m not a schoolteacher. And without a doubt, with love, desire, dreams and everything that has not the slightest connection with the professions that really exist, according to INSEE.
I don’t go to the office, I am an office. I don’t work, but I still work. Even when I sleep, and especially when I sleep. In the middle of the night my subconscious activates and wakes me up, as if illuminated by beauty and inspiration, to resolve a problem, to advance my work. If there was a profession of love, this would be it. If there was a profession of dawning day, nights and darkness, glorious twilights and nostalgic sunsets, I would gladly tick that box. I polish mirrors, I string beads, I make glasses and contact lenses to see better. I can’t help analyzing people’s lives through a narrative filter.
I navigate by sight in a rigorous nebula, I scaffold stone by stone castles in Spain, I build them conscientiously, sometimes it takes me ten years and sometimes they collapse because the foundations were not solid and I collapse Also. I am a girl who sleeps, who goes out, who listens, a thousand leagues above this strange world. Who tries to see clearly while closing his eyes. I’m a homemaker in an empty house. I gave it my all, I don’t regret anything. I’m a cicada who sang too much, I squandered everything just to have peace and children because children are worth more than money, Madam Judge. And freedom: hard won. The freedom not to have a profession, and not to appear on any nomenclature.
I gave everything and got nothing. They look down on me, they consider me, they discredit me. And yet, gentlemen administrators and citizens, I have had jobs. I’ve been a bookseller, dentist, architect, archaeologist, detective… I don’t really understand this world of adults who live on the backs of others from whom they take everything, and when you ask them for a little help, they don’t understand. terribly offended, they laugh and laugh, from the top of their very important and very flourishing activity, highly listed it seems, in front of them I’m worthless, I’m a ball, a parasite, what I do useless.
My profession does not exist, it has no administrative reality, and it no longer even has a social reality. One day, I earn thousands, one day I have no more money. But basically, even if I have nothing, the only difference with the others is that I don’t think I’m somebody. I’m like running water, like the air we breathe, like a cat, an object, a haggard and slightly drunk tramp who tells anything to anyone who wants to hear it. I am a writer.
