By David Delwiche
When I was younger, around seventeen or eighteen, I was haunted by visions so banal and so unremarkable that the word "haunted" would seem a little exaggerated to an outsider. It was like certain dreams I had almost every night, years later, to the point of driving me out of my mind: dreams where I was alone at home, or at the supermarket doing the shopping, where time didn't pass, where every gesture was mechanical and banal, where there was no one to see and nothing to do, where it was neither day nor night, dreams of boredom more suffocating than the worst nightmare.
Lying on my bed for whole afternoons, listening to Mike Oldfield, I would grow gently, politely depressed, without really knowing why, without even telling myself "I'm depressed"; it was as wordless and visceral as hunger or sleep, and images would run through me. I closed my eyes and saw the sun-drenched streets of the residential neighborhoods of Hanweiler, where I had wandered so many times even though I knew no one there. I saw myself alone, naturally, a stranger in the midst of normality, of life at its most natural and everyday.
"Ommadawn" made me think of the forest behind the municipal swimming pool, in Germany. I spent a good part of my adolescence there, alone, in that forest. You had to cross the metal bridge. I went on Sunday mornings, on free afternoons, sometimes in the evening too. When you spend hundreds of hours alone, walking and brooding, it is rarely a path toward others, or toward normality. But what should I have done: bought a scooter, cut my hair, taken up basketball?
I had developed a ritual of going for an evening walk in Germany, in Hanweiler. I liked the lights in the houses, the signs of the few shops, the sign pointing to the brothel and the tobacco shops. I would walk up to the gas station and buy cigarettes, beer, a small flask of hard liquor, and chocolate. Often a sausage from the stand next door, too. I would stroll along the road, which was gradually leaving the village proper and turning into a string of fences, warehouses, trees and fields, and I would have my little feast. Anyone who has never known the pleasure of an ice-cold beer in winter at dusk knows nothing. It was a drifter's pleasure, or a fugitive's, with my grub and my can, hidden in the dark, and I felt very far from home.
I associate these places, the swimming pool, the forest and its paths, Hanweiler with its lights and its gas station, with the Christmas season. Summer had no place in my imagination at the time, or let's say no place at all, let's say I was in a kind of existential winter, and I remember that other ritual of snacking on gingerbread hearts coated in chocolate, on Ricoré and Weihnachtstolle, once I was back from Germany. In the end it was very childish, or a cross between childhood and some of the more dangerous games that grown-ups don't suspect, like in the Stephen King novels about clowns and the Losers' Club: I would tag swastikas or inverted crosses, vandalize statues of the Virgin Mary, prowl the forest with my serrated knife, roam the streets of Hanweiler alone, and then go home to Mom, to the warmth of the hearth, and when the TV showed desecrated graves, people would look at me and laugh, good-naturedly: Stéphane, the kindly metalhead of the family, so picturesque.
I often scanned, I constantly scanned the lit windows of houses, in Germany and elsewhere. I wanted to see what it was like in people's homes: was it wood-panelled, were there books, paintings, were they sitting in front of the TV, or standing in the kitchen talking, taking a bath, tinkering in the cellar? I had a family and a home like everyone else, but I spent my life alone in the streets after school, enjoying the cold and looking through windows, trying to imagine the lives of the people inside.
It reminds me of that Stephen King short story, "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away." It's about a traveling salesman who spends his life on the road and in motel rooms, and whose hobby is to jot down in a notebook the wacky, comic and tragic phrases he finds in the restrooms of highway rest stops. He ends up standing in front of a farmer's field one winter evening, when his life has become unbearable for good, gun in hand. He stares at the house, trying to imagine what the members of the family are doing, and gives himself one minute to kill himself, or not.