Movement Through the End / Mouvement par la fin

Excerpted from his postface to the original French text and included as this bilingual edition's preface, the late Jacques Dupin How best to approach this short book, a book that burns and freezes, and whose title is abruptly completed, as if torn apart, beaten to a pulp, by the a portrait of pain ? From that point, beyond that point, here, pain is a gaze. A gaze that recognizes itself, growing deeper and lighter when the words that traverse it scrape on the paper. The first word, the point of origin, leaps up from the instant of death and fades away in torpor. Notes from an anachronistic diary, splinters torn from the suffering body, sparks scattered in the air. Far removed from any narcissistic complaisance, this portrait of pain is a constant transcribed day after day from what the body and the mind endure in the ordeal. The realistic notation, impeccably close and precise, opens to the outer world, exalts in the contemplation of the sea or the night, a tree, a cloud, the flight of a sparrow hawk above the walls. The linked chain of crises, of testing treatment, of injections constantly renewed as they project a dim light, provoking the exorable climb toward the light. A decantation that suddenly crystalizes and loosens the oppression. The tortured body reinvents, in order to stay alert, the escape route through an open window and the reconciliation with space.