SHADOW MAN
Shadow Man is a text written in order to celebrate the work of David Bowie and it has been presented at a night of reading at BrixtonBookJam
One day, I noticed that what I was writing concerned him more and more, and though in an indirect manner, it seemed to have no other purpose than to reflect him. He had assumed a strange ascendancy over me in all these things. Sometimes I wondered if he was trying to restrain me at all costs. I spoke of him, but it gradually became a completely different feeling — a sort of erosion of the future.
I had the impression that I had already said everything possible about it, that I had gotten ahead of myself in such a way that the farthest possibility in the future was already there — a future I could no longer go beyond.
Eventually, I allowed myself to be persuaded that finishing was the best way to make our relationship bearable. It’s true, I did not always recognize this. I noted it with surprise, with a slight feeling of strangeness — but eventually, with discomfort and without surprise — that he was probably lacking enough in intention to deflect my own.
“You get by well enough,” he remarked. “You are astonishing, you know?”
A help, if it existed at all, consisted in turning my attention away from an image with which I could never have behaved naturally or genuinely — except in a state of half-attention, almost of indifference. If he turned me into a shadow to make me worthy of the darkness, I must also admit that this maneuver succeeded more than it should have.
It is possible, too, that he helped me by turning me away from responsibility — by wrapping me in an ambiguous silence that depended as much on my refusal to converse with him as on the fact that, in truth and without realizing it, I spoke to him constantly through that very refusal.
The consolation might have been to say to myself: You have renounced foreseeing, not the unforeseeable. But the consolation turned around like a barb: the unforeseeable was none other than the renunciation itself, as though each event demanded from me the promise that I would slip out of my own story.
I just wanted to point out that, though he rarely spoke about himself, he gave as little impression as possible of neglecting the person speaking to him. He listened in silence — but in such a way that his silences were not inert, though no doubt slightly suffocating, as if they consisted of repeating, in a more distant world, exactly everything one was trying to make him understand.
I can recall it as an intoxicating navigation — the motion that had, more than once, driven me toward a goal, toward a land I did not know and was not trying to reach. I did not complain that, in the end, there was neither land nor goal, because in the meantime, through this very motion, I had lost my memory of the land. I had lost it — but I had also gained the possibility of moving forward at random, even though, in truth, consigned to this randomness, I had to renounce the hope of ever stopping.
I did not allow myself to be deflected from the certainty of being at a turning point — one that required all my strength, all my attention — by the recollection that I had already, and at almost every instant, been certain I was approaching a turning point from which, I then saw, he had only turned me back, led me back.
No, don’t distance him. Do not push him away. Draw him to you instead. Lead him to you. Clear the way for him. Call him softly by his name — by his name? But I mustn’t call him — and at this moment, I couldn’t.
You haven’t said everything to him; the essential part is missing. The description must be completed — it must be now! Now! What have I forgotten? Why doesn’t everything disappear? Why is it someone else who is entering the sphere? Then who is the one involved here? Wasn’t it I who took the drink?
All the force of the day had to strain toward the end — rise and fall toward it — and perhaps he answered immediately. But when the end came, after the scattering of a few seconds, everything had already disappeared… disappeared with the day.