The invisible friend

The night was still prepar­ing to wel­come me, but I could not bring myself to aban­don my timid con­science, shak­en by the action film I had just watched, the last James Bond, beau­ti­ful­ly shot, poor­ly writ­ten, noth­ing to turn away from tradition.

I don’t fall asleep, because I feel this mini-regret for not hav­ing accom­plished or obtained every­thing I want­ed with­out hav­ing iden­ti­fied what the day’s pro­gram should have been.

Our days often go like this. We believe we own rein­deer while our stars, our sky, our des­tiny are influ­enced and dri­ven by sophis­ti­cat­ed, name­less machin­ery. All these ges­tures, wrong­ly inspired or skill­ful­ly cal­cu­lat­ed, all these desires, all these mis­takes made for them, all these clev­er­ly con­struct­ed rea­sons, all these cer­tain­ties that do not hold up in the slight­est breeze, all these hes­i­ta­tions that make us poets, all these regrets that feed our fits of anger. Peace does not eas­i­ly come when it is time to fall asleep. How­ev­er, we end up clos­ing our eyes, we become motion­less again to give the body time to fin­ish the arith­metic of what has been lived, uncon­scious­ly or not, most often with­out our knowledge.

It is said that the uncon­scious is nei­ther the reser­voir of our frus­tra­tions nor an ani­mal liv­ing in the ances­tral for­est of our impuls­es. The most recent dis­cov­er­ies of neu­ro­science lead us to believe that man’s best friend is not his dog, but his brain, that he is the Great Fil­ter, the Great Autho­riz­er, the tremen­dous response for our hap­pi­ness and our adven­tures (the brain is an eter­nal opti­mist who cross­es the bound­aries of our fears for us). We surf on the exten­sive work of our minds. Our ego, our sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, is told all the lies we want because no mat­ter what we believe, we must leave it to our bod­ies to lead the boat. Oth­er­wise, we would sink. This impres­sive process is cer­tain­ly not flaw­less, and we should not sim­pli­fy and think that we would only be irre­spon­si­ble, pup­pets in the hands of an opaque bio­log­i­cal machine.

Nev­er­the­less, if we have to admire and pray, it is not before God, but before the altar of our Uncon­scious­ness. Med­i­tate, then let your­self go to the game of life. We live to sur­vive. We dis­cov­er it every day, we refine Dar­win’s con­clu­sions, we are as much a vast uni­verse as a cloud of sim­ple dust among a larg­er cos­mos. What is there to under­stand about all this ? What use is this in our quest for our food ? I don’t know about that. I don’t under­stand that. I’m speech­less. I may be head­ing for dis­as­ter or beyond despair. It’s dizzying.