Somehow copy the sweet conduct of these
Young olives in the spring mistral a-quiver…
One becomes sorry to become so soon…
— “Why Wait?”, Lawrence Durrell
Bouldering gingerly across a rocky outcrop, K. takes up her perch. We are close to the summit of the Massif des Albères, where the view is everything.
Looking north, the ground plummets far beneath us. Green fades to grey as the city of Perpignan spreads itself thick across the horizon. Looking south, glimpses of Catalonia break the treeline.
On the drive up, we passed isolated hamlets and the occasional hikers’ refuge – all now hidden by the canopy of the surrounding forêt domaniale. Strands of mist and low cloud cling to the treetops uncharacteristically, even as the leaves rustle gently in anticipation, waiting for the arrival of the north-westerly wind known as the mistral, which rushes upwards from the distant sea, cutting across a coastal curve that stretches from Toulon to Girona.
I begin to meander towards K., following her along the craggy ridge. The wind blows me this way and that as she looks across the Pyrenees, which flows westward as far as the eye can see. At her back, the sea glamours. We look past each other and grow evermore distant.
Barely visible in a distant cove, I try to catch a glimpse of the temporary centre of our universe: the port town of Collioure.
‡
In Collioure, re-enchantment with the world still feels possible. Dazzling is even a profession here. By night, small boats shine lights on the surface of the Mediterranean sea, coaxing anchovies and sardines into invisible nets. The fishermen learn their trade from the sun, no doubt, which dazzles everything.
It was the perfect environment for Henri Matisse, who arrived in Collioure in 1905, looking to escape Parisian poverty and a cosmopolitan art scene he found stifling. But the town was not his first port of call. He had first travelled to the south of France a year earlier in 1904, landing in St-Tropez at the encouragement of a more seasoned transplant, Paul Signac, who had arrived in the region at the end of the last century.
An influential neo-impressionist, Signac was also an enthusiastic anarchist and vice-president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. He arrived by the Mediterranean sea in search of new freedom in life and in art, and he claimed to have found it through an adherence to the pointillistic style then in vogue.
Signac’s enthusiasm for the region did not hurt, but Matisse took little convincing to join him in the southern sun. Having grown up in a dreary northern textile town that supplied the French capital with its linens, he was anxious to break free of Paris’s orbit, and Signac’s forceful personality soon made him an important mentor to the artist in a new and alien environment.
Matisse’s time spent with Signac was not as liberating as he had hoped, however. Signac was abrasive and bull-headed in both his artistic and political beliefs. Their fellow Tropézien, Henri-Edmond Cross, perhaps most succinctly captures the will to power expressed by Signac’s assembled renegades. Nature, they believed, was nothing but “disorder, chaos, gaping holes”, and it was the job of the artist to bring order to the Real:
Offset this disorder, this chance, these holes with your order and profusion … Select fragments or details of the beauty on offer. Impose order on these fragments, always bearing in mind the end result. At this moment, we make a work of art. We transform, we transpose, we assert power.
But Matisse, who had journeyed south in the hopes of developing an artistic vision all his own, was struggling to assert himself under the group’s influence, feeling overshadowed by their politicised aesthetics. When he tentatively began to move away from pointillism, utilising much broader brushstrokes than was customary, Signac was not shy in expressing his distaste for Matisse’s developments. Now feeling suffocated by his friend and mentor, Matisse grew anxious, plagued by insomnia and self-doubt. He sought new climes to make his own.
‡
It was 2021 then. Lockdown restrictions had been tentatively eased. K. and I had moved to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, nine months into the pandemic, in hopes of escaping the pressure of London under quarantine.
It was a difficult time to meet new people, and we made only two friends during our first eighteen months in the city – a young couple who lived opposite. Introductions were first made via neighbourly greetings card, kicking off an epistolary friendship that grew over weeks. We started leaving gifts on each other’s doorsteps – mostly plant cuttings and booze – before inviting each other into our quarantine bubbles. When spring arrived the following year, we drank beer in our respective gardens, exchanging tips on what grows best in the city’s soil.
As the world began to hint at a reluctant return to normality, one of our new friends explained that their uncle had a house in the south of France, and they’d love it if we joined them there for a week in the sun. Whereabouts? In Collioure, they said.
I had been two Collioure twice before: first with my parents in 2008, who were so taken with its light that they began planning their retirement to a caravan park outside the neighbouring town of Argelès-sur-Mer; then again, with K. in tow, in 2013. But a few months later, tragedy struck. My mam started to lose sensation in her legs and had major surgery to remove something large but benign that had been pressing up against the nerves in her spine. The anaesthetic wore off along with all her senses.
The doctors suggested that psychosis was sometimes triggered through steroid treatment in alcoholics. She terrorised the ward, got moved onto a mental health facility, and terrorised that place too. They moved her home and she terrorised us. I barely left the house for six months, before eventually breaking free, moving nomadic and traumatized between the towns and cities across England and Wales. I’ve never stopped running since.
It had been eight years since all that had transpired, and I had not thought about Collioure much since. But I was nonetheless struck blind by the serendipity of our new friends’ intended destination. K. and I accepted their invitation gladly. I had loved it and still loved it, irrespective of all that came to pass. in orbit of each visitation. I thought about rewriting my future there. Instead, I should have recognised the omen of a new return.
This third trip to Collioure was shrouded in a bright melancholia. The heat, the light, the mountains, the mistral: they were all tonics. But I found myself despondent and uncommunicative, smoking copious amounts of cheap tobacco and disappearing into a tattered copy of Madame Bovary, barely keeping up appearances. Finding myself far more haunted by my parents’ dashed daydreams than I had anticipated, it soon became clear there was no future for K. and I in Collioure either.
We called time on our decade together shortly after our return home.
‡
On a trip to visit her sister in nearby Perpignan, it was Amélie Matisse, Henri’s wife, who first set foot in Collioure. Not that it was an entirely unknown location to a fin-de-siècle generation of pointillists; Signac himself had visited and painted the town’s harbour and belltower in 1887. But no artist had yet chosen to settle there.
On his wife’s recommendation, Henri arrived in the town by train and was immediately taken with it. He implored his friends and the rest of the family to join him as he found bed and board for the summer. All seemed to confirm his fascination with its light. Each of them in turn describe not a dazzling, however, but an enlightenment.
Andre Derain, with whom Matisse would develop the most fruitful artistic companionship, was particularly inspired by the town’s colours: the tanned skin of its working people, the blue beards of its sailors, the tones of the trees, the colourful pottery so popular in the region. “But it’s the light, a pale gilded light, that suppresses shadow”, he wrote in a letter to another painter, Maurice de Vlaminck — it is the light that makes it all come alive.
The question now was how to capture this light for all to see. “The work to be done is fearful”, Derain adds. “Everything I’ve done up to now strikes me as stupid.”
The light’s effects on the northerners did not come as a surprise to Paul Soulier, a native of Collioure. It is “this intense light, this perpetual dazzlement, that gives a northerner the impression of a new world”, he writes, “struck above all by the bright light, and by colours so strong and harmonious that they possess you like an enchantment.”
Later befriending Soulier, Matisse translated this enchantment onto canvas with a bold flatness, and according to one biographer, it is his 1905 work The Open Window that “is perhaps the richest and most radiant expression of Matisse’s sense that painting gave access to another world: a mystery, glimpsed through an open door or window”.
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Collioure has continued to linger on in my dreams. I have thought about it often. I have thought about the crack-ups and new beginnings that have orbited each visitation.
As I begin to write these words, it is 2023. The pandemic is over, but its lingering effects are hard to shake. I live in Newcastle now, where I am pursuing a doctorate and transing my gender, trying to build a new life on top of the wreckage of my twenties.
On arrival in the city, six months after our last trip to the south of France, I suffered through a mental breakdown as all of life’s familiar habits turned sour and curdled in a post-pandemic malaise. Nine months off work, with no complacent relationship to hide behind, I was finally forced to reckon with the trauma of homelessness and a lifetime of repressed queerness. But for all my bold attempts to start afresh, I cannot escape the bittersweet knowledge that everything I once knew about my life is now over.
I live alone now on the third floor of a block of flats, unable to weather co-habitation without it triggering a slow descent into agoraphobia. Through the windows, the sky performs for me nightly. Coastal winds leave the air frigid, but if you’re lucky, aurora borealis can be seen above on an evening.
For all the city’s beauty, the winds cloud my eyes and lungs during the long and damp nights of winter, in ways that stifle my mood in turn. I have yet to relearn how to care for myself as a single entity. I am sick constantly. My dad, having grown up in nearby Sunderland, refers to it affectionately as England’s ‘Bronchitis coast’.
My penchant for rolling tobacco only makes matters worse. Rather than kick the habit, I cling onto the mildness of its effects. Lesley-Ann Brown writes that “tobacco is considered to be the grandfather of plant medicine … traditionally used to treat grief.” Today, it is the only remedy I self-administer with any regularity, most often late at night when I set about writing all my thoughts down. This only offers me a temporary reprieve, however. The stale smell left behind by indoor smoking accumulates alongside my own stagnancy. I am too often nocturnal here.
Turning away from the drabness of a Northumberland winter, I look to the wall behind me, where a familiar light emanates from my newest and most-prized possession: a large framed print of Henri Matisse’s The Open Window, depicting a view of Collioure’s harbour from the artist’s studio.
I situate myself beneath the open window with ease, imagining myself drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes just beyond the window’s balustrade. I have done that, I tell myself. I will do that again.
I transport myself there constantly.
‡
In The Open Window, we see the shutter doors leading out of Matisse’s studio, located above what was then the sandal-makers, to three potted plants sitting on a short balcony. Beyond, we see the beach, a gathering of sail boats, and the harbour walls. The vista, however, is rendered completely flat across a dynamic field of colour.
To focus in on the painting’s details, one is reminded of the brightest examples of Mark Rothko’s journeys into inner space, from the miniature colour fields he daubed onto the concrete columns of New York subway stations to the towering planes of his more famous later works.
Rothko arguably encapsulates the end point of a modernism that Matisse inaugurated. His Seagram murals – monuments to tragedy – are named after their originally intended destination: the walls of the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. Growing increasingly nauseous at the thought of his works looming over New York’s dining well-to-do, he withdrew the paintings and cancelled the commission in 1960, later donating them to the Tate in London a year before his suicide.
The commission was already disagreeable to Rothko, as he hoped his paintings would “ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.” The murals were a conscious protest against the decorative. Matisse, by contrast, exploded what decorative art could be. His experiments in Collioure drew painting out of itself. The flatness of his paintings becomes a radical immanence. Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, reflecting on Matisse’s 1911 work Interior with Aubergines, argue that it constitutes a kind of “setting-in-becoming, which Matisse describes as ‘decorative’ in a sense that is entirely his own since it implies a radical new relation between art and its outside, one that touches on the problematic of the decorative itself.” They add:
It is this truly radioactive decorativity of Matisse’s painting that renders virtually possible, and even demands … a new alliance with architecture [by asking] the question of how to integrate the ‘human’ into the decorative.
‡
The painting becomes a focal point, an anchor around which I organise my new life. It is my Combray; my Hawaiian postcard tucked in the crevices of a vehicle’s dashboard; my bittersweet escape. Its prominence in memory soon takes on a further significance that is life-changing. Remembering is transformed into hallucination, and out of its flatness grow visions of life to be lived full-heartedly.
Following a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I spend twelve months on the waiting list for a course of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR). Its efficacy disputed, it is a controversial form of therapy that essentially replicates REM sleep – that phase of unconsciousness when the body is paralysed and the eyes dart wildly, left-right, left-right, behind closed lids; that phase of sleep when dreams occur. With my therapist, I revisit painful memories of entrapment in the family home, periods of capture and neglect, unwitting abuse. Left-right, left-right, my therapist’s arm swings like a metronome as otherwise inert memories become pools of swirling emotion. It is an acutely hallucinatory process; a process in which one dreams awake.
Since a trauma is a memory made free radical, the unconscious cannot neatly arrange such experiences into a narrative to be told to itself – a chaos that our dreams, it is believed, are able to alleviate. But unlike dreams of life’s general joys and stresses, trauma is free-floating, like a molten pinball ricocheting through past, present and future. When afflicted by a trauma, the memory factory at the centre of the brain, the hippocampus – its name given for its seahorse-like appearance – metamorphosises into something more resembling a hydra.
My therapist guides me through memories that are suddenly no longer ancient marks, gouged permanently onto the walls of the unconscious. Instead, they are oil paintings yet to dry, primed for reworking. I intervene in old haunts and interact with past selves to finally suture long-gaping wounds. It is hard work, and in the midst of therapy, my darkest thoughts become overwhelming; all the better, then, that at the end of each session, we return to a ‘calm place’ I have chosen for myself weeks before.
That place is Collioure. I stand on the promenade, smelling a mixture of sea air, cigarette smoke, sardines and anchovies, fresh coffee. I look out at the people walking by. I feel the history of the place coursing through me. I feel the air glitter as light passes through airborne crystals of salt and sand. I feel grounded suddenly, my feet firmly planted in the rivers of time.
‡
For months, I ache with longing for a return to Collioure. I begin to write a book that will, I hope, enable me to do so. At the very least, it will give me a valid excuse to take a research holiday. It is a book that functions as a way to keep meditating on this calmest of places; as a way to further order all I have encountered there.
Over years, this book became the product of a délire – what Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls “a reflexive delirium”; a “poetic text” or “cryptogram concealing a pretext”; the sort of text written when one “yields to a mild form of mania”; a delirium common to a writerly madness. Although approached today with a clear-minded sobriety, I cannot ignore the fact that many of the ideas contained within first occurred to me on the threshold of a suicidal despair. But this was not intended to be a book about despair; just as Jacob, in his dreams, saw a ladder that led him to heaven, so too in my dreams have I seen a path that leads beyond the present to pastures new. It was a book about climbing out of despair, along a path hitherto untrodden.
It was a book intended to be a treatise on a place, and also about other treatises on that place, enthused with the forces that have long encircled it. Indeed, I am not the first to have been so enchanted with this town and the surrounding area, although few records of the lives lived there have ever been translated into English. In fact, its remove from English interests has been part of its attraction. It is a region with an occulted history, a hotbed for gnosticisms and, more specifically, Catharism. It hardly feels like a modern place in this regard, but appropriately, it has birthed its own modernisms.
My third visit to Collioure, in the midst of COVID clouds, felt like the beginning of a meditation on a pandemic modernism. I had hoped to uncover this bright modernism, which is not so much browbeaten by an Outside but opened up by it, producing new affordances that cut fissures across time. Again, that it was meditation taking place in a principality far from Britain is no accident; our modernisms have for too long felt melancholic, informed by sad readings of tragic souls. There is something attractive about this too; about the gothic modernism of the British Isles, and at another time, this idea for a book might have found its sense of place far closer to home, but I endeavour to deny myself the familiarity of such sad passions.
Already have I followed in the footsteps of others who have traversed this rainy isle, buffeted by the occulted forces that drive so many of us to despair. I have walked the Suffolk coast with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in one hand, Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie in the other, two diametrically opposed journeys through a landscape that both are stalked by, and which even culminated in unhappy deaths for their semi-present authors; I have walked the busy streets of London and the seaside idylls of Cornwall with Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier for company; I spent my thirtieth birthday in Heptonstall cemetery, pockets stuffed with poetry by Ted Hughes, Slyvia Plath and Emily Brontë. There is a book to be written about these journeys too perhaps, triangulating a quintessentially British-modernist melancholy, but I fear Justin Barton has already written down a (truly underrated) meander in this zone that I dare not enter into the shadow of.
Barton’s journey is quintessentially English, although it cannot be so neatly situated in England proper. His is an England still dreaming, a phantasm unsubstantiated, whose fortified interior is perforated by counter-histories, memories of elsewhere, poetic excursions into the unknown that is still within and alongside us. Modernism, in this manner, has often been susceptible to reactionary forces that fear the contamination of exterior forces, which can be mythologised as readily as they are exoticized and racialised. But modernism at its finest understands each perforation from without as being a simultaneous extension into the unknown. This is not so much an exoticism in practice as it is a wrestling with poetic problematics of relation, wherein no being is so pure, whole and consistent as to sit comfortably in any man-made category. It is for this reason that, for many a British reader, a British modernism still excites. There is a sense of a place called England, with its own conditions of existence, that are nonetheless scrambled by the fallout of empire and capitalist homogenisation. But again, I did not want to write a book about Britain. It is worthwhile momentarily deferring to Barton, then, on his sensory habitation of this modernist interzone at length, in order to both situate the book I had in mind in its errant lineage, whilst also explaining further why I have chosen to look elsewhere; why I have chosen, ultimately, to write it no more.
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Beginning his physical journey across the North Yorkshire moors (which is also a mental journey across the far reaches of the globe), Barton writes how modernism “is really an eerie ancientism. Or to be more precise, an ‘eerie arcadianism’.” Modernism was always, in this regard, a questioning of modernity; of our place, as apparent ‘moderns’, caught in the interzone between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, which are themselves only vague heuristics denoting a line between conscious experience and the Real. “There is always a wilderness or semi-wilderness: a hauntingly (and hauntedly) positive hinterland, or Outside”, Barton continues; “the world of modernism is always transected by an anomalous dimension inhabited by forces that are both positive and negative, and can recurrently prove to be at a higher level of power than the forces of the ordinary world”.
Modernism can be explicit, or it can be a kind of shadow of itself, which carries some of the elements of modernism, but is either a dreaming utilised, and largely destroyed, by a theoretical field (as with Freud and Oedipus), or it can be a mere tracing that creates no new dreaming primarily from the ancient sources, and merely suppresses the power of existing dreamings (as with Joyce’s Ulysses).
The eerie wilderness in modernism can be the mountain in Picnic at Hanging Rock, or the places by the sea in The Waves … It can be the beach in Neuromancer, or the night-countryside emptiness of the places across which the horse-god worshipping boy rides his horse in Equus – or it can be Zarathustra’s mountains, or a forest somewhere outside Athens, or “the eye of the forest” in Patti Smith’s Horses…
The wilderness in a modernist dreaming is in fact much less fundamental than the anomalous dimension that transects everything – the body without organs, as it has been called – but it may nonetheless be much more in the foreground. Modernist writers enact a lucid awareness of the body without organs, but the exact extent and nature of this dimension tends to be left open. Aspects of the oneirosphere of the human world can be suggested – as with Shakespeare’s organic beings having a contact with India that does not involve travel in any ordinary sense – but a modernist dreaming in invoking the body without organs lightly suggests its existence, but does not firmly map its extent or aspects.
The modernism I hoped to unearth was no less gnostic, no less occulted, no less frightful and challenging, but it is of another order. It does not belong here in Britain. That is perhaps why it is so enchanting to me.
Now more than ever, I hope to one day take leave of this sad little rainy fascist island for somewhere new. Although it is a region little known to most, I hope that place is the south-west coast of France. I want to tell stories about those who have made a home there, as I still long to. I hope to begin with the Collioure of Henri Matisse, who found its light so dazzling he birthed a wild and beastly modernism there. From there, I would move outwards, travelling paths frequented by Claude Simon, Joë Bousquet, René Nelli, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze, Ezra Pound, the Trobadours, and many more. Though despair and madness lurk in its darkest corners, I would follow the light. I would break free of the imagined wilderness of a British modernism to explore the wild interzone that is as inside as it is out: a radical immanence devoid of culture, which is not nature either. I hope to exist there in order to resist nostalgia’s hardening of the present; in order to recover some sense of our lost futures.
But how to capture the spirit of this strange place today? How to account for its peculiar postmodernity? How to excavate dead dreams from beneath the generations of sand that has accumulated on every surface?
‡
I return to this vision of Collioure perhaps because The Open Window complicates my perception of the world outside, of dreary England. Its chaotic colouring is at once dynamic and entirely flat, as the window, the balcony beyond, the small boats bobbing in Collioure’s port, all appear with an illusory lack of perspective, at once vibrant and without depth.
The painting’s presentation makes it close to a visual pun. As a depiction of the world outside, painted inside, it encapsulates Fauvism’s innate “destruction of Form … its explosion of figurative space, its ‘anti-visual’ character, its absence of stylistic unity, its ‘schizophrenic’ tendency”. It is a style that “free[s] painting of all interiority”; that “open[s] up painting from the inside to the Outside, to the multiplicity of forces and to their multiplication, in an unprecedented conjunction of the arts.” It is in my memories of Collioure that life in the present is also freed from a claustrophobic interiority, where the world is unfolded by outside forces.
The pandemic has made us all more fearful of these forces, no doubt. I’m reminded perpetually of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. “My particular province is speculative philosophy”, the story’s narrator confesses in the epilogue, and he speculates wildly on the fate of the Martians, who have succumbed to a non-human invasion of their own. Deferring to scientific investigation, he notes how, “in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found.” The Martians were killed by a epidemic of all too familiar viruses.
As the novel draws to a close, its narrator writes down all he has experienced, but confesses to a lingering post-traumatic stress, which has “left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind.” The new world is haunted by spectres of recent upheaval. “I sit in my study writing by lamplight,” he ruminates, “and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate.” Visions of normalcy “become vague and unreal”. His descriptions of London after the end of a world once known, a world now disturbed, are strikingly familiar, in spite of the fact they were written over a century before a more recent horror from the twentieth-first century.
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The day before the UK embraced lockdown restrictions to help fight the spread of the coronavirus, I was working as a photographer’s assistant for an architectural company in south-east London. None of our team wanted to be out in the world then, but we were tasked with taking photographs of the London skyline from Hampstead Heath, so that an architectural render of a proposed skyscraper could be created digitally back at the office. The penultimate paragraph of The War of the Worlds captures something of our experience, albeit right before the impending catastrophe of mass infection:
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day…
Our last great day was already anxious. The virus was among us. We would never see sights like it again, not without the echoes that haunt Wells’ narrator still.
I wonder what it would be like to look beyond my open window and not feel afraid of these invisible forces that continue to perpetuate horrors, years after COVID was claimed to be defeated. These days, I install myself in the bay window of my one-bed flat and recognise, on occasion, how this otherwise normal place of writing is only an echo of the places I have installed myself to write books the last six years, and how far from Matisse’s vision it feels.
‡
The shutters that enclosed these windows by night are fastened tight, lest the mistral open dreams onto the night outside. It too hopes to free all from interiority. By day, the ships that sail in and out of the harbour flock along the wind’s perturbations. When it blows, it coats everything in glass, making the air itself glisten. It grinds the gears that make every thought turn, unrelenting. Antoine Montes, the protagonist of Claude Simon’s Pyrenean novel The Wind, reflects on how the mistral haunts all that it touches, recalling
how the wind blew almost continually for three months, so that when it did stop (a few hours or a few days – but never more than two or three) you thought you could still hear it, wild and wailing, not outdoors but somehow inside your own head: voices emptied of meaning, nothing but noise and, so it seemed, dust – the dust that penetrated everywhere, insinuated itself under your burning eyelids, in your mouth, communicating its taste to the things you ate, interposing between the skin of your fingertips and what they took hold of (papers left on the desk the day before, plates, napkins) that haunting, imperceptible, granular film.
Everything is carried along and changed by the mistral. From atop the Massif, we feel the grit of the region’s interlocking histories. Although the mountains act as a natural point of delineation, marking the ragged border between France and Spain, they covet a hidden diversity. We do not only reside along the backbone of what a contested Catalonia calls the Pirineu, but also the Spanish Pirineos, the Aragonese Pirineus, the Basque Piriniaok, the Occitan Piréneus. Each name contains echoes of its other. Nonetheless, it is here that dialects deviate as incessantly as time itself is dilated. Medieval troubadours share dusty breath with twentieth-century modernists. Contemporary occultists are haunted by the spectre of an ancient Catharism. Grail tales are whispered constantly. Picasso and Braque, Matisse and Derain, along with many others lesser known, witness shapes and colours previously unseen here, where the light vibrates with the mistral. Simone Weil skirts the borders of an Occitan wilderness in Vichy France. Walter Benjamin meets his end. Catalonia, Provence, Languedoc: each occupies a distinct region, seemingly far removed, yet all understood as the South of France. For all their various distinctions, they are conjoined by the paths of those who have traipsed between them.
Before long, one has an acute sense of how space and time, geographies and geologies, cultures and currents bifurcate here on uneven keels, melding with the various strata of the Pyrénées. The mistral’s insinuating dust, lathered over the entire region, soon necessitates the advancement of a Mallarméan materialism, “somewhat more complicated than that ‘physical vibration of language in the air’ to which traditional Marxist materialism has prided itself on assimilating literature.” So much else is caused to vibrate here too, such that the invisible hand that rolls the dice incessantly can only be embraced. But the wind’s presence in cultural life is not mere aestheticism, nor Romantic symbolism; it buffers all experience, both virtual and actual, whistling through the tumult of emotion and commerce, inherently embroiling the two. The “haunting, imperceptible, granular film” it leaves behind is so quintessentially tangible, after all.
A reference to Marxism is far from inapposite here; windy climes necessitate a more aleatory materialism in matters of life. But what else does the mistral bring to the region? Over centuries past, it has brought peoples from much further afield. Lawrence Durrell, making a home for himself in Provence, finds a region still haunted by “Caesar’s vast ghost”, which has “consequently [become] a ready seat for dissent”; which “has remained a crucible of dissent and a prey to conquest from all sides, often in a chronic state of destabilization.”
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Don’t you miss the days when time ran so slowly we were able to invent loads of accelerationisms?
During the COVID years, I realised quite quickly that I had gotten stuck. I wrote various blogposts that were timid vents expressing a feeling of writer’s block. To write about writer’s block was an ironic way to overcome it. The posts became repetitive — and I knew that they were repetitive whilst I was writing them — but I did it anyway because it worked. It helped me to loosen the cogs so that I could then go back to book-writing.
It is now 2025. A melancholic but hopeful reprise of my interest in Mediterranean modernism has persisted as a private companion, as I await the chance to immerse myself in four-year-old thoughts and finally reckon with all that the pandemic induced within me. But in 2025, a peculiar COVID nostalgia has never felt more distant from my life right now. Meeting Byro a year ago, beginning a love affair that has developed with an unprecedented joy and ease, has made me realise all that I missed when stuck inside.
The COVID years were painfully para-social for me. The loss of all prior sources of income out in the world triggered an experiment with monetised para-academia. I could not keep it up. I spent my days writing and doing my best to ignore the world outside, making weekly incursions across the Yorkshire Moors, driving through Brontë country whilst listening to Phoebe Bridgers before reading poetry in frigid graveyards. I had no idea how depressed I already was.
Byro’s experience was different. We both spent lockdown lurking in Discord servers, but whereas I was arguing over the validities of the latest accelerationist offshoots, they were consuming dariacore productivities that were faster than anything our Internet scene could imagine.
What fascinated me about Matisse’s modernism was the total collapse of inside and outside. The radical immanence that existed between the two, distilled into a vibrant new decorativity. I was thinking about how the Internet age has been inappositely structured across a divide. The ‘terminally online’ are told to ‘touch grass’, but we are all online, we are all terminal, and we all go outside. The frightful truth of the early twenty-first century is that the separation between online and offline has always been a misnomer. We have maintained it anyway, perhaps fearful of what the leaking of cyberspace will force us to become. But we have already become what we must feared. We have become so soon. Now, I sense that the Internet is over. It is everywhere, and is therefore no longer the place — a place — to be.
This is a strange realisation for a blogger to come to. A few months ago, I longed to finish my PhD and play catch up. But now I realise that it is all already over. A pandemic modernism has been eclipsed by violent reaction, a live-streamed genocide, and the discordant paces of life that are at once trapped in amber locally and accelerating faster than I am able to think globally. Those who birthed this modernism — the digicore artists now attracting massive audiences at gigs in meatspace — have inaugurated a new era before most of us are able to comprehend the consequences of the last one. Nothing is the same.
Maybe I will return to The Open Window one day. Maybe I will return to Collioure. But right now, I sense that a power shift is coming, which will make all prior thoughts and habits redundant. I have no publisher with whom to disseminate my more long-winded ideas, even if I felt able to write fast enough to distill them. I have this blog, but now cannot write fast enough to keep up with everything. I offer up this snapshot of the last few years as a capstone to a project no longer relevant, no longer worthy of completion. I offer it up to shed myself of the burden, and to ready myself for a radical new environment.
The window has been open for so long. We have defenestrated ourselves in a digital delirium.