Free Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker

those days. I can even remember the watchfulness of the monks when I glanced up to catch the eye of whichever one of the older boys I was trying to charm. The smell of old incense and white wax clinging to the choir stalls, the obscure and fumbling desire we felt for one another, and above that, the mass. Kyrie, gloria, credo, sanctus, benedictus, agnus dei. I had all the concentration of a fox in season when I was thirteen. The restlessness was brittle in my bones. Yet every day, as I sit down to write, the striped blanket across my shoulders, I sink back into that time. The mind floats with the shape of the mass, opening like a fan before me. I sink into thecold, empty space which it creates; I lean there on my left hand. I begin to write.
    Out of memory and desire I make shapes. I reach back to those long freezing days in the classrooms, the gold above us in the autumn, biting our scarves as we ran along the edges of the paths, scattering the leaves. I touch the pleasure of sensation in that loss of innocence, the escape from banality into a vortex of desire and pain, our first loves, the first embrace of the forbidden tree and the joy of our escape from Eden. There is nothing so poignant or so treacherous as a boy’s love.
    Even then, I saw the darkness I see now. But it was like a shadow in the corner of my eye, a sudden movement as a lizard vanishes behind the shutters. But in the last years I have felt the darkness, gaining ground, widening like a stain across the day. And I have watched the darkness coming with complete serenity. The door stands always open, to let the darkness in. Out of this knowledge too, I will make my writing. And I have nothing to fear.
    There is another shape too, which returns. One night, walking alone in the Midi, in a town I hardly knew, I was searching, yes, I suppose I was, looking for the men leaning against their cars in the dark, watching for the glow of cigarettes in the doorways, I passed the church. And I heard the scream of an owl rising in the dark. I looked up. He suddenly took off from the lime trees above me, floodlit from beneath, a great white owl, his belly bleached white in the darkness, his huge white wings outstretched, crying in the night, flinging himself away into the darkness. And as I followed his flight into thedark, the night appeared to be a solid substance, matter to be written. I cannot believe that I have anything to fear.
    Bien à vous,
    Paul Michel.

    30 September 1981
    Cher Maître,
    How odd that your memory of the cold during mass should be so similar. Our schooldays are a nightmare shared. My most intense memories date from my childhood. I expect that is a universal phenomenon. We lived in a large flat in the rue Montgaillard in Toulouse. My mother used to stretch the washing line across the street on a pulley system attached to her neighbor’s window. And they shared the line. I remember her calling, Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie, out of the window whenever she was ready to use the line. The rents of those flats in the narrow street are colossal now.
    I was an only child and spent most of the day helping my mother, handing her clothes pegs, folding the sheets and heating the flat iron on the stove. We had wood delivered once a week and I carried the logs one by one up the dark tiled staircase to the cupboard in the kitchen where my mother kept her woodstore. She lived like a countrywoman in the middle of the city. She kept tomato plants and sweet peas on the balcony, their scent dominated the stifling summer nights. I remember the sound of dirty water, dishwater, washing water, being flung down from the flats into the street, the shutters banging in the night, families quarreling behind locked doors.
    My father was often away from home doing repair work on the railways. He came back late in the evening, dirty and tired, and was forbidden to kiss me until he had washed. She was fanatically clean. She scrubbed everything; the kitchen, the pots, the sheets, the