easy it was to pass from socialite to has-been, from night owl to washed-up, and she feared for me a fate worse than death and its torments. She got up to make me a coffee. I lingered for another hour after having finished dinner. Then, after a kiss from Jeanne on the forehead, I made my way down the hill, taking my time on the most indirect roads.
After this nocturnal drifting through deserted streets, I arrived on time at the Apocryphe. A number of people were coming out of impressive cars and rushing to the entrance. The door opened onto violent light and red shadows dancing on a wide staircase illuminated by projector beams, provoking a feeling of disoriented wandering, as if my identity had been lost or dissolved within the chiaroscuro. Passing through the entrance of the club, something of my being was lost or absorbed, an inexplicable and immeasurable stripping away that, once I finally ended up on the dance floor, hadnât left any of me behind except my carnal covering, spurred on only by the rhythmic pulsing of the music. Confronted with the bass,I was seized by a contraction; on the other extreme, a sharp trepan bore into my skull. The effect dulled once one had grown accustomed to it but continued to operate nevertheless. My body wore itself out with retractions of fleeting deliverance.
That second night I put into practice and observed the effects of the principles I had managed to deduce the night before. I stopped focusing on mere manual technique and instead focused on the reactions of the dance floor to this or that experimental effect. There I had free rein to try my hand at this new expertise. I was captivated by the idea of a struggle with no stakes other than my own satisfaction. I was experimenting without any restrictions, embarking upon the basics of a new language that no one had taught me; I was the master and the student, but the apprenticeship of this new science was not a form of autodidacticism. Rather, I was discovering the rules as I went along, establishing what had always existed without any basic precepts. Each night I was giving a speech in this unknown, unformulated language, unaware that I was deviating from a specific practice that so many others had followed before me.
George and the Padre came to see me each in his turn while I was working. In that glassed-in booth, a visit felt like an invasion. We chatted, cramped together, our words masked by the music, obscured behind a wall of sound. They both noticed that I displayed a magnificent and unexpected gift for the task at hand. It was settled that until I found another job I would remain the resident DJ. The Padre couldnât help acting as a sort of moral guideâhe had decided to view this adventure as an ablution, as a necessary submersion in the world of terrestrial passions. It was a type of trial, a confrontation with the excesses of evil designed to steel my character.
My memory of all this is broken, incomplete. All those nights ended upmelting into one, jerky and repetitive like the music I was distilling there in a state of extreme fatigue. I had never stuck with anything long enough to really immerse myself in it. Ennui was my curse and nothing was ever able to shake me out of it. The strangeness lurking beneath the surface of something could only last for so long. Everything quickly became a tainted repetition, void of all charm. Faced with this flesh I was trying to make move every night, I felt disgust, a brutal alternating between excitement and dejection, resulting in surrender to my essential melancholy. All I felt was contempt, such intense contempt! The numerous, innumerable bodies made up a monster of a hundred heads and tangled limbs whose only cohesion and life force came from the rhythmic impulse I dealt to it. The whole night, an absurd imperative commanded me to postpone the inevitable death and division of this collective body that I was making evolve before my eyes, from my glass booth shaking it
After this nocturnal drifting through deserted streets, I arrived on time at the Apocryphe. A number of people were coming out of impressive cars and rushing to the entrance. The door opened onto violent light and red shadows dancing on a wide staircase illuminated by projector beams, provoking a feeling of disoriented wandering, as if my identity had been lost or dissolved within the chiaroscuro. Passing through the entrance of the club, something of my being was lost or absorbed, an inexplicable and immeasurable stripping away that, once I finally ended up on the dance floor, hadnât left any of me behind except my carnal covering, spurred on only by the rhythmic pulsing of the music. Confronted with the bass,I was seized by a contraction; on the other extreme, a sharp trepan bore into my skull. The effect dulled once one had grown accustomed to it but continued to operate nevertheless. My body wore itself out with retractions of fleeting deliverance.
That second night I put into practice and observed the effects of the principles I had managed to deduce the night before. I stopped focusing on mere manual technique and instead focused on the reactions of the dance floor to this or that experimental effect. There I had free rein to try my hand at this new expertise. I was captivated by the idea of a struggle with no stakes other than my own satisfaction. I was experimenting without any restrictions, embarking upon the basics of a new language that no one had taught me; I was the master and the student, but the apprenticeship of this new science was not a form of autodidacticism. Rather, I was discovering the rules as I went along, establishing what had always existed without any basic precepts. Each night I was giving a speech in this unknown, unformulated language, unaware that I was deviating from a specific practice that so many others had followed before me.
George and the Padre came to see me each in his turn while I was working. In that glassed-in booth, a visit felt like an invasion. We chatted, cramped together, our words masked by the music, obscured behind a wall of sound. They both noticed that I displayed a magnificent and unexpected gift for the task at hand. It was settled that until I found another job I would remain the resident DJ. The Padre couldnât help acting as a sort of moral guideâhe had decided to view this adventure as an ablution, as a necessary submersion in the world of terrestrial passions. It was a type of trial, a confrontation with the excesses of evil designed to steel my character.
My memory of all this is broken, incomplete. All those nights ended upmelting into one, jerky and repetitive like the music I was distilling there in a state of extreme fatigue. I had never stuck with anything long enough to really immerse myself in it. Ennui was my curse and nothing was ever able to shake me out of it. The strangeness lurking beneath the surface of something could only last for so long. Everything quickly became a tainted repetition, void of all charm. Faced with this flesh I was trying to make move every night, I felt disgust, a brutal alternating between excitement and dejection, resulting in surrender to my essential melancholy. All I felt was contempt, such intense contempt! The numerous, innumerable bodies made up a monster of a hundred heads and tangled limbs whose only cohesion and life force came from the rhythmic impulse I dealt to it. The whole night, an absurd imperative commanded me to postpone the inevitable death and division of this collective body that I was making evolve before my eyes, from my glass booth shaking it
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