•
Rating: I imagine this wall as a frontier. The frontier of love for life and for those little things that make it up and which, depending on the mood and the day, become useless or useful. I climb, just stick my head out, my feet slip on the smooth bricks, but it's enough for me to look beyond and I see, see clearly, that Boris Vian is standing on another wall - the frontier-station that comes after - playing his trumpet to the moon… no notes come out, but cocktails, luminous fluids, pretty girls, and the world colors itself in harmony. The frontier where Vian stands is that of curiosity, of love for everything that is unknown and that one is not or is not yet. That frontier is the last obstacle before peace with the world and Vian doesn't climb over it, doesn't surpass it, but dominates it, looks at what lies on both sides of the wall, then takes paper and pen and carves his fake, yet perfectly real world in watercolors.
This is the story of how happiness can resemble an eel that emerges from the sink drain, climbing up the pipes, to eat your pineapple toothpaste. This is a love story, of carnal love and love for life alone, which doesn’t define life because it only thinks of living it… this damned life. This story is a ruthless, fierce, and narcissistic criticism of life, whorish and mediocre, and how it does everything to disappear from your existence, to vanish, among exhaust fumes that invade the streets, at the first good opportunity that presents itself. Vian grabs life by the hair, and strains his weak heart to prevent it from escaping, to share it, to feel it pulsate, to explain to people that they are much better than they were taught to think, that they are people, beings, and that they should invent machines not to work, that they should spend their time only making love and listening to the melodies of Duke Ellington.
Two young people in love, life that gets in the way, rooms that become small and dark, a house that creaks, a friend obsessed with a kind of Sartre, rats that become hostile, a wealth dissipated to cure a sudden and malignant illness, work that arrives only to worsen things… this is everything, perhaps too much.
And forgive me if I can't analyze, judge, explain, but I wasn't a spectator. No, I was an intrusive conqueror who took over these pages, living them, feeling first like Boris Vian, then as the woman who loved him, and then as a little mouse who decides to commit suicide in the jaws of an insensitive cat. I entered this dreamlike and surreal world taking everything I could take and subcontracting my pleasure to the world around me, realizing that all that matters is looking at the legs of the pretty girls who traverse this world and little else.
An anthem to the harsh lightness, to the alcoholic state, to the social fluidizer, and bear in mind that this story is true. Totally true. True because Vian invented it from scratch.
Boris Vian, Froth on the Daydream - 1947
Loading comments slowly
