We Are Made of the Impacts of Hail

I was born as smallpox vanished.
Pockmarked reflections: we are blocked-out now, shaped by fire shavings and the crunch of ice in the warm night of many worlds.
Here, the imprint emerges from its own disappearance.
Our breaths are pitted like hail.

Non-being is not; it quivers immensely, as we burn in silence.

(Vibrances et échos-jetées d'un frémissement qui s'immensifie en-deçà de l'être.)

The pockmarked landscape of the skin.
A touch left its absence etched upon the skin and deep in the dermis.
The face is now a terrain of still waves, a wild green field once shell-torn
and turned into a sea.

Nous sommes faits des impacts de grêle,
d'une brassée-souffle, un volement de cicatrices.

Le corps se modèle selon des scories et des trouées, il est formé d'éboulements sur soi qui se tannent et s'érigent.

We are made of hail strikes, creases, failures, and glinting shards of reality.
We were born where reality became impossible to itself — impossible in the very midst of the world, in all its openness and light — where it could not reach itself and fell back into a minute, yet primary retreat below the threshold of its own visibility. There, the flesh of our true experience came into being.
We are the ecstasies, the springing blown-off echoes of what never took place. We are what successive abortions failed to slice apart.
We are surges of waves, at once vivid, swift, and motionless, emerging from the part of reality that refused to be; not products of being, but incandescences of non-being made immense, raised as horizontal cathedrals for they possess no ground. That is our active sanctuary.

I need a retreat thrown into the air: in the air-and-fire transcendence of shavings screamed loose; in the flight of the displaced edge of the leaf, passing through the air like a sudden ecstasy; and in the appearing clarity of photographs framed by margins marked with questions and endless primordial howls, and scored with blessings.

We burn in silence.

...formés des impacts de grêle : la chaleur instantanée de l'impact, cette puissante forge brève, répond au froid des grêlons, la blessure de leur glace qui est prise de ciel compacté.

The fire of impact responds to the hailstones' ice.

This is a causal response. Ice and fire joined in the impact — not two, non-dual, they came as one and declared:

"first we give you the pain, and then we give you the sores — watch how well they fit — making you the hammered, the hammering, and the quenching.
We brought you into being within the earlier cataclysm; you now carry a true world in pain.
You must be born as the bridegroom. For to be born one must be in love. And you are the one who loved,
like a horrifying scream that could never be uttered."

The ice and the fire, stone and air, birth and destruction, distortion and shaping, shattering and bridal union, hollowed vision and the intense halo of promises taken away. Hail's assaults crease reality. Those born from it live with a fierce intensity, as if crossing between worlds — and they pass straight through you.

The pockmarked landscape of the skin: je suis l'écaille où la lumière s'effondre, je suis le tremblement laissé par les coups — et le contour arraché.

La peau est un couperet, le fameux tranchoir du dedans-dehors (qui sépare 'intériorité' et 'monde'). Mais peut-être la peau est-elle elle-même la forme cicatricielle transformée d'une coupure antérieure — une séparation ou brisure autre qui eut lieu, mais quand ? et au sein de quoi ? Coupure entre quoi et quoi, entre quoi et QUI ? — et dont nous serions dès lors les prisonniers amnésiques.

The skin is a kind of blade, the cutting edge between inside and outside, between inner life and the world.
But perhaps the skin itself is only the scarred shape left by an earlier cut — some other break or separation that once occurred, though when? and within what? A cut between what and what, between what and WHOM? — and whose amnesiac prisoners we have been ever since.

We attempt to write the semantic non-existent that nonetheless pulses and beats!

Nous frappons contre les murs de l'invisible au milieu de mille fleuves, mille steppes et mille strates ! Nous voulons que la nature soit arrachée à elle-même, qu'elle soit pulvérisée et rebâtie, afin que le réel se déverse enfin dans la réalité ! Nous sommes les extases du monde qui n'a pas encore commencé !

We deal with an undocumented density that thunders, amplifies a certain je ne sais quoi, and disappears. It stands before us, yet seems to resurge.

La peau, notre 'sac-contenant', est-elle une bordure de grêle, l'instabilité d'un versant de coupure, un côté rogné, travaillé, ou une attache déchiquetée ? Un "bord débordé", une marge repliée sur elle-même, dans laquelle nous nous serions greffés nous-mêmes comme... à l'envers ?

Proposition : appelons le corps... chute.
'Chute' guide un début de contamination sémantique.

The French word chute can mean a fall, the Fall, or a downfall; a shift at the end of a speech, an ending that gives it its meaning; and it also refers to an offcut or a trim, such as a small piece of film removed during editing.

It also sounds like « chut ! », meaning « shush!». Taisez-vous, chut ! Tombez donc, Baphomet ! Lucifer ! Tombe ! Tombe ! — Shush! Shush! Baphomet! Lightbearer! Shush! Nous chantions cela, très joyeusement, me semble-t-il, enfants, dans un beau paysage de campagne, en un monde parallèle où je crois vraiment n'avoir jamais vécu.

La bordure est un seuil actif stratifié.

Le corps comme bordure de grêle, un bord débordé.

The body is a rim of hail, an edge run over, a slope that pours and unpours its cuts.

Here, the body is a liminal, inhabited space, transmuted and slowly entranced, active with densities: the rim of hail is the front garden or the window ledge strewn with hailstones.

These, still hard, form a carpet of separate ice, like reflectors, like nutrients and ferments. They form a field of mutation, silent yet active. This carpet—this threshold, truly—seems to live suspended between cold and forge, between immobility and work, between extreme slowness and living energy.

The active threshold, the body as a rim of hail, is neither exterior nor interior, nor a simple boundary: it is an in-between of dualities, a region of receptivity and mutation, a modulation that modulates. Here, the body is its own reverse.

Proposition: le corps comme bordure de grêle désigne une mer de coupures liantes similaire à celle qu'on expérimente dans les sommeils et somnolences dissociatifs.

'Rim of hail' can refer to the cuts and splices that form the sort of environment you find yourself in during altered states, such as the dissociative sleep states I experience.

Is it even possible to describe this?

Can you picture what a dissociative sleep state might be like?

Words fall short. I've never read anything that resembles it.
I don't write well enough to do that, but I can try to give you some hints.

Thoughts, emotions, memories, impressions, and intuitions are not separate things. We pull them apart in order to learn logic, and because the realm of emotion remains unexplored by our still-primitive societies; we are not yet capable of taking emotions into account in their true reality.

In dissociative sleep states, this living magma of thoughts and feelings becomes tactile, dense. They are no longer more or less layered over our existence as they usually are. Instead, they surround you; you are immersed in them as in a tangible ocean. This ocean is often wildly turbulent. You are plunged — your whole being, your whole breath — into the thick, feverish churn of these cutting, shifting thoughts and emotions. They show you actual situations from within, revealing their hidden workings, yet in a language that is almost impossible to grasp intellectually.

This unfolding seems at the same time to be a recalibration of your mind and your energies, as though you were being retuned, kneaded at the level of being itself. The experience can be extremely intense and at times almost painful, or subtler and gentle. It is a field-language made of images, of velocities, of layers intersecting one another… You feel as though you understand — or rather as though you are being worked on by a phenomenon outside you, yet one that is itself a phenomenon of understanding.

You seem to be moved within a field of consciousness that is no longer really “you,” but a “world,” a “sea,” perhaps “the inside of an earth”… In any case, it is nearly inexpressible, and it sometimes takes a long time to recover once you wake.

This happens as if we had tipped over into another side of a built reality.

Or into the plane of chaos.

Nous sommes ôtés du film

Could chute be a proper translation — or a temporarily relevant mutation of meaning?

In the editing room, something has been removed: a person, perhaps, a word, an encrypted clue, or traces of another event. Small curls of cellulose lie scattered on the bench and on the floor. It is getting late now. They are silent cuts, coiled and tense like discarded memories. The editor himself is slowly changing.

These trims are fragments of living encrypted memory, pieces of what will no longer fit. "Does the world exist, and what did the story used to be?" Now we won't remember life but distortions of remembrance, as scattered clippings of time litter the ground. From there, reality began to fracture.

It now moves in pulses, in fragmented waves that never settle into a story. Memories that do not resemble any kind of recollection may be impossible to identify as memories. They live with a dense intensity but are blind to themselves. The real event is hidden in what has been taken away (mais la réalité demeure comme un règne tremblant).

The event is the absence itself, and the true character may never appear. The film becomes a dissociation of its own making, and we may never fully know what we had been watching.

What happened?

The cut has taken place, the thousand circumcisions of a god
who may actually be a host of demons.
These entities are gone now from the world they created; a trace of them remains,
an imprint of shadows that has always defiled us.

Is Chute a side of reality, a parallel face of existence on which we are continuously being aborted by cuttings, sliced apart, trimmed away with pincers?

IS IT THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE FORCED TO FIT IN?

Dec. 2025

(Ref : Clipside of the pinkeye flight -- Son et Lumière, The Mars Volta).

Flight renvoie bien sûr ici aux états altérés de conscience.

L'âme de l'antiquité est légère et s'envole ; elle quittera le corps pour voyager durant les transes chamaniques (soul flights). Le vol est un franchissement dans la réalité, bien mieux qu'une 'entrée en matière'.

Ainsi, l'âme observe, est agie et renseignée ; elle obtient des connaissances et découvre comment agir. Les vols nocturnes du Moyen Âge — sans doute des souffles feuilletés de rêves et de transes, pris de créativité comme surgissement et de réceptivité par disponibilité passive — seront les extases induites par les psychotropes et l'imagination. La Renaissance continue à vivre ou bien simplement à fantasmer ces inductions à travers le thème, souvent hypocrite, de la sorcellerie qu'elle veille à mettre en scène.

Quelques poètes romantiques et les occultistes apprirent eux aussi à voler, pour un travail — un œuvrement — de la conscience dans et par la liminalité comme espace réel de l'esprit. Mais cette œuvre reste sans doute opératoire (travail, processus, action) et ainsi encore techniciste, c'est-à-dire pré-capturée dans l'ontologie des effectuations et productions de simples fixités combinables et à briser.

Les dreaming flights et astral flights contemporains, sinon nos junk flights, héritent vraisemblablement de cette timide verve intéressée qui émut le XIXe siècle, et notre pop-mystique actuelle mêle des fragments de cet ésotérisme occidental avec d'autres fractures, celles des mémoires effacées du chamanisme des peuples dits premiers, américains surtout, qui furent martyrisés par l'ontologie européenne, tandis que les nouvelles populations de l'ouest commencent à réclamer leur droit à rêver par elles-mêmes la nature du monde et son Histoire.

Mais cette présentation n'est sans doute elle-même qu'un flight of ideas, un flight into delirium peut-être, qui m'apaise dans l'englobement d'un état de rêve enfin retrouvé à l'aurore.

Dec. 2025.