Here you'll find a simple, accessible presentation.

This presentation simplifies its subject so much that it ultimately misses it.

Let us share the failing, the crossing-out, the wounding, and the healing, if you ever consent. Let us keep trying to understand, between the sores and the circling of scents, of loss; between the certainty of our ruins and the memory of dew.

Trying to understand implies being altered by the process of confronting our own questions.

Here is the version that is too easily absorbed.

HeЯ[L] refers both to one woman, Sister D., and to a group of women who belong to the sect, or to a circle very similar to a sect, which I endured as a child. We knew each other as children; we almost lived together at some point, but my amnesia prevented me from recognizing them. They are fully aware of this. They too were children then, or teenagers, or young adults. Like Sister D., several of them are victims as well, but they prefer not to acknowledge it.

Their persistence in my life has been tragic. They are at once the agents of deceit and those who bring it to light. They are the blood that feeds my heart and the wound that bruises it.

If you're looking for more concrete, down-to-earth reference points, I invite you to read the long post titled The Undisclosed Rape Zone, which you'll find here in the Bio-Dysgraphia section. At the end of that post, there is a part titled Foundation of HeЯ[L], where I summarize the situation. No other post will contain autobiographical material.

HeЯ[L]. You may pronounce the glyph 'Herl.'

You will certainly encounter some variations of it, such as:
mЯLe   HeЯˋ|'L   HeЯ::L   HeЯL   Me&HeЯL   HeЯ[L _&I]   ImЯeehL

I am trying to untangle identities that are complex, confused, and profoundly disorienting — and if you believe that the difference between you and others is perfectly clear, that it could be reduced, for instance, to a few crude acts of self-assertion, then you haven't even begun to gaze into the maw-crystal of reality itself.

Who is, or who are, HeЯ[L] to HaRL?

Let us treat Harl often as another person; such that he may at times not be He “Ya” — “Я”, Russian for “I” — and not quite “Me.”

HeЯ[L] comes toward him, one after another, each arriving alone, like the first drops of rain that announce the winter soon to reign. She appears out of nowhere and already knows him. She meets him for the first time and becomes his friend, his lover, his love, or no more than a passing name. Harl loves HeЯ[L] more than anyone he has ever met or dreamed of knowing. It seems to him that they have been bound to each other since the dawn of time, that they both belong to the same incomprehensible knot of Eternity. HeЯ[L] breaks over him, and winter settles in. One appeared at first, then several. In the end, a whole court of absences stands there, gathered around him, they're on his side, close and remote, far away, infinitely remote and deadly. HeЯ[L] never says that they know HeЯ[L].

HeЯ::L is a libertine circle, very sad and dull, a guild of forgetting, boredom and flames. There, they gather with others to celebrate Harl's tenderness, his fate and his singular vibrancy, his uncompleted death, and that strange imprint he left inside each one, which no one knows how to remove. One must eat, or suffocate on, the lingering soul. The circle keeps a memory Harl has lost, and from it rise the illusions he must face again. Amnesia repeats itself; it is a labyrinth, not a state. The shadows cast within it preserve silence and loss.

HeЯˋ|'L is a living contradiction. At once, she wants and does not want Harl to know and remember. She is the strength of illusion itself, the motion of the lie, the world. Yet she is also the one who tells the truth, the only one, the single grace that sometimes speaks the naked painful truth that Harl needs to hear if he ever wants to escape. Why so? Is HeЯˋ|'L a High Priestess, to be at once the veil and the unveiling?

But it is an ontological force.

HeЯ[L] is the visible itself, in a world not yet begun.

Me and HeЯ[L] — She and I — do they love each other?

Is HeЯ[L] his love, his vertiginous pain, made manifest through antagonism within the terrible conditions of the world, the place where being is always already failing to be, where the real runs aground on the shoals of its own reality?

Some among HeЯ[L] are sadistic criminals and simply vile individuals: deceiving and delusional abusers, fascinated with rape, eager to defile and mock others, especially anyone they see as pure or 'superior'. (Dans l'horreur du Silence commun, un désert a été forcé à l'intérieur de toi. Personne ne le saisira jamais. Seul, je t'avais déjà épousée.)

None of them live as Harl does, nor seek to understand him. They arouse the shadow and the need to devour around him.

Yet all of them love him. The one whom HeЯ[L] truly loves is he. And he will never care for anyone else; he recognizes himself only in HeЯ[L], who seems to be his home, his love, his peace, long forgotten. But his silent heart remembers.

If she is his antagonistic love, then she is his king-love — and the impossible, if not the dreadful, here turns into a primordial offering, a birthing of existence itself.

Beware the love you hate; you may well be the true parents of one another, in a sense deeper and more authentic than any biology.

HeЯ[L] can only be a dangerous garden, a staggering one. Forgive me: that's where part of me lives, and where it somehow rests. The other parts learned to fly long ago, and I remain on the ground, exhausting myself trying to reach them.

Understand my attempt. I'm trying to find my way and create myself as I go, groping like a blind alchemist, forever a beginner.

I'm trying to see more clearly into the deadly impossibility where I was born and where I am condemned to live intensely.

In this work of elucidation and transformation, two central questions arise for me: does HeЯ[L] exist, and to what extent is she me?

A word on colors and shapes

[Images are not included in this version of the site.]

A simple color code guides the images available on the first pages of this site.

Its axis is constantly disturbed, obstructed, and endlessly reiterated, in keeping with the law of decantations proper to the meanders where we dwell.

I am made of black and red.
She is made of white and black.

The frames are also touched with blue. From beyond the image, it reflects upon them, like the hope for a world still fit to live in, its distant echo or faded memory. The blue and the red of blood together form the paradox of the violet, which is at once liminality and (flawed) sovereignty. Above all, the blue, reflected in the image from outside, joins the white, the black, and the red to form the whole color set. Yellow has always been there. It need not enter the composition. It is the hidden gold at the heart of everything, which humans refuse to see.

The images are AI-generated. I have rarely won the battle of the prompt, and none of these images are perfect to my taste. Nevertheless, they record the fertile duality of intention and chance. This results from the successive shifts — translations and mutations — that arise from the continual exchange between my prompts, the generations supplying randomness, and the black, white, and red Work of refinement. Thus, the gaze sets its own alchemies in motion through the winnowing, moving with the slow rhythm of invisible membranes. In the end, only a few images remain on my desk. The living membrane, a silent medium of communication and change, is essential to life.

I therefore have a kind of color code — call it a touch of precious chaos, if you like — but the machine blows on the embers of its seeds, and I accept that I cannot fully control the outcome. It creates unexpected shifts and openings.

Red — Black — White

Blue — Brass — Violet

I am where Red is, and where Black is — and I stand with Gold-Brass, when it is hidden.
She is Black as well, and White stands for her — Violet and Red, hidden.

For instance:

Red is death, brutal annihilation, as well as it is Earth — the ground-body clay, and the sovereignty... in a world forever unbegun. It is both creation and circling. It is life, and the inexpressible pain — murder and transformations, one thousand abortions and rapes — as well as the primacy of blossoming over any fixed reality; it is birth, crashed onto the ground in hell, and the red flush on your face in the sweetest of all unexpected kisses; it is the unrestricted liberation of primal instincts, and the profound soothing that results from the revelation of truth.

White represents flows of sperm, as well as purity and virginity; it is a nurturing milk — a good mother — and the white hue of a face drained of color in dissociative horror; white is a veil covering what has always stood in front of you, and it is the radiance of unity: the unimaginable blend of all colors when we take a deep sip of Infinity — and our desolate feeling of exile from it.

These images, therefore, should not be read by trying to determine which character stands for whom, for example as though they had been organized by gender or by type. They operate in no such manner.

Here, for instance, are some portraits of HeЯ[L] and me, appearing now as one figure, now as several.

Images on this site combine symbols, forces, and aspects. Only in this sense are they psychic decantations — visual roughings-out of dynamic yet unresolved pregnances.

These images simply make a guess within the unreachable, within amnesia and its own inward re-entanglements. Above all, they divine within our inexpressible impressions — the sensations and their thick shadows — and within the inexpressible sorrow.

In dissociative amnesia, memories are encoded differently.

They are present, but in an unrecognizable form: they bear no resemblance to what we normally call a memory.

For me, repressed or recovered memories have a great deal to do with masses of energy or impressions that are opaque, or in a state of pre-clarification. These masses are spatialized, spread out, and vibrating in the bodily space — that is, within my body, or outside my body but nearby. It is a little like being constantly immersed in water and swimming, or moving through a thick, warm air that you have to push your way into. But that water or that air is you as well. There is also the problem of electric shocks in my head, and sensations of internal slow laceration or torsion in the chest and throat.

In this symbolic and alchemical work with images — of which you will see only a very pared-down and extremely softened subset — I work these layers, knead them, and carve my way through the labyrinths they contain. This is not a literary metaphor, but a factual description of my daily life. I operate on volumes that are invisible but extremely present for me. In a certain way, these volumes are at once my place, my "spirit level and mercurial compass," the tool and what the tool must work on.

These explorations through text and image therefore mix and unravel, simultaneously, sensory, psychic, bodily and motor, energetic, and emotional aspects — the emotions are often ultra-violent and dangerous, dissociated or dissociating, and I sometimes feel as if they are going to tear me apart — but also symbolic and technical aspects (I spend entire nights editing images to the sound of my computer fan moaning). The organized system of assaults began in the first months of my life, perhaps in the maternity ward immediately after birth, according to some witnesses. I have therefore spent my entire life in traumatic dissociation and in various degrees of amnesia. I am probably a somewhat special case.

It is a matter of sculpting gradually, within myself and inside all my outwardness (densités opaques à malaxer en mes dehors, qui sont là, au-devant, et insistent). I begin by roughing out a hard and worthless stone that is me; I feel that I model my own clay, its resistance, its thickness, its volumes, wandering alone among the smooth and rough surfaces. Now there are images — selected, upscaled, modified, converted — and a few fragments of text, some obscure muttered incantations in French, that I will have to very slowly and painstakingly write and reinvent in English, trying to recapture the nuances. The clay retracts and crumbles. I get results but I end up destroying the whole thing, more often than not.

I have not excluded every image that contains mistakes I could not fix. For example, the one below is faulty in several ways. Should I have left it out, when I still find it gorgeous?

Before you continue reading, I need to put into words my three basic feelings — the ones that define how I experience consciousness, my lived sense of being conscious, even if you probably won't understand them. I'm old enough now to say this quite simply.

1 — I experience reality as a defect in being (une défectuosité de l'être) : it has a certain way of existing — a temporal and material texture — that feels inherently unfinished, as a non-occurrence of itself. It is an entanglement that keeps stumbling over itself instead of ever truly coming to life. What you call “the world” is, to me, a phenomenal impossibility, a jolted attempt that deludes you.

Nous habitons la brisure du monde incommencé.

We dwell — with joy, with teeth — in prior apocalypses.

They are the forever-throbbing withdrawal of what, each time, had refused to be born.

Some are aware of this. Things are not yet — hence the first astonishment, if not the wonder. You may, however, prefer to think that they are already, but not yet, and might one day come to be. Can we, then, overcome this temporality of refusal? This marsh of neither birth nor hell pleases you so much that there is, most certainly, no way out.

Perhaps having lived in amnesia since birth has shaped the way I perceive things. Or perhaps you are the void and the absence — and I am not.

2 — Something feels off, out of its own rightness: we were never meant to be inside our bodies. You are certain that you both have and are a body, but I am not. Being in my body by default is abnormal; I most certainly should only be in it when I choose to. Unfortunately, from an undecided pull between inward and outward, I am constantly standing on the barrier between the two, neither here nor beyond; like a ship close to harbor, not moored, never set to sea. This constant sensation is deeply uncomfortable. I cannot, or can no longer, leave this prison that I do not inhabit, and in which I sometimes try in vain to anchor myself in reverse.

I must point out that my body is usually painful, as if bruised from the inside. In particular, my entire torso feels as though it is filled with dead branches, my face seems compressed from the outside, my throat and feet are either searing or throbbing. The shell of the body is but an inner scab in which I do not wish to live. Emotions inflame it, and since you do not understand, and therefore won't acknowledge what I describe, the prospect of human interaction only makes things drastically worse. I live alone so as not to endure your despicable kind any longer.

3 — Language does not communicate information but — centered in the unsayable, which we inhabit — it modulates a field of potential disclosure. This field is thick, and the thinkable thoughts are modulations of volumes and velocities among its internal relations — relations that contain the true meaning, rarely or never reached. We do not speak; rather, we try to approximate. When someone talks, I understand through the density of modulations within which that utterance seems to have been pre-inscribed. Meaning, then, is drawn and gathered almost as densities of breath.

It all seems abstract only because such experiences are rarely expressed, and the ordinary means of language fail us here.