That’s fine, but everything that happened before this is not going to just disappear. The trigger on November 25th can’t be overcome. I was talking about causes, profound causes. To go into that, stir it all up? What good would that do? Will it make the book more interesting? No. It won’t make the book more interesting. And most of all, it’s not very polite. It’s not essential, essential, I’m perverse, just consider the way I engage in mental torture. To the point where some people, made crazy by things I’d said to them, these people around me, close to me, were driven to beat me, to insult me, sometimes very harshly (bitch, disgusting, perverse, whore, that all happened), to strangle me (two times, once in Bordeaux, and once right here in Montpellier), to shake me, to beat me, insult me. But always, pushed to the limit, I trust them when they say, at their limit, that they know me, they know me well, they’ve seen me, they’ve heard me, pushed to their limit by a mechanism inside me, a verbal mechanism, extremely effective, extremely destructive, extremely sly, above all extremely sadistic, at all times evoking elements from reality, fitting, wounding, in a kind of ferocious machinery that no one can stop, certainly not me. Except death one day. Or another trigger, in the other direction. But it would all come down to the same thing. My motto could have been ‘everything can always be twisted around’ and ‘everything can always be mashed together’ so it’s logical. I went to see my homeopathic doctor yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d last seen her, she gave me mercurius, mercury, quicksilver, quoting the corresponding phrase: “wanting to break social conventions or to see them only as the instrument of human relations, he ended up breaking human bonds themselves,” it’s logical. I need logic. I’m getting there, others understand that I say what I think. In Sujet Angot, there’s a passage in which Claude says as a compliment: “your writing is so unbelievable, intelligent, muddled, but always luminous, accessible, direct, physical. Your readers don’t understand a thing and they understand everything. It’s intimate, personal, shameless, autobiographical, and universal. You are touching without using gimmicks, without being emotional, you make people think with bits and bobs, a miracle of logical disorganization. Freedom without chaos, openness without drift.” That’s very kind, but he doesn’t get it. It wasn’t freedom without chaos anymore, but the opposite, nor was it openness without drift, but the opposite. I couldn’t take it anymore. With my muddled bits and bobs. I have a critical apparatus, there, a rather solid one. Roudinesco’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, I’m happy with it. At my level. As they say, by the way, people who say “at my level” put themselves down, I don’t claim to be a specialist either, I’ve got my limitations, I’m a failure, I try to be logical, simple, and to make myself understood by most people. If everyone did the same, we wouldn’t have all this shit. A lot of writers think they’re hot shit, that’s not very polite.

Valda candy

What is a substratum? It comes from substernere, underlay. That which serves as a foundation for another existence, without which a reality (conceived of as accidental) could not subsist. Without which the trigger would not have had all these consequences. It’s the substance, the essence, the base. On which an action is carried out. Queneau, “a solid substratum for the development of the actions which he might conceive,” Renan, “the earth provides the substratum, the field of battle and of work, but man provides the soul.” The earth, that element upon which lies a geological layer. Linguistically, the Gallic substratum in France. The substratum. What are the zones? What is the terrain? Upon what does it grow?

Heredity