The man who tilts

Thierry Metz

I am starting once more to read — slowly — Thierry Metz’s L’homme qui penche (The Man Who Tilts), which comprises 90 numbered short sections: prose fragments written ab extremis, from the ward of a psychiatric hospital where he made two brief stays before his final suicide. 

Here is the first section:

1.

Centre hospitalier de Cadillac en Gironde, pavillon Charcot. October 1996

C’est l’alcool. Je suis là pour me sevrer, redevenir un homme d’eau et de thé. J’envisage les jours qui viennent avec tranquillité, de loin, mais attentif. Je dois tuer quelqu’un en moi, même si je ne sais pas trop comment m’y prendre. Toute la question ici est de ne pas perdre le fil. De le lier à ce que l’on est, à ce que je suis, écrivant. 

Cadillac Psychiatric Hospital, Gironde, France. Charcot Pavilion. October 1996.

It’s the alcohol. I am here to wean myself off it, to become once more a man of water and tea. I contemplate the coming days with a distant but attentive tranquillity. I must kill someone inside of me, even though I do not really know how to do it. The whole point here is not to lose the thread: to tie it to what one is, to what I am, writing.

Coming so soon after the word “tuer” — to kill — which itself protudes so suddenly, after the balanced calm of “tranquillité, de loin, mais attentif,” I cannot help hearing behind the choice of words “perdre le fil” the alternative “perdre le fils.”  The overriding destructive event in Metz’s life was the terrible accident, eight years earlier, in which his eight-year-old son was killed on the main road in front of their house. The whole point being not to lose the thread, has standing behind it the shadow of the whole point being not to lose the son. It’s the alcohol: it’s not just the alcohol.

The double alignment of small fragments of prose together with the setting of a psychiatric ward brings Robert Walser’s Microscripts to mind. After essentially failing to establish his place as a writer in the world, Walser — having begun to suffer from hallucinations — retreated to an asylum for the final two and a half decades of his life. Mounting difficulties in writing led him to invent an approach whereby using a pencil (impermanent, tentative, effaceable, the writing instrument of small children) instead of a pen (permanent, definite, calligraphic), and writing in the most minute and unobtrusive manner possible, writing only on small scraps of paper (e.g. the back of a business card), he was able to navigate a way through the sort of block or cramp that was besetting him. This too was writing in extremis.