The ballad of the lost,
after François Villon

There, between sky, sea and city,
The tide rises.
Nothing moves, nothing is created.
The time
has frozen on the threshold of a new fire.

So show us,
When the sulphur and fire were already raging.
It was August 1466.
It was August 1945.
The collegiate church of Dinant was consumed in the flames of Burgundy
and the clouds of Hiroshima.

It was Sodom, it was Reggane,
Today and yesterday.
On the shores of the Mediterranean, debris piles up
and
over every new shape hangs the shadow of destruction

Tell us about these intimate landscapes and pale interiors in which the
violence is cut.
and in which our demissions are mired.
Let’s evoke these haunting abysses together,
the orgies of ghosts that haunt us.

Catastrophe is a complex web

and ruptures have their own music.

Others before you have scratched where it itches.
and whispered their secrets to our stupors and spleens
drawing unspeakable intoxication from wood and colour.
So sang the chiaroscuro of Henri Bles
Joachim Patinier’s utopian blues
The peasant devilries of Brueghel the Elder.

Painting as generative symphony,
The mocking score of apocalypses.

What a Renaissance it was, mixing Harmonie’s hopes with its own,
The resistance of detail,
the wisdom of the small
and the abjection.

Vibrant erotics of matter that cherished our feathers, our hair, our bile and the
surges of our flesh,
our coarse aspirations to the sun
and the importance of the earth,
realising that creation is a repeated fall,
a matter of gravity.

Once hanged or consumed,
Queens as we are today,
We, doused and washed by the rain,
that the sun has dried and blackened,
that magpies and crows have gouged out,
Let’s start new ghoulish dances together.

History is a skinned column,
a radioactive carnival,
a ruined theatre with no audience.

No psychopomp, no redeemer for our dirty shags.
Between dog and wolf,
Hybrids,
blood and juice on the lips,
covered in rubbish.
beating our tails,
our senses gallop.

On the impassive paths of progress, the debris of our worlds can become
comrades. Military carcasses, gutted factories, burnt-out vans,
are temples to our dead,
agoras filled with tales of future orchards.

Wreathed in smoke and empty skies,
Let’s travel in tight, trembling circles.
In the mist of these unknown horizons,
the present is a vertigo and a labyrinth we have yet to desire.

Texte by | Cy Lecerf Maulpoix