Postcard from Lyon

Noémi Lefebvre

Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis

I’m rereading the closing lines of my current project and I have to admit you’re right, I am as always, once again, me; I am so me in spite of myself that I’m actually boring myself! If you only knew how much I admire that ease with which you simply are you, when I am nothing but me and will never be even the tiniest bit you, however I try, and yes I do try every day because I envy your courageous and yet so natural approach to social life and solo life, to work and unemployment, to fear and disappointment, to idiots and experts. More than anything I envy the brilliant way you go about living normally and how you breathe whereas I handle nothing very well, as you put it, I can’t draw a breath without running away, as you also point out, and you’re right, here’s the proof in black and white, for here, once again and as always, I go mistaking ‘normal life’ for ‘mundane life’ and trying to match ‘here and now’ with ‘how now brown cow’. That’s as far as my laughable philosophy goes… So, yes, you’re right, I really should get a proper job! But what to do when you’re hopeless at everything? Oh I’d so like to step out of myself, to stop plugging away in myself the way sheep, dogs, crows, carp and all the other animals do in their own ways; to be you or at least someone else. I would write strange and very beautiful statements, poetry perhaps; at the same time I’d have a taste for simple language and for its little formulae that touch the imagination or the heart or mind or wherever we are properly human; I’d write in altogether new and surprising ways, and at the same time everyone would understand me, lovers would exchange my fine sentiments on the benches of this square where I’m writing to you, my friend, facing the town, before the blue outline of the Alps, beneath the Canut weavers’ workshops. But these old houses on the Croix-Rousse slopes where the silk-workers lived and struggled are no more than very expensive apartments for sale to the new normals bursting with future glory in anticipation of the end of the world, which only shows up my own maladjustment. To write differently, you were saying the other day – well yes I’d love to, but what can I do, every inch of myself goes on crying out to be me!

All this to say: I’m missing you a lot, and I’d still love to do that evening plan we talked about, you know, at one of those underground bars where we’d go in masks, where I’d be Woolf and you Hemingway. Or Apollinaire who you so so adore. That would be a change for us, don’t you think? xxx

Noémi Lefebvre is the author of Blue Self-Portrait and Poetics of Work.