Excerpts from the 1979-1983 diary of Alix Cléo Roubaud (Editions du Seuil)

Created under the title La Nuit on May 15, 1990 at the Salle Gaveau by the FA ensemble directed by Dominique My and broadcast live on France Musique as part of chamber music Tuesdays presented by Olivier Bernager.

Duration: 12'. Unedited (see composer).

This journal is written in French and English ; several notebooks are brought together to form this book. Except for the last, all quotes used here are taken from the first “ cahier bleu ”.

Alix Cléo Roubaud died on January 28, 1983, at the age of thirty-one, from a pulmonary embolism. She had studied architecture, psychology, philosophy and was preparing a study on the style of Wittgenstein and his theory of the image. She was primarily a photographer.

The diary reveals various concerns both personal and professional. My work consisted of picking out one or two characteristic phrases from each of them, assigning them a specific treatment or motif, then putting them in -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_» with each other, which is already the case in the text.

The form of this work is therefore closely related to a series of associations of ideas where each motif calls up one or more others, simultaneously or successively. Moreover, the variations of the different patterns - although clearly differentiated - come together and thereby recreate what is specific to language, that is to say an ambiguity, an ambivalence of meaning ; an idea " simple " is supported and carries other ideas at the same time.

This often results in a great sound density : the musical score, in perpetual motion, is the place where these fragments of text arise, unfold and disappear, fragments of a worried, sensitive and acute consciousness. .

Nocturnal music, melancholic music, always unstable, always moving within, carrying the unique poetic task consisting in making the intangible appear through the tangible, the elusive through the graspable_cc781905-5cde-3194 -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_: “ Unleash the soul of things. Their incorporeal double » said Alix Cléo Roubaud.

Cahier Bleu from December 23, 1979 to June 11, 1980 in Paris, London, Cambridge

23.12.79

(…), like the shift in meaning.

​

Watching you already photographed, slipping between you and me, the thin mental film of your death, of my death.

6/7.01.80

(…)

Bringing the soul out of things. Their incorporeal double. Your other face, the one you don't see, below your eye, beyond your life 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_     _cc781905-5cde- 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_     _cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_     _cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_  _cc781 905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_     redoublement _cc781905 -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_   born from a loving gaze : so far I love you. (…)

Photographing sleep (where it cannot be seen) ; (…) finally there I photograph death and its nostalgia, but its quiet horror.

(…)

Since when did I not write love even in the same terms in which I formulate it ?

01.02.80

(…)

((don't come back) come back) ((don't) (come back (not)) (don't) come back.

It is difficult to get rid of the idea of death.

03.12.80

(…)

Make the singular dance, repeat it, make it turn on itself, rotate it, move, sing. Repeat the singular to make it sing. Repeat.

09.12.80

May we be each other's darkroom (don't wake up don't look now) !!!

31.3.80

(…), curiously fragile objects, as if destined to disappear. But everything seems destined to disappear.

Everything else will disappear

01.04.80 Not that it matters what do I know ? it, no, matters-not. that.

(…)

Pictures of. Fact is terrified. No not engulfed by you.

(…)

Prisoner of my own cage, well appointed, unlocatable.

my skin of course, hours on it, the day in bed or on a chair

nowhere else, even the picture.

(…)

So unbelievably, ugly tired skin hair bloated with happiness should out out of everything out way out.

02.04.80

(…)

something is wrong.

20.4.80

Country, landscape, phases, phrases : one thing, then another.

a cloud then another cloud, why not ?

10.6.80

Save me from the difficult night when it is not you who sleep with your familiar mass but me separated from you ; narrow and separated from you ; turn me around without mass no no difficulty alas no alas towards the vacillating point of the doubt of everything.

Do not regret anything. is a discipline. aimed at a state. slowly with grace. spiritual. completely unscathed. hard night. no regrets. the clouds. Grace. hard. the night. aimed at discipline. slow from mass. familiar. immortals. we. familiar.

Second blue notebook from July 26, 1981 to July 20, 1982

3.8.81

(…)

Silence

entirely