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By Root 1109 0

as I am by a compulsive tic to switch from one channel to another - can perfecdy well be used to demonstrate the contrary. I am convinced that there is a sense in the happenings of this world, that a coherent story, explicable in all its series of cause and effect, is going on somewhere at this very moment, and is not beyond our capacity to verify, and that this story contains the key for judging and understanding everything else. It is this conviction that keeps me nailed to my chair staring at the video with glazed eyes while the frenetic clicks of the remote control conjure up and dismiss interviews with ministers, lovers' embraces, deodorant ads, rock concerts, people arrested hiding their faces, space rocket launches, Wild West gunfights, dancers' pirouettes, boxing matches, quiz shows, Samurai duels. If I don't stop to watch any of these programmes it's because they're not the programme I'm looking for, I know it exists, and I'm sure it's not one of these, and that they only transmit these programmes to deceive and discourage people like myself who are convinced that it's the other programme that matters. That's why I keep switching from one channel to another: not because my mind is no longer capable of even the very brief concentration required to follow a film or a dialogue or a horse race. On the contrary: my attention is already entirely projected towards something I absolutely must not miss, something unique that is happening at this very moment while my screen is still cluttered with superfluous and interchangeable images, something that must already have begun so of course I've missed the beginning and if I don't hurry up I risk losing the end as well. My finger leaps across the keys of the remote control discarding husks of empty appearance like the superimposed peelings of a multicoloured onion.

Meanwhile the real programme is out there in the ether on a frequency I don't know, perhaps it will be lost in space without my being able to intercept it: there is an unknown station transmitting a story that has to do with me, my story, the only story that can explain to me who I am, where I come from and where I'm going. Right now the only relationship I can establish with my story is a negative relationship: that of rejecting other stories, discarding all the deceitful images they offer me. This pushing of buttons is the bridge I am building towards that other bridge that fans out into the void and that my harpoons still haven't been able to hook: two incomplete bridges of electromagnetic impulses that fail to meet and are lost in the dustclouds of a fragmented world.

It was when I realized this that I stopped waving the remote control at the screen and started pointing it out of the window, at the city, its lights, its neon signs, the facades of the skyscrapers, the roof spires, the scaffolding of the cranes with their long iron beaks, the clouds. Then I went out in the streets with the remote control hidden under the flap of my coat, pointing it like a weapon. At the trial they said I hated the city, that I wanted to make it disappear, that I was driven by a destructive impulse. It's not true. I love, I have always loved our city, its two rivers, the occasional small squares transformed by their trees into oases of shade, the harrowing wail of its ambulance sirens, the wind that rakes the Avenues, the crumpled newspapers that flit just above ground like tired hens. I know that our city could be the happiest in the world, I know that it is the happiest, not here on the wavelength where I find myself, but on another frequency, it's there the city I've lived in all my life finally becomes my habitat. That's the channel I was trying to tune into when I pointed the remote control at the sparkling windows of the jewellers’, at the stately facades of the banks, at the awnings and rotating doors of the big hotels: prompting my gestures was the desire to save all stories in one story that would be mine too: not the threatening and obsessive malice I have been accused of.

They were all in the dark, lost: police, magistrates,