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Note: I have kept no other texts or documents from that year of 1998.
But it was in September of that same year, 1998, that I began writing my last
book, “Chemins Entiers”.
After a long period of silent gestation, deep within me, I now felt impelled to focus
in an attentive receptivity and let the words come, a few sentences at a time, day
after day.
At tea-time or in the few idle moments my responsibilities on the site of
Matrimandir left me, I would sit on a tools chest next to a planning table in the
carpentry shed, or make myself a square foot of clear table between the wages and
attendance books, amid the clatter and clamour of voices and activity, and let it
percolate, or distillate itself into clear drops of meaning and the rhythm and dance
of a slow creative rivulet of experience offered; there was nothing to organise, no
thinking to do, no plan to follow; there was only that tranquil, but imperative
compulsion, like an act of bearing fruit, that joined the deepest and most silent
source within to a sort of living and active synthesis of all assimilated experience –
not just life-experience, but the experience of consciousness – of the past ten years
or so.
It came in French; even though I had not been speaking French for many years,
but for the short periods of C’s visits, and not reading much French either, but for
the Agenda now and then, I did not have to search for words: the right words were
picked up on the way down, or rather, on the way out, from the storage area of the
physical mind.
I did not have to make any corrections later on, but for a couple of words which I
had not gotten right, and a few mix-ups of English and French usage or spelling.
***