Un barage contre le Pacifique

I don't remember if I actually read the Marguerite Duras book. I might have, but I just wikipediaed the story and it seems unfamiliar. What I do remember is that, in my mid-twenties, very depressed, rudderless, and self-medicating with cannabis, I mentioned this title to my shrink, in the context of describing how I felt my father had always tried to create a barrier between the harshness of the world and my family. It was this I called "un barage contre le Pacifique." To me, the phrase evoked protection, immensity, the color blue, large looming white concave structures in the sunlight, the streets of a small seaside town, impossibly clean and empty and still...

For a while now, I notice I've been imagining "places" like this again. Usually, it's because I feel I need to disarm some creeping anxiety to get to sleep, or to go back to sleep after taking a midnight piss. I see them as soothing utopias, mental pacifiers. They don't appear spontaneously, rather I have to conjure them up, to invent them as active fantasies. The setting is always Mediterranean-ish: sunny, dry, mountainous, with water nearby. Perhaps Spain or Greece? But not the real ones, because they are too crowded and messy. Or maybe it's on another planet, much like earth, but different, emptier, less threatening, simplified.

There is always a building of some sort. Maybe a hotel, or perhaps a school, or a palace, or most often now, a cave, like the ones they use in Tibet for meditation. A cave in a limestone cliff. Sometime there is a town nearby, sometime the place is more isolated.

So I imagine that I'm not in my room, in bed, but that I'm in a protective cave-womb, in a world that is more like a succession of still images than a real place. It is a world where there is only the present and things are unchanging. Or if they do change, it is through invisible shifts and slips... I hover in this world, without really interacting with it. I spend my time sleeping. But I'm also meditating. This is my job: to meditate. This meditation is not the Buddhist meditation I try to practice in real life, you know: sitting in the midst of experience and just noticing what arises, accepting it, letting go of the struggle, of the resistance that leads to suffering... In the make-believe world my meditation is actually a job I've been assigned: it contributes to keep the world together. It generates a benign force-field around the place where I am: the hotel, the school, the white marble palace, the cave, so I can be safe, so everyone, all the people who are near me, but remain invisible, can be safe. In a way this is the opposite of my Buddhist meditation: it is all about clinging to the idea of safety, about freezing the march of time and death, about hiding in a dream.

Sometimes the cave is very deep, and actually it is a whole complex of caves - a buried city inside the mountain. In this version, the city was built by robots for colonists who were supposed to come later. I guess we are on another planet, or a moon, or in an alternative universe. The city is deserted, or almost deserted: there are a few other indistinct people here and there, but we don't hang out together. I have a job, which is to be "the janitor." This again involves "meditation" but also walking around the empty cave-city and making sure everything runs smoothly, perhaps telepathically controlling the robots. But I'm not really expecting the rest of the colonists anymore. It seems the project has been abandoned. Or sometimes the colonists are already there, but they are sleeping, in some sort of suspended animation. And the city itself is actually the spaceship we all flew in on, but buried inside the mountain.

Matter is just a kind of very concentrated energy. In a similar way, I feel these fantasies are concentrations: barriers, dams against the currents of anxiety that run through me. They offer momentary respite, but still the anxiety rages and weighs with all its liquid weight against the fragile structures of my mind and body. Worse, these deliberate waking dreams feed the anxiety, because they help me hide and turn away from it. But they have a strange and mesmerizing beauty. They are sirens I seldom resist.