"JEAN COCTEAU speaks to the year 2000" "I don't know if this house still exists." "I was supposed to be with Mme Weisweiller for 8 days, and stayed 12 years." "I have decorated all the walls." "It's possible that the house has disappeared and, even if the means of transmission no longer exist and my image can't be projected any more, in any case, I hope to be before you as a ghost even though I don't believe in death." "I don't believe in death since it is merely one of the forms of life and I consider that Saint Augustine wasn't wrong when he said that a man who believed in antipodes was an utter fool." "He was a great saint and thus he couldn't be all wrong." "It is quite clear that we're living according to conventional norms like the calendar or the watch and it's likely that we have misled ourselves and perhaps you are still misleading yourselves." "It's possible that what we call progress could prove to be the development of an error." "Long ago, during WWI, I paid a visit to" "Gabriel Voisin's factory." "He was a major airplane manufacturer." "I looked at his airplanes and said:" "Voisin, Why is it that your latest airplanes seem the most old-fashioned to me?" "He answered:" ""It's very simple, we made a mistake." "We started with the wing." "We have not come up with something corresponding to the wheel." "It's as if we had made the first cars with mechanical legs." I immediately realized that this was following the wrong track, and maybe, in your time, this wrong track may have been lept over, splintered or even utterly obliterated" "and that you may have found something completely different, unknown to me but that I have predicted:" "by which I mean: anti-gravitation." "St. Augustine wasn't wrong, because Tokyo isn't on our back side and we're not on Tokyo's back side." "There is no upside down." "If Burkhard Heim suspects that one shouldn't fly but fall, he may prove right." "You may by now have discovered, like the ancient Incas, some gold or an unknown metal which seems light but at the same time is in fact very heavy and which escapes gravitation and that, instead of rising," "you, who are watching this, the young people that I am facing right now, instead of rising, you are falling." "Which means that anti- gravitation involves falling instead of rising, which brings us to our problem:" "These days we're pulling things up from the ground with very complicated machines." "All of this is very expensive." "Right now I'm being filmed with a machine which often involves technical accidents" "I don't know what is going on in your time, but I suspect that the youth of your times isn't, like ours, straddling contradictions." "Our youth is straddling contradictions because it hasn't known the great era which was called the heroic era of Montparnasse and it hasn't known the civilisation, the one to which I belonged." "We remain apprentice robots." "I certainly hope that you have not become robots but on the contrary that you have become very humanized: that's my hope." "But I have no idea who you are or how you are thinking, or what you are doing." "I don't know the dances you are dancing." "The dance of our time is called the twist." "Maybe you have heard about it." "You most certainly have your own dance." "Right now we are living in a time of frivolity" "Here on the côte d'azur" "There is the coast and the hinterland." "All one speaks about," "The journalists speak about.." "Nice, Cannes, Saint-Tropez" "Jean-les-pains, but as soon as you get into the hinterland it's really magnificent as it's still unmarked by this sort architectural Esperanto which remains our time's great mistake." "Maybe you won't make the same mistake." "By this I mean that the same house is being built everywhere and no attention is paid to climate, atmospherical conditions or landscape." "Well, if you have broken with this architectural Esperanto, I hope that you now have houses that can stir feelings instead of simply being prisons which lock you up or barracks which fence you in." "I told you that nowadays youth is straddling contradictions." "It has lost the kind of humanity that ours was and yet it isn't quite robotic yet." "That's why the young are always being accused of being too sad and worried:" "it's only normal." "You certainly must still know the great painter called Picasso" "Picasso said to me: "It takes a long time to grow young."" "And he was right in the sense that someone young doesn't yet know which way to go, but contemplates whether to go left or right." "Being worried is also being old, but slowly one finds one's way." "One is no longer hitchhiking." "I don't know if that expression still means something for you." "For us it signifies to place oneself at the side of the road and make a sign and then you drive off in a car that's not your own and at a speed that's not your won either." "Young people say that they're going fast, but they're not, for they are travelling in a car that's not their own." "It's very possible that that's all gone, it's possible that there are no more cars and that you are now floating slightly over the road, maybe there are no more vehicles, maybe there still are vehicles," "what do I know?" "But still I have a great hope in this idea of anti-gravitation." "Not long ago was found an Inca gateway called the Gate of the Sun." "On this Gate is written that it's a gift to the people from Venus who brought the secret of anti-gravitation" "This secret is lost and we are wearily pulling up from the ground" "We are travelling the world these days at a high speed, but like a fly who flies around an orange and who can't go much further than the peel can from the skin" "All this must seem strange to you" "I repeat that we live in an era of research and attempts and are on a road that is unknown to us." "Maybe you are, I won't say sitting, because youth should never be sitting down, but maybe you have your legs solidly placed while now one can't reproach the youth for amusing itself, because it doesn't know exactly" "what has taken place nor towards where or what it is heading." "I've always preferred mythology to history" "Because history is made up of truths which eventually turn into lies, while mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths." "And if I have the good fortune to live on in your minds, it would be in mythological form." "I will tell you why." "What is a poet?" "By poet I mean just as well a painter, a musician as a sculptor, an architect or whoever it might be." "But it's important not to confuse what is poetical and poetry." "Poetry is a kind of superior mathematics and, let's not forget:" "it's almost always prophetical." "There is a prophet in each poet and we are very humble about this because a poet is a man who resembles the people that are interrogated at the Salpêtrière hospital." "These very ordinary people who, under interrogation, say extraordinary things in their hypnotic sleep." "I must excuse myself for improvising while speaking as I risk looking like those people, who, when waking up, want to show off a certain intelligence and end up showing their stupidity." "It's possible that you find me stupid." "But in the end I wish to be honest." "A poet is in a way the work-hand whose act engages a self more profound than himself, which he doesn't know too well... mysterious forces which inhabit him and which he knows poorly." "I would go as far as to say:" "a schizophrenic who inhabits us all and of whom almost all grown-ups are ashamed, of whom a part of humanity has shame and of whom only heroes, children and poets aren't ashamed." "They are the intermediaries between these schizophrenics and the exterior and they try to make it livable." "This is exactly what a poet is." "I have been made a character that I am not a character from a legend who is not at all like me, but who protects me in some way because I wouldn't want this character to shake my hand," "but he protects me the same way that Don Juan disguises his servant so that he will get the beatings that were meant for him." "So when I'm beaten up and burned at the public square, it's not me who is beaten up, and it's not me who is burned in the public square." "This inner person who lives in me is a totally timeless character whom I know very poorly." "Thus, I am not responsible for what I am about to say to you." "I am not responsible for my poems." "I am but an intermediary, a medium, a work-hand." "All poets are mediums and work-hands for this mysterious force that inhabits them." "Thus, it is hard for me to speak to you of this." "I am not making myself up." "I do not mean inspiration." "Inspiration does not come to us out of the blue." "Inspiration should be called expiration." "It's something that emerges from our depths, our night and a poet tries to lay out his night upon the table and he sometimes clumsily helps this deeper me who is mostly in a bad mood because he isn't well served." "It's this me who tries to speak to you now, from my mouth, but poorly, since, I repeat, I am not that me" "I am following him without a guide, which means that from our birth to our death we are a stream of others." "We are always another." "I have constructed on the beach of Villefranche-sur-mer a church, perhaps it still exists, perhaps you know it, perhaps it no longer exists." "This church of Villefranche is the work of an intermediary" "I'm coming back to this." "I shut myself inside this church at" "Villefranche for two years," "I painted it like a pharaoh painting his own coffin." "I was, and this is why I can tell you without shame, already dead when I painted this church because I wasn't" "so to speak, quite there." "I was simply a worker climbing ladders... getting onto scaffolding and fixtures." "Making a ceiling poses great difficulties," "I even wonder how Michelangelo managed to do the Sistine Chapel." "He had one candle fixed on his forehead with a wire and this candle must have dripped on his face." "He didn't paint using what is called tempera paint, he painted frescoes, - in other words, he was more of a workman than an artist" "At this moment, a manual laborer is speaking to you" "Evidently it happens to me when I write not exactly being a manual laborer since my head and hands must work at the same time my hand serves the mysterious person that lives in me and that I don't know." "I often take a rest by doing plastic creation which means that I paint walls." "I'm often asked why I paint churches It's because I need walls and don't find them elsewhere except in a building that perhaps no longer exists and that is today the wedding hall of Menton, which isn't a church." "Generally I need these walls to get some rest." "People tend to think that I get tired: no, because my hands are doing the work." "They become intelligent or rather possessed by genius, however one tends to get this word wrong: one thinks that the word genius is not to be used and that genius only belongs to Goethe, to Victor Hugo," "Shakespeare, but no!" "Genius can be the way a woman steps out of her car." "Stendhal, who you surely still know, said:" ""She got out of her carriage with genius"" "Genius is a kind of superior expression of the individual." "We can get back to poetry." "It's possibly the highest expression of the individual." "Thus, it is possible, if you are still reading my books, if you are still reading my poems, that these poems, which today seem very obscure and difficult for my contemporaries and for my compatriots, have for you" "become much more open, that they have opened over time and that you are reading me, if you are still reading me, with greater facility than today, when I seem to be speaking an unknown language." "It is in fact unknown, because it has to be learned." "I don't speak Chinese, but if I wanted to speak it, I would learn." "Many people imagine that you open a book you look at it and then you have read it." "You haven't!" "First you need to learn the mysterious language of poetry." "I think there is a chance that this language will come down to you while other things that may seem more important will not." "We are living in an time obsessed with actuality." "People like immediacy, haste and actuality and poetry is, I repeat, timeless." "This means that it doesn't correspond to what's happening" "It is out-of-the-moment." "The poets have an extraordinary method." "I already told you that poetry is a kind of superior mathematics a supreme language, but at the moment we are experiencing something very dangerous:" "Collective genius." "Science is made of collective genius." "It consists of men who do extraordinary things while the man of real genius, the poet, and the poet in all his forms is alone." "I hope wholeheartedly that by now, I mean in the room where" "I am in the midst of speaking, genius hasn't become something like a shameful and contagious sickness against which you wish to be immunized" "The individual and the individual genius doesn't count anymore and are replaced by a great collective and scientific genius but I should also tell you that science, even though it consists of a number of men who unite in order to achieve marvels like" "the electronic brain, for example." "Well, at the start of it all there is always a lone man who discovers, who invents, and, by the way, is forgotten." "Yesterday I read in a journal that two centuries ago someone had started to note on paper the basis for an electronic brain and that the construction had been started" "Here again we stumble on something very serious which is misunderstood religion." "Many extraordinary inventions have been stopped by religion, like in Portugal, where the first plane, a plane like the ones that we conceive of today, which means that the wingspan is becoming smaller and smaller, but we are still in the wrong, anyway, it was the first airplane" "to leave the ground, before the king and queen, and since it was inconceivable to enter the sky without meeting God and the angels, well, religion put a stop to this discovery, of which Cardinal Tisson told me that the sketches still exist," "the sketches are in Rome, in the Vatican." "They are still with us." "Many extraordinary things have been made centuries ago, but the secrets are lost on us." "For example, it seems that if one constructed the Ark of the Covenant the way it's described in the Bible in acacia tree and negative gold, seraphims on the left and on the right made of negative gold;" "in this way an extraordinary electrical battery was made." "This is the reason why, when the Ark is lifted to Aminadab's house, a cowherd that touched it was struck down: it was a battery." "This was forgotten, lost and then found again." "I told you about youth straddling contradictions, but everyone is straddling contradictions." "For example, discoveries of amazing medicines are made today but this leads to the need to find other medicines to cure these because they are dangerous." "We have what is called penicillin we have antibiotics and sometimes antibiotics and penicillin save the lives of people that couldn't have been saved some time back, like bullfighters." "But we have to find cures that make you recover from these cures which are a sort of poison." "We can see what sort of situation we are in." "War as it has been conceived down to our days, and I use this word in a sense that is outdated" " the military notices it and I don't know how things are now -- but it's quite evident that scientists are taken away, stolen, kidnapped, and that there is a secret diplomacy, a secret war, undertaken by mysterious agents who no longer" "have the style of the Saint Cyréen academy or the WWI soldiers attacking from their trenches." "I sincerely hope that maybe war is gone and that also these mysterious wars called cold wars, which may be even more terrible and dangerous, albeit secret." "Many people think that one can stick to old-fashioned politics, other people look too far ahead and loose all sense of reality." "Today we have as a commander of France a man who looks very far ahead, but he must have men around him who look after immediate concerns." "It's very hard to reconcile the two aims." "It's likely that our politics of today seem completely incomprehensible to you since they already seem that way to us." "The Academy is another phantasm." "I should tell you another thing that is extremely delicate:" "I don't hesitate doing so as I will no longer be here to get bashed." "It seems clear that honor, the thing one calls honor, awards and prize presentations, that those kinds of things" "are penalties that are ..." "I can't find the word..." "Let's say: transcendental." "Transcendental penalties." "Brummell, maybe the name Brummell is still known to you" "He was a famous English dandy." "One day a young man gave him a compliment for his elegance at the Epsom races." "He said, he answered this young man:" ""I must not be too elegant since you are taking notice."" "That's a phrase that could, leaving the trivial field, could be the answer for a young man questioning a poet or scientist." "The really remarkable man should be invisible." "And if he is given a prize, if he is awarded the Legion of Honor, if he is elected to the Academy.." "I am a member of the French Academy, the Belgian Academy, the American Academy, the German Academy" "I am also doctor honoris causa at Oxford even though I hardly speak a word of English." "These are awards that need to be accepted in shame, because they are examples of transcendental penalties, one unveils oneself, allowing a tip of one's ear to be unveiled, which is a mistake." "I will cite a famous musician, I don't know if he's still known." "He was a very great musician who was thought of as a joker but who wasn't that at all." "To avoid the sublime he gave very comical titles to his compositions." "I'm talking about Erik Satie." "About Maurice Ravel, who had refused the Legion of Honor, he said: "What matters is not simply refusing the Legion of Honor, even more you must be undeserving of it." He said of someone else" ""He refuses the Legion of Honor, but all of his work accepts it."" "I hope that all this nonsense, these silly cymbals that people people wear on their evening dresses and that all these frills and flounces have disappeared from art and that now you are a serious and attentive young generation." "Of course, I wish people could keep of me the image of the other of these countless others I have been, the mysterious other that inhabits me." "I don't want to be remembered as the self speaking to you, but as the self who is in the shadows, my shadows and who has been expressing himself without control, because, I repeat:" "control is a dangerous thing and errors, errors are what is the real expression of the individual." "Because if Picasso puts an eye where it shouldn't be, one sees it more clearly than if placed where it should be." "A sofa in a salon is invisible because it's in the right place, but put out on the street, it becomes a sofa once again." "Art has an element of surprise, and this is why I speak about art rather than science, because science in a way is a series of errors that contradict each other and great philosophers are remembered because they are writers gifted with genius." "It's clear that all that Descartes said doesn't add up, yet Descartes remains Descartes because he's a great writer." "In reality, my work shows you who I am better than the image that you see right now before you." "And if my work is worthwhile I want to have written on my gravestone:" ""I'm starting out"." "Translation by Knappen@KG"