In February 2013 I begin rereading the Iliad. I’m looking to encounter Ajax, the one who loses his immense glory a certain evening. The Iliad was waiting for me. Its atrocious delights. Everyone is going to die. Everyone is expecting to die. One cannot live without dying. One avoids dying only by suspending life beneath one's tent. I can no longer stop reading the Iliad: it's the same scenario chant after chant, they fight, they kill, they die, they are going to die they present themselves at the contest, they state their names, genealogies, what beautiful characters they will have been, they kill each other in song, I wish that it would never end, the song, the blood, the flood of bodies, the anger of the Scamander who has had E-nough E-nough of being full of cadavers I feel it personally, what is this story of overdying, this agony whose end is known and whose length in time and space is unknown.

My mother has been ready for the last act since the year 2000 and all armour-plated with bandages for a year, no one is ignorant of who is going to win what who is going to lose what, who, living now extends beyond

And during this time Mandela lying like Maman in a Medicalisedbed wanders motionless the borderless shores

Categories of modern suffering take shape, rise up before our thoughts, in a haze their anxious silhouettes are the Nearby Shades, those representing Maman and Mandela as alreadydead stilliving. The majority of the populations parade before the layer of pioneers in a state of respectful uneasiness. One doesn't know what they are thinking. One cannot interrogate them. They are themselves every day in a new state whose laws they do not know. Researchers specialised in the study of these exceptional longevities are in training, they have no model, they advance by hypotheses and errors into these zones that are only beginning to reveal their outlines. The scouts are themselves mistaken about their own fate. Nobody knows anything. The question of ‘knowledge’ is a major problem. Everyone senses that it is a veritable pharmakon: a psychic substance that is both desirable and dreadful which at any moment can prove to be poison itself.