Wall of water
Camouflage
Noise in the underbrush

Can you ever be sure of anything? Everyone uses lies to help the present of the future slide into the past, it’s a kind of aid, the way pills are coated to slide down our sore oesophagus. Are you perhaps only sure of yourself? Have you never deceived in order to achieve something? Have you never inflated or toned down a recollection in order to better seduce or outrage? Who do we really still believe, if not the next person to stab you in the back?
Things are so obtuse and ordinary, so often unavoidable, that the temptation to kill monotony with sweeping light effects or sudden bursts of illumination is incessant. In November 1986, during an era of excessive media coverage, Georges Besse was assassinated in France. Action Directe coolly carried out the deed, brandishing the force of a judgment without appeal, the physical extension of a decision by extreme leftists against Renault’s director. Leftist? Renault? Are you sure? Let’s not forget that Renault’s boss in ‘86 had been employed by the “Commisariat a l’Energie Atomique” (Atomic Energy Commission) since the fifties, and later, in the mid-seventies, he became president of “La Compagnie Generale des Matieres Nucleaires” (General Company of Nuclear Resources). It should also not be forgotten that a deal had been struck to supply Iran with enriched uranium and that the deal in question remained unfulfilled for a long time… too long by Khomeiny’s standards. Action Directe was closely related to certain splinter groups of the Lebanese revolutionary militia, thus the connection was made and the covert operation began. While the press was concentrating on the transgression of the radical left and on the hostage situation in Beirut, the truth was revealed: governments were exchanging meticulous computations between themselves, regarding a few grams of enriched uranium that were or were not supplied. The death of Besse was nothing but Teheran’s contrived way of putting on the pressure. We should also remember a certain Kissinger who became a master in the art of manipulating hatred… we can thank him for Pinochet, among others. Apparently, time makes us more rational and vigilant. We supplement our permanent filters with that awareness, particularly since the knowledge of deceit is glorified in successful fictional TV series. But deception allows for suspicion and it too becomes more complex, covering up its past in diffuse layers… churning out “interested parties” that appear out of nowhere… scapegoats. The infamous State? This ideal malefactor who amasses falsely accused “dubious politics”. But what delinquent are we talking about? Are we talking about some auto-reproductive machine that observes officials passing by every 15 years or so? Or maybe of some conspiring protocol by the temporarily enlightened? By pretending to be the Great Sorcerer, some well-placed cretins have managed to make the masses think that the problem lies even higher up. “When the wise man points to the moon, the idiot watches his finger” goes the adage. For once, the finger is the guilty party and the entire world watches the moon in terror. And when a politician isn’t obviously fraudulent, we find ourselves facing a “the
re must be something fishy behind this” or a “too good for his own good, must be stupid”. Meat, snuff movies, Mitterand’s canines, Michael’s face, Cher’s ribs, boy and girl bands, the caves of Lascaut, the Chernobyl cloud, Milli Vanilli, the botched coup in Venezuela, Boronali revealed by Pierre Girieud at the “Salon des Independants”, the Supreme Soviet, authors paying ghost-writers to produce copy, colonization, why Pepsi here and Coke there, amnesties, chastity, candor, forgiveness, the sheep… our good old sheep don’t seem natural anymore, they seem more akin to laboratory experiments, it’s all a ploy to cover up the bona fide truth.
Under the white blouses or tailored suits, these are the people who fidget about with of our reality, who reduce us to nothing more than DNA, alternating electrical fields and hydrodynamic run-offs built around materialized aggregates passing through fiber-optic cable. Doesn’t that sound poetic? While the traumatically deformed test subjects, stored in big glass bowls stacked on metal shelving units, stare at us through eyes jaundiced by formaldehyde. But is it all bad news? There are also marvels of science, like the slab of fish growing in containers full of protein, anticipating a time when mass animal slaughter will end. But what do you expect to come from this enormous masquerade, if not defiance? There are those who decode, or at least try to, but there is also the mass rendered brainless by the alienating old songs, sedated by the TV IV and vanilla scented promises. The mass whose judgment has been perverted by lipstick-red smiles, grass green lettuce and rosy pink thighs. The mass that instinctually knows it is being ridiculed on a grand scale, but also knows it won’t really discover that until ten or twenty years down the line. How can they be blamed for mixing it all up into a corrosive sludge along with Roswell, elections, scoops, GMO’s, counterfeit notes, coloring agents, the International Monetary Fund, Scientology, Mandarom, bearded ladies and the Loch Ness monster? And what does it matter if Nessie turns out to be nothing but a broiling and smoldering volcanic fault line that overturns small boats in its vortex… Edinburgh’s tourism agencies continue to suggest “scary” tours and sightseers hurry to sign up. The scientific explanation caused considerably fewer waves than the persistence of the legend… that should explain a lot about the human being’s relationship with the truth. We evolve in a keep net where those who have something to hide invent ten different versions of the facts to make sure that the truth doesn’t seem as credible as the lie, or where those who observe a simple truth have to invent a conspiracy or plot to assure themselves of their seemingly lucid impressions. And now, look around you. Who is lying to you?

Nicolas Deckmyn