Very clever who, today, could conjecture on the return to grace of a flamboyant spring in March 2025. On the 29th precisely, at the end of a divine solar eclipse implored for the light to finally return. As opposed to an endless night, a long immersion in a tunnel built under a mountain of uncertainties, the nauseating smells of jerky and devastating political games. The earthquake of dissolution is taking its toll and our country is buckling under the pressure exerted by the urgency of a decision whose devastating effects will shake our country for months. Indeed, the only guarantee granted by Emmanuel Macron’s insidious maneuver is a disorder, a “doglikeness” in the functioning of our institutions, the about-face of a people whose submission he has vainly plotted. The ride seized up. His little horses advancing on the carpet of his Jupiterian design will not reach the central box but will return towards the start, in the stable deserted by the colts and all the cracks. The President is shaky, still young, and does not intend to give up his throne as King Lear might have envisaged to share his inheritance. But what to bequeath and to whom his estate is burdened with debts, liabilities and even more future. This immediate future that no one can really write except by scribbling its unpredictability, by transcribing dark hypotheses supported by deep divisions, the desire to free scruples, without masks, without nuances, without restraints. “A moment of life resembling an eclipse, where neither hope nor despair has any weight”*, where shadow and light mingle in a diffuse torment, an unconscious osmosis.
Macaques, our peaceful cousins
Should we forget the shimmer of our summer joys, the Tour de France, the Paris Olympics, the ferias, the parties, the festivals and the jousts, our vacations, a renewed horizon in a gaze fixed on the distance of an ocean, a mountain, a same gaze fixed on others. May we find ourselves in a common destiny appeased by the desire to live well together. A necessity in the making to apprehend challenges of a completely different kind, major, minimized by the immediacy of everyday life. The stigmata of global warming mark our attitudes, our behaviors a little more each day, foreshadow constraints to be taken into consideration, to be faced in solidarity and, from now on, in the very short term. Peoples are already organizing themselves to plan their survival, animals, for their part, have not waited to anticipate in spaces redesigned for sharing. The rhesus macaques of Puerto Rico have thus modified their social behaviors to tolerate promiscuity under the rarefied shade of their environment. This unusual tolerance has significantly reduced the alarming mortality rate of the species, which is nevertheless known for its aggressive wanderings. The choice to live in an appropriate interaction has proven beneficial. Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest cousins (98% common DNA). They delouse each other to ease tensions and adapt wisely to their degraded environments. On March 29, 2025, like us, they will suffer the eclipse before appreciating a new sun, huddled in the shadows to preserve the wounds.
Georges Chabrier
*Borrowed from Hafid Aggoune
