Notes
It is a text written in cafés and hotel rooms, a sort of travel notebook without subjective trajectory and without linearity. A crossing at treetop height, the skin scraped against asphalt and beaten earth. On the lookout for the rumble of an engine, a voice, an earthquake or a vein that throbs, one presses an ear to the metal of the tracks and listens to the disquiet of the present.
The idea began to germinate in 2017, but it was in March 2018, while I was travelling by scooter between Sóc Trăng and the island of Phú Quốc, in Vietnam, that two concrete images struck me full in the face. First, that of a man on his old tired scooter, his feet in bad shape in his flip-flops, hauling behind him a stack of crates of beer bottles. Then, that of a very square truck, noisy, hauling a load of gas cylinders. Banal images in Southeast Asia. And yet I felt that it was that. Felt that I had to find in writing something that belongs to these visions: to carry the weight of things, to transport matter by the means of the sentence.
From the first pieces of text, drafted six months later, I am after a language turned toward the outside, taken from the concreteness of the world. Journey after journey, a cloud of matter takes shape: dust, rubber, gas and oils, smoke, steam and soot, leathers and skins, asphalt, beaten earth, wood, plastic, gasoline and diesel oil, stone and tar, beer, rain, flesh, clamminess, resin… Of course there is a travelling subjectivity, an I that crosses territories, but what seeks to take on a face, I believe, is above all a sort of one – the French on, in the sense of homme: the share of humanity that acts things when one undergoes them. This human exteriority is history, characters and narratives. It is also, in its appearing, monstrosity.
How, by rubbing against the outside, to go beyond description and attain to fable? How to extract a share of the imaginary from what streams by, while avoiding flying off too fast into the notions of “encounter,” of “becoming” or of “otherness,” which have become the mantras of travel literature? As soon as one begins to come loose from the sensible crust of experience – and it happens, I admit, in those moments when self and other become the main characters of the narrative –, as soon as one sees the ground drawing away, one turns attention back to sensation. One seeks in matter what exalts it and transforms it into gold. One exaggerates the outside until the drama moves there, into the knocking of machines, the coldness of plank walls or the sweat of bodies that dance.
One will recognize in this text motifs from Ecuador, from Thailand, from Myanmar, from Indonesia, from Cambodia, etc.: colours, place names, words in foreign languages, garments, tattoos, dishes, fruits, reliefs and landscapes that can stir the feeling of elsewhere. But it is an elsewhere streaked with proximities. From one country to another, one finds the same hardnesses, the same shocks, the same drunkennesses. One seeks to unveil the material stratum that runs through and draws together the diverse outward forms. Iron is iron wherever it is. Besides, one will also travel in Quebec and Ontario. “It could be anywhere,” wrote Maude Smith Gagnon in Un drap. Une place1.
One moves on foot, by plane, by train, by bus, by car, by motorbike, by tuk-tuk. One is in an airport, on the road, in the street, in a bar, under an interchange, in a bus station. One is confronted with banality. But things are banal only in appearance. As soon as one breaks down their movements and their contents, they come alive, become powers, figures, above all when one turns on them a catastrophized gaze – the gaze of our era in climate crisis. Catastrophized and near delirious: it takes a touch of paranoia (heightened by the solitude of travel) to amplify the shocks, the hostilities, the minuscule combats that take place between things and between bodies.
Bangkok, February 2025
From the outset, I conceived Earth Terminal as an unfinishable work, non-linear and unbordered. If one really wishes, one can reconstitute the journeys or restore the chronology, but it would make no sense. Each fragment was written with this notion of non-linearity in mind, knowing that it might appear at any point of the reading path: as incipit, at the end, or anywhere in the middle. Thus each text forms a small universe all on its own and at the same time presents, like a neuron bristling with dendrites, branches that allow it to be linked to other micro-universes. Here, it is the keywords tied to matter that play the part of synapses: it is by following these veins that one travels between the texts, carting from one to the other impressions and substances of the world.
In 2019, I built a first web version on my old Wix site, with a very basic architecture (keyword cloud, multiple-choice navigation). I imagined pursuing my journeys and the work site for years, even decades. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. I still added two fragments during the lull of summer 2020, but afterwards I barely travelled anymore. I did the very opposite: I built a house. When at last I could return to nomadic life in 2024, I had trouble taking up the work site again. There is thus a hiatus of more than five years in Earth Terminal. It was only in May 2026, in Malé, in the Maldives, that the gears bit again. I don’t know if I will manage to recover the pre-pandemic rhythm, but I know now that I can – that I must – go on.
I thank from the bottom of my heart Arnaud Maïsetti, who revised with me the texts preceding the hiatus.
Thanks to the advances of artificial intelligence, I have just rebuilt, this September of 2026, the Earth Terminal site by means of Claude Code (Opus 5.5). The site now resembles what I had in mind at the origin. I have planned a dynamic mechanism: when new texts are added, the keywords and other elements will be updated; new paths will become possible. Earth Terminal is reborn as I had imagined it: as an expanding mass of matter conceived, written and published outside the bookish universe.
Although I use Claude to program the site, I should specify that all the texts are written by hand – a useful clarification, perhaps, in this month when the literary world has discovered the hard way the writing capacities of AIs.
Nakhon Ratchasima, September 2026
On this translation. The texts of Earth Terminal are written in French. This English version was made in November 2026 with Claude (Anthropic), at the author’s request: a foreignizing translation, which keeps the strangeness, the swerves and the gaps of the source rather than smoothing them out. The dialogues in Spanish stay in Spanish. In the Andes, terminal terrestre is what the bus station is called; in French, the words also say the terminal phase of the Earth.