My friend Manon doesn’t like Grenoble (even if she has the audacity to pretend otherwise). In her defense, she is of Marseille origin and was forced to settle there when she became a couple. The joke lasted four months. Since then, from Marseille, Manon has been making jokes. She doesn’t understand that I am madly in love with Grenoble. Every time she or someone else talks to me about « cuvette » and of « pollution », my heart leaps with an urge to scream: You absolutely have not understood a bunch of bastards! » (my heart is 90 years old). When the critics come from Parisians, it’s even worse (am I obliged to say here that according to a classification of the newspaper “Le Point », one breathes better in Grenoble than in Paris?)
To be completely honest, I have a cognitive bias that I assume here. I fell in love with Grenoble by falling in love with C. It was his city. At the beginning of our relationship, C. introduced me to mountain walking, hiking, picnics near the snow, vertiginous passes that confront her finitude. I melted for the serenity of this city, which resembled him. When you fall in love, I think you adhere to a general, psychogeographical proposition. With him, who meditates, in his city, who rests me, I was my new self. At the top of Ecotoux, we talked about death. Before, I wouldn’t have been able to. I was that horny girl screaming in the streets of Lille ” life is beautiful “. I couldn’t have fallen in love with Grenoble before. And besides, I had known Grenoble before and absolutely nothing had happened then.
The sequel after the ad
No doubt it is necessary to love a city that it sticks to our state of mind of the moment, that our inner veins and urban arteries enter into synergy, that there is a form of harmony of ecosystems. That’s what it says in a nice text published in “Liberation “, Paul B. Preciado in the grip of a passion for Barcelona:
“It is neither the origin, nor the time spent, nor the residence which determines the possibility of an urban love. The beloved city coincides neither with inheritance, nor with blood, nor with land, nor with success, nor with profit […]. The first stage of urban love is that of the map: it occurs when you feel that the cartography of the city you love is superimposed on any other. To fall in love with a city is to feel, when you travel through it, the material limits between your body and its streets become blurred, when the map becomes anatomy. »
« The second stage is that of writing. continues Preciado and we think of Annie Ernaux who has been writing in Cergy since 1975. A place where she feels in her place, close and far from the attractive-repulsive Paris, a place that liberates her. A “abstract, imaginary city”, Or “there is not the weight of a social history that crushes you”. In “Logbook”, she writes: “On sunny days like today, the edges of the buildings tear the sky, the glass panels radiate. I’ve lived in the Ville Nouvelle for twelve years and I don’t know what it looks like. »
The absence of history and constraint, a relaxation, possibilities, an opening of one’s identity, this is also what Laure Murat, historian, writer and professor at UCLA talks about, in “This is not a city”, his book love at first sight for Los Angeles (a city victim of clichés). ” I liked Los Angeles right away. Literally. Coming out of the plane. The softness of the air, the soft light, this pale golden light which still today relaxes my heart as soon as I leave the airport ” she says. And even : ” I love Los Angeles because it’s the opposite of Paris, the opposite of history, the opposite of constraint. »
Loving a city would therefore also mean feeling free there. And whatelse ?
And you, which city are you in love with? And what does that say about you? Write to me at rgreusard@rue89.com
#declaration #love #Grenoble
