Prochaine Station: Aristide Briand

I have an entire city living, breathing, singing, laughing inside my head.

I have an entire city weeping, shouting, dreaming, dancing inside my head.

How does one share an experience that begins with the very impossibility of its narration? An experience that continuously collapses in on itself because it defies all logic and structure, for it stems from the very act of having forgotten it. An experience that can only be brought to the plane of coherence by reckoning with its very incoherences.

Elaborating on the Proustian concept of mémoire involontaire, Cathy Caruth calls such experiences 'impossible' pasts—impossible because they were never fully integrated into consciousness when they first happened. Yet paradoxically, it is precisely their inaccessible and unspeakable nature that makes them possible in the mind of the one possessed by them. 

It is rather ruthless and unforgiving, this dangerous game of memory. It tests the limits of language, making the simple act of utterance a living nightmare.

How does one speak the unspeakable?

In October 2024, I moved to the city of Strasbourg in France. What was supposed to be the fulfilment of a childhood dream quickly turned into my worst nightmare as I battled with severe physical and mental health challenges. I spent most of my time being transferred from one emergency room to another, the entire world closing in on me as I lay motionless and breathless for hours in my bed, staring out the window of my small 9m2 room. While Strasbourg was busy preparing to welcome the world for its Christmas festivities with glühwein, Alsatian carols, and bowls of steaming spätzle, I was making SOS calls, taking the same trams to the same hospitals, and listening to the sound of my footsteps on the snow-covered streets leading back to my hostel which stood right opposite the tram station Aristide Briand.

After making the hard decision of returning to India, Strasbourg has continued to live within me—its tram  announcements, carousels, Christmas markets, and church bells all playing out like a tune I can't get out of my head. This persistent return of Strasbourg's soundscape brings to mind Theodor Reik who called this phenomenon of 'a tune stuck in the head' an "ear worm" that follows him everywhere— a “haunting melody" powerful enough to be re-experienced across time and space.

All the sounds that surrounded me there and which I didn't 'register' at the time somehow entered into my being and have become, since my return, louder than they ever were. As Pierre Schaeffer puts it, sound has the capacity to penetrate bodies, to tune bodies to places and times. Or, following Brandon LaBelle, ‘sound binds and unhinges, harmonises and traumatises; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating’.

Prochaine Station: Aristide Briand (Next Station: Aristide Briand) is deeply personal short film that
attempts to make audible both the silence and the cacophony that otherwise consume me and to sonically chart out the 'impossible' geographies of trauma itself.

At the beginning of this note, I had started out by wondering—how does one speak about the unspeakable? It is a question that entraps me every time I'm asked to give health updates to my loved ones.

Taking this question even further, if speech itself becomes restricted in the case of trauma, how does the other bear witness to this suffering? How does one listen to what is impossible? How does one listen to the pain of others?  
The film becomes, I hope, an answer or a glimpse into 'what really goes inside my head'.  

I was also thinking of one of my favourite poems, ‘Travel Elegy’ by Wisława Szymborska while working on the film. It offers me the words I do not have, and it is for this reason that I wish it be read alongside my work.