- L'homme sur le banc: Anyway, we're all sheep. We all eat at set hours line up to use the can at set hours, we all watch the boob tube. In the past we'd make a public protest of it, at least. But nowadays, slavey's par for the course. We've always been slaves, you'll tell me. But to submit to this extent! We even fuck at set hours. Think for a moment of those who, in a few years' time, will have kids of their own and as a result will have new constraints to deal with.
- Greg: It all begins with hysteria. Conversion hysteria.In the late 1800s certain patients suffered from psychic disorders like blindness and paralysis but not organic injuries. They were thought to be bluffing. But if you stick a pin into a paralyzed hysteric's leg, he feels nothing, no pain. At the time Freud began to work with a doctor named Breuer who took hysteria very seriously. By using hypnosis,he managed to return to the patient's past and discovered one or more traumatic events that caused the symptoms. In fact it's an idea a violent but forbidden desire that is so repressed it becomes totally unconscious. Then it resurfaces, but converted into a physical symptom. For example a young woman at her father's sickbed. She tends to him. An incestuous desire appears in her. She thinks Not another step in that direction. So the desire and the thought that comes with it are repressed. But the thing is, it resurfaces in physical form. Here, as a paralysis. To put it simply she can no longer walk. Or in the case of certain neurotics the appearance of phobias or obsessions.
- Greg: It's amazing to see just how much our unconscious expresses itself in our daily lives. Through our faulty acts, our Freudian slips. And the projections we make in life. Everything has meaning. The unconscious speaks all the time. It's strange how our unconscious speaks by itself. After all, we usually speak to our entourage consciously, without really being heard. We always talk to ourselves.
- L'homme sur le banc: Look at that poster. Attractive. It was designed to be. Think a little.Panties are meant to protect two orifices. Or to protect us from these two orifices. Brassieres, as you know, are designed to provide support. These two pieces of fabric, their first mission accomplished, are then turned into tools of charm. So they come at a high price, probably because we are all fetishists.
- L'homme sur le banc: Relax, young lady, I'm going. But in any case, whatever you do, what sky can fall on your heads?
- Sandrine: Wouldn't it be really interesting to study the body? To know how and why a thought, a desire turns into pain or paralysis?
- L'homme sur le banc: You know I just realized something really odd. Like you, I observe people and the world around me. All that exists. If I touch someone a woman, you for instance, she'll react. She may slap me. Or be glad about it. But in fact what are you if not a void? Did that shock you?
- Sandrine: You didn't feel anything since I'm a void.
- L'homme sur le banc: What I see. People, trees, that tall building over there.I realise with difficulty, that everything, including the sense of space, and time and distance.All that is entirely in my head. What's more, they're images first seen upside down, then set right by reflex in my mind. In other words I see you upside down. Matter is made up of atoms. Atoms made up of a nucleus and electrons that vibrate around it. But the distance between the nucleus and these electrons is more than a thousand times greater than their dimension. Observe those trees. They look like a compact mass. If you get closer, you realise that void is greater than matter.
- L'homme sur le banc: You see they're exactly the same signs, but you read them in two different ways. What does that prove? That the way you see things and beings is predigested. Unconsciously oriented by acquired knowledge, which can also conceal certain truths. You might tell me, What is truth?
- La mère de Sandrine: What got into you to touch yourself in the next room after making love with him?
- Sandrine: I wasn't satisfied, that's all. It could have excited him. Hardly.
- La mère de Sandrine: That's something you should only do to avoid seeing other men. And discreetly.
- La mère de Sandrine: We all have moments of freedom. Often privately. Meaning, in secret. We all have our secret lives. Everyone knows it, everyone pretends not to, and that's fine.
- La mère de Sandrine: Usually, you're in love first, and all that changes later. For you it's the opposite. There are more than love matches. That's a good thing. Sure, society puts you in a cage. But that's how it is. So choose the most comfortable cage you can.
- Sandrine: Your respectable straitjacket is not for me.
- La mère de Sandrine: Don't get on your high horse. It's hard not living like other people. You'll learn that at your expense.
- Greg: Are you a masochist? Then why be obedient all the time?
- Mina: For the eroticism and the pleasure. It's practical. But I also find a kind of liberation in it. Freedom isn't something very easy to live with. Obedience led me to something different, more profound.To stop thinking. To stop thinking is to be free of pain. Nuns, yogis. They gave me simple advice.Crush my ego. I obeyed. Without asking myself questions. By not thinking, my inner defences fell. So, without even wanting to, I could find previously hidden realities inside myself. In fact, my pain was linked to a profound refusal to accept myself. So the pain slowly diminished. I gradually felt almost totally free. I also began to really know my body, and to use it including as an object of pleasure. I stopped thinking. My constant anxiety disappeared.
- L'homme sur le banc: I love to watch the stars. It's one of those simple things that gives me a small idea of infinity, along with some grandiose poetry at the same time. Did you know the Earth revolves around the sun at 110,000 km an hour? And as the entire solar system revolves at 800,000 km an hour around the centre of the Milky Way, we are now moving one million km an hour through space without realizing it. If the stars all exploded now, we'd see the first burst in four and a half years, and the others gradually over billions of years, in the time it takes the images to reach us. If our sun disintegrated, we'd have to wait eight minutes before seeing it. You think we're alone in the universe? But do you realise, we're the only living beings in our solar system. But the other sun closest to us is four and a half light years away, or more simply, four thousand million billion kilometers. At the speed of 50 km a second, it's the speed of our space probes. It would take us at best 25,000 years to reach the closest possibly inhabited planet. Maybe there are secret doors that allow us to cross space and time in a flash.
- L'homme sur le banc: God loves those who dare.
- Sandrine: I don't believe in God.
- L'homme sur le banc: Neither do I. But sometimes it's useful to find a word to talk about certain things we don't know.
- L'homme sur le banc: The sound of my shout spreads at 360 metres a second along the boulevard. Supposing you could travel faster than the sound. You shall overtake it and hear it again. On the other hand had you started before it, at this same speed, at 400 metres a second the shout wouldn't overtake you and you wouldn't hear a thing. You understand? During the last century, physicists all thought the same was true of light. Not at all. You can't catch light. You can't pass light. It's an absolute. Einstein came up with a rather disturbing explanatory model.According to this model, the time we live the speed we move! at, the space we occupy are relative to our speed. Suppose we have the same watch, set in the same way. You travel by plane, I stay here. Your watch goes less fast because the time each of us lives in is different. Obviously, the difference is minute. So minute we can't detect it. But if I now flew in a rocket at 990% of the speed of light and came back to Earth a day later, you will have lived 18 years, and me, 24 hours. The space I occupy, during that time, would become very small, but my mass, let's say my body, would be harder to pull than a thousand freight trains. Taking this theory to its conclusion, we come to think that at the beginning, the universe was just a quantity of matter no bigger than a ping-pong ball which exploded 10 to 20 billion years ago. Let's say 14, more likely. It took 4 billion years for the Milky Way, our galaxy, to appear. 10 billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Our Earth dates back 4.5 billion years. In the beginning, we could have touched the Moon with our hand. The Earth cooled off but it took one or two billion years to create the atmosphere, then water. Reptiles date from two or three billion years. Man, probably a million. Imagine that all this time is represented by a 24-hour day. The Stone Age would begin at five minutes to midnight, virtually at the end of the 24 hours. The birth of Christ at one minute to midnight. Most surprising of all, we are here, we human beings, tiny bubbles lost in the immensity, and we have the capacity to understand all that. Because the miracle is that all is logic. If there is a god, he may not be a softie, but he's certainly a very good mathematician.
- Sandrine: I thought you didn't believe in anything.
- L'homme sur le banc: I don't believe in a god conceivable to the human mind that's all. Even that I have doubts about.
- L'homme sur le banc: What is life, what is pleasure, what is love? Look at this landscape. What does it inspire in you?
- Sandrine: A feeling of calm and harmony.
- L'homme sur le banc: As it does for me. But, and you know this, it's first of all emptiness, yet at the same time filled with plants and insects, and thousands of animals that devour each other to survive. The plants grow thanks to the light, thanks to the sun. But the balance, the harmony depends on never-ending savagery and murder. Maybe we're nothing more than silly accidents in the universe. Or else fallen angels.
- Sandrine: Fallen from what?
- L'homme sur le banc: I don't know.