I am born in Caen in 1952. After a peaceful childhood in a small Normandy village of 300 inhabitants, I spend a few years on the Channel coast in Granville, where, at the age of 13, a serious accident, in which the police and the French army play a dirty game, will influence the rest of my adolescence and probably my life.
After three months in hospital and recovering from the accident, I return to Caen to finish my schooling. I let myself be inspired by Dada and the Surrealists, Henry Miller and Boris Vian, the films of Fellini and Pasolini, the magazine ACTUEL, Lao Tse, Yin and Yan, the counter-culture of the Beat Generation and, of course, Artaud and the revolt of May ’68. At the end of the ’60s, I follow the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and Siddharta and quit everything to live a few years “on the road” through Europe and some Muslim countries in Asia Minor (see On Buddha’s Head). I am musically accompanied by Frank Zappa, Gong, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and Sun Ra at the Amougies festival, and by Hendrix, the Doors, Leonard Cohen, Donovan and Richie Havens, who closed the festival with the sounds of Freedom at the Isle of Wight festival, then by Pink Floyd at the Zenith in Caen. During these years, I experiment with hashish, LSD, opium and amphetamines, but avoid heroin after witnessing, powerless, the destruction of many young lives by H.
When I returned from Asia in 1972, I left France to escape military service and found asylum in Germany, where I first had to survive, not only by learning to master the German language, but also by immersing myself in German culture and putting down roots, as I saw little chance of returning to France any time soon without risking prison. Switzerland, the country where I lived for a while and where my best friend Pierre, who travelled with me in Asia, still lives, was closed to me because of an entry ban (see On Buddha’s Head). All that remained was for me to gain a foothold in this Germanic world that I had already appreciated on my previous European peregrinations.
It was here, in the social-democratic Ruhr region, that I started my family, became involved in the German pacifist and third-worldist movement and applied for political asylum, which was of course rejected by the German authorities. I narrowly escaped extradition and struggled to support my family, which had meanwhile grown with the birth of two beautiful sons. During this period, life and its obligations naturally took over and I wrote less and less. I even partially lost the use of the French language.
A few years ago, I went back to all the texts I had carefully preserved over the years. I reworked them, sometimes in French, sometimes in German, sometimes in strange linguistic roundabouts. I published my first book in French: “ Sur la tête de Buddha ‘ in 2022, and its twin ’Auf Buddhas Kopf ” a year later. The idea of writing “Hommage à Antonin Artaud et à la Beat Generation”, my second book, came directly to me after re-reading the texts and poems I’d jotted down in a school notebook. I then set about researching Artaud the Momo and the other seers and visionaries.
My current projects:
The German version of “ Hommage à Antonin Artaud et à la Beat Generation ”, which should not be a simple translation, but consider German beats as well as their East German equivalents. Another book project that I’ve been dragging on for over a year and which is progressing very slowly: “ Bamiyan, la vallée divine ”, the story of a mythical valley in the heart of Afghanistan, traversed by Alexander of Macedonia, the Greco-Buddhist kings and the artists of Gandhara, before being destroyed by Genghis Khan and forgotten for several centuries before the Taliban finished the work of the Mongol emperors and pulverized the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.