I had to conjure up the accomplished fact of a sedentary destiny. So I went everywhere boats go, on all seas and every ocean; I even rubbed shoulders with the extreme latitudes of the poles. I crossed straits, rounded all the capes of the earth, and circumnavigated it from east to west. I neglected nothing, not even the whimsical itineraries of Blaise Cendrars; and it was in the wake of his mischievous and recomposed memory that the truth he sought in travel appeared to me. Henry Miller, in his unwavering admiration for the poet, said he found what he hadn't come looking for: a literary justification for his personal designs. On seas he never crossed, I drew inspiration from his roadmaps to write my journal, in the great shadow he left behind like a negligent adventurer. Generous with his experiences and not the least bit conceited about his genius. His first impressions were written like a logbook just a hundred years ago, on the black and blue waters of the North Atlantic as he was heading for Brazil. The ocean I cross, meanwhile, has the colors of warm seas and the clouds reflecting them, laden with tropical humidity.

His navigation journal recounts his life as a passenger on the Formose, at peace, distracted from all his turmoils, as if in parentheses. Being at sea washes away his identity, all that obsesses and torments him. He forges a new beginning, a reason to exist far from his earthly roots and origin, and the homebound blood of his ancestors. He has just found a stage name that represents him. Frédéric Louis Sauser died somewhere beyond the shores of the world, far from the image he then had of himself. Like a soul wandering among seabirds, he would follow the ships without ever settling on them. Freshly born from the ashes of his lineage, Cendrars definitively embarked and continued his journey, convinced of ignoring the destination, let alone the end; only the course mattered, even if he hesitated to commit. His still approximate roadmaps are the memory of a poet destined to fulfill himself. The journey he undertook in 1924 aboard the Formose was an initiation.

The crossing I am currently undertaking on the Queen Elizabeth is its distant echo: the approximate resonance. Deference kept towards the wanderer and the magnificent mystifier. Once I took to the sea, it was forever, at least for long wanderings; with the secret ambition of getting becalmed there. For improbable crossings beyond the horizon, a thousand miles from the world claimed to be true to disqualify poets; this narrow universe that left me time to understand that I do not belong to it and that I abandon with each departure, with each of my embarkations for Cythera. Since I have been of age to travel, to write, and to forge reasons for it, temptations have added to experiences. Many books have emerged from this vocation. I have learned the patience of one preparing to depart and the courage boasted by those returning to the home port, promising to weigh anchor again. The stubborn Sisyphus must have been a sailor. Cendras and I do not share the same philosophy of travel. When sailing, everything is forgotten; nothing matters but the eternity of the moment. Writers have agreed: it is vain to chase one's shadow to redefine its meaning; one cannot trace its course. The oceans erase the memory, all questioning of the past, all anxiety about tomorrow. One does not assert oneself when going to sea, one is reborn from oneself; for in this unstable universe where nothing is true for long, everything is possible. Imaginations come to life, strengthen, and redefine themselves. Disappearing between sky and sea, that is the challenge, the desperate wager. The rule defined by the roll of the dice. To be in perpetual weightlessness and rebuild oneself. To consider what remains of the emerged world, already almost abolished, ghost lands with no more memory and no destiny. I never make a stopover and do not go ashore when the ship is docked. Poetry is a long-haul navigation, and I hold the helm. Wandering with Blaise Cendrars is nevertheless a privilege, a good fortune; it is accepting to be in unstable equilibrium, to navigate outside the maritime routes far from the beacons inscribed on maps since the time of portolans. It is to mourn the worst and the best of oneself, what one has been to entrust oneself to the four winds of adventure; it is to be reborn and have no more shadow. It is with this spirit and determination that I take to the sea each time as if it were the last time. To be fairly certain of achieving it, one must create a chimerical universe, a useful lie; slip into one's story whose setting and scenario are written and drawn with a steady hand and an unblemished line. Settle into a chosen reality. Enter the photograph, the snapshot taken of oneself and susceptible to illusions. To open a vast breach and settle there.

Blaise! Your poetic wanderings have supplanted the geography of your frantic escape: a few long-haul navigations were enough to inoculate you with the sense of departure never postponed to the calends. With the ultimate goal of returning, to be another to satisfy your wish to complete the journey, to finish your lap of honor. You had a route to trace on a map, a coda to place on the symphony of your existence. To forever merge with the sea would have been a desecration, a deviation in the quest for your existential imagination. If you traveled, it was to return to land one day as one catches one's breath after an exhilarating race, as one seizes one's chance in the light of an uncertain victory. Once one has approached one's lifeline to never let go. Your dream was within you. It was vain to expect more. You could then anchor without remorse and without regret. It was the time of travel and the poet: that of revelation, the conclusion of an impulse necessary for your survival; the quest for the gene missing from your destiny, from your birth. You could now fill the trunk that followed you in your wanderings. The sea was a beginning for you, while it will be my ultimate end; the swan song you did not need. And never mind if I am wrong about the future: what I leave behind will not be lost. The past is archived. While you were searching for a reason to exist, somewhere, anywhere but on land, I will continue to take the sea as a witness, as one enters closure, religion, at the whim of the seven seas and the four winds. I will take to the open sea indefinitely, fully aware of the storms awaiting me, and I will heave to whenever necessary, until the clouds and depressions blocking my path are exhausted. At sea, the journey is a profane mass, the idealized space of an eternity in light of my definition of happiness; of the dream to which I associate my destiny. It is not a resignation, it is not an abandonment; just a letting go. A gradual slide towards freedom on a ship without a flag and oceans without belonging. The only field of possibilities in my eyes, to which I can henceforth belong. Wandering without expecting anything but the predestination of the ghost ship on which I will eventually embark, whose name and destination will never be known. And whose story will be suspect to preserve its mystery; but only in the eyes of the earth's lost. I do not have the anxious mind of most men; I believe that the great emptiness of the universe is a form of abnegation that has always suited me and that the paradoxical state of absence is a promising definition of a return to the primordial sea. That is why I accept being disinherited from the world. In full settlement of all land and my life.

Blaise Cendrars
dipped his pen into existence like an inkwell.
That's how he lived, 
always on one foot, against the grain of the beaten paths. 
To do this, 
he strove to distort the world 
to make it accessible to his existential quest for the zero point of writing. 
He won his bet, 
which was to impose his double on Frédéric Louis Sauser. 
Thus, as soon as he was no longer able to travel 
or move physically, 
he understood the measure of the writer's subsidiarity over the traveler 
and the man of action. 
With this acknowledgment, 
once everything was consumed he consented to the return to grace 
of who he was,
remaining in the background.