All is syphilis

Pathologic is definitely haunting me with its tall and sickly grass, its autumnal mist that one guesses is full of smoke from chimneys and various industrial, animal or other smells, and with its red brick houses, typical of the end of the 19th century, which are the setting in which I grew up.

The city where I grew up is marked by the industry of the 19th century, with its nearby mines and its barons of the iron and steel industry (de Wendel) or of the earthenware industry (de Geiger), as well as by the German presence after the 1870 war. Streets and entire districts were built by the Prussians, with their endless red brick walls, increasingly leprous and eaten up by vegetation since my childhood, because they were left abandoned. In fact they are even destroyed more and more often, to be replaced by superb pale grey cubes, probably eco-responsible, and all this forces me to go out less and less, and to take refuge in my photo albums, my memories, or in video games which quite involuntarily provide me with a satisfying hallucination.

This atmosphere of decrepitude already fascinated me as a teenager, and I was not the only one. At the time, there were several abandoned houses in my town, and even a disused swimming pool. We used to hang out there on summer afternoons, smoking our first cigarettes and drinking our first beers. I loved the atmosphere of the abandoned locker rooms, the hiding places, the filth, the broken glass on the floor. I remember a game of Call of Cthulhu with two friends in the basement of the pool. We were scared to death but didn't dare admit it to each other.

The houses in this game invariably remind me of the abandoned mansion I've written about here, which we called "the SESA" (after the factory next door to which it belonged). It stood alone in the middle of an overgrown park, a real jungle, which was part of a barracks and factory district built by the Germans after the 1870 war; it was also where my college was located. We hung out there from time to time, with my teenage bum band, but I didn't go in there as often as my friends. The house terrified me. Walking past it at night, I just couldn't look at it. There was something authentically evil about it that continues, 25 years later, to haunt me in my dreams.

Walking through Pathologic is like walking through a city made entirely of "SESA". I don't see it as a "video game" at all. It is a technical device that allows me to walk in my own fantasies, without having to make any effort of imagination, but on the contrary, being able to abandon myself completely to the pure fascination of these totally personal, totally intimate settings. Walking (finally...) in a universe that is only repetition of the same dead things, empty of meaning and of any future. It's neither the world, nor the afterlife, nor life, nor death, nor the afterlife. I still don't know what to call it.