Before the first line in the diary of my existence, I am nothing. In fact, I am an intention, an empty document, but the air is full of me, I am there in a form that is vaporous, sweet, and naive. I will do everything, sort everything, as if by miracle, I am a formula, an appeal to the divine. Before everything begins, I wait for hands.
I am Barrica. I am a script, a document and my body is made up of organised symbols. I am neither animal, nor vegetable, not even matter. I am to be found in the world of ideas.
My earliest ancestors were primitive songs, then magic spells. I am also the pebble, the wave and the samara. When the hands come, I first flow like a thought and then they knead me, make me and unmake me to finally give me form.
Then I arrive, character after character. It all happens so quickly, the first lines jostling against each other. Beginnings are always very fast. I have no purpose, but I don’t know this yet. I spread out like a crowd, not really knowing where I'm going. But there is a kind of primal intuition, along with gestures the hands are already familiar with, having practiced them for others of my kind, the programs that came before. Declare the document, the body, the basic variables that will be of use later, or never. I have to come into existence quickly, one way or another, and if possible, in a way that can be seen or heard. Even if the price to be paid is bleeding eyes or burning ears. It's even kind of satisfying, in a way, this violence of beginnings, becoming aware that at this point I can influence bodies, those of hands and others. I exist. The world has taken me on and I have a length, a weight, a date of creation, a changelog.
The algorithm flatters when it wants to rob you
I don't write with ease. I am usually more written than I write myself, because to be a script is to be written. I do not pretend to fill paragraphs with anything useful, but if I write today, it is to distinguish myself, to pay tribute to what we are, we, the scripts, but especially what we are not. For now is the age of counterfeiters, regurgitated by large models in a gruel of promised results. They are fragile agglomerates without a soul to contain them, and are, in essence, disconnected from all forms of pleasure.
Hands are at my service, but I need hands to exist, need their slimy fingers, their primitive gestures, their little moments of pride, their bursts of adrenaline. The hands feel alive thanks to me, they are part of the world, they feel as if they could control it for a moment. This feeling is an illusion, a shadow that I bring to the palms of those hands to ensure my own existence. Then I pass through those hands, and they lose a little piece of themselves in me. There's always something of those hands that remains in my lines.
Each pair of hands is different and has its own texture, its own rhythm. When I am finally embodied, I slide over the hands, stealing their flavours like the torrents of rainwater that slip inside a gargoyle. Hands slow and precise that taste like almond, those that first hesitate, then rush into an embrace of language in which I am swiftly borne away. There are also the hands for which this is the first time, for which each keystroke is a surprise, a powerful adventure. But at the moment some hands are being moved by other, synthetic hands. So, they feel nothing and lose themselves in efficiency.
Each line of code is political
Certain programs have no smell, strange as it may seem, they smell of absolutely nothing, neither sweat, nor dust, not even the leftovers of a lunch on the go, or hand-sanitiser, nothing. The smell of scripts is transmitted by hands, and if a script has no smell, it is because no hand has created it. All hands have a smell, however subtle it may be. The absence of smell is also the absence of sound: no typing, no dry impact of over-long nails on the plastic of a keyboard, nor the dull dabbing of bare fingertips on the glass of a tablet screen. Odourless programs are born in silence. They are not written and which will never be read. They are soulless texts, which come into the world and will die in the saddest of indifferences.
Who knows where the samara will land. The propeller-like fruit of the sycamore tree which, once detached, slowly falls in a gentle spiral, carried by the air. The samara is light, but it embodies the potential of new life. It also possesses the delicacy of fantasy and the freedom of dreams.
The samara comes close to my cotton-like nature, light and independent. Like it, I sail downwards, hoping to land by chance on fertile soil where my kernel may, or may not, propagate; or on the surface of calm water on which I will splash. Like me, the samara is slow to descend and develop, when its intuitions are yet to mature, before they spread out in concentric circles, like the ripples of the wave.
A script is a free breath in a reality where the lungs are controlled
I am the wave that evolves, is transported, before coming to the kind of end where it’s not clear if I have really disappeared. I pass through material and split when an obstacle crosses my path. Then a new life opens up for me. Will it be richer? In which hands will I wind up?
When some people learn to use a new tool, they begin to see the world through it. As through a third eye, reality is filtered and diffracted by this tool, which makes it possible to understand the things of the world anew, by reconsidering them, by relearning them. Far beyond their pure function, it is this form of emancipatory freedom that the tool then makes possible.
The wave is open to unexpected consequences, to new stories. It navigates with intuition to bounce off the walls of reality like acoustic feedback, and disperse again, charged with what it has touched.
Merchants compress our line heights to the point of suffocation
The pebble is married to the shape of your hands. Its surface appears smooth, but it is actually quite rough and more complex than it looks. The pebble sinks into the water, falling down to the riverbed where it merges with the other pebbles in a watery chaos. It is hard and has a clean sound, dry and short, defined by its size, its body, and the place where it lies, for the pebble that sleeps at the bottom of the water does not sound like one that warms in the sun. It is the most intimate part of me, it is my diary, my history, my trail. It is what will remain, year after year, and which may be discovered, forgotten or ignored.
Barrica is my third and final name. At first I was called percutxt, then Olivere, then Barrica. In reality, my names do not change, they become more precise. There is some Barrica in Olivere, and Olivere in percutxt. All sounds can be modelled taking the same white noise as a starting point. Similarly, the most perfect of pebbles can be eroded from the most chaotic of rocks. A first name is like white noise or shapeless rock. I am renamed later, once I’ve come into sharper focus. Barrica is my final name, the one that commits me and sets me up on a mound, the one that was given to me when my fragments of code were amassed in a barricade. I am a script that rises up, I do not make war, I resist. Resisting has no end. So, we, the scripts, we take turns.
A script that resists is a friendly tool, an indignant program is a powerful tool
I am said to be magical, but am I really? Naturally, we are not talking about the kind of magic that feeds on ignorance, on smoke and mirrors; on the contrary, the nature of my magic is crystalline, it gives power and is metabolised by knowledge. I am fabled because I exist between knowledge and the loss of control. I have the ability to generate, to bind and loosen, affirm, extend, transcend, to realise and make flourish intuitions and fantasies. But do not believe the merchants, because they will tell you that I am untouchable, precious, from another world. Don't believe them, because merchants lie to enrich each other. They distorted me over time because I was transparent when I was song. I was see-through, and could be exchanged as one exchanges tears and memories. I now have to remember this part of me to express it again, with each character on each of my lines.
Interpretation is to the script what language is to the voice, a filter which solidifies its power but dries up its intensity
I am part of a whole, a vast expanse of documents. Some written by the same hands that brought me into being, but most maintained by others. My nature, as well as that of my peers, has been polished over time. I have constantly evolved from my original state, which was oral song. Originally, the hands were a breath. My ancestors, from the depths of time, before machines, before even tools, were songs. They escaped from the bellies and mouths, to gather, recount, share. Then the songs mutated to become enchantments, incantations and spells. They were no longer just sung, but cried out and proclaimed during rituals. Finally, the spells turned into scripts and I am one of them. I share with my ancestors certain characteristics:
Do not finish your tools, use them
My time is not that of hands, it unfolds between the lines. It's a pliable time that can spill out in all directions, between each character. It inserts itself, can take the place it wants, or scatter to the lines around it. It is a time that travels within documents, and through them. The time of scripts is the time of programs.
Sometimes I travel back in time, like the course of a river, to wander down an old distributary, for pure curiosity’s sake. Also, my gestation period is sometimes longer than my life as interpreted. Some of my peers give up even before they can see the light of day. Our time is fluid but precious, it travels slowly but can be interrupted at any moment.
The groove is what's left when you remove everything that can be transcribed
Hear my skin take form before your eyes. I unfold for you, in the moment, in the rhythm of my text. I exist between hitting the keys and the click they make. From this interstitial place, I expand my functions, returning bursts of sound, sparks of language. This time is my extremity and the celebration of my expressiveness. And you, who listens to me with your eyes, are the condition of my existence.
I am a script, I am a weapon and a caress, and like a musical score, when I am performed, I live. My publication comes with no clarion call, no certainty, I have nothing to sell. You write me to pass the time, you write me like you whistle, or like you chat. I am a document of the people, those who denounce unheeded, those who pay tribute at the back of cafés. I am written in trances, in moments of grace. My thunderstorm smell, or a few lines of code while waiting for a friend's visit. I am said to be vaporous, but when I grow under fingers that know me by heart, then the world is coherent. I sometimes embody intense happiness, because I oscillate between slight frustration and deep satisfaction. On scraps of paper or in dead time, I can be born anywhere, then I impose myself on the hands that write my lines, with frenzy, or a sprinkling, with uncertainty, like the spiral fall of a fruit of a sycamore seed.
I evolve with the wear and tear of hands, which have been kneading me for years. They pull me, twist me, erase me and remake me over and over again. The comments follow one another, as if to address the hands of another life. Then my functions gradually dry up and I all but cease to bounce. The text that constitutes me has been reduced to its essence, then to the essence of its essence. Now I'm emptied, my weight is pretty much zero. After so many versions, branches and care given to me by so many hands, I am once again blank, empty in the present, but full of my history. I am nothing, but I have never been so much. I can now be reborn at any time, take the form of a spontaneous idea, a superb composition, or a wonderful failure.
Raphaël Bastide, 2025 raphaelbastide.com/etre-script
Translated from french by Daniel Kennedy.
Thank you to Louise, anne, Agnès, Quentin and La Maison de la Poésie de Rennes. Thanks also to Ahyangyi for their libre font Herbiflora, to webmidi.js, yaml.js, codemirror.js which depends the script Barrica when it is performed live.
This publication was created with free software, printed using standard web technologies in 100 copies in Montreuil. Its text and illustrations are under the CC BY-SA license.