From 'A Whale Called Milieu': Thinking with the Milieu

Ellen Dillon

Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James

1.       This line has cast itself out

We are linked together, threaded on a line that has made itself for and by the telling of this story. In the beginning was a whale. This is not the first story to begin in the existence, or the belly, of a whale, and you’ll notice that we’re not beginning there, or by telling you what to call us. The whale herself was called ‘Milieu’. What kind of name is that? We’ll have to come back to that question. Before untangling names, we need to think about the kind of whale that casts out lines for trapping readers, viewers, ambient sounds and atmospheric conditions. Shouldn’t whales shun such lines? Shouldn’t gestures of capture repel them? Who is this Milieu, who sets out to perform the kind of actions her kind have, for so long, been subjected to?

In notes written towards the end of his life, French writer, educator and film-maker Fernand Deligny expressed wonder at the fact that his own name was written on the covers of books that recounted the experiences, plural, of lives, plural. He saw himself as having harpooned 60 years of existences with the derisory little line of his name. These harpooned existences, he named Milieu. Il y avait une fois une baleine appelée MILIEU, once upon a time there was a whale called MILIEU, harpooned on a line made from another name. So it’s tricky, from the beginning, to work out who’s catching and who’s being caught, who’s casting lines and who’s being trapped in them. If 60 years’ worth of experiences, captured in words, constitute a whale called Milieu, the experiences themselves captured the attention of the owner of the name that became the line that caught them, so the first act of capture was on the part of the whale, or part of her. We think of her, in writing this, as ‘her’, and it only now occurs to us that she doesn’t need to be, that baleine is feminine but Milieu masculine, neither noun determining the gender of the owner of the name, only the word designating them. This logic has appeared too late, though, to transform Milieu from the wide-eyed, dimpled whale-form she’s taken in our minds, a counterpoint or paramour for Moby-Dick, Leviathan, or the lonesome 52 Blue.

Milieu’s most basic meaning is middle or centre. It also connects with setting, background, social standing and environment. Those secondary senses of the word all spool out of its middleness. We who find ourselves at war with the middle, the average, the normal and the real should, indeed, be crossing seas to hunt down the whale who bears this name. And we are. But she conjured us up first, using herself as bait, to set this chase in motion for purposes of her own.

We think of her, on a Wednesday morning walk, when a little grey cloud that looks, temporarily, like a breaching whale, bobs close to the milky sun. Of course, we know that our mistress whale is nowhere near the sun. We also know that the ‘we’ entertaining this whimsical thinking is composed of the tug of dog on leash, the breath of autumn wind through leaves growing russet edging, the scent of soap melted down in a neighbours’ bonfire, as well as the body and mind where these impulses and sensations combine.

On a morning where queasiness is the dominant sensation, driving our slightly frantic pacing and shallowing out our breath, we remind ourselves that the middle of a doughnut is a nothing.

There is a line from Fanny Howe’s ‘Bewilderment’ that we circle back to often: Bewilderment circumambulates, believing that at the centre of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality. This line speaks to us with a directness at odds with its, and our own, signature circling, reminding us that our lost looping and loping movements trace out the axis of our own reality. That this repetition may be congealing the loop to dough, and the central reality to hole, does little to still the bewildered and bewildering retracing of steps.

We most often find ourselves reaching for this line when we bump, hard, up against the passage of Deligny’s that we find rebarbative enough to push us away from his work for whole months at a time. In this sequence from the film Ce Gamin, là, he is standing in front of huge sheets of butcher paper, on which he and his fellow presences proches–the workers who live alongside the autistic children in his experimental lieu de vie, living place, in the Cevennes–have painstakingly traced out the routes taken by Janmari and the other children on their daily walks. In front of these artefacts designed to make some sort of legible map out of the kids’ wanderings, we hear Deligny muse on the reflexivity inherent in such phrases as il tourne sur lui-même—he is turning around himself—adding si ce fameux lui-même est en fait absent, vacant, cet enfant-là tourne autour de rien, sur rien, éperdument perdu–if that famous himself is, in fact, absent, vacant, that child there is turning on nothing, around nothing, hopelessly lost.

Have you ever seen a bigger ‘if’? It’s looming over that poor child, casting shadow on his very being, annihilating the selfhood of a circling child with a piece of grammatical sleight of hand centred on a logical doughnut hole. If there is no self to circle, the child is circling around nothing, therefore has no self. Circular logic. Bewildering circumambulation.

Deligny’s insistence on the absence of selfhood in this child, and all the other autistic children, draws on a typically 20th century French overemphasis on the centrality of language to self. He is incapable of entendre–hearing and/or understanding–a non-language-using child as a full self. In one of the language games French, particularly his, is an exhausting, inexhaustible source of, he switches the ‘se’ of reflexivity (e.g. se laver, to wash oneself, s’habiller, to dress oneself) for the demonstrative adjective ‘ce’, this–ce laver, this washing, ce faire, this doing. This doing removes reflexivity from the experience of this child here, Ce Gamin, là, meaning that he is no longer washing himself or dressing himself, just washing or dressing.

There is so much that we love and respect in Deligny’s life and work, but this gesture is a void. We can’t think through or past it, and have to go around. One tangent that we find ourselves on is the syntactical indistinguishability of reflexivity and reciprocity in French: se regarder can be to look at oneself or each other, se parler to talk to oneself or each other. Rewatching the films, we’re struck by how much language these allegedly mutique kids use. In the same way the term non-verbal is misused nowadays to describe people who verbalise, often ecstatically, Deligny describes little girls whose days are filled with babble and chatter as mutique when the sounds they make are not directed towards communication with others.

It seems to us that it’s the se of reciprocity rather than reflexivity that’s out of play here. Not in the sense that it’s lacking, but in that it lacks interest for the language user. The kids are, audibly, not mute or silent. They surround themselves with sounds. They don’t often use those sounds to attract the attention of, or send a message to, others. In this, their use of language has a purely reflexive quality. It is absolutely pure self-centred  language use, the kind that forms a pleasurable sensory cocoon between self and outside world, circumambulating an unusually self-contained axis of reality.

A centre can hold; the hollowed-out hole in the middle of a fallen-apart thing can hold infinite much. A sound-spun cocoon between self and world can hold a whole other world.

Deligny wrote that you can’t baptise yourself, only BE baptised, the act of naming being the point that anchors you in the consciousness of others. Milieu has been named– Deligny performed the baptism in the margin of his massive book–and this naming has anchored her in our consciousness. More than that, though – the anchor becomes a centre around which a consciousness can assemble itself. We exist because this name is hooked into the centre of us and we can work ourselves out around it. In the beginning was the name. In the middle is this circumambulation, movement around the name. 

2.      the line they move inside and are propelled by 

A cloud makes itself into whatever form it needs. Fernand makes an odd comment, in a letter to Félix Guattari, about Janmari barking. It’s Deleuze who would be happy, he writes, the noise of a line tracing itself, as if you could hear grass growing, or the hairs of a beard. 

We know that a cloud makes its own shape. For Fernand, sitting at a scrubbed and paper-stacked table in a house filled with muttering and movement, a line traces itself. And he hears this tracing happening in the barking of a boy he has decided to deem mute, mutique. That boy’s barking isn’t language to him, but is the sound of things that don’t exist as words: drawing and growing. Reading these notes, sounding them out, is like watching a cloud shape itself before our eyes.

In one of his seminars on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze described the two fundamental forms of knowledge: seeing and speaking, the visible and the enunciable. We’re glued in rapt attention to the sight of some kind of knowledge cloud-forming itself as we watch. Line or cloud. Line and cloud. Dividing and lonely.

The translation of those seminar notes reads Who is it that has spoken of the line of the outside? Why do I use this express word? We’re drawn back repeatedly to the awkwardness of that translation, ‘this express word’ for exprès, on purpose. Falling for a faux ami has turned the act of choosing a word deliberately into some sort of kwik-e-word that we can’t stop thinking about. Biffo Berardi has an odd bit in his book on poetry and finance about people being forced to pay attention at an accelerated rate. This has always struck us as equally clunky and wrong: you can’t hurry attention; you can cut it short, but you can’t speed it up. You can say a word fast, so fast it loses all meaning, but there is no express word. Meaning happens in its own time. Attention does too, and their time-frames don’t conform to the hours and minutes on the clock, and are deformed by the rigid segmentations of workday and school-day.

At school this week, a kid suggested that we can be trained to appreciate things, that people hated fog and found it to be the most disgusting of weather until the poets drew attention to its mystical, picturesque qualities and we fell in love with fallen cloud.

We have been half in love with fallen cloud all week, especially when it rests on the crest of the hills across from the house. When we, including dog, are out walking in the bog field, there are moments where it looks luscious and full-bodied enough to sink into. Other times, the cloud-cover is too beautiful and low-hanging for us to be confident of driving safely. We have never been confident of driving safely. A Deleuze seminar or an intricate harmony by Low the band will seize our attention so violently we cannot see the road. Deleuze says that, for Foucault, the form of visible knowledge is light. Is it actually ironic that darkness falls on us as we listen to this lesson, and we have to pull over into the closest gateway until the moment of intense attention passes? We were going to write ‘intense focus’ for variety, but focus requires sight, and seeing and thinking cannot be done together in our experience. Either light or groping through fog. Not both.

Knowledge has form, Deleuze says. But it makes itself into whatever form it needs. We watch as the afternoon’s dour, grey rainclouds remould themselves into light-filled piles, and stretches of draped and flaky mackerel skin. They must know something, be trying to tell us something, in remodelling themselves into so much ephemeral deliciousness.

The sound of a line tracing itself is a boy barking without words. The line of the outside traces itself around something, swallows that thing whole. Makes the outline of a whale by surrounding the boat.

A man sets out in a boat to kill a whale. A story follows him. This particular storyline escapes the man wherever it can, spools off in time and space to follow obsessions of its own before returning to its protagonist. It takes 135 chapters to loop Ahab in his own harpoon-line. The storyline tries so hard to get away from him, to wander free of an arc vaulting towards inevitable doom.

We think a lot about storytelling, about the reductive violence of the narrative arc. We grew up in a household where every effect had a single, identifiable cause. Someone’s teeth grew out crooked because they’d bruised their milk-teeth on a coffee table; someone’s warts were cured by the daily application of slugs.

These claims for the narrative coherence of the universe left us unprepared for the chaos we have found the world to be, as grownups. As grownups entangled with dogs whimpering in their sleep, rain splattering the windows and clattering in torrents from blocked gutters, formless anxiety at a teeming to-do list and fitful efforts to claw out time to write in. To write one line in. We can’t hear grass growing over the humming of our headful of bees. But we can hear the line, through the hum. There’s an Irish proverb that says Faigheann cos ar siúl rud nach bhfaigheann cos ina cónaí–a walking foot finds things a foot at rest doesn’t. We live by this, in our aimless wandering. Even wondering, our feet are restless. When they twitch too much to sleep or focus, we spin out another loop of the line. Or are spun by it.

In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne,  Herman Melville wrote of [t]he calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which man ought always to compose. We lack calm coolness, and find ourselves torn between the silence of Melville’s grass-growing peace, and the wordless barking relayed by Fernand. We think of their two letters crossing each other in time and space, in some tiny, individuated universe where the line of creation takes the form of amplified grass-sound. Not as in, the wind in it. As in, life moving through its laminae, amplified to the point of audibility. 

Ellen Dillon is a poet and writer of exploratory prose from Limerick, Ireland. Her most recent books are Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel (HVTN, 2023) and tentatives (Pamenar Press, 2023). 

She has also written Butter Intervention (Veer 2, 2022), Morsel May Sleep (Sublunary Editions, 2021), and Sonnets to Malkmus (Sad Press, 2019), as well as the chapbooks Excavate (Poems after Pasolini) (Oystercatcher Press, 2020) and Achatina, achatina! (SoundEye Press, 2019). She is Arts Council Writer in Residence in University College Cork for 2025. Her current work of lyric essay, prose poetry and fiction, A Whale Called Milieu, was shortlisted for the 2024 Prototype Prize for writers and artists working at the intersections of different literary and artistic forms.

Ellen can be found online at @drnollid.bsky.social and @drnollid