It is not exactly true that I decided to try and run a marathon because I couldn't write poetry in alexandrines. Nevertheless, it had to do with poetry.

I started learning poetry in the metro, because the metro made me anxious: descending deep underground, the closed space, the crowds that block the elevator... Most of us are anxious in the metro. That's why, as soon as we sit, we take out our phones and busy ourselves. Reading was not enough to keep my mind off the anguish. Playing games gave me headaches. So I started reciting poetry. The screen of the phone seems to have been designed for poetry. It is just long enough for a verse. The strophe just fits in. I chose one poem, and started learning it by heart. A sonnet usually took just the time of my travel. I had forgotten most of it the next day but it did not matter. The point was to reach the station without having the leisure to relapse into anxiety.

I have often wondered why poetry was more effective than, for instance, reading a novel, or a newspaper. Possibly it has something to do with the wiring of the brain. Learning poetry involves memory, obviously, but also small calculations. When memory fails, and one forgets a few words in the verse, one can rely on the rhyme and the number of missing feet. It is a bit like doing crosswords. It could be that the regions of the brain that are used in memory and for numbers are far away from those that trigger fear, so that irrigating one area with fresh blood leaves the other all weak and dry. I have noticed that in time of deep anguish, I've had trouble with simple mathematical tasks, like remembering the pin code of my credit card, or telephone numbers, etc.

This reference to the brain may be a concession to the ideology of neuroscience.

In any case, I think the true factor which makes poetry a remedy against anxiety lies in the rhythm. The temporality of anxiety is very much like that of hashish as Baudelaire describes it. It opens itself into an abyss, so that the passing of a minute becomes an eternity of unendurable suffering. The next five minutes, the next station, appear unreachable. Literally separated from the present moment by a gap of time so enormous it seems impossible to cross. But precisely the rhythm of poetry makes the temporality indivisible. There is a limit to the divisibility – strophes, verses, words, feet – but then each foot takes a drop of time, and these add up. And the train has reached the station.

Of course, it does not always work. But poetry may be a help.

I used to cycle in Burgundy and I often rode on a particularly nasty slope. Nothing like an Alpine summit, nor the famous Mont Ventoux of the Tour de France. But it was on my way home, when I was already tired. It started with a very steep stretch, followed by a false flat, which rose again slowly, until a bend discovered yet another slope, two kilometers long or so, of barren land, no trees, no houses, leading to a village on top of the hill. The village used to be a Roman fort. It was build on a cliff. The last hundred meters looked like a huge wall. I realized that reciting a poem on the last stretch made it a lot easier. As if the whole of my body adapted to the rhythm of verses – legs and breathing, not too fast, not too slow – and the effort to concentrate on the verses kept my mind off the road and the slowly passing bushes and the village on top.

I was also running at the time. I decided to give a goal to my training, and try and run a marathon. I knew it would be hard. I started learning Rimbaud's “Bateau ivre,” while training. Because the poem is almost as long a marathon. Because of the quasi-hypnotic quality of the verses. And because I saw myself lost amid the kilometers of the marathon, like the poor boat, a mere barge really, built for canals and slow rivers, in the furious tides of the ocean.
 

For months, almost every morning, I ran around the square nearby, reciting my poem. It saved time to do both at the same time, running and learning the poem. I remember a dark and rainy morning, late October, when the absurdity of the task struck me. But I went on.

I didn't quite know it at the time but it was a kind of metaphysical experiment. The question was: could poetry keep time together? Could poetry steady the abysses that may open inside a minute?