Telling stories, then, is the best way to negotiate with Fear and its objects. It is impossible to ignore Fear, because, as Descartes phrases it, it is as loud as thunder. But telling stories, encapsulating Fear in a story, pushes it back at a distance, and disengages the subject from the scene. Ideally, I would only be a spectator looking at the fearsome thing, on stage, with bemusement. And, as the story takes shape, the scene changes, it evolves towards an ending which can only be quite ordinary. That is the way with stories. Otherwise, we would not believe in stories. We would not even bother to hear them. The extra-ordinary is not denied, it shows itself, it takes form, but in the end it turns out ordinary. It might even be amusing. I cannot do wit like Woody Allen, and in one gesture, in a single line, mock and belittle the object. I cannot do poetry like Baudelaire, and, again in a single line, frame the horror. I lean towards marathons rather than sprints or stunts. A marathon, even half a marathon, or quarter of a marathon, which would be my kind of distance, leaves a lot of empty time. I tell myself stories, hoping to catch the beasts, the emptiness, the oppression of crowds in the net of the story, and distort their fearsome associations into another kind of plot, with a happy ending. Happy, or not so happy. It is not important. For I am no longer inside the story. I am telling the story.

It is Bachelard's therapy, though these imaginary exercises take place in a language that is addressed to another (like a postcard) rather than in the solipsistic imagination of the open-eyed dreamer. In a way, it is also Descartes' therapy with the difference that it takes place in the imagination rather than in the brain or in Reason. According to Descartes, there are two ways to overcome the strange aversions that weight on us. The first one is to change the associations that make the object fearsome. One needs to train like a dog, which can learn not to flee at the report of gunshot but run towards the fallen bird. It all happens in the brain. The soul remains enslaved. The second way, for philosophers with a strong character, is to use will and judgment: fight the fear face-to-face, so to speak, with the soul's own weapons.

Does it work? But Pascal conjectures it does not. He even devises a test: a plank above the abyss, large enough... The truth is I would rather not take the test. So I had to look for something else.

However, telling stories is a way to reconfigure the associations leading to fear, not in the brain but in the mind, but in the mind below, or beside, Reason itself. Stories do not rely on Reason only. Their mechanism is not as transparent as we would wish the productions of Reason to be. They may use obscure associations that like dreams, or like wit, carry unopened messages just seen through the envelope. Nevertheless, stories take place in a domain where the self is not absent, a domain that may not be transparent, that may retain its own mechanisms, but which the self may explore with its own resources.

Remember the Meditations: the evil genius drops the narrator into troubled waters from which he emerges with the cogito, to find firm ground, on which he can plant the tree of science. There remain whirlpools in the sky and all around us but at least they may be mastered by numbers and mathematics. The Mediations tell the story of someone who was scared of water as Pascal was of emptiness. Descartes wrote a story that took him out of the wild waters, where reigns the evil genius, and brought back all water in the world, all its whirlpools, under the supervision of mathematics, and under the supervision of God who guarantees the truth of our mathematics.

Telling stories brings back the phobia into the domain of the self, the ego, if you wish. It is not psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis discovers at the source of phobias a displacement, or a metaphor, that has changed the object of fear. Everyone believed little Hans was afraid of horses. But see, his father looks like a horse. Little Hans is afraid of his father, and he is only afraid of horses because he loves his father too much to admit he is afraid of him. Now that he knows he is afraid of his father, he no longer needs to be afraid of horses. Horses are no longer scary. They are just animals – four legs, a long head, a huge willy – nothing to be afraid of. Psychoanalysis may be true, in a way. It may even work. But it loses the meaning of the phobic object, its phenomenological way of being. This bizarre world where horses have magical powers has collapsed. Anyone would miss it. It is a world, or a real perspective on the world. It need not to be destroyed, but explored, and described, and turned into story, if possible.

In fact, I knew it from the start. I remember distinctly, in Hong Kong, how I was worried. It was not just that my hotel room was twenty floors too high. I strolled around town, taking photos and telling myself stories, trying to put the emptiness below my window at a distance. I could not have not formulated it explicitly, but in a way I knew that the only solution was to restage the vertigo. That is what all the videos are about: restaging the Fear, playing with the thing. They do not aim at analyzing the fear, or pointing to the object of fear. Rather they aim at playing with the object, encapsulating the object in harmless story without erasing its fearsome appearance.

Of course, the storytelling may fail. Then the story does not work, or the object refuses to be caught in the story, or pierces through the net, and escapes to haunt free and wild the streets of the city, or make invisible but fearsome signs behind windows. That's life. Woody could lose his wit. Baudelaire could discover an infinite that would not fit in a verse. Even Freud could meet a horse that would scare him more than any father, or (because Freud was mechanically inclined) a locomotive, whose drive would be more scary than that of death.

Lying on the well-known couch, I tell the story to my analyst: why I think that Freud is not useless but is beside the point. I also tell him about Descartes' brain, and Baudelaire's poetry and Woody's wit, and Bachelard's imagination... Earlier, he'd asked me to speak about my work but now he breathes heavily as if he were falling sleep. I know this is a trick and that, in fact, he is looking at his e-mails. Nevertheless, I go on. My rejection of Freud is also a reproach addressed to him, of course. So I tell him the method that I have devised to escape the emptiness, and the beasts, and the oppression of crowds, and escape him as well, leave him at last. I am a bit worried, and the question is: will he let me go now?