"Towards the Flame", by François Migeot: the Scriabin cataclysm

Review The poet François Migeot wanders here towards music, that of a piano piece by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin ★★★★☆

By Philippe Cassard

Published on August 18, 2025 at 11:00 a.m.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). MANUEL COHEN / MANUEL COHEN VIA AFP

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When he is not immersing his reverie in Gustave Courbet's "A Burial at Ornans" ("Along the Cliffs", 2019) or amidst Pierre Bonnard's gardens ("At the Heart of the Instant", 2021), the poet François Migeot wanders towards music, which he listens to until the most secret surge of its expression. There was Brahms and the admirable collection "Chiaroscuro" (2013). Here is "Towards the Flame", which follows at a suitable distance the neurotic jolts of the short eponymous piano piece by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). These visions of terror, these howls (pain? ecstasy?), this final cataclysm illuminate "all these exhausted faces, emptied of the hour that carried them, retreat forward, into the heart where the knot tightens" . The poet sifts the overly dense reception of emotions to better "revive the vanished space before the blood dries" . And the reader, caught in the sumptuous draperies of this language, lets "the gaze abandon itself to the parade of imprints" .