A Sort of Highly-Gifted One

By Alban Bourdy

"A sort of highly-gifted one" is an autobiographical testimony that narrates all my life, my course of "highly-gifted" (diagnosed in early childhood).

"A sort of highly-gifted one" because I am a kind of highly-gifted, representative and at the same time singular.

Everything is told under the psychological aspect, without self-censorship, always with the subjective look of who I was at each moment. I have conceived this book as a long version of the lectures that I give regularly, like in the opening of the "Surdouessence" symposias that I organize. Surdouessence is also an association that I created for the accompaniment of the highly-gifted people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Éditions Dédicaces
• Release date: Jul 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770767331

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Alban Bourdy

A Sort of Highly-Gifted One

First published by Editions Dedicaces in 2018

Copyright © Alban Bourdy, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-77076-733-1

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Contents

The Alpha and the Omega

We are all made of Stars

Flowers on the Path

Le tourbillon de la vie

The Strange Beast

The Liberation Pact

Dream Life

Life is a Game

Eyes Bigger than the World

Butterflies

Code Della Vita

The Fall

Going Back to my Roots

Bridge Over Troubled Water

To catch a Star

Rainbow

Resourcing Heights

The Songs are Life

Overheating

L'arbre de vie

A Teaddy Bear in the Land of Se(x)cts

Writing Against Forgetting

Replugged

Seen on TV

Bouncing

Mon Everest

On the Road Again

Surdouessence

1

The Alpha and the Omega

What I am about to tell you was close to have never happened. It is vertiginous to realize how a lot of things come from some small oscillation, almost imperceptible, at a specific moment.

The story I am going to reveal you is the story of a life, my life. My name is Alban Bourdy, and I was born on October, 13th in 1983, what was not an easy thing.

At the moment I was close to come to the world and see the light, my life became about to be smothered in the egg. According to the ambivalence of the number 13, the day of my birth could have been also the date of my premature death.

I got four days ahead on the announced date, and, meanwhile this slight precocity, I could not really get out. I stopped at halfway, maybe taken by a doubt or finding the difficulty too strong, I don’t know. Anyway, I was stuck in the passage, in this famous tunnel linking death and life.

I was in a bad shape, suffocating gradually. I clinically died, causing panic of the caregivers working around my birth.

I was in a head position, and the staff at my mother’s bedside said that my head was too big, and that was causing big trouble to emerge in the realm of the living.

While my life signal was lost and nobody was still believing, the destiny has finally switched. My heart beat again and I found the strength to stride the few centimeters which separated me from the outside.

Almost out, and rid of the umbilical cord, I was seated. And there, exposed to the world and to the gaudy light of the Courcouronnes hospital, I was observing everywhere, with a sharp questioning a little incredulous, before regularly manifesting a loud dissatisfaction.

I am diagnosed with fever. I was ripped off from my mother who only saw me very briefly, and they put me under an incubator. The fever falls quickly, and I do not have any particular symptom, but I’m still left four days in this incubator, under infusions. My mummy is too weak to be able to move towards me during all this time. My first terrestrial meals are antibiotics, my first layer is made with glass, all my first environment is artificial and impersonal.

This world in which I arrive does not lavish me a warm welcome.

2

We are all made of Stars

The first memories I have of my terrestrial life are paradoxically pictures of starry sky.

Lying in my parents’ bed, I look at the sky through the window of the seventh floor while telling me that I come from there, from this sky. I am even all this vault, and that being called Alban seems nothing, it’s like he’s a creation of my parents, these huge strange creatures that seem so dependent on me.

I can’t understand finitude and what could represent something that exists in a limited way, without also being in a yesterday or a tomorrow.

Looking at the sky and the bright stars, I’m trying to imagine what could be before, before my birth. Something almost constantly calls me to this. I can touch a feeling of nothing, a feeling of what could be what I am before Alban exists. This feeling is both an emptiness and a fullness. It comforts me, it rests me. I am searching for it, and in the same time it scares me.

While growing I’m going to lose access to this state that I yet touched every night during at least several months. My efforts to find it again will remain vain.

3

Flowers on the Path

Since birth, I reject the meat of my baby meals, spitting out all that is meat, whether it is baby food jars or homemade preparations. And this despite the subterfuges imagined by my parents for me to ingest it disguised. As it is, I am viscerally vegetarian even before the mind can interfere.

Like all three-year old kids, I am lead to preschool. Born at the end of the year, I don’t have three years yet, but whatever. I’m told it’s a mandatory step. This school world is paralyzing me. I have to say that I never went to a nursery, my maternal grandmother living at our home and not working, so she is always there to take care of me.

In this day of first back-to-school, to me looking like a long and incomprehensible punishment, I am going to see a pink swirl dragging me with it.

This whirlwind is Lucille, a little girl of my class who is to me eldest of almost six months in a row and who lives in my district.

I had never seen her before and my meeting with her this day is epic. It looks like she already knows me. She immediately spotted me, and as soon as the opportunity arises she comes to me and steals the stuffed Smurfette that I took with me as the only comfort on this sinister day looking like a capital execution.

I am hurt by this abduction and am about to cry. This is in addition to my total misunderstanding of what is happening in this day where everything seems to go wrong as in a nightmare. I am distraught, I wonder what is this strange monster that allowed herself such an affront while I didn’t do anything to her.

I come to protest tearfully. The called monster is of rather charming. Lucille is a graceful little blonde girl with glasses, a little pale. She seems very self-confident and she quickly makes me doing what she wants. She smiles at my reaction to what she did, she uses what she stole to lead me to her. She gives me back the object of the offense, and uses the grief she caused by comforting and embracing me. She’s going to become almost instantly my girlfriend. I have the feeling that it’s obvious, as if this girl was waiting for me.

This is the second twin female presence by my side during my early childhood. The first and unavoidable one is Sarah. Sarah is one the first cousins I have from my mother’ side. She is the same age as me, she also have a few months more. We grow up side by side, a bit like twins, even if we only see each other on weekends, one weekend out of two, when we go to her home in Dijon, as well as during the summer holidays.

Are especially meaning to me the Saturday nights spent playing with her the game of seven families under the table of her living room, table where our parents end their dinner with my grandmother and sometimes also some uncles and aunts.

In the background, there is TV on. TV which broadcasts the Top 50, the ranking of best sales of 45 rpm discs in France. While playing and savoring to be with my twin-cousin, I can follow the whole new Top 50’ classification and the evolutions in this one, as well as all the adult conversations that animate the diners.

4

Le tourbillon de la vie

Iam almost every night in the grip of some terrible nightmares. Often the same. The one where I am sued by the big bad wolf of Chantal Goya’ shows. I am very scared of this character who embodies for me the absolute evil.

In these dreams, I run, out of breath, in the big and wide hallway of our apartment. A horrible anxiety is pounding me. I’m trying to escape, but I know it’s vain. I know soon there will come a time I couldn’t escape. I know that despite my efforts, he will catch me and eat me, there’s nothing I can do to save me from this. This chaser is too big and strong compared to me. Sometimes I abandon myself to his assaults in a corner in the early night. Hoping that once he gets devoured me he will leave me alone, having won and had what he wanted. I think then I can spend a peaceful night, which is not what happens. I couldn’t explain what happens when I let myself be eaten, it’s like a void, a break of a few moments, then the light come back and it’s like I’m resuscitating.

Sometimes I don’t make difference between dream and reality, and I often run in the corridor, thinking, having seen a shadow, to be pursued by this famous wolf. I never feel safe in this huge dark hallway, it’s like this is an area where nobody’s watching and where light never enters, letting the worst things supremely reign. I know that I can’t even scream, my grandmother watches TV and can’t hear me through the thick walls on which to bump the head hurts and where no one can push down any thumbtack. I take refuge sometimes in the wardrobe of the entrance, I stayed there one day a long time refusing to go out. I was lying in the back, on the covers stored, head in the clothes hanging on hangers.

I learned to read and write without learning. Someday, when I was just four years old, my parents realized that I know how to read when I read aloud a road panel where it was written Massy-Palaiseau , a blue highway sign. Incredulous, they asked me to read all kind of other panels, all those who showed up. They first irrationally thought that I had precisely pinpointed the first one by passing several times over there. They were paling while I read everything to them. They were flabbergasted when they had to admit the obvious. I didn’t know if it was a good or a bad thing to know how to read, it seemed so amazing for them while it seemed so natural to me.

They had already begun to doubt something a little before, when I spotted the moments they had forgotten to read me a bubble in a comic book, but they thought I was just aware that they didn’t read the speech of the character drawn under that bubble. The same thing sometimes happened on texts without pictures, then they thought that I realized the oblivion according to the comparison between the size of the text and what had been read. Meanwhile, they had the feeling that I was following the text as they were reading it to me, I heard them spoke about it between them.

I am 4, and I’m doing puzzles of 1000/2000 pieces, puzzles normally reserved to aged ten and older.

I’m going to the cinema for the first time to see The Jungle Book of Disney, from the Rudyard Kipling’ book that I read in pocket book. I’m not able to really enjoy the movie. We are in the big cinema of the Évry’ Agora, and the place seems to me icy, too big, too crowded, too dark. I am scared. I will not go to a cinema anymore before I got ten years old.

I have a great thirst to learn everything. I can’t bear staying on a question without answer, I always want to know more. I am made of passions that are burning me and taking up all my time. My first passion is for the animals. It’s first about to know all the different species, their different aspects and ways of life, and then it’s about to protect them. I can’t understand how the fate of the animals can be on earth so nefarious and that nobody seems to really care about it.

I write letters to some presidents of the republic to ask them to take some strong actions to save the species in danger in their territories. I appeal to Chinese president to demand him to take care of the pandas, to the one of the Zimbabwe to protect the elephants, and to other ones. I have a strong language to them. I don’t settle for asking them to do things, I blame them for their attitude until now. My parents worry a little about the reaction could have these governments disinclined to critics or fun.

When I come to the feeling to have dealt with the whole issue about the animals, my passion changes and becomes the jazz. I chose some discs in the Corbeil-Essonnes’ media library that my parents loan for me. I play saxophone, I want to play tenor or baritone, but I am told that a little boy of 5 years like me can only play alto. What a desperation to be a little boy, it’s absolutely not what I’m feeling to be. The hired teacher confirms the diagnosis and imposes me the alto, he says at least for the beginning, until I’m taller. I am very disappointed. Alto doesn’t interest me and frustrates me. And, as far as I can understand, the teacher promises me tenor later for not to disappoint me too much, but I will have to wait to be a teenager to touch the desired instrument. I can’t wait all that time, I have other things to do.

Alto, it’s Charlie Parker. And Parker scares me a little, especially since I saw on TV the movie Bird of Clint Eastwood. I didn’t understood a lot from this movie, it was dark, poisonous, an universe from where we just could want to escape and run. I don’t like movies about musicians. It takes away all the beauty, all the high things. The Amadeus from Miloš Forman have also traumatized me and have taken off my enthusiasm about Mozart, and of course more about Salieri. And, anyway, I don’t like the tone too high of the alto sax. I love the warmness, the breadth and the velvety of a lower saxophone. I want to play like John Coltrane, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.

My teacher Antoine Beauchamp thinks that I have a good musical hear because I am good to his dictations of notes. In fact, I’m cheating. I know the solfeggio and the musical keyboards, and I see on what touch he presses. This teacher is ill-at-ease with me, he never had a student as younger. My father phones him on Christmas morning of 1988 to tell him that I stop the lessons with him, the poor guy is very asleep on the other side and it takes time for him to understand. It was an obsession for me in this holy day to make sure that I will never go again to these savorless lessons.

I will face Antoine Beauchamp later as music teacher, in public college Paul Éluard of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

I also try the trumpet, but despite my enthusiasm I don’t reach any good result. I am lucky to loan a trumpet, I keep it at home during three weeks. I can’t place my mouth properly, and the only thing that I succeed to do is to ruin my lips. Anyway, I love this object with a religious devotion. I am constantly walking through the apartment with the heavy instrument that I hold in my hands, while my physiological pacifier is at my neck tied by a necklace of blue pearls. I like that this pacifier to be iced. I don’t know how to fall asleep without suckle it. When I don’t have a need of it by my side I put it in the freezer. There is also in this freezer another object that is precious to me, it’s a little plastic pink heart with water into. Almost everything I love is pink, I love this color. This plastic heart has sometimes a use, it’s when my nose is bleeding, then I put it in my neck to make the bleeding stop. I have this addiction to the physiological pacifier but I don’t have any memory to have sucked my thumb.

In this beginning of the year, the object of my passion stops to be the jazz and become the history of France. This new passion quickly especially focuses on the Revolution. What is welcome because it’s the year of the bicentennial dear to the minister Jack Lang.

I am possessed by a real feverish obsession about the French Revolution. I make people offering me figurines with the effigy of the main characters of this bloody epic, and I read some voluminous books about the topic, very heavy books under which my elbows often collapse.

I keep seeing regularly Lucille, even if I go extremely rarely to the preschool. Each time my parents force them to send me in it despite my protests, I start developing diseases for not going there. My body rebels and takes over when my words can’t be heard anymore. First, those are repeated otitis with high fever. Then there are acute sinusitis evolving in angina, always with high fever. Until that I end up developing a mysterious dysfunction, I start to sternly limp as if I had a dislocated hip. My mum comes then to really panic and put me away definitively from the accursed establishment.

The nap is my first grievance against the preschool Robert Desnos of Fleury-Mérogis. These naps that are imposed to us every afternoon, I can’t stand it. It’s incomprehensible, it’s like we couldn’t sleep at our home, and as night isn’t enough to sleep at. We are crammed lying in the dark for several hours, this is torture to me. I haven’t got any desire to sleep, I am overflowing with energy and things to think about.

I yet can’t bear to have to sleep at the evening, and is asked there to sleep in the afternoon in this overheated prison with a confined atmosphere unbreathable. It’s unacceptable ! I do not appreciate even the fact that people can make us sleep on order, it’s hard for me to conceive such a thing. Normally, we sleep because we are tired. And generally I always have trouble with this notion of obeying when I don’t understand the merits.

During these moments of strain in a sleeping bag, I spend my time writing. I write with the tip of my finger in space around or on the smooth outer surface of the sleeping bag. But I hardly see the tip of my finger, I just guess it in the light beam coming from the room where the school staff chatting while drinking coffee.

It’s in these moments that I’m creating the Kellermannia, an overpopulated continent that I place in the Atlantic ocean, between Europe and North America. A kind of gargantuan reminiscence of Atlantida or Mu continent.

I am perpetually intoxicating myself with cerebral activity pushing me ever further, I depresses as soon as I run out of fuel in my mind. I can’t stand to have to go to sleep at night, I don’t understand why we are daily condemned to this kind of death, which is also to me synonymous of nightmares in which I am powerless. I always want to have new fields of thoughts, always want to know more, I can’t understand how can we waste time sleeping when there is so much to discover, so much to learn, so much to imagine, so much to feel.

And yet I have already the chance to have parents who, at the evening, or work or go sleeping very late because they are totally offset by their night jobs. So it leads that I never go to bed at appropriate hours for children of my age. I go to bed always very late, never before midnight, never before the hour where finishes the second film of the evening on TV. My grandmother would never miss to watch the two movies of the evening. I don’t want to sleep, even when my body is betraying myself and my eyes are closing. I’m trying to delay as much as possible the fateful time, even to circumvent it. I have a tendency to believe in miracles and always think that I can win the battle against sleep. I brake so hard not to switch, of course in vain.

I can’t bring myself to accept this rest phase, I don’t understand how can we accept that the brain activity can stop or even decrease. It scares me and disappoints me. How can all that just fall back, slow down ? When everything must never ends to grow and progress. I have the feeling to lose everything each evening when I go asleep, diving into this inevitable abyss.

I don’t understand the meaning of all this lost time. And all this time where we lose consciousness, how does it count ? How can we build something when we must lose control on it every night ? Why living when we have to sleep about half-time ? Is it a death from where we rise again every morning ?

I’m looking every time to increase the speed and the intensity of my thoughts and reasoning. I come to impressive states of exhilaration by progressing in this way. I try to make that state permanent, state that I prolong sometimes with a simultaneous masturbation.

The only meat I eat is sheep brains. I like eating that, sucking them up, I have the feeling that I’m going to have more brain and then be able to assimilate all that I so want to learn.

I adore Alain Souchon’ songs that I listen on a loop. I record incessantly some audio tapes with his songs that I’m mixing in every way. I love this way to be an adult and intelligent while in the same time having a child’s emotional and language. This man who has the same first name as my dad, and who has also like him curly hair, fascinates me. I like this way to be a man while taking the opposite of the masculine bragging. Meanwhile I can’t really identify with him. I find him physically quite repulsive, maybe because of his sad look even when he is funny, maybe also his red hair. I like so much too the music of his songs which is composed by Laurent Voulzy and which fit so well with Alain’ words. A music that I don’t hear like made by instruments but like an orchestration between the elements. We can hear in it the wind blowing, the boats sailing, the masts clashing, the trains crisscrossing the countryside,