Rush job...

My analyst has erected gateposts to divert the traffic in front of her house off her lawn. I feel good about her re-defining her limits and protecting her patch. We both enjoy her garden. Sometimes I think I feel good about any kind of positive change.

This is a field not far from my house, which I discovered when I was out walking last Thursday. It is said to be “en jachère fleurie” – floral fallow?

I had to translate “audition” in the legal sense, which in English is “hearing”.

It made me think of the musical sense of audition which I suppose is “casting” in French.

Much as I would love to see myself as “good-natured” I have to admit when I try to do too many things at once I become churlish.

I like to take my time over blog posts, and tend to put off writing till I have a reasonable space of time to spend putting them together. However, the world is speeding up, things are becoming crazy, it is very hot, I have a l_o_t of work to do, last night there was a French Canadian storyteller in Lombez, Robert 7 Crows (who says Crow = Corneille and Corbeau = Raven… Mmm. For me, corbeau has always been crow but I have no time to check this ...) On Saturday night I’ll be singing (my workshop has a 6 minute slot) at the end of year extravaganza of Music’Halle and the next day it seems I’ll be off to Marseilles for a week on "business". (nudge nudge wink wink).

so this one is rushed.

Went to the seaside this weekend and when we got to Gruissan we found by sheer coincidence there was a vernissage of an exhibition containing a painting of Françoise. (Exhibition of paintings by Emma Boutin). So here is a very serendipitous snapshot of the subject having stepped out of the frame.

Words, words, glorious words

Words that come up in the course of my work or reading, words that call out to me either because I’ve never seen them before, or because I have taken them for granted and never taken the trouble to look up what they mean.

Pipistrelles are bats. Pulchritude means physical comeliness. Molten seems to always go with rocks. Unbridgeable gaps. Led by their desire to know.

Psephology.


One day last week General Motors declared bankrupt. An abortion doctor was shot dead in an American church by an anti-abortionist. In France, the RMI became the RSA, to encourage people to work by making sure they earn more when employed than when unemployed. This incentive is being implemented against a background of rising unemployment, which is expected to reach 10% next year. I don’t know if anyone will benefit from it.

I believe that if wealth was redistributed, each member of the human race could live decently, have food and clean drinking water, be given a living wage.

The mayor of London is going to put 31 pianos around the capital for three weeks from the end of June, “with only a couple of metal chains and a laminated songbook for protection against the wiles of vandals and metropolitan musicophobes.”

An Air France plane from Brazil to Paris disappeared off the radar. No trace of it was found for fully a week.

For what it’s worth, I realised that there is “frique” in “Afrique”.

Going back slightly further, Anna Gavalda’s book Je l’aimais was released as a film starring Daniel Auteuil. I watched incredulously as he was interviewed and the film summarised as an account of the experiences of the character he played. That is not how I perceived the book at all. To me, the “Je l’aimais” clearly meant that she was saying that she had really loved him, and not the other way round, where the ambiguity would be about which woman - wife or mistress – he was finally admitting to loving. Or, rather, having loved.

I couldn’t believe that the interview was not with the leading lady rather than the leading man, whose role, to my mind, was secondary. The real love in the book is his mistress’, for she loves him exclusively, even moving to Paris to be near him. But he didn't let her "in".

I fondly remember reading Bertrand Russel’s In Praise of Idleness when I was an avid reader in my youth.

“Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.”

Fishing for a good time

PerhapsL&F -

Starts with throwing in your line. So sang Tom Waits.

So it’s a question of throwing in a fishing line and waiting for the bite

The tug

The pull

It is not cheating to throw in the line. You won’t catch any fish by throwing yourself in the water and threshing about.

You have to wait. You have to give them something they want.

And some of the fish will steal your worm and make off with it and remain free

but one fish will bite and be hooked

and for many an afternoon you will swing on the gate listening to the empty desolation of the wind

wondering about the brightness of the sun

the silence and the absence

yes for many a summer’s afternoon you will swing on the gate alone, looking at the ground, looking at the empty bottom of the street, looking

listening

waiting

being alone

many many afternoons alone

and then the mornings which you never notice, and the evenings, which come later, much later. It took so long to break through to evening loneliness and you haven’t ever really done it… not perfectly. It is never perfect. It was at one time and yet

whatever phase you are in you are not aware of it and waiting for some parameter to change …

you did not know you were free

and so you were not free

you were a prisoner

trapped in your routine

you used to believe in Brownian movement

you used to believe in chance meetings

you don’t anymore

how did this happen

Seeing's believing

May is full of bank holidays in France, especially Thursdays, and when people take the Friday off to create a long weekend they call it “faire le pont”. I heard the expression “viaduc” the other day – nice image of a double bridge.

I was “looking forward” to cutting the grass on this bank holiday, so imagine my surprise when I went into the garage to get the lawnmower and immediately realised there was something missing. The something was a bright red plastic petrol can. I bought it recently to replace the dull blue plastic petrol can that went missing from the same garage. The absence of the expected bright red blotch almost made me hysterical. I went out into the lane, thinking one of my son’s acquaintances must have needed petrol for his scooter and been afraid to ask, hoping the can itself would have been discarded in the ditch. As I walked up and down looking into the ditch, fulminant, the words “red rag to a bull” came to mind. This definition reminds me of the days when I used to feel frustrated about dictionaries. If I don’t understand the word in French I’m hardly going to understand it in English. Pronunciation is important but… wait a minute – reminds me of the check-in at Vienna airport. I ask Sylvia what a “Vortages Check-in” is. She says she has no idea. She asks the hostess behind the counter and bursts out laughing. It is German for “check-in”. Because I pronounced it in English she then saw it as an English word.

The last time I arrived at Blagnac to travel my mind switched to English as soon as I left home, and when I got into the lift I thought I saw “departs” (when it was actually “départs”). Can’t they get their English right, I seethed, it is departures not departs, which reminded me of the arrivals board which sports “delayed at” instead of "delayed to" – in fact, in English speaking airports they use another formulation altogether – "expected at"… Everytime I see “delayed at” I want to write to Air France but then the person I’m waiting for arrives and complaining seems insignificant.

In a Guardian interview of Kashuo Ishiguro I came across the word bathos (in the adjectival “bathetic” form) for the first time and coevals –

In the same interview I realised I was not sure what “vindicate” meant and I discovered the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi sabi: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Phew. That's a relief.

lepidopterist

Butterflies are one of the reasons I moved to the South West of France from Paris, along with starry skies and fresh air.

There are two kinds of red. Red that makes you angry and red that warns you of danger.
Returning to Caen from Scotland, having driven up there one Christmas and almost being snowed in by a blizzard, I was heartened by the tail lights of the car in front of me as I was heading down south at a snail’s pace. At one point I actually got the feeling that they had been put there especially for me, to keep me safe and make me feel part of a great network of people who drive cars. I suppose that is the opposite of paranoia.



P.S. fulminer bluster, rant, seethe, storm away, fulminate

L’amour bursting out of la cage

The mountains were so clear the other day. Such a joy.

“Mercurial” is a nice, interesting word I have come across quite often, recently, which took me to mercury. "Mercury occurs in deposits throughout the world as cinnabar (mercuric sulfide), source of the red pigment vermilion."

I immediately want to put another “l” in vermillion and I thought cinnabar was a town… On second reading, pigment and vermilion become Pygmalion.

I’m looking forward to reading Alain Badiou’s “L’hypothèse communiste”; found an article called “L’hypothèse de l’émancipation reste l’hypothèse communiste”

- which seemed to resonate with another Shakespeare quote - "Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery."

Ad Libitum - At one's pleasure, usually abbreviated ad lib – ad libido (and shake).

Speare definitely said it all. There seems to be a quote from him for everything. I found great comfort in “Time and the hour run through the roughest day” when I was a child. I remember repeating it to myself, clutching at the words like a talisman. Now it seems tame, as if the spark has gone out of it; it just doesn’t seem to mean much now. Could it be that quotes (like words) have a set amount of energy in them and once you have used it up you must move on to new ones? That would coincide with the experience of learning to sing a song. First you are attracted to the song, strongly enough to make you want to learn it, experience it, master it. Eventually, you overcome the difficulties and by the time you can almost do it with your eyes shut it no longer produces the same excitement, the energy has changed...

But not the energy of the song... which is surely fixed ... the energy of the singer, which is free to vary... Two energies, two vibrations = resonance or dissonance, harmony or dissharmony. Britta was intrigued at the fact that you cannot burn one log. To have a fire, you need at least two pieces of wood.

Rather than loudness, there is a kind of intensity, when a sound is just voiced - there is a kind of vibrational threshold, when you can hear voicing, that is where the greatest emotional intensity lies.

I seem to have managed to throw the wolves off my trail. I am no longer swimming in shark infested waters. I have found temporary respite on a kind of island or at least beach. Who knows how I got here. One Shakespeare quote that I find comforting now is “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.” If the path is the important thing, then a destination (or direction) is maybe not indispensable. Hoc omnia quibus egeo est.

I found some Physalis at the fruit counter of Aldi. I had never considered it edible and I did not intend to eat it, but as soon as I saw it I had to have some. I took it home and left it lying on the counter for a while, hoping it would do something to surprise me. It didn’t. It stayed remarkably the same for a long time. It didn’t even seem to be drying out or shrivelling up. So I stuck two of the fruits, inside their cages, into a pot, and put the pot on the window sill.

A short time later I was amazed to see zillions of seedlings bursting out of the cages. I assume they will grow up to be more Physalis; time will tell. If you click on the photo to enlarge it you can see what looks very much like a clover leaf in there.