Tooth and nail

Je vous lis en juillet, au bord de l'eau, quand il fait très chaud.

De temps à autre, je garde ma place avec un doigt,

planté sur un point comme un piquet de cerf volant,

ta phrase fait le tour de moi comme l'hirondelle fait le tour du ciel,

comme le vin fait le tour du palais

et quand je suis loin, très loin du point de départ, je reprends le fil de ma lecture,

mon regard re-penchant sur ta page comme un oiseau qui picore les signes, bibliophage sauvage, haletant entre les espaces et les paragraphes.

Parfois, ne trouvant rien, je cours, puis un mot me ralenti, et je te suis, et tuez moi.

Je vous ai lu en juillet, deux fois, autour de la cinquantaine.

Entre la première et la deuxième, vous avez oublié mon nom

C'est sans importance

On a le droit de n'exister pour personne

Être sans importance pour un autre…

Je vous lis, je vous ai lu en juillets,

l'écris vain jeté du lit, je vous le dis, jujitsu à ta virgule près ; lits crevants, juvénile jubilance,

vous, juillet, lu.

I bought a recording of Bach's Cello suites played by Yo Yo Ma on Itunes so I went to buy blank cds at the supermarket bookshop/multimedia outlet (which you may remember is called "l'espace temps").

As I waited for the sales attendant to finish her conversation with a friend and come and take my money, I noticed two copies of a book for sale, propped up on the counter, right in front of the cash register, some distance from the books. I noted the name of the author. BG.

In the evening I switched on the news and the main headline was that BG had died. The same day. I felt a sudden revulsion at the society we are living in. It couldn't be a coincidence. They put that book there because they knew it would have a good chance of selling because the author had just died. So we cash in on death. We are actually using death as a selling point. Do we have no scruples left? Or did we ever have any?


Amitiés bizarres…
The Heads of State and Government confirmed their determination to fight translational threats together.

I had never come across "nous" in English before...


A French question from a satisfied customer and an English sentence from the Guardian..
Ne vous ai-je pas encensée à la réception du document ?
Obama team 'incensed at being kept in the dark' as company denies underwater oil clouds

avoir les dents longues does not mean to be long in the tooth

Painting over the map.

People tattooed acupuncture pressure points on their bodies gazillions of years ago, but we have painted over them. The new layer hides the old layer which is eventually forgotten…

Perseverance

This blog is not going the way I want it to go. It started with the idea of palimpsest but I knew that was not quite right almost straight away. I liked the word because I liked the concept and I had come across it for the first time. The thrill of discovery. But I am not trying to scrape anything off and start again. Au contraire. Or maybe I’m trying to scrape through layers in places to recover what is underneath.

Originally, I thought the blog could serve to create a kind of “de facto mappemonde clignotante” – a set of master signifiers, nodes, the semantic/emotional poles I would like to capture/describe/put in place. The hotspots of my psychic/inner life. Here a colour, there a word, song, poem, or smell… what makes me me and not someone else, (and at the same time, perhaps, what prevents me from being happy about it).
I wrote in my analysis diary: “The other day I was thinking of one of them – duck blue (or teal) and I thought I could feel the energy blinking, like Christmas tree lights, they all blink and if one single bulb fuses they all go out, and how do you find which one it is but that’s not what I felt, I felt that once all my spots were blinking like a Christmas tree or map of some kind it did not serve any purpose, in fact it served a counter purpose, the only purpose it served was to fascinate me… and prevent me from actually making my way. Fascinate me in the morbid sense, like narcissus, keep me leaning over my own image my own self, my own ego, instead of engaging with the world or at least with the world of words other than in relation to my own pitiful personality or emotional problems.”
Then later: “The mappemonde clignotante is useless - it just flashes like a pinball table. I want to put a full stop on what I have been. And start a new paragraph, sentence, chapter, book.”

Tonight I toyed with the idea of letting this blog fizzle out and starting an anonymous blog to talk about analysis only, in a mixture of French and English, but that didn’t feel right either. It reminded me of all the files I have started and never finished. The line in A love of Swann where Alain Delon says to Jeremy Irons “Most people’s lives are like artists’ studios – full of unfinished sketches”. And of the painting above the piano, which I have not finished talking about. Or should I say writing? Or should I write describing?

It started out as an attempt to portray a particularly dramatic skyscape I glimpsed the first time I went sailing. I don’t like representational art, but the scene struck a very deep chord. The aesthetic “oh gawd I’ve just got to express how grateful I am for how beautiful that is in my own pathetic way or I’ll burst” theory. It was not clear, turquoise waters in the chalky Calanques on a sunny day. No. This was a symphony of grey. The sky was bulging with grey. The sea was stuffed with grey. The line between them was barely perceptible. It was an explosive kind of grey. Bright grey in places, with the Riviera sun trying to hammer its way through; dark, dull, menacing grey farther away. All of it was a very wet grey.

We were coming in to Marseilles and there was a catamaran regatta going on between us and the old port. We had to time it right to slip through among the competitors. That was thrilling in itself, because having no experience in sail-powered movement the timing involved seemed incongruous. We saw the catamarans at real close quarters, with the skippers leaning over so low they were almost in the water – and when they fell over they were very much in the water. All their sails were fluorescent. Once we were through to the other side, I looked out to sea and gasped at this huge expanse of bevelled grey, concave and convex, with slashes of fluorescent colour like flags in the middle. Growing smaller and smaller.








We parked the boat in front of the town hall and had a cup of tea.

When I got home I took the biggest canvas I could find – it had to be big to get that huge sky in – and painted it grey. I did my best to make the paint as thick and uneven as possible, and lavish on lashes of light and dark grey and bits of white, but it looked disturbingly flat. I didn't dare to touch it for a long time.

Then I tried to draw in the shapes of the sails. To be in proportion, they would have been tiny pin pricks. I can't draw that small. It looked ridiculous. I went as far as painting the sails fluorescent orange, pink, green and yellow.

The result was abominable. It didn’t kill the power of the image I had in my mind; it just didn’t seem to be in any way remotely connected to it. It stayed in the garage for many moons, where it could have been mistaken for a picture of the concrete garage floor with graffiti on it.

Eventually the summer sun reactivated, as it periodically does, my urge to express my aesthetic gratitude through paint, and I hit the canvas with all my favourite colours of the moment, and even some, for a reason unknown to me, that I didn’t like, and didn’t seem to go together.

As soon as I thought of the word perseverance, Persephone came to mind, and I googled her and discovered she ate p o m e g r a n a t e seeds. It’s a small world.

Denizens II

Art for the heart’s sake

Arabic calligraphy I find very attractive. It fits into a wholly pleasing aesthetic slot in my sensitivity. I don’t know what the words mean and I don’t feel the need to find out. This is restful, like sitting at a street café in a German-speaking country, enjoying guttural, familiar-sounding, but totally unintelligible speech. On Capri, visiting the blue grotto, our Scottish accents got us a seat on the boat with the German tourist guide.

Arabic music makes me feel that I am not at home. Maybe I only really encountered it for the first time when I spent the winter in Morocco as a teenager. My first trip outside my home country. The labyrinth of the Medina at night.

So I’m thinking about the idea of being foreign, which, strangely enough, for an Anglophone living in France, is sparked off by Arabic music. I should add that I once lived in Paris with a Moroccan lover who committed suicide. Could be that the feeling of foreignness is more a reluctance to acknowledge or return to that period of emotional devastation, the aftermath of the suicide, than anything to do with a geographic country.

One thing that saved me was Dubuffet’s Jardin d’Hiver in the Modern Art Museum at the Pompidou Centre. I would crawl into it of a Sunday afternoon, and I felt safe there. There are many pictures of it online, but I haven’t found one that captures the magic of the pale winter light that comes in the “skylight” in the ceiling of the grotto – I always assumed it to be the natural light of a pale winter sky, but, come to think of it, there must be a light bulb, since the source is concealed, and that wouldn’t work here, the way the sunshine manages to shine upwards from under the water in the blue grotto of Capri.

I loved the Pompidou Centre, which we always called Beaubourg; a free place to keep warm, especially on a wet Sunday afternoon, when entrance to the museum was free, too. It is probably what I miss most about Paris.

From today’s Guardian:
“The Pompidou Centre's marvellous L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti is a retrospective featuring not only Giacometti's sculptures, paintings and drawings, but also the studio itself - what went on there, and what was removed after the artist's death, including sections of the walls on which he drew and painted. These were not so much murals as a palimpsest of stains, scribbles and scratches, among which loom faces, walking men and standing women: Giacometti's perennial subjects.”

I added the bold. I felt that was really creepy. Visions of vultures and the word cannibalistic come to mind.

Traduttore, traditore

Working on Boris Vian for a musical-literary evening.

“In 1946, he published a faux-French translation of a novel by a non-existent African American author, Vernon Sullivan. Emphasizing through parody and self-referentiality the "impossibility" of translation from American English into French, Vian simultaneously attacks both the notions of a constructed, fetishized "original" text and of racial authenticity.”

Of course translation is impossible.

I will be singing Corcovado on Saturday night, and as a courtesy to my French audience I have translated the English version into French, and will sing both. I have no idea whether the English is faithful to the Portuguese original, so any relationship between my French version and it will be tenuous. I intend to check with a friend who is a Portuguese to French translator, but I dare not till after the gig.

Rosemary Arrojo, Oficina de tradução (The Translation Workshop):

“Instead of considering the text, or the sign, as a receptacle in which ‘content’ can be deposited and kept under control, I suggest that its prototypical image becomes that of a palimpsest, from the Greek palimpsestos (‘rubbed smooth again’).

[…]Metaphorically, the ‘palimpsest’ becomes the text erased in each cultural community and each epoch, so as to give way to another writing (or interpretation, reading or translation) of the ‘same’ text.”

Firths and Fourths

Star wars message from Charmaine the other day - “May the fourth be with you”.

Weblog. We blog. Web lock. Backlog. I have come up against resistance. The urge to write here no longer blithely bulldozes through self-consciousness and the fear of ridicule. Everything that comes into my mind under the “I could post this” heading is immediately crushed and nipped in the bud.

I cannot write the truth because someone might read it… I think I may well start an anonymous blog and a blog in French, or some combination of both, to beat at least some of my censors, or follow my original impulse which was to sprout forth freely in one or tother.

In the meantime, what am I actually free to write? That the first thing our new President elect did was fly off in the private jet of a multibillionaire friend and spend three days in said friend’s yacht with a Jacuzzi on the upper deck and a crew of 17 in waiting? Sending the silent message to disinherited urban youth that if they want to enjoy the same privileges, they only have to rise earlier and work harder.

In the picture, the gold structure reminds me of the ominous presence of bridges such as the ones over the Firth of Forth. The Forth’s Bridges. The original Forth Bridge is a railway bridge which was used as a metaphor for a job that can never be completed – a metal bridge, the paint had to be kept in a decent state of repair to protect it from the salt, and the bridge was so long that as soon as they reached one end it was time to start again at the other end.

Like a kind of giant palimpsest which you don’t have to physically erase, because the signs painted on it disappear gradually over time, through the action of the elements, but that requires regular reinscription just to stay in existence.

Otoliths

I was translating a list of fish that can be caught in Gabon and had to look up “otolithe”. I had never seen the word before, in French or English.

Otolithe

Pseudotolithus senegalensis
Cassava croaker

As well as a fish, I found another meaning:

An otolith, (oto-, ear + lithos, a stone) or otoconium is a structure in the saccule or utricle of the inner ear.

Browsing the web, I came across the word again, in a fascinating article.

This phenomenon is common enough, sometimes called synchronicity, when you encounter a word for the first time then come across it again immediately afterwards. It sort of pops into existence. The second time you meet it, it feels as if another reality has winked at you. The reality of hidden connections.

It conjurs up lithops and monoliths, palaeontology and palimpsest, which reminds me that the word that set me off on this blog leaves me free to delete everything and start all over again.

Fish are fascinating. I never think of them hearing. Watching salmon attempting to jump up waterfalls is the best lesson in determination I can imagine.

Empty spaces

"The word parchment, usually pergamenum in medieval Latin, derives from the name of the city of Pergamum whose ancient King Eumenes is said by Pliny to have invented it in the second century BC during a trade blockade on papyrus.”

Parchment is made from animal skin and has imperfections; sometimes in pages of manuscripts one sees holes.

Palimpsest

Yesterday, I learnt a very nice word. Palimpsest.

"A palimpsest is a manuscript page, scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again." (Wikipedia)

Pâle, inceste... Palimpe; zest. Pal, imps, Est.

Serendipity.

Hungry. It is 8:48 and I haven’t had breakfast. I haven’t had anything to eat, but I did have a cup of tea, with milk. My stomach is rumbling. I’m busy working, translating some advertising materials related to wines and spirits. The other day, I wrote “hungry, lonely and afraid” on the whiteboard stuck to my cupboard door. It seemed like a good position to start writing from. I felt I could learn a lot by starting from that phrase. And here I am, hungry. All this type of hunger means is ‘when shall I make my toast’? Right now, or in half an hour? It is not a life-threatening hunger. It is not development-arresting hunger. It is not even a hunger that prevents me from thinking. The society I live in is plagued by the ills of over-eating, and my overweight body can gaze through the window of the press at places where millions of people are starving, lack clean drinking water and sanitation, or live under a constant threat of violence.