Sybarite

Whenever I come across a new word for the first time, I invariably come across it again very soon afterwards. It’s that second time that makes me want to think about it. Funny how the first and second times are always so close together…
Sybarite is the latest word. It means "a voluptuary”. Something like a hedonist with luxury thrown in.
I came across it in a blog. I was reading the blog because I had been very impressed by a concert. Reese, aka Yves-Henry Guillonnet, is a first rate musician, and he was playing guitar in a duo with a certain Manu who has the sexiest voice I have heard in a long time. Their compositions were subtle, interesting, tender, cocasse, and amusing. In a word, they were brilliant! Unfortunately they have not yet released the recording of the gig, but they will, one day.



It was Saturday 10th May, and there were two concerts of interest on the same evening! The odds against this happening in (or, rather, around) a place like Lombez are mind-boggling. The first concert was at aperitif time and it was Vicky La Sardine (top picture), a friend who writes her own songs and plays them accompanied by an accordionist. She is also an excellent performer, and had a bit of success with a comedy act at one stage.

The second occurrence of sybarite came today, in a crit of the film by Claude Lelouch, “And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, please”. I watched it last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I fell asleep the first time I watched it, but I was very tired… Part of the reason I like it is because Patricia Kaas sings some of the songs I’m practicing now for my piano/voice duo with Bertil Sylvander. Bertil’s day job is running a clown school, at La Robin, and we are working on some nice jazz standards and improvising. I hope he doesn’t want us to wear red noses… (Ha ha! They're not that kind of clowns - "Send them in", I hear you say). Yesterday we worked on “Que reste-t-il de nos amours” and I switched blithely from that to "I wish you bliss, but more than thiss...". When I watched the film last night, you guessed, that’s what Patricia Kaas does, starts off in French and switches to English... well, at least I know where I got that idea from... a lot of the time I am convinced my ideas are original and all it means is that my memory is not as good as it could be…

Which is another thing I like about the film – the main characters are suffering from amnesia and at the end the line between phantasme, reality and memory becomes very hazy...

Lemons from Algeria

In the news, London. A young barrister starts shooting out of his window, without opening it. He didn’t hit anyone, or aim at anyone, although he fired shots into his neighbours’ homes. What was he aiming at? The police returned fire and killed him. Suicide using the police as a means?

These lemons are from Algeria. There is a long story about them. It is taking a long time to write.

In my post on 15/04/07 I included a short excerpt from “Diary of an Analysand” which is not a diary but a collection of pieces of writing about the psychoanalytic journey – ending with Why? What follows is what followed.

I don’t know why. In truth I was a wanderer, wandering. I was a wanderer seeking something I had never found and until I found it, there was no way of knowing what it was I was looking for. All I knew was that it was something I had not yet found. The unknown. An unknown me, my god.

And there was something about not deliberately going somewhere to avoid missing the undeliberate, magical destination. It had to be happened upon as if by chance. A miracle. I was wandering around earth waiting for a lightning beam to strike me and make me what I was, what I wanted to become. I was expecting to be actuated from the outside. But that’s not how I perceived it. I perceived myself as self-sufficient. I didn’t want anything from anybody. I didn’t want anything from anybody except consecration from the Big Unknowable Other. The Big Unknowable Other that held the secret to my realisation. The BUO had to tell me that I was on the right track by not being on any track, by avoiding all tracks.

I believed that was what it meant to be alive, to not follow a direction laid down by anybody, even myself. My only direction was to keep on, go on, reach as far as I could without having a direction. Like an organism that tries to get as far away from its point of origin as possible, for no other reason than to find out what it is like as far away from home as it is possible to get. For no reason other than to be able to say “I went as far as I could, I went all the way” even though ‘all the way’ didn’t mean anything till I had found the end of the road, found the end of my road, reached the outer limits of my movement. And that could never happen, because I knew I would drop off the end of the earth. I would die lost, running round the globe for the Nth time, happy at never having been in the same place twice, happy that there was enough earth to make this possible.

I don’t know even now what is important. The means of transport I used, the places I ended up in simply through not wanting to be in another place, the discoveries. I don’t know if any detail is more important than any others. I suppose the only thing that is important and that allows me to think about all that is the fact that I finally stumbled on a destination. I finally found myself with a direction. Tobruk, for better or worse, temporary or permanent, pointing like an iron shaving under a magnet. Magnetised.

Before this, I was a short circuit, emitter and receiver – oh I had plenty of energy. I certainly emitted, loud and clear, but I was not happy with what I received. The short circuit was not satisfactory but I did not know why. Why was always my weak point. Why not? Everything was arbitrary, anyway, or so I thought, so I felt, and I did not ask to be an emitter and a receiver, I did not ask to come into existence, at least, if I did ask to come into existence, if I was the one who had actually chosen the time and place and circumstances of my birth, I had no recollection of it and came into life completely and utterly surprised by the whole thing. Unarmed. Naked. Confused.

I still am confused, but I’m no longer naked or unarmed. I’m still an emitter and a receiver, but I’ve found the tuning button. Or I have added a tuning button. Or the tuning button magically appeared, came into existence without knowing why, like me. In any case, there is now a tuning button and I can’t imagine why there wasn’t one before. Surely we should all be born with access to our tuning buttons? My only conclusion is once again that I am a freak of nature. No tuning button, then tuning button appears. There was no tuning button because I had not discovered the concept of tuning. Tuning in; tuning out. I did it automatically, frustrated at all that interference. Static. Crackle. I wasn’t doing it properly. My parameters were wrong. I was a 20^th century adult, using the parameters of some kind of prehistoric protozoa.

Toast to jube jube

My son had set the toaster to “2” which merely warms the bread, in my opinion. Maybe he doesn’t want butter to melt in his mouth… When I noticed this I turned it up full. The toaster got confused, or did both settings at the same time and the toast came out burnt. As I looked at the black edges the word “carbonised” tip-toed across my mind in slippers. We are carbon-based creatures. I had never made the connection before! When we say someone “is toast” we mean they are finished (the complete opposite of saying they are “the toast of”…) but we are all the product of cosmic combustion, so we actually start out as toast. We could well be the black bits scraped off the breakfast of some mysterious greater entity…

The village of Catrine. Cotton mill built 1787, demolished 1963

Catrine was a hamlet of eleven houses when a cotton mill was built there in 1787. The mill burnt down in 1963. When I was growing up, my father worked in the nearby Barony pit and my mother worked in the textile industry. The shops in the village included a fish monger and an ironmonger, where you could find everything from nails to washing machines. Today, most of the shops are boarded up, except for five or six pubs. The coal mines have closed down and the cotton industry has been delocalised. Wikipedia says Catrine is now “a picturesque village”.

Someone asked me where the cotton came from to run the mill, and I replied America. Glasgow also flourished as a port importing American tobacco. I am currently taking a drug called Champix to stop smoking. It makes me field weird, depressed one day, elated the next.

The first word that caught my attention since my last post is “inadvertently”.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin inadvertentia]

I just like the word, as I also like jeopardy, which, who would have guessed, comes from the French ‘jeu parti”

1. Risk of loss or injury; peril or danger.
2. Law. A defendant's risk or danger of conviction when put on trial.

[Middle English juperti, from Old French jeu parti, even game, uncertainty : jeu, game (from Latin iocus, joke, game) + parti, past participle of partir, to divide (from Latin partīre, from pars, part-, part; see part).]

Phonetically so close to leopard, no doubt some Martian trying to decipher English would think the meanings were related. Not so, not even the origins of the word:

“In Antiquity, it was believed that a leopard was a hybrid between a lion and a panther, as is reflected in its name, a Greek compound word derived from λέων léon ("lion") and πάρδος párdos ("male panther")”.

Another single letter change takes us to leotard, as in tutu (jube jube...)

“Writing is a performance art, so expect to experience performance anxiety, almost every time you write. Think of it as page-fright. :-)”

One of my favourite artists in one of my favourite newspapers:

I was reading in the aforementioned news-paper about arms being shipped to Mugabe via South Africa and the wooden language of diplomacy clunking out “we don’t have the authority” to not deliver this cargo when all of a sudden the sun came out:

“Dockers in Durban were refusing last night to unload the ship. The SA Transport and Allied Workers Union's general secretary, Randall Howard, said: "Satawu does not agree with the position of the government not to intervene with this shipment of weapons. Our members will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road."

Phew. There are still some people alive in the world.

Fulcrum
n., pl. -crums or -cra (-krə).

1. The point or support on which a lever pivots.
2. Zoology. An anatomical structure that acts as a hinge or a point of support.
3. An agent through which vital powers are exercised.

[Latin, bedpost, from fulcīre, to support.]
(point d’appui, pivot.)

“Pivot” in French is also the name of the presenter of the longest-running book programme, and so his name has become synonymous with literature.

I had never heard of an “Interest-only mortgage” before. The mind boggles.

And the last word of today is allay:-

“Research allays fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels”

Oh, I’m so relieved. I think of the little Dutch boy determined to save his community by sticking his finger in the hole in the dyke, but the adults can’t decide where the hole is, or there are so many holes they can’t decide which one he should be allowed to try to dam with his finger, and meanwhile the tsunami approaches...

And the myth isn’t based on true, European experience. There was no little Hans the Dutch boy. The Americans made it up.

A straightforward subset

Like Humpty-Dumpty, I sat on a wall and was amazed to see flowers growing out of the stone. I had seen these flowers before, I knew they were called Giroflée, but I didn’t know what they were called in English. The words “Wall, flower!” came floating into my mind and the feeling was like something dawning on me. I mentally clapped my hands. I told my French friends that in English, the first meaning of “wallflower” that comes to mind is a girl left leaning against the wall at a dance, when the boys or men come to pick their partners. In French the expression is “faire tapisserie” – to act as wallpaper. When I got the chance to look up Giroflée in the dictionary, I was delighted to find that sure enough, they are wallflowers. Intrigued, I googled around a bit and found a pleasing passage to the effect that the figurative usage is the same in German, and the “coincidence is purely coincidental”.

When wall & flower were juxtaposed in my mind, just after the pleasure of the dawning that I was seeing wallflowers for the first time, I felt downhearted, as if the word was reminding me of unpleasant experiences. The ‘poor me’ syndrome. But as I thought about the dancing classes at school, and the Sunday school parties you could be invited to or had to invite a partner to, I remembered some of my “cavaliers” (horseman, flippant, dancing partner…) Alasdair Cairns, Ian Niven (both of whom were butchers’ sons) and Jimmy Logan… I didn't feel particularly beautiful, but I wasn’t downright ugly either. There is no sacrosanct “past” – we re-write it every time we think about it, depending on the frame of mind we are in at the moment. And if My Story is open to interpretation, what about His Story?

Giroflée of course reminded me of girofle and the Body Shop mistranslation of Clover (Trèfle) as clou de girofle (cloves). Which took me to trèfles, one of the four suits in playing cards. Darn me if I could work out how they got “club” from “clover".

I eventually found the answer:
club, n., a suit in a standard deck of cards, from a translation of either the Spanish basto or the Italian baston (both are cognates of baton). Use of the term in English dates to 1563. The origin is not obvious because over the years the symbol on English decks of cards changed. English cards adopted the symbol used in French decks, where it is called a trèfle, or trefoil, but kept the old name club.

Listening to radio 4 I heard the word ‘flaccid’ - I know what it means, but it is not a word I have ever used - it is one of those words I lay no claim to. Not mine.

English is a language I use, but I don’t use all of it. My English is a subset of “English” – as I suppose your English is, too. In fact, nobody actually uses - passively or actively – the whole language. And yet we manage to communicate.

And if My English is a straightforward subset, what could I say about My French? I feel somehow “entitled” to use English as I please, because I was born in the British Isles, but I have no such sense of entitlement in French – I am a humble borrower, a mere uninvited guest… Which reminds me how impressed I was the first time I read Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent. I found his use of language wonderful and was gobsmacked to read on the cover that English was not his native language.

Food scarcity and Zimbabwe are the main worries in the news at the moment.

Quantum entanglement

Here is Françoise Guerlin singing Que reste-t-il de nos amours… I hope to put my own version of this song online, in French and English, with Bertil Sylvander au piano, within the next ten years.
I have tagged it as Françoise Guerlin, Trenet. Ah, the joys of French polysémie!!! (traînée = vapour trail, among other things).

I came across an article in the Guardian the other day that reminded me of The Prestige, and Todd McGowan's article:

“[…] teleportation is actually already being done by physicists. It relies on a deeply strange phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which physicists have already used to "teleport" a photon 89 miles between La Palma and Tenerife in the Canary Island group. […] "You are not actually moving the photons from one place to another because you are destroying the original. What materialises at the other end is your twin which has all the information of the previous object."

Car pictures by J.W. Vraets.