france

night had fallen and i had still twenty kilometres or more to go.

there was a beaming full moon and i told myself i would be happy to walk under it.  each time a car swooshed past i stood on the verge and held out my thumb, squinting into the anonymous headlight dazzle and holding a piece of cardboard painted with the word Taizé.

when a car stopped the man said he was going to taizé and then he said: c'est dangeroux marcher comme ça la nuit.  i thanked him heartily for stopping for me.  when he heard i was from the UK he said: ah, we have been paying homage to the beatles all the way since lyon.  his young son and daughter must have been wide-eyed at the sight of the man with his big rucksack and his funny accent coming in from the night.  they both had their favourite beatles songs.

"it took me so-wo-wo-wow long
to find out
...but i found out..."

it is late.  most people have left the church service.  night time taizé is teeming with people. 
i stand with my rucksack and observe the gait of one tall fellow.
how particular gaits are.  i know that gait and suddenly he knows my onlooking presence and my brother finlay and i have reunited. 

later on we organise a massive grand old duke of york session on the patio.  there must be approaching a hundred youths engaged in a variety of group dances.  we have the help of an extrovert spaniard and his fiddle, who directs everyone to find a partner and form two big lines, everyone facing their partner.  the first couple join hands and side-step buoyantly all the way down the middle and then back to the start.  they peel off to the sides, dancing round the outside to the other end where they form an arch with their raised hands; the two lines follow close behind, each person meeting up with their partner to pass through the arch and advance successively towards the head partner position.   an atmosphere of festive gaiety is engendered and i imagine that we are attending a country fair of yesteryear.

later finlay and i retire to the woods and cook a lentil onion cheese stew over the fire and sing and talk until late.  finlay finds it humorous that the advise "just act naturally" is given to people who are precisely finding it difficult to act naturally.  it becomes a puzzler; what exactly is meant by acting naturally.   and how does one act unnaturally? 
we consider the simpleness of the story of the grand old duke of york

(Oh, the grand old duke of york
he had ten thousand men
he marched them up to the top of the hill
and he marched them down again).

we set about comparing that story to the complex wordscapes of Queen's songs; we set about trying to remember the lyrics to bohemian rhapsody and we soon throw ourselves into a full, albeit slightly muddled, rendition.  we cannot reproduce freddy mercury's rich vocal tones but we consider the rich meaningscape of his lyrics.

the moon is massive and shining up in the sky.  in the field silver light is everywhere and bathes low clouds which spread their cloudy silver tendrils in front of the trees across the valley.

finlay exclaims:  how can a night be more beautiful?

finlay has found a lift to poland; we borrow juggling balls from a girl sitting alone on the grass for a goodbye game of donkey. 
i give the balls back to her and then i offer her some blackberries i have picked from the brambles at the side of the field.  we sit opposite each other and play a game whereby i throw up a blackberry for her to catch in her mouth.  blackberries are thrown until she does not catch one - then the catcher/thrower positions are swapped.
when all the blackberries are finished i say: j'aimerais passer plus de temps avec toi.
but the daylight is ending and i want to find a lift to lyon before the darkness comes.

i find a lift to lyon
and there in the dark i call charlène.  i have called her all while she was picking grapes and her answer phone message: 
laaa       la-la-la  la-la-la  la-la-laa     la-la-la  la-la-la  la-la-laaa la  in her soft childlike voice is in my head.  i am excited to see her again, but
"ah, i have changed plans...i am now in brittany"
i do not know what to feel.  we have spent the summer exchanging words and colours and music through the post. we said: maybe we will cycle to india together.  i walk to the park and find a place to roll out my sleeping bag by the river.  i feel small.

in the next days charlène hitches south and so do i and we meet up at the train station at the top of the hill in marseille.   we take a walk along the port, beyond the port to where the white rocks fall steeply to the sea.  
i ask a group of young boys in swimming trunks if it is possible to jump there and they say: yes.  i ask them if they have ever jumped and one boy says: yes.  and then he says: look     and runs to the edge of the cliff and lunges high into the air and falls,
falls...
a big white splash appears in the sparkling blue sea. 
his body resurfaces swimming lithely gliding through the crystaline water.

it is a hot day and jumping into that water refreshes enormously.

that evening a little party unfolds at the flat of the friend charlène is staying with.  i observe myself gravitating towards her and wanting to sit next to her but i also observe her polite indifference, neither inviting nor repelling.
the feeling of being attracted to a girl who is not attracted to you is ideal for generating a genuine feeling of humbleness.

the next day charlène accompanies me part way to a spot to hitchhike out of town.  she tells me that she has booked a flight to mexico after seeing the price of the flight was the same as what she earned picking grapes. she says travelling is like a drug; i consider the difference between being addicted to something and liking to do something.  charlène says she is not travelling in marseille at the moment because she already knows this place.  i think about 'being in an unknown place' as a definition of travelling, and what it actually means to know a place.  in a wider sense everybody is a traveller of life and a desire to 'know' new places is only one aspect of the voyage.
maybe a traveller is someone who wants to discover all that is unknown - unknown places, unknown scents and sounds, unknown people, unknown ways of life, ideas as yet unexplored, emotions as yet unfelt. discovering parts of the self as yet unknown.

charlène has inspired me with the book she wrote about her travels in india last year.  her writing has inspired me because of the fidelity of her words in describing the moment.  before i wanted to be suspicious of the slipperiness of the sensations of the moment that passes; i only wanted to focus on the elements of the moment that stay the same for all moments. 
now i want to be more faithful to the depth of each moment, in spite of its temporality.

i hitch out towards the vineyards, looking for more work picking grapes.  i am told that increasingly grapes are cut with machines in the south and i am advised that my best chances are near bordeaux.

sticking your thumb out and letting a driver decide to stop is a fascinating way to meet people.  their private car space has been opened up to you; there is a good feeling of good will that underpins the hitcher/driver interaction.  both are affirming that it is good to be in a world where people can be trusted and where people do good turns where possible.  giving a lift is a simple thing to do.  it may be far from a necessity - i happen to want to move from here to there.  gratifying people's wants is a good way to engender happiness.  (providing that what they want is reasonable).

i get out of one car at a motorway péage bottleneck, standing among all the cars with my rucksack and barefeet. a woman from the window of a nearby car says: where are you going? 
and soon i climb in. 
the shortest time between lifts ever.
the woman tells me that i make her think about a documentary generation sur la route about young people who abandon stationary living to travel and seek little jobs en route. 
in the car are three friends from Nice and they are generating ideas for a theatre production.  they lean close to one another and talk excitedly.  i only catch phrases and vague scenes, but i can sense the buzzing creativity of their imagined human worlds.  the young man sitting in the front seat is wearing a t-shirt on which it is written: "Yes, it is rocket science."   for some reason, i find that significant.
they tell me that the best way to find out about vineyard work is "de bouche a oreille".  i tell them that in english this expression is "from mouth to mouth".   
i reflect and i say "no, in english we don't say from mouth to mouth.   mouth to mouth is when you breathe air into someone's mouth when they have stopped breathing. 
in english we say by word of mouth".



a car stops and the driver says he can take me to bordeaux. i notice he is an old man.   his movements when he pushes the button to wind down the window or to make the indicator flash are so slow that i doubt whether he is able to drive the car safely on the highspeed motorway.  he almost never looks at me.  his voice is low and breathy.  he tells me he has travelled in his youth.  he says:
i speak a little english
ich spreche ein bisschen deutsch
hablo un poco espagnol
ana kanh-dar shwiya al-arbiya
and something which meant "i can speak a little hebrew" in hebrew.
he spoke it as if it were a litany.

he was hard of hearing and seemed not to even register some of my questions and i began to think: i will not converse much with this fellow. 
however, at a certain stage of the journey he began to speak about love.  i had to lean closer and listen furiously, and i asked little questions to show my interest.  he said that humanity is entering a phase of spiritual evolution.   and it consists of moving beyond material concerns and moving towards "aimer l'amour",  loving the love.
 
and the loves to love to love the love   a van morrison moment came on.  i asked him what exactly he thought love was and he said:  "l'amour c'est dieu, c'est ton esprit, c'est tout"  it is recognising the divine within you and the divine within everybody.
at one point i said: it is easy for people to become waylaid with material concerns.  he replied gently that it was important not to judge others.  i nodded in agreement and it seemed that what we were doing, speeding along the motorway in his little car, was affirming the essence of jesus' message.  let us love and let us not judge.

i am homing in on my goal of finding vendange work; i see a job offer for vendangeurs on a shop window. 
however i spend a good part of the morning watching cars slide nonchalently past and eventually decide to walk back into town and get the train somewhere, but that is when a woman stops and drives me back to her home saying: my neighbours have vineyards, let's ask them.   patricia is from chile and her friendliness shines.  she loves to travel and she loves to welcome warmly.  she puts on the coffee machine and lets me use the internet and that is when i read an email from my parents saying that walkers shortbread factory have offered me a job starting soon in scotland.  that is when i decide to abandon the search for grapes-picking work and to make haste for home, for the prospect of a job which lasts more than a week is appealing.

i lay aside my piece of cardboard that says SUD?
and make one that says NORD
and the ensuing lifts are long and roll me along the motorway north. the final lift is when the daylight is diminishing.  a grey-haired, bespectacled, lively man stops and says:  ah i must have hitched thousands of kilometres in my youth.
i say: you have to be a little bit crazy to hitchike
and he says: you have to be a little bit crazy to be an artist.
he describes his worst hitchhiking memory:  one night somewhere on the road to paris the night fell and the cold fell and he was left at the side of the road teeth chattering   all he did all night was spit on the ground and observe how long it took for the spittle to freeze.
i tell him i have always avoided that situation by taking a tent and sleeping bag with me.
we laugh: undesirable experiences are sometimes funny when you look back at them.
we talk and talk or maybe mainly he talks and i listen and so i make the acquaintance of denis pugnere who suddenly makes me think of picasso when i walk around his workshop and look at his stone sculptures.  upon arrival at his home in orleans it is dark and he has invited me to spend the night chez lui.   it is not long before the rain falls heavily and it is a good night to be given a roof after two weeks or dry weather.  i present him with the bottle of wine that patricia gave to me upon our parture that morning, saying "you are the second person full of kindness who i have met today."

denis introduces the philosophical proposition that "tout ce que est réel est parfait", which he attributes to spinoza.   it seems rather too blithe to maintain that all is perfect when one considers the wars and the suffering and the flagrant human badness.   all the same, some moments are described as perfect by some people.
denis summarizes with a sigh and "ah, la vie est complexe"
i say:  but is it really?
are all qualities that we attribute to life not mere interpretations?
all that we can really say about life is that life is.
whether it is big or bad or beautiful or complex or simple depends on how we interpret it.
life is simple for the person who says that life is simple.

denis fixes me with his gaze, and i think: he is wondering what are the possibilities of communication between us.
he entreats me to consider the stars and the galaxies which we can perceive across billions of light years.
he talks about our bodies, made up of millions of cells, each cell with its own memory and its own programming to direct its functioning.   he mentions the stars again and concludes "and there you are, and when you go outside you will take care not to step on the snails.      life is complex"

i think about the stars, and the cells of our bodies, and the snails and say, "what makes it even more complex is the fact that we are aware of its complexity."

i spend the first few hours of the next day waiting thinking: maybe today will be a day when i will get no lift.  be ready for everything.
then a couple stop who are beginning a few days holiday in normandie.  i accompany them to an art exhibition by a photographer friend of theirs, then the rain begins to fall in bucket loads and they decide to take a swerving detour to dieppe to leave me there for the ferry that night.  friendliness in a car.
sitting in their comfortable capsule, speeding along the motorway, listening to saint-germain's bopping chilled energy or keith jarret trilling up and down the piano or pink martini and their old-time swinging vibe.  the car is enveloped in rain, which ravishes the outside of the windows in writhing streams.

i sit on the rocks and watch the majestic clouds glowing red pink in the far away west.  the next day i see my friend andy and he tells me that he admired the same sunset from across the channel. 
why are sunsets so beautiful?
daytime distances are blue.   suddenly at the dusk hour they become impassioned with warmth and red.  it is as if the west had caught light from a glowing pile of embers, warm and close-up but actually very far-away.  the far off horizon glowing close and warm.




je suis libre     libre comme la mer
comme la belle mer   mon frère
je suis libre comme les pierres
comme les grandes belles pierres
comme les nuages, et les oiseaux

la terre d'angleterre a travers la mer
the land of england across the sea

la belle france

i saw my friend Andy - who had received serious wounds from a polar bear attack - in hospital in his hometown brighton; i looked in his eyes, which were a mixture of equanimity and tired awe, and i thought:

nothing can be taken for granted in this life
who can tell what is going to come next?

his parents gave me a warm welcome in their house, and then took me to the next village of newhaven from where i got the night ferry to dieppe, france.  it was a four hour crossing and was 03:30am when all the cars we beginning to disembark and i met a friendly englishman called buck who took me an hour up the road to Rouen.
i had been reading about the gothic churches in the stories of Maupassant and decided to take a walk around the centre.  the streets of Rouen were dark and silent. i thought about climbing up the scaffolding of one dark église but instead i fell asleep on a little grassy knoll nearby, after watching a soft veil of ragged clouds being pulled across a bright quarter moon. 
it was light when i was awoken by a man collecting rubbish nearby.  i wandered through the streets and followed the road to paris out of town and began hitch-hiking in the sun.  a manager of the supermarket chain intermarché stopped and took me all the way in his nice car to orly airport south of paris, a trip which took several hours and where i caught up a little bit with sleep.   i then had a long walk along a busy road through exhaust-fume-filled tunnels before finding a suitable place to hitch at a bus stop.  two girls waiting for the bus saw me hitching and said i should take the bus with them to the train station; one of them gave me a ticket which would pay for both.  we talked a while and she told me she was from mauritania and when we said goodbye we knocked our fists together several times the way rappers do. 

i took the train and fell asleep.
when i woke up the train had been mostly emptied of passengers.  the afternoon was warm and slow. the landscape consisted of the river Seine surrounded by trees and green fields and it was very pretty.

a friendly turk called Mous who had been living here for 8 years took me on to fontainbleau, where i lay by the square pond and looked across the lawn to the chateau and wrote:

fairytale turrets, long chimneys rising into the soft blue sky with the fluffy imprint of clouds
blades of grass dancing in the breeze
the splash of a fountain
the drone of a plane
yellow luminous sunlight everywhere,
   falling on this page.

i walked into the forest and found a place to sleep amongst a pile of big boulders atop a little hill.  i levelled a strip of sloping sand to lie looking up at the moon and the stars and when the clouds came i pulled my tent fly sheet over me and listened to the little tinkling of the raindrops.

the next day i followed the roads east.  a young man from china had been living in italy for the past ten years was touring france on holiday and took me a good way along the road.  he seemed to spend a lot of time alone and it was good for him to share the road with me, and share his breaksticks and pickled gherkins also.  at one point in the conversation i said: maybe to really be with another person you have to abandon something of yourself.  i liked it when he disagreed and said, thoughtfully and slowly: no, i think first you have to completely accept yourself, both good and bad parts, only then you can accept other people.
 
the self/society is a topic i still haven't got to the bottom of.

in the afternoon i arrived at Les Riceys, the little village where i would vendanger for 10 days.  i was the first to arrive but by the evening there were thirty people sitting round the big dining table, ready to pick grapes the next day.   there was a group of women from Montpellier who had been coming every year for the last seven or eight years; for them the vendange is a holiday, "it is hard work to pick the grapes, but we have a laugh.  it is good be away from our normal jobs, out in the sun".  more than simply picking grapes, these vineyard owners want to make it a celebration; every midday we would come back from the vineyards to the big house and enjoy sumptuous meals, always with a big tray of cheeses passed round afterwards, and then the fruit tarts, then the café.  always several bottles of champagne opened up and passed around.  every evening it would be the same; i had never empirically confirmed that there were people who actually lived like that.  my french friend Xavier - who had put me in touch with these vineyard owners - had told me about the bread and cheese and salami picnics during the morning break at the vineyard and the chocolate and beer given out at the afternoon break.  it sounded fantastic, but it was just as he said.  "everyone works hard when they are picking grapes, but enjoys themselves in between."

everyone slept in dormitories and got up at seven for a breakfast of baguette and butter and jam and coffee and worked from 8 until 12;  after our long sumptuous midday meal everyone sat around or dozed until heading out for the afternoon shift from 2 til 6.  sometimes the afternoon sun was very hot and sweat trickled down everyone's faces and some of the young men took off their shirts.  the work was unavoidably back-straining.  even going through a variety of positions - crouching down, sitting down, kneeling down or lying down and cutting the grapes above your head with the sunlight shining through the thick leaves - most of the grapes grew within a foot of the ground, and your back had to stretch and use muscles which are never normally used.  i had never felt my back so much.  after picking grapes one september my brother kevin sent an email entitled "my back is broken"

i think of that title now.

jeffery is about to start university and likes to practise his english.  one morning at the vineyard he asked me
carson, how are you?
at that moment i didn't know how to describe how i was
so i said:  hmmm, i don't know
he suggested that maybe i was tie-red
i agreed that i was, but didn't want tired to be the sum description of how i was so i said
i am also happy
why? was his response
i thought about the reason for my happiness:
because i am alive
because the sun is shining
because there are a lot of good people in the world

jeffery's next question was: are you a hippy?
i told him that depended on how he defined hippy
he said:  like bob marley, smoke marijuana...
do you have to smoke marijuana to be a hippy? i asked
you don't have to be  he said
he thought.
someone who wants Peace and Love

if that is what being a hippy is then i think it would be good if everyone in the world was a hippy.

jeffery elaborates:  a hippy is someone who is disconnected from reality
what reality i asked him
political reality, social reality, every reality...

he got me puzzling over how to know what reality was.

one day i cut with lionel, a member of the family who own the vineyards.  we cut fast together and call ourselves "les bêtes de la vigne" the vineyard beasts.  lionel tells me the french word for tits and slang terms for having sex.  another man overhears and tells me that "can i have a shag?" is what he says means "hello" to people who do not speak any french.

the next day the village newspaper reports that a girl was raped in a nearby vineyard.

it is true that men are generally crazy about the bodies of women

the night when all the grapes have been cut we have a party.  lots of empty bottles of champagne pile up in the glass recycling box outside.  lionel draws my attention to adéline, an attractive young girl, dancing alone and says:  why don't you ask her for a dance? this is your chance; you do like this in france - you take her by both hands and dance really close.
he pressurizes me to ask her for a dance.
i tell him that i have spent the last years learning that the way i like to do things is often not the same as the way other people like to do things.   instead of dancing like that i would climb a tree with a girl.

through the tunnel to the dark courtyard is a big chestnut tree.  i sit on the top branches and see the bright crescent moon hovering above the horizon.

happiness.

later on a group of people are dancing and a special ambience is created.  everyone moves their bodies with ease and looks at each other with knowing smiles - everyone knows that this is the moment to feel good.  i begin to dance with florien - a tall youth with whom i have had vigorous battles across a chessboard and we dance with arms moving flowingly and a little wildly.   what could be termed "feeling the groove" is a very fulfilling feeling.
i also dance with marine, a girl i have only spoken to occasionally.  we look at each other with fascination now, directly pin-pointing the attraction we see in each other's eyes.
i would have liked to get close to her, but i realised that dancing with our eyes was intimate connection enough.

after finishing the cutting of the grapes, we took a group photo next to the tractor with lengths of vine and bunches of grapes tied around our hair.  streamers trailed out of the windows and the horn was honked continually as we drove through the village streets shouting "on a fini!"     we've finished!
i sat in the back of one of the vans and watched a cloud of dust floating in a shaft of light. 
i listened to the excited yells and thought:  they are celebrating the whole of life.  they have chosen this moment for the celebration.

the day when everybody left i got a lift with the minibus returning to montpellier and got off at macon.
i am not sure what to do, whether to meet up with a friend, or look for more work picking grapes.  i find myself hitching to Taizé
it is good to be on the road again.
it is good to sleep in the trees, like being inside a massive lawn of oversized finely detailed weeds, like walking for hours barefoot on warm flagstone pavements or over cool morning dew-drenched grass in parks.

a woman gives me a lift to Taizé and says that she too likes to go barefoot all summer.  she says she doesn't go barefoot in town, because everyone looks askance.
it is good to meet someone who affirms my barefeet.

slowly a hush descends over the long line of people queuing for the canteen meal and voices slowly rise intoning the Taizé chant ubi caritas

Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est.
(where there is charity and love,
where there is charity God is there)


i was sitting on the bench outside the church reading a booklet on the hindi language when a young girl came and sat on the bench next to me.  at one point i observed her smiling and laughing.  it seemed she was looking at me, so i asked her: what is funny?   she said: nothing and shook her head, still very happy about something.  as i was slowly putting my shoes on she asked me if i spoke any other languages.  i said: french and she said: come and see this text.  i came and sat next to her and she opened a black notebook at a page which had a variety of things written in different languages.  one of the longer notes was written with wild handwriting in what looked like a slavic langauge.   the french text she wanted to show me was written in block capitals and read:

le Christ ressuscité vient animer une fête au plus intime de l'homme. 
(the resurrected Christ is coming to liven up a party in the most intimate part of man.)

she asked me to copy it down and then to go and find it somewhere in Taizé.  i had some trouble understanding exactly what she meant.  did i have to find somewhere where those words were written down, or another person who had written it down? (she also talked about finding someone else).  all she said was: you have to find it yourself, although somebody else can help you.   when i asked for a clue she pointed to Taizé entrance and said:  that way.  then she said she would walk with me that way and show me another church in which i should look.

she had very bright happy eyes and she looked at me and said:  you have beautiful eyes     i could not help smiling broadly and responding with joy to the joy she was radiating.
i went over the words i had written down and now memorised slowly and realised that it means the resurrected christ will bring deep joy. 
we walked down into the old Taizé village.  she left me at the entrance to a simple but striking church i had never seen before built with rough ochre-coloured stone.  she gestured to the church and said: go and find it.  as she was walking away i said:  how will i let you know when i have found it?  she didn't hesitate much before saying: i will know    and walked on

inside the church was very dim with simple red stainglass strips glowing at the front.  i sat at the back for some time and realised that i wouldn't find any written text here and that she probably meant that in this church i would fully realise the meaning of that text:  christ will bring deep joy.


i wondered if i should broaden what the words Resurrected Christ meant to me so as to link them with what i felt to be deep joy.
i decided that what was most important for me was the fact that deep joy existed; it so happened that the name resurrected christ was what some people identified as the source of it.


i liked reading brother Alois' letter from Chile, where he affirms feeling happy even in the face of complicated realities:

"opting for joy does not mean running away from life's problems.  instead it enables us to face reality and even suffering.  opting for joy is inseparable from a concern for other human beings.  it fills us with unlimited compassion."


is it the possibility of joy which makes the existence of suffering so insufferable?

is joy the reason for existence?

would a joyless life be barely worth living?

to all these questions i reply to myself:  probably.