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
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
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