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.
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.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento