Monday, October 31, 2005
Saignon, vallée d'Apt, Luberon, Vaucluse, Provençe, Home.
I think it must be a rare thing, at my age, to be confronted with the passage of time. That I have been growing older all these years, and that those around have done the same, is désequilibrant, unbalancing. One may think about it, acknowledge it as a rational, logical person, but no one ever believes it. I think I must have always felt like Stevens' jar in Tennessee, supremely unperturbed by the change swirling around it. But here I am, very starkly nine years old no longer. The other children have grown older, and I suppose I must have, too. Since saturday night, I have leapt a whole eleven years into the future.
And yet nothing, nothing has changed. There may be incidences of the new, the renouvellé here and there, or perhaps some old stores have closed. But that doesn't mean they're gone. If anything, their absence only makes them seem that much more present. I am chez Poirson, in l'ancien maison de l'eveque, the old house of the bishop. It is at once palatial and rustic. The traveling is ended now. No more cultural experience now, only reintegration. How to hold a fork and knife the French way (never switch hands). How to pass the food properly, how to be the first one to dig in. How to speak gloriously without fear of error. I am not here to see; I am here to remember. I am not visiting a place, I am visiting my own childhood. This is a walk down memory lane, but with visual aids. Traveling has nothing on this. We have been coming here, to this house, since I was nine. We have been living in this place since I was six, and I remember everything. There is magic in this place, ghosts, too. The smells are as vivid now as they ever were, even if the lavender is grey and dying with the autumn refrain, and "the skreak and skritter of evening gone." Phantom scents, living on as though unaware of their own passing. The way Douglas Adams insisted that it was easy to fly, that all one has to do is be distracted just prior to impact, and thereby "miss the ground," so were these ghosts been distracted from the fact of their own deaths. It is all at once frozen and fluid. It is not uncanny, unheimlich, because it never faded from memory in the first place. I can still see, really see myself playing in the living room here as I was, as we all were. There is the chessboard we made, painting the squares blue, red and green, when Jacob and Romée were, for a few months, seized with an enthusiasm for chess. There, behind the house, is the ravine into which we would accidentally kick the soccer ball, and have to brave nettles and thornbushes and stinging ortilles to recover it. There is the driveway which saw my last, ill-fated attept at driving, and there is the rise where it all ended in tears. This is the place where we played petanque with the deadly serious expressions of the old Provençal men, calling, "tu tires ou tu pointes?" This is the village itself, Saignon, the place where all this remembrance is crystallized, clasped in amber. There is the cantine of the school where the kitchen ladies would exhort us, in provincial Provencal accents, to "mainge, mainge!" There is the great wooden door of the church that we used to use as a goal, and even now I hear the stout thud of the ball striking home. And right here, in front of the same church, grows the wild roumarin, rosemary, that my mother would send me to "steal" when she was cooking. There is the restaurant, Le Baladin, for which my friend Antoine and I would hunt snails in the bushes outside the village, selling them to the restaurant for two francs apiece, at which pointe they were converted, by some French alchemy, to expensive escargot. This is the place Camille, the tomboy, headbutted me in the mouth, and this the place where M. Mercier gave me some ice for my rapidly swelling lip and told me to suck it up, and I did, and there is the soccer field they built for us when they tired of our defiling the church door and cemetery with our childish athletic bêtises, and this is the place where during les Fetes Votives de 1992, which I was never to see again, a woman came onstage and sang the most rapturously mangled rendition of "New York, New York." And this is the place where I have gathered up my memories; this is the place where I am, and will always be, forever young. This is not merely home. This is the kingdom where nobody dies.
And yet nothing, nothing has changed. There may be incidences of the new, the renouvellé here and there, or perhaps some old stores have closed. But that doesn't mean they're gone. If anything, their absence only makes them seem that much more present. I am chez Poirson, in l'ancien maison de l'eveque, the old house of the bishop. It is at once palatial and rustic. The traveling is ended now. No more cultural experience now, only reintegration. How to hold a fork and knife the French way (never switch hands). How to pass the food properly, how to be the first one to dig in. How to speak gloriously without fear of error. I am not here to see; I am here to remember. I am not visiting a place, I am visiting my own childhood. This is a walk down memory lane, but with visual aids. Traveling has nothing on this. We have been coming here, to this house, since I was nine. We have been living in this place since I was six, and I remember everything. There is magic in this place, ghosts, too. The smells are as vivid now as they ever were, even if the lavender is grey and dying with the autumn refrain, and "the skreak and skritter of evening gone." Phantom scents, living on as though unaware of their own passing. The way Douglas Adams insisted that it was easy to fly, that all one has to do is be distracted just prior to impact, and thereby "miss the ground," so were these ghosts been distracted from the fact of their own deaths. It is all at once frozen and fluid. It is not uncanny, unheimlich, because it never faded from memory in the first place. I can still see, really see myself playing in the living room here as I was, as we all were. There is the chessboard we made, painting the squares blue, red and green, when Jacob and Romée were, for a few months, seized with an enthusiasm for chess. There, behind the house, is the ravine into which we would accidentally kick the soccer ball, and have to brave nettles and thornbushes and stinging ortilles to recover it. There is the driveway which saw my last, ill-fated attept at driving, and there is the rise where it all ended in tears. This is the place where we played petanque with the deadly serious expressions of the old Provençal men, calling, "tu tires ou tu pointes?" This is the village itself, Saignon, the place where all this remembrance is crystallized, clasped in amber. There is the cantine of the school where the kitchen ladies would exhort us, in provincial Provencal accents, to "mainge, mainge!" There is the great wooden door of the church that we used to use as a goal, and even now I hear the stout thud of the ball striking home. And right here, in front of the same church, grows the wild roumarin, rosemary, that my mother would send me to "steal" when she was cooking. There is the restaurant, Le Baladin, for which my friend Antoine and I would hunt snails in the bushes outside the village, selling them to the restaurant for two francs apiece, at which pointe they were converted, by some French alchemy, to expensive escargot. This is the place Camille, the tomboy, headbutted me in the mouth, and this the place where M. Mercier gave me some ice for my rapidly swelling lip and told me to suck it up, and I did, and there is the soccer field they built for us when they tired of our defiling the church door and cemetery with our childish athletic bêtises, and this is the place where during les Fetes Votives de 1992, which I was never to see again, a woman came onstage and sang the most rapturously mangled rendition of "New York, New York." And this is the place where I have gathered up my memories; this is the place where I am, and will always be, forever young. This is not merely home. This is the kingdom where nobody dies.
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