infinitude

It was too pretty out yesterday afternoon, the only question was where to take a bike ride.  Sunday I had had a good hike with Dorian near Mauroux (pronounced moh-roucks).  We passed through the phantom village of Orgueil, a strong outpost along the Lot River at the time of the Hundred Years War but completely effaced in the meantime.  Funny name for a town since the word means arrogant pride.  Our ride took us through Lacapelle-Cabenac where we detoured down a dreamy lane between high stone walls to make the annual pilgrimage to Le Repaire d'Orgueil.  This is an ancient house with the cross-shaped windows that date it back to the 14th century at least.  The sign on the gate has it to the 12th century.  We've been going there for a few years, standing on the pedals of the bike to peer over high boxwood hedges to see the wonderful gardens inside.  Unlike many French gardens, this one is a loose progression of intimate environments rather than a rigid, Cartesian plunking down of specimin trees and shrubs in stiff rows and columns.

The name of the house made me imagine severe, proud owners, forbidding noblemen who could freeze your blood with a single glance.  Mrs Snoutsworthy noticed a woman inside the gate making her way slowly on crutches.  "She gave me a big smile when I said hello:  why don't you go talk to her."  Before I knew it we were inside!  We made it inside!  We were walking around the gardens, hearing the names of all the trees, learning that the gorgeous spring used in the old days to water horses yielded water that was unlike most springs, always lukewarm, ideal for horses.  The woman spoke beautiful French, and at a stately pace.  Later her "companion" joined us and he and I talked ghosts and voices from the beyond while Mrs. S and the woman sauntered off to the herb garden.  He suggested I look at the site of "beyonders" at infinitude.  He said they had had a destructive mole that year but he couldn't bear to kill it.  He found a book on moles and learned that they make vast lengths of tunnels, tens of meters in length and can hear from a great distance the sound of a single worm falling into a tunnel.

They invited us to come back and have tea and see the inside of the house sometime.

You don't have to shout, young man

A few days ago, I heard Obama exulting over the "landmark-health-care-reform" victory.  His cigarette voice firm, sentences clipped and all terminated with the downward note of a skipper giving a heading to the helmsman.  All of a sudden, an unmicrophoned voice from the audience shouted faintly, "What about the public option?"   The big O didn't miss a beat, blamed it on Congress, "We couldn't get it passed in Congers".  The audience member said something else and O replied, "You don't have to shout, young man."

A small incident admittedly, but gleaming with the shrapnel of exploding irony.  Since polls show that most people want a some sort of socialized medical insurance system, wouldn't it kind of make sense for someone in an audience to shout?  The whole health care performance was as hard to interpret as an Eric Romer movie dubbed into Old Norse.  But if you believe Glenn Greenwald  (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/) Obama and the Dems wanted to ditch de-privatizing the health insurance system all along.

The teabaggers make it all even harder to evaluate as they bark so hysterically.  Don't you ever wonder why dogs go completely bonkers when you just innocently walk past their fenced in yard?  Where's the proportionality? And why do their owners tolerate it?  Or if they like it, why don't they just do their own barking?  Why the intermediary?  But back to insurance, if you believe the insurance gangsters got about what they wanted from their legally bribed politicians, you can admire the craftsmanship at least.  They got about thirty million new customers and, better yet, customers who are legally obliged to buy.  But they negotiated the mountain path of socialization so nicely, the wheels of their cart so close to the edge that dislodged pebbles could have provoked landslides.  The question lingering in the air like an uncredited fart, how come we have to pay monopoly-jacked rates, huge profit margins, obscene compensation packages for something we could get for next to nothing under a system of public insurance?

Not that many people here get it that things are not as they seem.  Obama couldn't turn out to be the typical psycho-killer oligarch-loving American president any more than Charlton Heston could play Goebbels.  If his skin color doesn't prove this, just check out his enemies.      

virgin poplars

The thermometer on the window sill broke through my arbitrary barrier of 10° C (=50° F). with a dull sunlight and a north wind that you would hardly notice if you were headed south on your bike.  So I headed south through dear old Albas up the road with lacets switching up the scrubby hillsides with I’m guessing absolutely zero change in grade for the whole 3 or 4 km of the climb to Sauzet.  The same goes for the gorgeous climb up from Caîx to Crayssac.  Who laid out these roads so perfectly?  Was it a graduate of the famous grandes ecoles is the School of Bridges and Highways founded in 1716?  The roadways are so narrow that I need to really pay attention when being passed since my sense of position has been slightly compromised by Old Betsy, my acoustic neuroma.

Mrs Snoutsworthy, she who delights in maps, pulled out the chart even for this ride we’ve both done a hundred times.  Maps which, I must say, are worthy of the well- laid out roads.  You have to see them to believe the detail.  The scale is 1:25,000 and each one covers  9 miles x 12 miles.  One inch = 320 feet.  Best of all, the map notes many house names, lieux dits, and then the lieu dit is often marked with a small road sign too.  This is a wonderful comfort for someone who gets lost in the bathtub.

 

The north wind was cutting my neck on the D45 while I recited Baudelaire’s poem Elevation to distract myself.  But suddenly just before the Chateau de Cousserans there were the Thousand Virgins as I call this grove of poplar trees that is such a fine sight at this time of year, nude, no leaves, the sun low in the west bringing out the roundness and rosyness of their trunks.  They often look virginal, these groves and you see them a lot, usually planted in what might be flood plains, often in odd triangles of left-over property.  I’ve asked a lot of locals what they are for.  Everyone tells me the lumber is basically only good for pallets, though the guy in Goujounac has samples on display of tongue and groove flooring.   The owner’s son shrugged when I asked him if it really makes good flooring.  “It is in fact popular,”  he said.

Someone told me that it was traditional to plant a grove of poplars like this at the birth of a daughter.  By the time she was ready to get married, a paysan would cut it all and sell it and add the proceeds as part of her dowry.    

Saint Avit

On my way over to Montcabrier on the 811,  someone kept trying to pass me, swerving in and out in my rear view mirror.   My driving often causes this temporary insanity in French drivers where they forget all that they love about life, their little children perhaps, the well-feathered retirement they have in store in not so many years, all forgotten in their obsession to get around this putain de Kangoo going 65 kph (if I’m lucky) in a 90.  How must they be feeling?  Are they enraged?  Or is it more like the irresistable need to square up a picture that is hanging crooked?   When I got to the usual turn-off for Cazes, I decided to ignore the detour sign and give the poor bastard behind me a break.  Halfway up the mountain, a major tree-trimming project forced me to turn back.  And that’s why I ended up going to Montcabrier through Duravel, the way I used to ride my bike over there to work, before the murder.

I think I am used to Le Moulin de Cavart being empty and for the most part, I enjoy being there, at the foot of towering cliffs with caves that were supposedly all inhabited during the Neolithic.  You can’t see the home of the Dutch neighbors for the thick stand of bamboo.  The shop is much as it was when I worked there:  my last, unfinished project, repairing an armoire is still balanced on a bench where I left it  maybe 4 years ago, like Miss Haversham in her wedding dress.  The carp pond looks like hell, clogged with weeds, the water level low, the carp apparently eaten by herons.  I did an inspection of the house maybe just to make myself feel sad.   The shutters that I made and that made Helene happy.  Alix’s room plastered with awful fashion photos from a phase she has undoubtedly outgrown in LA,  Dorian’s floor strewn with millions of little pieces of toys he’s outgrown in just two years.   Eleonore’s room with her strong drawings, the bed I made for her trashed by a small bird that somehow got in and died, feathers all over the place.

On the way back the sign for the “vestiges” of the 11^th century church of Saint Avit caught my eye and I decided to make another pilgrimage.   I don’t trust the Kangoo on dirt roads after getting stuck in Floressas, towed out with a tractor.  It’s a pretty lane into a  gnarly oak forest.  Does anybody remember why they built a church exactly there?  Did some narcissitic nobleman make a vow during a battle?  Don’t the slit windows suggest a fortified church?  Did all the farmers run in and hide out during a raid?  And the masons who cut the stones and laid the lauze roof of the apse, were they forced to do this for free or paid a wage?   And by the way, are chunks of lauze apt to fall while I gaze upward taking photos?  

view into the abside.  note the slit window

lauze, dry stone, corbelled , roof of the abside.  If the center stone fell...

And then beyond the material facts, what did anybody get out of this church?  Was it, like my suburban Methodist church (funded by a narcissitic capitalist benefactor), principally a place to socialize and make music?  The only iconography I would make out was at one side of a voute, two figures that I imagine to be Adam and Eve.  They have that horror-struck expression of many primitive Romanesque carvings, the recognition I suppose that sex is so profoundly evil that if you yield you will be driven into exile from paradise.  This is pretty much the message on other rural Romanesque churches I know, such as the far finer one in Besse. 

carving at the base of the arch. (click for a closeup of the sinners)

I’d love to know what bearing this message had on the life of parishoners a thousand years ago.  Did it cause them horrible anxiety and inner conflict?  Or did they regard it as cynical propaganda,  an analog to international terrorism in our day, a way of scaring the children before they go to sleep, giving them bad dreams?  And why is it always Adam and Eve, the Fall?  Why not, say, Cain and Abel, the horror of breaking the taboo on murder?   

update  Francis kindly sent a link to a brief and tantalizing item on the Duravel tourism office web site (here).  Here's my translation: 

"This rustic church served outlying houses in a parish with a population of 200 souls.  The church was constructed beside a spring with curative powers and was also close to an important crossroads.  From its style, the church dates to the 12th century but the foundations of the choir are more ancient still and in the nave,  hewn stones from the 6th century have been found."

I'm eager to go back and look for the healing spring and the crossroads.   And also to try to visualize the forest of twisted oaks as farm land especially now that Stephanie has stumbled across lots of old postcards from Castelfranc and Albas showing fields now overgrown with brush and small gnarly trees.  




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O tempus, o mores

About 10 years ago, the bike trip we took from Avignon to Albi was almost entirely on country roads so tiny that the occasional center line seemed like a visual joke pulled by the road crew.  I swear most of the cars were a lot smaller 10 years ago.  We carried all our camping and cooking stuff,  food, clothing, all reduced to a bare minimum such that when one of the Thermarest sleeping pads failed, we had to go shopping.  Like Rip Van Winkles we briefly ventured onto a couple major highways looking for camping stores in shopping malls.  New sleeping pad bungeed to the back rack, we slammed the door on that madness and pushed on through a world that was pretty much built up by 1860, the stone farmhouses and barns, the orchards, the vineyards.

An article in Basta (http://www.bastamag.net) made me realize how much difference 10 years has made.  First of all, that there IS a Basta, founded in 2005 as a journal about anti-development fights.  And you can find it anywhere in France,  in almost any newspaper store in almost any town of more than a couple thousand inhabitants.  I'm not sure how this distribution system works, but there's nothing like it in the USA where any equally radical viewpoint is relegated to the internet.   You could never find something like  CounterPunch for example at an American airport newspaper stand.  

And second, that Basta is covering the protest movement against the cancer of shopping centers.  "In Toulouse, soon there will be more supermarkets than there are customers."  The tide seems irresistable as we have been noticing around the outskirts of Cahors.  How on earth in this day and age and in the middle of a world-wide financial crisis could they be cutting ribbons on huge new shopping centers?  But they are.   And the cars are relentlessly getting bigger too.

proposed "Gateway to Gascony" shopping center sprawling out to gobble farmland near Toulouse

The developer, a company with American roots, has a bizarre website http://lesportesdegascogne.com/ with splendid pictures of airy, environmentally correct shopping experience (no cars in view, no parking lots, no pollution).  An elegant tickertape runs beneath this revelling in the triumphant facts:  the French high court affirmed a lower court permit, so now it's build, baby, build.

We've changed a lot in 10 years too.  From timid buyers of a sleeping pad at InterSport, we have degenerated to consumers of major appliances, queen-sized beds, building materials all bought at major chain stores in large shopping centers.