Repas d'un midi lointain

From the first chapter of a discontinued, hopelessly autobiographical fiction. Set in the mid 1970s, in a village near Nice. First blogged in 2006. Whole chapter here. Re-posted as my submission to Issue 12 of the >Language >Place Blog Carnival, which has a special theme of food.


Delectable though it was, the food was not the best thing around that table. The best things were the conversation and, well, the love.

Here is another day. The midday meal is simple - hard, spicy sausages cooked long and slowly with finely sliced white cabbage and juniper berries. Louise, the cook, her arm pinioned close to her chest by the scars of surgery, asks Antoine to ladle everyone's portion from the deep pot. Steam wafts around the table, the heaps of cabbage glisten damply on our plates, hiding the dark chunks of sausage, nuggets of strong, satisfying taste. It is subtle, not to be hurried. I get lost in the nuance of scent and texture and juices, but surface to notice the nuance of words and looks, how Antoine and Jean-Paul dive into the food, smacking their lips and full of praise, only the edges of their eyes betraying concern for Louise, only the tiniest flicker of fear and dread at seeing her flinch in pain.

Louise is telling Jean-Paul which Alpine foothills farmer made the sausage, debating the merits of various breeds of pig, the hardships of small farmers. They debate everything - pigs, parenting, politics - in the same tone of passionate enjoyment. They care, the thought comes to me - for the food on their plates, for each other, for Marielle and Laura's future and the future of France. Despite their smiling irony, their fierce awareness of how little difference their caring makes, they care. They experience themselves as part of a family, part of a class, a region, a country. In this they are utterly different from the people I grew up with. No wonder their food and their smiles taste so different.

They speak of strikes and factory closures, of protests against nuclear power. Giscard, they spit. Mitterrand, they spit, with a sadder, more intimate anger. The long shadow of 1968, the failed, receding revolution, overlays the shadow of Louise's cancer and the shadows of Marianne's breakdown, Jean-Paul's infidelity and guilt. So many shadows, but so much warmth and light too. Here we are, around the table in my memory, a scene in chiaroscuro.

Here is my own pale, curious face, breaking into indignation as Louise points behind me. While Marielle distracted me with chatter, Laura has been picking out the chunks of sausage from her plate and feeding them to Obélix, the cat. Whiskers shining with grease, he looks over-full and slightly sick. Laura smirks unrepentantly. I am chagrined. I'm a bad child-minder. I didn't see. Louise puts her good arm around me. 'No, chérie, it takes a lifetime to grow eyes in the back of your head. I can see you love my grandchildren. Have some more sausage before that damn cat eats it all. Antoine, give her some more sausage. You like it, huh?'

Marianne is smiling too, one eye on us, one on Jean-Paul and his father who are onto their constant bone of contention. Jean-Paul and Marianne support the mildly trotskyist Unified Socialist Party. Antoine supports no one and nothing but the native cunning of the individual working man and woman. 'Middle-class,' he says. 'sectarian. Even if their hearts are in the right place.'

'Well, some of us are middle-class, yes, Papa. I suppose I'm middle-class now. Middle class and workers together, and we see the need for organising in the unions, for building consciousness, building a vanguard of support for change, even if it's going to be a long haul now, and perhaps a long haul to nowhere. You're becoming a nihilist in your old age.'

'I'm no nihilist!' Antoine waves his fork with a piece of sausage on it. 'I believe in the hearts of men, the strength and humour I've seen them show in the face of hardship. If you'd seen what I've seen, on the docks in Marseille... ' Louise is nudging him. 'Mm? Yes, yes, have some more sausage.' He puts down his fork to serve more sausage and take a deep draught of wine. 'You must eat, my little Laura, not give it to the cat. Eat and grow big and strong to make a revolution!'

Impossible to know where laughter, pain, sincerity, performance meet and blend.

'Revoloo... loo... loo...', Laura sucks on the syllables, hungry for long, spicy words, if not yet for spicy food.

Oh dear, oh well

Telescope, periscope, microscope

Poetry is a telescope, bringing us closer to what is very far away, an inverted periscope that takes us down to what is hidden, a microscope that lets us see what is invisible to the naked eye, a precision lens to make what was vague and confused come clear.

Antonio Munoz Molina

(rough translation from his blog, which Blogger, in its wisdom, will not link to - it's on my Links list, above, if you read Spanish).

Willow

Some of the strands are turning. So
the willow behind the house is streaked
yellow and pale green, in the wash
of the Fall sunshine.

My life is so crowded with ghosts
that they don't even trouble me now. They stand
wistfully at stairways, vanishing if
I turn to look at them.

What can we say? That God, for his own
purposes, saves us for his own ends?
Better surely to take it for granted, than
to take it for that.

You sat at my feet and lovingly
laced up my shoes. I read you a poem.
The sky changed; the light moved
and crossed the room. If only
I could have died then. The rest is
footnotes and addenda: the last chapter
of a biography, which you read out of duty,
since they are all alike. He got sick and died.

It's dangerous to talk too long to willows.
Their arguments are twisty turny, and
they flicker in the sun. They will soon have you
agreeing that there is no difference
between a sparkle in the air and
the life of an honest man.
Trees don't think like we do.

Light through the yellow leaves,
the rattle of twigs in the shifting wind;
the creak of branches, rotten but green,
the sift of the crumbling bark.
Don't breathe the dust. Don't listen to the whisper.
Some things we shouldn't know.

From Dale Favier's first collection, Opening the World - published by Pindrop Press.

Review to follow.

Shedding light on difficulty

(and scraping the barrel for a relevant photo)

It’s proving such a struggle to try and post something here every day this November that my chief motivation has become defiance of its very difficulty. Why so hard? Why do my simplest words go limp and numb, with a single sentence sometimes needing endless revisions? I read a short poem – The Past is the Present by Marianne Moore on wood s lot (also here). The tone, the multiple allusions, the line-lengths and the rhythm: so small, deep, satisfying is a poem, such a complex dance with words both studied and abandoned. A poem, or a paragraph of crafted writing, may be a small thing but need quite a lot of space. The image comes of my mind stuffed and swollen, throbbing with facts and worries and ‘to do’s’. Thoughts and feelings jammed together in a tight, constricted exit, waiting, tiring, with no food, no light. Oh. Magnanimously granting them a daily slot for speech, I guess, is not enough! I shall keep trying: breathe, let in some light and space, but may have to stop and let my mind rest until the swelling goes down.

Awaiting new use

Awaited inspiration did not come today. So here are some photos I took back in the Summer of a disused mill in Leeds, awaiting reincarnation as fashionable, upmarket apartments or offices.

Reading Winnicott

It's a while since I took this photo in the park, as you can tell from what they're wearing. Aesthetically, I was attracted by their dark skin and blue clothes against the almost-black hedge. Mostly, though, I know that, like many adults with painful childhood memories, I'm often transfixed by iconic scenes of parents and children interacting successfully. I do have memories of my dad doing exactly what this one's doing - and riding a bike is one of the few life skills I mastered fairly normally. Anyway, the photo remained on my computer, occasionally mouthing 'blog me', but demonstrating little relevance to anything... until Litlove's comment below about the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and his concept of 'transitional space'.

I remembered reading Winnicott back in the 1970s, when I first became interested in psychology and psychotherapy - someone rather humane and progressive, less grating on a feminist than most of the mid 20th century 'mother and child' merchants. Details had faded, though, so Friday lunchtime found me in the workplace library. They don't study humanities where I work, so although I'm right next door to a big library, I rarely make much personal use of it. They do study psychology, though - social psychology, but social and clinical clearly overlap. So there was plenty by Winnicott, it transpired. I went home with a couple of not-too-heavy collections of talks and articles and spent some of the weekend reading them. Reading and wincing, because here is a story told in elementary terms of 'good enough' parenting and consequent normal development, and I know a lot of it was not my own experience. It's dispiriting, but horribly fascinating to contemplate how long ago it all went wrong.

Clapham Common

On the grass, a flock of crows around some abandoned, unspeakable package and a flock of humans swigging from cans of beer, lolling on coats discarded in the afternoon's surprising warmth. It's a weird warmth, without light, a grey day with darkness closing in at 4 pm. Uneasy. You can see it in the scuttling steps of locals with their dogs and shopping. Only looking upwards at the statue and the rooftops and the last leaves does all seem calm and as it should be.

Temperence & Providence, 1895

Photos of Venice

by Hiroshi Watanabe

Intent on salvaging a bit of yesterday, I remembered late-night opening at nearby Somerset House, where they’re showing the Real Venice photo exhibition, on tour from the Venice Biennale and in aid of Venice in Peril. Finding the Embankment Gallery - two floors down from street level via many minimally signposted corridors and flights of stairs - was unnecessarily arduous, but the gallery, once found, is a lovely, old, low, vaulted space with wooden floors and subtle lighting. As for the photos, wow!

I suppose any half-way decent photographer, never mind this select group of very famous ones, can’t really go wrong in Venice. Still, the variety and impact of these was really gorgeous, intelligent and emotive. A quick selection can be seen here. For a longer look at all those on show in London, and more, go here.

Only Robert Walker predictably made me wince, amidst joyful engagement with the whole two long rooms of big, lightboxed photographs. I often don't care for lightboxes, but these were so superior and the gallery light so lovely also, that it wasn’t an issue. My favourites, perhaps, were Tim Parchikov’s and Nan Goldin’s (the latter not a photographer I can always warm to, even while much admiring her work). Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s almost abstract landscapes also forced me to rethink my instinctive recoil at the sight of his name. Fabulous really, and only £5. I hope I get to go back for another look.

Ho hum

I just had a completely unexpectedly horrible day. Deeply upset. Walking in circles in Oxford Street in floods of tears, bumping into people. (No one died). And you know what I realised – I can deal with difficult stuff! In the face of a real challenge, I actually tend to behave like a grown-up. I was upset, and then I did what needed to be done. Whatever the outcome, I think I learned something: that the worst part of my life is the lack of challenge in it. I am so depleted by tedium, by having nothing demanded of me but patience and endurance. It makes me smaller and more scared and helpless every day. Counter-intuitively (because the more depleted I feel, the less I feel capable of), I need to get out there and face some hard things – it’s the only way to be less scared. I probably knew this already, of course - It’s rather obvious. Experiencing it is something else.