I landed in Philadelphia less than an hour ago, and it just feels weird. I'm sure that will wear off in a few hours, but right now I'm experiencing culture shock. The money looks funny and I forget how to make change. They serve coffee in paper cups with nowhere to sit, and the tax isn't included on the menu board. And damn, is it ever a big cup, even at the "small" size. The accent annoys me, and I'm putting my adverbs in weird places when I try to talk. By tomorrow morning, I'm sure I'll be over it, but for the moment I feel like I'm in a foreign country again.
That's probably exacerbated by my physical condition, as a result of my last sleepless night in Paris, France, Europe. I spent a fair portion of the afternoon in the Musée des Arts et Metiers, which is connected to L'École des Arts et Metiers. It contains exhibits about the history of science, engineering, manufacturing, constructions, etc. Everything from astrolabes to iPods is represented. A great museum, really. Geek that I am, I was most interested in Pascal's calculating machines, the Cray supercomputer, the early phonographs, and the first pay phones. They had one terrific phonograph with two turntables and two horns, so you could actually cross-fade for dances and the like. Hand-cranked DJ'ing = amazing.
Near sunset, I met with Ilan by the Seine to play old-time music. It was definitely peculiar playing traditional Appalachian music in the shadow of Notre Dame de Paris as tourist boats shined their floodlights on us so people could take pictures. (I wonder how many vacation photos I'm in by now. I wonder if any of them realized that they were tourists taking photos of another tourist.) After a couple of hours, Max from the hostel in Aix tracked us down, along with his friend Ellen, and we hopped a bus to Belleville to see Savoy Cajun music at a punk club. It was a crazy mix of people -- the bar regulars were heavily tatooed Parisian punks, and the people there to actually hear the Cajun band were largely Americans. I dragged a bunch of them onto the dance floor for the two steps and waltzes. The band was terrific, and really a great musical segue for me. In addition to Cajun, they do some honky-tonk, but translated into Cajun French. So I got to two-step to George Jones's "N'Arretes Pas La Musique". Weird.
After the show, we met up with Steven, the bass player from the old-time band I crashed the previous night, and went to a late bar to get drunk and argue politics until 4am. Steven is British-born and a staunch royalist. He holds that the monarchy is the primary reason that Britain has had a stable government for hundreds of years. Ilan is a self-described Libertarian, and I found myself arguing in favor of Social Democracy, if only to take a contrary position. Many whiskeys later, I bid adieu to tous la monde and ambled back to the Hotel to get four hours of sleep before my flight. (Thank you, Benjamin Franklin, for the extra hour.)
I'm now over the mild hangover, back on U.S. soil, and awaiting my escape pod back to Appalachia. Weird to think that I'll sleep in my house tonight, and tomorrow night, and the night after that, into the foreseeable future. Weird to think that I'll wake up tomorrow to spend the day at a desk. Weird to think that I'll need to buy groceries, feed the cat, pay the water bill. I'm sure I'll be OK, but for now it just seems so foreign. I keep listening hard to the airport announcements to translate them, but they're already in English.
It's now the morning of my last day in France. Tomorrow I will wake up, get on the train to the airport, and catch a flight home. By now, the idea of home seems exotic. I'm thinking about collecting wood for the stove, about playing my banjo, about spending the winter in front of the fire working out accordion tunes.
But a part of me will also miss Paris, I think. After spending the afternoon in the park yesterday pecking at notes and being just a little too cold (although it will be colder still in Virginia), I went to the bar to catch up with Ilan and his French old-time band. Sadly for them, the show was really poorly attended, but it worked out for me in that they invited me to sit in with them, which was good fun. Ilan is an ex-pat American who married a French girl and has lived in Paris for four years. He's primarily a piano accordionist, and spent a year in Transylvania learning Romanian and gypsy styles. At his apartment after the show, he played some modern Romanian fiddle music for me – great stuff. We're going to meet up later today to play old-time music by the Seine, which I find to be an amusing juxtaposition. Tonight we'll hit the Cajun show, a band led by Sarah Savoy of the legendary Savoy family from Louisiana. So my last two nights in Europe will have been spent playing and dancing to traditional American music. A month ago, that would have seemed like a cop-out; today it just feels like a segue.
I've been in Paris for two days now, and am finding that I like it more than I had expected. In certain respects, it reminds me of the things that I like about New York – for instance, the fact that it's a perpetual freak show of buskers, hustlers, and con men. In the face of Paris Overload, I had the realization that I never actually went to New York as a tourist. The first time I went was an overnight visit for an interview, and the second time I went was to live, so I never had that feeling of needed to do everything I wanted to do in four days. In Paris, I had to abandon that notion pretty quickly, and am taking the days as they come. I haven't yet done any busking (it's way colder in Paris than it was in Provence), but I have been up to other projects.
My first stop in Paris was Shakespeare and Company, the English language bookstore that offers beds to traveling writers. It sounded like the ideal crash pad; unfortunately, there was no room in the stable. So instead I paid 28€ for the privilege of not sleeping a damned wink in the crowded hostel, thanks to the high school tour group that was staying there and hollering down the hall to each other all night. In the morning, I packed up and went down the block to the Hotel Pelican, where for 10€ more I've got my own room.
The Pelican itself is an odd little hotel. Its place on the row is at most twelve feet wide, which means that there are two rooms per floor and a badly-leaning spiral staircase going up the middle. The plumbing has problems (I took a very cold shower this afternoon, and my sink doesn't drain), my door doesn't shut all the way (even when locked), but I slept like a rock all night and it's a place to leave my stuff for a couple of days. For a 38€ hotel room two blocks from the Louvre, there's not much to complain about.
Status of my projects for Paris: 1) Attend one more dance in France: check. I went last night to a bal folk at Les 3 Arts with the band Qu'Import la Jument. Great band. And I was pleased to find that most of the dances were the same ones that I had seen way down in Provence – apparently the popular repertoire is fairly small. So I danced a bit, watched and listened a lot, and talked to the band and the bar staff a bit. It's maybe the only real trad bar in Paris: they do music several nights a week, all of it traditional (though not necessarily French). The barman gave me the name and number of an American old-time accordionist in Paris, whom I'll be meeting tonight at a gig in the Northeast corner of the city. The accordionist for Qu'Importe la Jument gave me directions to Paris Accordéon, the premiere accordion dealer in Paris. I left a Jugbusters CD with the bar, and came back to the Pelican with a head full of Belgian ale and some missions for today.
2) Visit the Museé de la Musique: check, sort of. I went to the museum, only to discover that the permanent collection is temporarily closed for renovation until March. Bummer. There was a special exhibition on Serge Gainsbourg, but it didn't have much to offer if you weren't already a die-hard Gainsbourg fan (and I'm not). So that trip was kind of a bust.
So today I addressed 3) Find a diatonic accordion: check. I walked to Paris Accordéon this morning, and found what could only exist in France or Italy: a fairly sizable shop dedicated to nothing but accordion sales, repairs, lessons, books, CDs, etc. An accordionphile's incestuous dream, and one that I shared for an hour or so, trying out different instruments, talking accordions with the proprietor, and generally being impressed that I was in an accordion emporium. I finally settled on a beautiful Italian model (what guy wouldn't want a beautiful Italian model?) that should be good enough to play even if I stick with it for several years. I passed over the cheaper Chinese-made Hohners – they just didn't seem to be built for a long-term relationship. I spent an hour or two in the park this afternoon getting better acquainted with the Italian model – she's complicated, but I think we'll get along fine.
So I've got a day left in France, and the checklist for Paris is complete. Tonight I'll meet Ilan and his French old-time band, which seems reasonably likely to lead to some shenanigans. I've been asked to bring my fiddle. Tomorrow I'll improvise – Ilan will be at work during the day, but Max should be somewhere in Paris by now, so maybe we'll meet up somewhere. Ilan told me about a Cajun concert tomorrow night, so we'll probably hit that for some fiddle and accordion greatness. And Sunday morning, I finally fly home. I actually feel like I could stay in Paris a few days longer. There's a jam session at Les 3 Arts on Sunday, and a Klezmer show Sunday night, but my time is up.
After a bit of impromptu hiking in between Arles and Aix yesterday morning (during which I stumbled upon a pretty sizable apiary, probably there to pollinate either grapes or olives), I spent the day sightseeing in Aix-En-Provence. While Aix is notable for having been host to Cezanne during his most productive years, there's not actually terribly much to see and do. It's a pleasant enough city – lots of pedestrian promenades and fountains – and that was really enough for me for the day. I spent the warm part of the afternoon sitting outside at a glacerie eating ice cream, drinking coffee, and reading. In the evening, I shuffled off to the hostel and met Max, an American living and teaching at an American boarding school in the south of France. We finished off the remainder of my Cote du Rhône red while talking about literature and politics, then headed back to town for a picnic dinner – the now-standard fare: bread, cheese, wine, and pastries. It's getting hard to remember what else there is to eat. Two bottles later, we again shuffled back to the hostel and met our third roommate, a crazy genius Moroccan-Sicilian bibliophile, who had just returned from town with a wine buzz of his own. With a triumphant matador's flourish, he produced a bra from his coat pocket. “De mon avocat” he proudly exclaimed. (I'm not clear whether he actually slept with his lawyer, or whether there was idiom at work that I don't know. In retrospect, probably his own personal idiolect.) He talked to us in a torrent of French, and I responded when I could get a word in, during the course of a conversation that veered from Keith Jarrett to Pliny the Elder to Nils Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer through a bewildering set of segues that I think wouldn't have made much sense even in English. My Sicilian-Moroccan friend was apparently a book dealer, in Aix to pick up a collectible folio of Pompeii. He gifted me with a sample page from the proofs, a color print on lovely cotton paper depicting the town of Pompeii before Vesuvius. An extraordinary souvenir of an extraordinary encounter.
I'm now on the train en route to Paris, the terminus of my trip. I have three days and three goals: 1) Attend one more dance in France, on Thursday night. 2) Visit the Museé de la Musique and its collection of rare and unusual musical instruments. Finally, a project that I decided upon while listening to some of my sound recordings on the train: 3) Find and possibly purchase a decent diatonic accordion. Now that I'll be doing no more traveling, save for the flight home, I'm willing to collect some baggage. I'll probably also look for CDs by some of the grand chanteurs whose songs I've run across during my travels. I've revised my estimate: it will take months to sort through the materials I've collected on this trip.
After a morning walk through the Carmargue, I set off to Arles, home of French bullfighting. The arena in Arles dates back to the Roman era. After Marseilles was sacked for backing Pompey instead of Caesar, Arles became the main port town for the region. The arena itself seats about 20,000 people, who would come to see the standard Roman blood sports – gladiator duels, Christians vs. wild animals, etc. During the Middle Age, people took advantage of the high outside walls of the arena and built their homes inside of it as a defense against the barbarians. The stadium hosted some 120 homes and two churches. Today, the structure has returned to its Roman roots, and mostly hosts bullfighting events. These days the odds are stacked heavily against the “wild” animals, but all 20,000 seats fill up for the bloodshed just the same.
Arles is/was also home to an ancient Roman theater. Not much remains of it today, although portions of it are being rebuilt. During the 14th century, the Christians wanted a cathedral, and it seemed oh-so-much-easier to borrow stone from that old run-down pagan amphitheater than to go out and quarry more. So Arles has a fairly run-of-the-mill cathedral (as 14th century cathedrals go) and lost a terrific piece of Roman antiquity, of which little remains but the columns (too Roman to adapt to church use).
The sad part is that I, too, have stopped being impressed by most of this. Just as I got castle fatigue in Ireland, I have antiquity and vista fatigue now. After hiking in the Alps, there's not a lot of walking that seems equally inspiring. After after so many Renaissance cathedrals, they fail to impress. 14th century architecture? Ho-hum.
So it's probably a good thing that I've started thinking about my trip in the past tense. I've only got five days left. For most people, five days would seem like a pretty decent vacation. But after five weeks, it seems like I'm almost home. Which doesn't seem like such a bad thing by now.
This morning, I piloted the trusty rented diesel Peugeot across the back roads of Provence, not really paying a great deal of attention to which route I was taking. I stopped at Sunday markets as I went, and replaced my now-rancid Muenster with some thoroughly moldy Gorgonzola. The two-bottles-for-three-euro Provencal red that I bought needs a good sturdy cheese to render it quaffable. By the end of the day, I had made my way across the Rhône to the town of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer – The Saint Marys of the Sea. As tradition goes, there was an Egyptian temple of Ra on the current site, and Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came here to evangelize and successfully converted the Egyptians to Christianity. A thousand or so years ago, their supposed remains were unearthed in the crypt of Sarah, that other great New Testament sainte. The town is more or less built around the crypt. This weekend was the annual pilgrimage to the Marys, which means taking their statues from the church, parading them around town, holding mass, running some bulls and white horses around town, and then finally putting the girls back on their thrones.
Sadly, I arrived in town too late, having dawdled in Provence until late in the day. The Marys were safely back at home by the time I got there. The crypt, however, was still open, so I got to set foot inside. The effect was intense and immediate. It's an 11th century crypt, which is to say tiny, and today was illuminated by hundreds (thousands?) of votive candles. The temperature inside the stone room was easily 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and there wasn't a lot of oxygen to be had because of all the flames. If ever I were to have a religious vision, those would have been the ideal conditions. But the Marys and Sarah were silent. Someone must have tipped them off that I wasn't Catholic. Although then again, neither was Paul.
The other great pilgrimage takes place in May: the pilgrimage to the crypt of Sarah, patron saint of gitanes (gypsies). Apparently the gitanes come in droves to pay homage. The gitanes that I've seen so far in France have little tradition left in them. They've been institutionalized while remaining marginal – they live in sprawling trailer parks under the bridges and overpasses of Marseilles, have reputations for heavy drink and petty crime, and are alternately resented and pitied. But on a festival day, like the pilgrimage to Sarah, I imagine things are different.
Aside from the saints, the town is known for raising bullfigting toreaus and for the Carmargue, an enormous wetland at the mouth of the Rhône that is home to hundreds of species of birds. On a brief walk this evening, I came across a flock of flamingos picking crustaceans from the marsh. It was too dark to take good pictures, but I'll do a bit more walking tomorrow. I'm not sure how many pictures I've taken on this trip, but it must be over thousand by now. Between those and the sound recordings, it will take me nearly as long to sort the trip out as it did to take it.
Tonight I went to a folk dance in Gattières, about 24km north of Nice. The format was just what I was looking for – a dance workshop, followed by a potluck, followed by a dance. For the first time in a couple of weeks, I got to hang out and talk music and dance with people, albeit in very broken French. An Algerian fellow (whose name I have regrettably, if I ever actually caught it) swapped some songs with me on the guitar before the dance, and gave me the names of some of the great French chanteurs to check out later. The dance itself made my head explode – unfamiliar and fairly complicated dances, not called, with the instructions during the workshop portion entirely in French (of course). Nonetheless, I hung in there and got at least a few of them partly right. It wasn't strictly Provençal dances – I'm not sure if that level of purity exists anymore. (The accordion player lamented that folk music is dying in France.) But it was a mix of Provençal, Breton, Irish, and English trad dances. It would have been fun to have called an American square dance for them, but they had the program pretty well laid out, and most of them already knew most of the dances. The band was Les Pieds Bleus (The Blue Feet), which was two diatonic accordions and a fiddle, an arrangement not uncommon in France. They were kind enough to let me record the music, and I've got contact info to swap CDs by mail later.
Everyone at the dance was enormously kind to me, despite my gibberish attempts at conversation. And for the record, French potlucks rock. Since I was sans cuisine, I brought a bag of grapes (which all got eaten by the break, so I guess I didn't do so badly). The dessert table in particular was epic. I have no idea what I ate, but my palette and stomach will sleep happily tonight.
I'm loathe to admit it, but I'm bored of the beach. Had I come to Nice directly from Donegal, it would have been a dream – warm sun, azure sea, lazy promenades along the coast. But I've been here too long, and I'm just no good at regular tourist stuff. I tried a bit of busking yesterday on the Quai des États-Unis with no success whatsoever. Busking just doesn't seem to be part of the French thing. I've been traveling in France for three weeks now, only today came across the first buskers I've seen. They were foreigners, too, and not having much luck, either. All of the art and music that I've seen has been sanctioned – in its arranged place at its arranged time.
So I've given up and gone with the sanctioned flow, and am now at the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain. I can't quite remember the last time I set foot in a real art museum – I hung that up a couple of lives ago. But it's Friday, the museum is free, so I took a look around. Most of it was stuff I had seen before, or at least like stuff that I had seen before. Maybe the best thing that I saw was a John Cage quote engraved above a doorway: Even when nothing is happening, there is always something happening. Which is a good refrain for this trip – even while sitting on remote beach or drinking a ponderous cup of coffee in an outdoor café, things are happening, both inside and out. I think my French is improving, although the changes are so gradual that it's hard to tell how much. Nice isn't such a great town for practicing, really. While French is certainly the predominant language, there are loads of Italians, Algerians, Turks, Moroccans, and tourists from throughout Europe. Last night I ate at a Mexican restaurant and could overhear conversations in both Swedish and Portuguese. (I don't speak either, but have spent enough time in Sweden and Brazil to recognize both.) Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm having trouble understanding someone's French because my French is bad, or because it's being spoken with a thick Turkish accent. Probably a bit of both. I'm staying in a very Turkish/Algerian part of town that has far more kebab shops than crêperies. (It also has more than its share of apparently North African hookers, which makes walking back at night a bit more interesting.) Closer to the beach, it's all pizza places and gelato shops. (Lord yes. Gelato.)
For tomorrow, I've caved and rented a car. There is a dance workshop in Gattières, and no other way to get to it. So I'll have a couple of days to drive to more out-of-the-way places in Provence, hopefully to find a bit more music before I split north for Paris. For this afternoon, it will be a few last hours on the Mediterranean shore before I bid it farewell.
This week, I am behaving as a proper tourist. For the moment, drinking bottle of rosé on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean at Cassis, a small fishing/tourist town west of Marseilles. After doing the math, I was surprised at how little money I've spent over the last month, so I decided to spring for the hotel with balconies avec vue mer – with sea views. It costs four times what the hostel in Chamonix did, but sitting shirtless in the 26 degree sun breathing salt air, I'm not troubled by that. And finally getting a good night's sleep isn't so bad, either.
Aside from the obvious sun and sea, which exist everywhere on the Cote d'Azur, two things bring me to Cassis in particular – nostalgia and the calanques. The calanques are easy to describe but fairly difficult to really portray in words. “Mediterranean fjords” is probably the best that I can do. Huge white limestone and marble cliffs loom over the rising and falling sea. The calanques themselves are deep cuts in the cliffs that extend from the sea inland for hundreds of meters, natural harbors around which one can hike or into which one can sail. I walked yesterday to the calanques at En Vau, and took a swim with fish of many shapes ans sizes. It's not quite a deserted beach, but one populated mostly by hikers and rock climbers. I took a couple of nice dives off the rocks into the sea before re-clothing and hiking back to town. Aside from the swim the highlights of the hike were la Narine de Neptune (the nostril of Neptune) – a hole in the limestone cliff that snores in time with the rise and fall of the sea 30 meters below – and a bit of vandalism that changed a sign from “SENTIER DANGEREUX” (“Dangerous Trail”) to “SENTIER D'ANGE HEREUX” (“Trail of the Happy Angel”). I never do tire of puns.
The other reason for being in Cassis is nostalgia, a faux ami if ever there was one. Her Ladyship and I were here two and half years ago, on the event of my thirtieth birthday. It was a grand adventure – we were newly in love, it was our first time in France, and we were drunk on sentimentality, good cheese, and Provençal rosé. This time is significantly different. I'm here alone, and while the cheese is as good as ever, the rosé has lost some flavor. My French is still less than conversational, which leaves me lacking the company of others. I'm on a different kind of trip this time, and in that sense, Cassis was a mis-step – I'm trying to relive old experiences instead of creating new ones. So tomorrow I'm off to Nice – just passing time in a beautiful place, really – and then, provided I can find a car, off to a dance workshop in rural Provence on Saturday night. Metéo France is on strike (ah, the grand French tradition), but the newspaper speculates that my meteorological timing should be just right, and I should be able to absorb some sun on the Cote d'Azur all week before the rains come and I move further inland, hopefully to absorb a bit of la musique Provençale.
I'm currently parked at Gite le Vagabond, in Chamonix, at the foot of the Mont Blanc massif. Chamonix sits in a high-elevation Alpine valley; the snow caps of Mont Blanc, highest peak in Europe, loom over the roof of the hostel. Today I took the cable car halfway up the massif to do a bit of hiking at 7000 feet, just below the snow line. The views were nothing short of incredible – paragliders sail above and below the trails, over the wires of the highest cable car in the world. I took a route around the side of the mountain to the Mer de Glace, a glacier that flows between the peaks. It felt great to be back out in some wilderness after three days in the city.
The town of Chamonix itself is pretty interesting. I've never been anywhere that caters so much to the outdoor crowd. Every shop sells mountaineering gear; every other person is a hiker, a mountain biker, or a paraglider. In the winter, of course, it's all snurfers and ski bums, but this is the low season – after the summer biking season, but before the winter ski season. My roommates are a couple of Aussies getting ready to circumnavigate Mont Blanc this week. Which hopefully means they won't be up late getting trashed.
I'm undecided as to what I'll be doing this week. It's tempting to set off on another backpacking trip – I could probably do three or four days across the Alps, staying at refuges as I go. But that would mean time away from Provence, and time not spent speaking French or learning tunes. Which probably means that I'll just spent the weekend day hiking and set off toward Provence on Sunday. The Alps should be here for me when I come back some day.
What to make of E & J? They've decided that they can't fit in, so they can't fit in. They think they're looking for 'reality', but are in fact chasing a fantasy, looking for a France that hasn't existed for thirty years, and being hurt when reality doesn't conform to the film world. They're determined to be non-conformist, but then hold everyone else responsible for their isolation. They give no one the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they're being mocked at every moment. When people are friendly, they don't follow up and reciprocate the friendship. It was wearying to be with them. So now I'm en route to Mont Blanc, for a few days of no-doubt-freezing hiking. But I'm ready for it, then two weeks in Provence before I fly home.
I've been two days now in Amiens, visiting with E and J. By tomorrow, I'll be moving on again, either to Dijon or toward the Alps, depending on how far I can get in a day. While it's been comfortable visiting with friends from home, that's exactly why I need to leave. Too much English, too much staying in, not enough discovery. E & J have both expressed difficulty with their time in Amiens – at once a city too much like home, consumer and sprawling, and at the same time xenophobic and hyper-aware of difference. They came with romantic notions of Paris '68, and will leave with the realization that the western world is ruining itself in the same way for the same reasons everywhere. I've largely avoided the cities for some of those reasons – too cosmopolitan, too much the same everywhere, so they have to invent difference to keep people apart. Having spent a few days in the city, I feel the need to escape again. There's nothing much here for me, and by the weekend my time in France will be half exhausted, and my trip 2/3 over.
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
I spent yesterday at Mont-Saint-Michel, that architectural marvel of Normandy. It's an uncomfortable mixture of the sublime and the garish. There's no disputing that the environmental setting is dramatic, and the abbey itself is architecturally and historically astounding. But there's only one route from the terre of the wet sands to the ciel of the abbey, and that's through the gauntlet of crepe stands and tourist shops that line Mont-Saint-Michel's one narrow street. It serves to make me more interested in Mont-Saint-Michel's modern history than in its more distant past. Who sold that real estate to the crepe vendors, and when? How much does that land cost, anyway? How long could I busk there without being stopped?
More generally, looking through my photos of the trip, I see that I've visited more than my share of abbeys and cathedrals. Even an atheist can't help but be moved by these architectural marvels – which is of course exactly what they were designed to do: to lift the eyes and the mind toward heaven. Most of these cathedrals have stood for hundreds of years still fulfilling that mission long after their architects have passed on.
Of course like most man-made wonders, they were built from the blood of the peasantry. The popes and cardinals hoarded gold while nations starved, they marched their own holy armies against the principalities of man (and sometimes against each other), they swapped indulgences to the wealthy in exchange for money and labor to construct their cathedrals, they claimed to administer to the needs of the soul while torturing the bodies of their spiritual competitors under the premise of heresy. The abbeys and cathedrals stand as testament to all of that, too, so perhaps the real wonder is that the peasantry didn't tear more of them down long ago.
The Name of the Rose is about all of that and more – part historical fiction, part murder mystery, part concordance of heresies. It made for good accompaniment through the cathedrals of Brittany; I read it perhaps too quickly as to get the English language out of my hands as soon as possible.
Next stop: De la terre a la lune.
Carl Sagan
Cosmos
The decision to read Cosmos during my trip was fairly random -- it was on my shelf, I hadn't read it, and it fits in the pocket. So Sagan's oeuvre on the cosmos made its way around the terrestrial sphere with me: I read it in buses, I read it in my tent by lamp light beneath the night sky. On a remote beach on the Dingle peninsula, illuminated by the red glow of my emergency head lamp, I read Sagan's optimistic conjectures of extra-terrestrial life. He wants so badly for Them to be out there; wants so badly for Them to contact us. More importantly, he wants us not to blow ourselves up before They find us. The threat of nuclear winter looms large over his 1979 text.
For him, science isn't ever the problem; science is the answer. Sagan clings to the scientist's ideal of untainted knowledge -- the probing of the atom was faultless; nuclear weapons are the corruption. He believes that space exploration will serve a unifying role in human history, based on the only-partly-metaphoric premise that from space, you can't see national borders. He conveniently neglects the fact that the core motivation of nearly all U.S. space exploration has been jingoistic paranoia. From the first beeps of Sputnik to (at least) Reagan's orbital laser wet dream, space exploration (certainly up to 1979) was all about outshining, out competing, and out maneuvering the Russians. I don't know much about the ISS -- in theory, I think it's the sort of thing that Sagan had in mind. In practice, I'm not sure how much of a unifying force it's been -- the U.S. is certainly as nationalistic as ever; so is China, France, India, etc. Sending rockets to Alpha Centauri isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it's the thing that will make us all hold hands and sing together.
I've now been two days in Cancale, at les Bordées de Cancale, a festival of sea songs. My trusty field recorder has been harvesting a wealth of tunes and songs. I spent some time last night making a bit of music with the fellows from Jenkin's Ear – a bunch of Englishmen who served together in the royal navy and now record traditional English sea shanties from Guernsey and beyond.
I've walked several times down the path between Cancale and the auberge de jeunesse, about 4km down the seaside. The path follows the rise and fall of the sea cliffs, and as the rain blows in and blows back out again, Mont Saint Michel appears and disappears across the bay. At low tide, the oyster beds lie open to the air, and the oyster farmers collect them by the tractor load, sell them at the markets, and ship them inland to the restaurants. It's a traitorous town in which to dislike shellfish, a fact that I am doing my best to keep to myself (like going to Bordeaux and admitting that you don't much like wine).
For tonight, the auberge is full, but the festival very much still on, so I am couch surfing with la jolie Anne and Vippen, the Indian nationalist. A strange trio, indeed, and it makes me laugh to think of it. In Breton France, at a festival of sea shanties, sacked out on the floor of a French woman with an Indian guy and a head full of Irish tunes. It's a crucible for the mind, and my calendar says that this weekend my trip is half over. Virginia seems a long way away. I sat on a cliff today and worked out a few mountain tunes from memory. I find they come easily, even though I can't quite picture the front of my own house.
This morning, before the rain, I took a walk around the WWII memorial across the harbor from the old city. St. Malo itself was all but leveled during the war – not by the Germans, but by the Allies in an effort to reclaim it around the time of the D-Day invasions. The old town has since been rebuilt, but the bunkers and gun emplacements across the harbor still stand. Or mostly stand, anyway. The clearly display signs of the battle – there are turrets with steel walls six inches thick peeled open like ripe fruit, their surfaces pocked and pitted with shells. I can't imagine the determination it would take to man such an emplacement while the walls around you turned to molten slag amidst the deafening shriek of your own machine gun. Nobody should have to be put in such a place, although many are put in much worse.
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