ICI REPOSE

 
 

The Truffle Square:

  

Having missed the marché aux truffes before Christmas I try my luck again on the first Friday after New Year. The day is clear, and as the sun rises just after 8pm, the clouds disperse under a strong cold wind. I drop the children at school and race along the dual carriageway of the D942 toward Carpentras hoping to see some thing of the ritual Michelle de La Pradelle describes in her chapter on the Truffle Circle. I am already late, as it’s now passed 8.30 in the morning and it is hard to find parking, but I manage to reach the open entrance area to the Hotel Dieu at around 8.40am where a group of mostly men, in various coats, hats, and boots mingle and chat amongst each other, occasionally moving between groups, shaking hands and greeting one another. By their demeanour and the casual nature of the groupings I feel a tinge of disappointment for it appears that they have just spilled out from the grand building after the market has taken place. I have gone and missed the Market again.

To make up for the disappointment I walk through the small crowd, divided by small tributaries of space, to catch some of the ambience and spirit of this unique ritual. I feel a certain tension as I clutch the cloth bag I have brought along with me. I am made very aware that I am not part of this gathering, but there is no obvious odour and no sense that I am witness to anything but a small gathering of acquaintances meeting to chat on market day. The only difference in this gathering is the apparent uniformity of clothing and of age – most of the individuals are middle aged or a little older. I leave the throng and cross to the Place du 25 Aout 1944 to look at the stalls. Here I catch an overwhelming perfume of vanilla mixed with cooked chicken and decide I must use my nostrils today. But the mistral and the fresh winter air conspires against me, driving the scent quickly away and up into the clear blue sky. Maybe that’s why the crowd outside marché aux truffes was not infused with the conspicuous pungent smell of wild truffle. And maybe, just maybe the market has yet to take place…

I glance back and see that the crowd is thinning but I can see no one coming away from the Hotel Dieu. In fact the throng in front of the building are made up of the rabassier just gathering prior to the market. Presumably not wanting to appear too eager or too craven they waited outside the Hotel in a show of nonchalance until nearly 9am to enter the courtyard and prepare themselves for the trading. I follow them in and see that the square of tables surrounded by metal barricades that had appeared so empty on my last visit, like a stage set emptied of its actors, was now filled almost along each side. The members of the crowd I had seen outside milling around had now revealed small cloth bags or taken from baskets bags and placed them in front of them so they face into the open space in the middle of the truffle square. This simple gesture almost certainly belies the heroic effort and careful preparation that each rabassier has taken in preparing their small offerings. But instead of feverish anticipation that often accompanies the buildup to a market auction there is a strange reluctance to show interest in any sale before it actually commences, as if the participants in the market are holding back. In this it recalls the rather cold auctioneering of say the contemporary fine art market stuffed full of anonymous agents for superrich collectors. But here no one tries to look into the contents of the others bags – it is up to each individual seller how much or little they wish to reveal of their unburied treasure – some have turned down the sides of the bags so that the truffles can be easily seen but others make no effort to open their contents for viewing. It is nearly 9am and the rabassier seem to be more alert, when a late arrival enters the square, a woman dressed in a bright green coat looking a little hurried and tired, searches the backs of her rivals for her place at the table.

 

http://www.avignon-et-provence.com/provence/truffe_noire/#.Twtz5EqreHk

This arena of exchange concerns a very peculiar commodity, displayed in almost perfunctory fashion (though the plastic bags and battered baskets de La Pradelle describes have now been largely replaced by small linen sacks some with Marché aux Truffes printed on the outside). Some sellers have folded down the sides of the sacks to reveal their finds while others simply place their bag on the table and wait with their ‘black diamonds’. Now, there is a flimsy moment of calm before the tables finally filled up, and latecomers trying to squeeze in to show their finds. The wind whips into the courtyard and kicks up leaves in a funneling swirl that rise over the courtyard. Then precisely on the stroke of 9am, as the clock chimes its last bell, another group of individuals comes in the right hand corner of the barrier. They enter the centre of the tables and start circulating quickly. Some can be seen talking briefly and intently to a seller; over 3 or 4 intense minutes all the trading is completed - up to 60 to 70 small sacks of truffes will have changed hands in a series of precise conversations where how, when, and what you say, may seal or break the deal.

It appears that what is most important is not how they look but how they smell, how they feel and how much the seller is willing to hold onto his or her maximum price. For the buyer it is mostly a question of quality but also of trust. And yet for both the rabassier or his agent and the buyer or trader it is precisely how each nugget of truffe looks that really counts – in its utter authenticity, its nobbliness or dirtiness which distinguishes it from other products - for it is far too precious to be scrubbed and cleaned, or represented as a prime specimen, as all its precious juice, its essence and concentrated earthiness resides in its hidden interstices which quality must be reckoned only from outside. The buyers circle the tables at first almost nonchalantly, regarding the bags and their guardians with swift approval. Then slowly the activity draws closer and the traders start to look at the truffes, dipping their hands into the bags, feel and scrapping the produce. Some put their heads right into the sacks, sniffing and snuffling the contents as if they were a truffle pig or dog searching out these succulent bonbon of the terrain in the roots of oak trees. They sniff, poke, turn, touch, scrape and generally man handle the contents of the bags. But this must all be part of the game, that quick exchange of gestures that ripens the words that will clinch the deal. The sellers look on almost indifferently – they know that their finds are good, that they are ‘genuine’ truffles from the Ventoux and must be accorded the proper value. Here it is a sellers market,  the trader/buyer merely competing with each other over how much if any of this luxury object they can obtain without overspending.

ICI REPOSE

« Je les connais tous, les sites humains d'où sont partis les hommes, l'abri du charbonnier, la cuve à vin creusée dans la paroi du roc, le poste à feu oublié du chasseur et, quelque part en un lieu hanté de moi seul, perdu dans la broussaille, cette aire immense avec des talus et quatre grands fossés mangés par l'herbe. Un vieux peuple, rude et sensé, au cours d'une migration énergique, avait sans doute établi là, jadis, son camp à l'ombre de la Terre. »         

'I knew them all, the human sites from which man sprung, the charcoal burner’s shelter, the wine vats dug into the cliff, the hunters’ fiery point, and somewhere, in a place haunted by me alone, lost in the scrub this enormous clearing edged with four huge ditches, eaten away by grass. An old people, rough and sensitive, during a great migration established their camp here, at the earth’s shadowy edge.' (Bosco – author’s translation)

Much like my ignorance of Henri Bosco, I was blissfully unaware, as I stood in the cemetery at Loumarin admiring its tranquility and beauty, that it had recently been the centre of a political and symbolic storm. A storm encapsulated by the terse phrase:

ICI REPOSE

For Camus’ beautiful resting place unlike Bosco’s was not wholly assured. Larger forces, represented by powerful partisan politics, and a brutal nationalism, had been working to undermine the peaceful graveyard. Camus’ name and his mortal remains were being summoned – his literary terroir, claimed as a national treasure – by the President, who in his wisdom: "... thought it would be a particularly pertinent choice." Sarkozy also told assembled journalists that a final decision had yet been taken, but "[It is] a project which is extraordinarily close to my heart." Thus the President, somewhat out of the blue, had suggested that Camus should quit his provincial slumber, be torn from his adopted Provencal soil, and come to rest in Paris, as a full national hero, worthy of full honours in the Pantheon. The signs had been there, if one had been attentive to them. Not least in the way Sarkozy had appropriated Camus’ words early on in his Presidency while on a state visit to Tunisia. Looking out across the Mediterranean, back across the bright blue sea toward France, he had listened ostentatiously to a Camus text being read out loud to him. Camus as the foreigner and the outsider, independent in mind and thoroughly outspoken, apparently appealed to Sarkozy’s own sense of marginal ancestry, and bolstered his credentials as a President with an urbane, civilized and generous appeal[1]. Although it was much debated and then commented upon, whether he had really read much, if any of the writers’ oeuvre.  His reputation as a hater of both books and all literary study preceding his effusive confession that the project ‘was extraordinarily close to my heart’, seemed to have dampened his announcement.

  Was this really such an astute political maneuver? This project to recuperate Camus, scourge of the far-right (and even more famously the far left), resistance fighter, champion of the oppressed and unrepresented, the poor and marginalized. All initiated at the insistence of President Sarkozy, this former Interior Minister of France who famously called the youth of the banlieue 'scum’ (racaille, a term that bears implicit racial and ethnic resonances). All any one, not fascinated in the politics of this situation, could think when he made this controversial proposition, was what the hell would Camus of made of it all. This turning over of the soil, and this digging into the past, from interior to exterior and back again all in one shameless move:

 Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. (Camus - The Stranger 1.1.1)

Nothing could be stranger than this abrupt turning over of truth, this meddling in and reconstruction of ancestry, and yet simultaneously, nothing could be more familiar, more heart warming to the consummate outsider:

‘It was pleasant; the coffee had warmed me up, and the smell of flowers on the night air was coming through the open door. I think I dozed off for a while.’ (Camus - The Stranger 1.1.14)

Just as abruptly as he had been reawakened into public consciousness, Camus was allowed to doze off again, rooted into his Provencal garden, a petit paradise. But this had nothing to do with any goodwill on the President’s part. It was because Camus’s son would not agree to the disinternment. The Élysée Palace had somehow failed to get the consent of the next of kin, before making this important public announcement. While Camus’ daughter was less unequivocal, apparently vacillating, his son was not for turning – his father would never have wanted such ostentatious honour. Then again perhaps this was all part of the plan to make the suggestion publicly – a demonstration of a certain broadness and imagination on the part of the famously unliterary, uncultured President – let it hang there, in the media, and then quietly let it slip. Maybe now he can suggest another Pantheonista – someone closer politically to him (Celine perhaps) – and let Camus respose in peace beside his wife…

But I can only imagine, if they ever tried digging up the coffin and attempted to exhume him, that the rich bed of plants and fauna that now luxuriated over his body had broken through the casket, and turned his mortal remains entirely, transformed into a rich sweet compost; so with the appropriate degree of absurdity, and with the writers characteristic parrhesia, finally dissolving all attempts for a proper, decent disinterment!

---

[1] An Élysée adviser, Georges-Marc Benamou, told journalists that Camus's "non-conformism in relation to France's elites" appealed to the president, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, who likes to paint himself as having come from a wholly unconventional political background, as an outsider inside the Palace.

Reveries of Mont Ventoux

While I was wandering in those mountains upon a Friday in Holy Week, the strong desire seized me to write an epic in an heroic strain, taking as my theme Scipio Africanus the Great, who had, strange to say, been dear to me from my childhood. But although I began the execution of this project with enthusiasm, I straightway abandoned it, owing to a variety of distractions. The poem was, however, christened Africa, from the name of its hero, and, whether from his fortunes or mine, it did not fail to arouse the interest of many before they had seen it.” (from Petrarch's Letter to Posterity (1909 English translation, with notes, by James Harvey Robinson)

I have become obsessed with Mont Ventoux. It was the one geographical, and physical presence, apart from the Rhone that I had some idea of, before transplanting to the Vaucluse. Passing on the Autoroute de Soleil it leaves an instant impression, graphic in its size and somehow mysteriously wild with its white-capped summit, that false summer crown of snow that in winter transforms into a semi-Artic landscape replete with Artic hare. Everyone who passes through the Rhone Valley will see it, even if they do not know its name or its unique history. It was in my mind as a brooding presence as we drove down to the village of Saint Saturnin-Les-Avignon; this mountain on which the Tour de France sporadically tests its heroes and sometimes breaks them. But somewhat disappointingly the house and garden, which we were renting had no view of the giant Mont. We could see it from the road below, and almost any where else we went walking or by car, but it seemed frustratingly that it was obscured by the houses and trees planted just below us.

   But now as the last leaves curling and yellowing fall off the fig tree at the back of the house I gain a sudden unexpected glimpse of the Mountain. And as the sun begins its afternoon descent and baths the summit in a subtle array of pink and violet light I register a sense of belonging. No longer will I have to climb up, out onto the bedroom windowsill, to look at the weather on the Mont Ventoux, or check how clear the air is by peering in its direction from the road. No, now I can see it without leaving the garden, by opening the back door and standing on the tiled terrace, looking up at it through the bare branches of the tree. Just its bare summit rising from the dark ridge of scrubby pines, viewed from over the rooftops and trees of our neighbour's house, but nevertheless there in all its majesty. And at night I will be able to watch the lights of cars like scattered fireflies flickering on the ridge as they descend from a nocturnal drive to the Mont’s windy heights. That is until the fig tree comes back to life and obscures the view with its opulent leaves.

  Still that leaves me plenty enough time to contemplate the Giant of Provence from our back garden and imagine what it might be like to be upon the uncanny, unfamiliar surfaces of its exposed ridge. How insufferable the heat in the summer, as you break cover from the treeline and rise into the calciferous boulder scape. Or I can recall now, as I stare up at the observatory tower which marks its peak, the only time I have been near its crown, on a full moonlit night this October. Almost clinging to the car, fearful that it might turn over as the wind hits its side at the Col des Tempétes, I clambered breathlessly up its white bare flanks with my son following carefully behind. Sometimes holding each others' hands as if to reassure ourselves that we would not fly off in the wind. And beneath our feet the crisp shards of bleached stone somehow shifting, sorted into sizes by the winds, the rain and its freezing action. On the shingly slopes just above the monument to Tommy Simpson we ascend as quickly and lightly as possible. And here we are now, under the full moon light, approaching the crest of the ridge plateau, buffeted by the wind. We see the concreted stakes marking the pathway – like pilgrim waymarkers lost in a desert – it is a strange Dantesque landscape. My son picks out a cluster of lights that seem to form themselves into a trident as we gaze down over the extended plain of the Comtat Venaissin, out towards Avignon and its orange glower. On this night the exposed flanks of la Jousserène and the precipice of the Ravin de la Cave de Diau appear, less like the powdery accumulation of inert cosmic dust that seems to make people think of the moon, and more like an exposed plateau of windswept calciferous bones, under constant chemical and physical attack, spotted with strange miniature vegetation. Hardened and tempered by the dry sun, this bone yard of stone captures the terrifying grandeur of Dante’s ascent into Purgatorio, as he looks now down at the circles of Hell, which he has somehow escaped. And indeed the shadow that the full moon seemed to be casting now gave a particular hellish gloom to the valley behind us as we stood pressed against the wind, leaning over the precipice and looking out north eastwards with watering eyes into a dark, unlit landscape. For a moment there was a feeling of utter desolation.

   It was only a few days later as I was reading a chapter of Put me back on my bike, William Fotheringham’s biography of Tommy Simpson, that this impression of the Mountain’s strange wild devastation, and its dangerous foreboding presence, was confirmed. It is worth quoting the passage for its lurid details (but why 90 sheep and why 30 goats?):

…part of the fascination of the Ventoux must derive from the hostile forces the mountain can unleash. Hurricanes could wipe out up to 90 sheep and 30 goats in one fell swoop, and flash floods could wreak havoc in neighbouring towns. The mountain was known for its wolves …its caves were reputed by local legend to lead down to hell itself. Even the very stones are to be feared when the wind gets up. In one midwinter storm in the 1970s, the body of a woman tourist was found just below the summit. The car that she and her husband were driving had been blown off the road, its windscreen smashed by a stone driven by the wind and she had then attempted to walk the few hundred metres to the observatory for help. Her body was virtually unrecognizable due to the bruises from the windblown rocks. ‘She had been stoned. Killed by the rocks. It seemed incredible,’ said a soldier stationed at the summit… (Fotheringham: 206-7) 

Walking then, through the uncertain, unfamiliar moonlight with my son, on the gently curved backbone of the mountain, following the concreted poles there is a sudden falling away into a shadowy blackness, rising up from beneath and then toppling as if into the dark void. Like Virgil guiding Dante, I stop, holding on for dear life to his hand, as the wind roars across the exposed ridge, threatening to tear us apart and grind us into the boney shards of the mountain's barren crown. Below our feet the shifting, crackling bones of a million souls. In Dante's Purgatorio, the penitent walks through flames to purge himself of lustful thought and feeling, but in the Inferno, the unforgiven lustfilled souls are blown about incessantly, in restless hurricane-like winds. Hell indeed – how odd this touch of the sublime.

Walk 4: 

L’Ane des Abeilles Sunday 13^th November

   In the foothills of Mont Ventoux, that curve gently in a bow all the way from the summit down to the Gorges de la Nesque and up again to the Monts de Vaucluse, we commence our climb, effortlessly ascending from the centre of Villes-sur-Auzon, up a small back road, that passes the cemetery and runs up the Combe de Sault. The heat from the sun still seems unseasonably intense, burning on our backs even at 2 pm. We take deep draughts of water from the metal flask. There is an overpowering odor of wild thyme, of olives, bare vines, all intermingled with the scent of dwarf mint, dried grasses and flowerheads that we brush against as we walk. Some of the grasses and flowers are still proudly drying in the sun while others dangling, their seeds falling away into the thin rocky soil hopefully. We are passing small half-terraced fields of vines with a few shriveled, drying grapes. The shattered rubble of the rock slips down the slopes on either side of the Combe. We reach a turn in the track. In front of us, a little to the right, a simple cross looks down onto a small hidden vineyard, still with their reddening leaves, that grows in a small protected bowl where the earth and moisture collects. 

   Now we turn away as if from the Mountain, and walk along the GR91 for approximately 500 metres until we come to the road, the source of much roaring of motorbikes and fast cars. Walking this way, there is always a view over the shoulder of Mont Ventoux. As we reach the embankment of the D1 road we make sure there is no convoy of bikers waiting to roar past us and cross the tarmac hurriedly. Quickly we are swallowed up in a labyrinth of scrubby trees and brushwood, a mixture of stunted deciduous oaks, and evergreen holm oaks, dwarf varieties gripping the thin rocky soil. We head upwards, trying to relocate the proper pathway, scrambling under and over the trees disordered branches, tearing our legs on the prickly leaves and twisting briars. This was not a good idea. All we seem to be doing is going further into a dense maze of tangled wood - in no time we will be completely disorientated. 
  This landscape reminds me now of the hinterland depicted in Pagnol’s stories La Gloire de Mon Père and Le Château de ma Mère, an emptied scrubby landscape that lies just beyond the towns and villages: a land that hides in its elaborate topography, extraordinary vistas, crevices, gorges, all of which conceal within its harsh brush-woods, small oases-like settlements. It is only by retracing our steps and returning to the road that we find the signed way again. Now, as we drop away from the road again, along a concealed track, we hear some bells – is it the sound of a goatherd? They seem to be coming from above on the other side but we cannot see anything. As we descend the track the bank disappears and falls away on the right, to reveal an encampment - les Escampeaux. There is something enchanting in the moment as if we were entering a forbidden paradise. It is completely silent now, the sun only reaching the far side of the valley. We strain to hear the bells again. And then we see it, at the bottom of a roughed out pasture, a donkey shaking its head. The sound of bells ringing. Around its broad grey neck hangs a cluster of bells. It is presumably irritated by some flies or other insects, and shakes its head. We stop to watch for a moment, then walk on into the sun. In the curve of this miniature, concealed valley are a few half restored houses and by their side a van, parked just off the track, with the words painted on its rusted flank - L’Ane des Abeilles. We dream now together, of having our very own donkey of the bees, to walk with, and to accompany us on our new imaginary journeys.

For you, this place, these innumerable caverns out of which seep so much dark abysmal water, far surpassed not only the gilded palaces of kings but all of life’s greatest pleasures and earth’s most bountiful harvests. Here, as devoted recluse, stripped of all clothing but that of your hair, you confronted three times ten Decembers, impervious to the cold and devoid of all fear. And because of this, the love and hope that lay deeply within your heart allayed all hunger, mitigated all cold, and rendered even your hard stone bed perfectly bearable. (Petrarch quoted Sobin: 189)

Camus' Grave (continuing)

Everything speaks here then of a certain humility, and a deflating of the grandiosity of man, in a returning toward the earth, and in an acknowledgment of natures’ omnipotent beauty – part of the mysterious absurdity of man’s conscious life. It reminds me of a description, by Vincent Van Gogh of the enclosed garden at Arles hospital:

…And then, as a pendant, the inner court. It is an arcaded gallery like those one finds in Arab buildings, all whitewashed. In front of those galleries an antique garden with a pond in the middle, and eight flower beds, forget-me-nots, Christmas roses, anemones, ranunculus, wallflowers, daisies, and so on. And under the gallery orange trees and oleander. So it is a picture quite full of flowers and vernal green. However, three gloomy black tree trunks pass through it like serpents, and in the foreground four big dismal clusters of somber box shrub…

This dense verdant passage extracted from a letter written to his sister Wil, on 30 April 1889, and to whom he also wrote:

Ivy favours old willows without branches – each spring the ivy seeks out the trunk of an old oak – and that is just how it is with cancer, that mysterious plant which so often fastens on to people whose lives were nothing but love and devotion. (Van Gogh: 435)

  The melancholy note of the serpentine trees and the somber box shrubs catch his ‘dismal’ mood, and yet, this spreading ivy that fastens on life, gives his thought a note of optimism, of life’s intertwined binding and loosing, while surreptitiously acknowledging the threat of impending death. For how swiftly did his brother Theo degenerate after Vincent’s own death, as though his life withered away without his brother, with the sudden lose of one-half of that symbiotic relationship which was the root of both their artistic lives. And the letter found in Vincent’s pocket unsent, and another rewritten, edited slightly, to draw the sting:

‘I tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you play your part in the production of some canvases,…For this is where we have got to, and this is all, or at least it is the main thing I have to tell you at a moment of comparative crisis. At a time when things are very strained between dealers in pictures of dead artists, and artists who are alive.

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and it has cost me half of my reason – that’s all right -… but as far as I can tell, you are not one of those traders in men, and you can choose to still act with humanity. But what do you want? (Van Gogh, 24 July 1890: 502/150)

  What was it that Theo told his brother in Paris on that fateful day in July 1890? Whatever, it was the end for both of them, in this temporary split. And yet in this untieing there is an absolute rebinding of the brothers. For at the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise, we witness Theo finally reunited with Vincent, his body disinterred from the hospital grounds in Utrecht where he had been hastily buried in 1891, and reburied beside his elder brother in the year 1914. Long before all the museums and the extravagant claims on, and for Vincent’s work, on the eve of a European cataclysm, the Van Gogh brothers’ were brought together once again, just as Camus and his wife, in a vigorous intertwining of vegetation. Their graves also bear small unadorned headstones, inscribed modestly with black letters – ICI Repose VINCENT VAN GOGH  - 1853-1890 – ICI REPOSE THEO VAN GOGH 1857-1891. And here too, like Camus’s twin plot the burial place has been transformed into a garden, a rich bed of ivy tumbles over the rectangle, joining together with his brother’s resting-place in a plump double bed of intertwined leaves. So in life as in death each is strictly allocated their plot. 

Walk 1.

Loumarin - 25 September

A Visitation:

 Loumarin Cemetery was a place I visited as much to locate the simple gravestones of another writer buried there, Henri Bosco with his wife, as to remember Camus. Indeed it was at my own wife’s insistence and somewhat against my will. For I am not a frequenter of cemeteries, these places of the dead like hospitals that remind me of our insistent mortality, are places to be avoided. But she had wanted, now we had made it to Loumarin, to go and see something of Bosco’s, a trace or scent of his presence, and had finally persuaded me with a charming account of his writing that we must visit his grave. And at first it was a lot harder than I had thought to locate Bosco’s tomb, just as it had been to try and imagine how Loumarin was a hundred years ago, overrun as it is with tourists and suffering under the influence of rich ex-pat foreigners.

 Bosco’s writing is steeped, as in so much of the literature to spring out from Provence, in the rich variety of culture and habitat of very specific localized traditions. Much of his lyrical and poetic writing, which has rarely been translated into English, gives a childeye’s view of life, and presents an almost dreamy, fantastical account of existence in Early Twentieth Century Provence. After returning form North Africa and giving up his teaching-post in Morocco, Bosco began writing fulltime, dividing his time between his summer retreat in Bastidon and an apartment in the Chateau of Loumarin. This particular Chateau he had been instrumental in restoring, sits slightly outside the village and looks down across a flat meadow to the football ground where local teams still play.

But the breeze was coming from the Beyond, beginning in the plateaus where poppies, wild asters, and hyssop plants grow, it had in passing, gathered up all the perfumes that lay hidden in little valleys, buried in warm hollows, suppressed in the slightest cracks of limestone: hawthorn, foxglove, centaury, blackberry blossoms, privet, rush leaved broom, rosemary, veronica. (Bosco: 23-24)

The almost abstract plan with its white symbols nailed to the noticeboard, devised to help visitors find Camus’s or Bosco’s tombs, only seemed to further complicate our search. For the grave ground, divided as it is into crude quadrants, and terraced because of the slope, is separated by low walls interspersed with a variety of trees, shrubs and flowering plants – creating an effect almost of a half-walled semi-tropical garden, made up of dusty pathways and impasses: ‘a carpet of primroses, snapdragons, rennets, wild teasels, star thistles and clover’ (Bosco: 23-24). It was only the arrival of another curious couple that indicated to us the whereabouts of Camus’ tomb. Bosco’s grave however, remained allusive. It seemed even harder to locate. And the couple who had stopped at Camus’s grave had mysteriously disappeared, obviously not interested in anyone but Albert. Finally we found it down another terrace in a part of the grave ground that remained only half full. Bosco’s grave accompanied by his wife, is a twin set of simple stone slabs incised with his/her name and dates, both fringed with pebbles. At the front the slabs are planted with lavender. So as you stand and remember you might brush the flowers with your hands and be replete…

Scarcely did you see wavering there like a memory, those gentle stretches of meadows, the breath of Lucerne, clover and furze, which delight the dreams of ordinary donkeys sleeping in their poor stables. (Bosco: 25) 

 

Barbarism from within?

Barbarism from within.

The Roman Empire, it is routinely explained was defeated by a barbarism that overcame its borders from outside, by conquest, raid and mass migration. However this, like most of narrative history is a gross simplification of how the Empire really disintegrated, both as a military, economic and political entity. It would have felt very different then, for the inhabitants of Europe, especially those in thrall to, or enslaved in, the machinery of Empire who gradually saw the hegemony and purpose of that Empire slipping away, as it dissolved into new entities. They did not worship the god Emperor or follow the strict duties of familias and service to the ideals of Roman citizenship but saw their world in relation to the natural resources and to their social position, viewing their existence less in an excess of trade and a constant building up of Imperial glory, and more in a return to exchange, subsistence and surfeit. It may have felt that the world was contracting back to its constituent parts, in local rhythms of season and climate, to a simple quotidian routine where daily pleasure and pain alternated across the agricultural year. Of course in hindsight we are led to read this as a disintegration and a dark age, but reuse, renewal and realignment created something different and potential from this apparent collapse into barbarism.

"Culture doesn't put food on the table," Mr Berlusconi's finance minister is reported to have said recently.

 After all we should be more aware and sensitive to the fact, that most of what we admire as Roman, was in fact created by barbarian people who inhabited Italy or the shores of the surrounding Mediterranean. This Roman borrowing, stealing and adapting extends not just from the architectural advances so admired by aficionados of Roman Imperial culture, the aqueducts, sewage systems, public baths and networks of paved road building, but also to literature, clothing, food, civil and religious rituals. All these were advances of culture, made by the foreigner - the Etruscan, Ligurian, or the Phoenician and to a lesser extent the Greek - in the Centuries before Rome became a military power. We are just not aware of it, because Rome in its conquest and military prowess considered total destruction as a central part of its modus operandi. Insubordinate or rebellious cities were routinely razed to the ground, and peoples executed en masse or converted into slaves. Many of the finest Roman sites and monuments that we can still see today are built over the foundations of structures and cultures erased by brutal force.

 In 2007, President Sarkozy berated students in a speech: "You have the right to study classic literature, but the taxpayer is not obliged to pay for your studies in classic literature." Then during a state visit to India he proclaimed: "You can like Céline without being anti-Semitic, just as you can like Proust without being homosexual."

What happened to the Roman Imperial project was a loss of faith, a corrosion of ideal and a lack of political will to continually defend what was essentially indefensible – a system built on exploitation, displaying all the methods and attributes of a Fascist State – finally the Emperor fell, toppled from his Godlike pedestal. Now we are witnessing a similar collapse within the European Empire, external factors are once again the convenient scapegoat. But this is a corrosive and unimaginative prognosis, driven by petty fears. There seems to be a lack of a progressive enlightened politics to defend the rights, tolerance and laws that the common culture of Europe not only deserves, but demands. It is not the banks, and the idiocy of over accumulation, excess consumption and unremitting ‘economic’ growth, but the spirit and values of an enlightened Europe that needs defending from the forces of prejudice, egotistical self-importance and fear. There should be a courageous, unrepentantly just, equal and free politics, which stands up unapologetically for the ideals of Europe’s Revolutionary history. A political will that confronts the fear rather than turning on the traveler, foreigners, the excluded other, the ‘barbarian’, in disgusting bouts of state sponsored violence and explosions of animal fury. Culture is not food but it is the defense, the nourishment for the only truly human response against our return to savagery – to a brutish vision of survival without purpose.

An intoxication, a release.   There's an intoxication, a release, when everything stripped away, left dumb founded by fear, and in the utter certainty of the nothingness, in death, and our insignificance within the universe. The question comes: What is it, why are we here, in the vast eternity of time - here now, on this earth? There is no answer.