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)