The Super Parisian

 

 

The house on the land adjacent stood empty for a number of years, since about the time that the previous caretaker had been found hanging from the rafters there.  We sometimes used its driveway to access the trail that paralleled the stream running along the foot of my wife’s property.  During one such walk, we noted a bit of activity there, some basic clean-up, then nothing again for years.  Until the Parisian appeared.    

He came down three or four years ago.  His project had started off modestly at first, resuscitating the vines, midwifing a modest little vineyard whose wines had soon gone on to win awards.  Thus, like most city people living part time on the land, his designs quickly moved beyond squiring a simple country life in harmony with the land, toward schemes involving how to maximize his investment, how to manipulate and squeeze out profit from it.    

He’d already insulted Lai Yong by asking her to sell off some of her land, mentioning that as it wasn’t worth much, he wouldn’t pay much.  Where he saw wasteland and scrub, she saw a healthy natural environment.  Of course she refused.  But he since began actively felling trees along the other end of the vineyard.  The wood stood stacked out front, accompanied by a “For Sale” sign.  But the locals have their own wood.  So the stacked logs took on the form of a fence that lines the top of his property.  A tidy row now, quite attractive in fact, but it won’t be long before rot sets in, and parts begin to topple into the road.  But never mind that now, there’s land to be cleared.     
 

It here is where the Parisian and I intersect.  Through most of the Covid times, I’d remained in Kyoto, spending nearly every night there, bar a handful.  As the pandemic dragged on, I grew more and more fed up with being in the city, more and more fed up with its near constant noise.  Nights were generally quiet, but without fail, the newspaper delivery bike would wake me at 4:30.  Sometimes I’d drop back off, but most times not.  In the afternoons, someone in the neighborhood would begin banging on something, a rousing aural representation of the Japanese inability to sit still.  How I had looked forward to being where I am at this very moment, looking out over the peaceful mountains and the valleys, the hint of green through the trees that are the fruit of the wines to come.  Instead I get noise.      

The Polish workers start early in order to beat the heat.  The rumbling of machines rises with the sun, punctuated by the odd chainsaw, like a frenetic woodpecker working his way through the trees. There too is the occasional faint whiff of a worker's tobacco smoke on the mistral. The first week it had been the bulldozer planing the earth to plant new rows of vine trellises.  But the trees continued to fall elsewhere, followed by the arrival of larger machines to remove large rocks and debris, then the return of the bulldozer to follow with the tidying up.  And the grinding carries on, a hurried frenzy to finish by autumn, to get next year’s grapes into the ground before the frosts.
 
Their work has severed a section of borrowed scenery, a dirt appendage now standing where an unbroken flow of trees had once been.  Hopefully when the vines are eventually planted, the green will return, leaving us afloat on a sea of grapes.  It will be attractive and quiet then to be sure, but where will the Parisian’s ambition take him next?  Based on how the climate is going, drought seems inevitable at some point, and if his investment in the grapes fails for a year or two, will he pull up roots and abandon that to which he never grew connected, beyond its monetization?   

Then, I guess, the land left alone will make decisions all its own, as is its wont. And the locals will laugh at this silly city fou, and shake their heads and turn their backs to the plow, as they have always done here.     

 

Addendum, late August 2023:  Operations at the winery have been suspended due to the illegal felling of trees mentioned above.   To the locals, an even greater sin was the "debarking" of the world -renowned cork trees, from which can be developed the eponymous product. 

On the turntable:  Phish, Baker's Dozen"

C'est la Guerre

 

 

The fires beat their retreat just shy of the stone marker that stands at the edge of an expansive vineyard.  It honors the partisans who parachuted in on the night of July 14, 1944, to subsequently chase out the fascists who had invaded two years before. In a house on the hill above, a Browning rifle leans against the fireplace, a decorative item that Lai Yong found in a shop somewhere.  The gun scares me a little.  How many people had it killed, or was the person to whom it was issued himself killed?  

I watched many films during the pandemic, including a number of classics that dealt with the European theatre of WWII.  It was an educational exercise for me, wanting to learn more about the history of the continent, and film can often provide evocative waypoints to better, more detailed sources. I usually abhor violence, particularly the Hollywood variety, where behind high bodycounts is a person to be grieved for. This feeling became particularly acute while watching Stalingrad, in those dark months after the death of my own son.  

I am amazed that war has lasted as long as it has.  Man’s greatest advantage over his fellow animals is his intellect.  So war begins where intellect fails.  But diplomacy in general has been scarce of late, might has again become the order of the day.  Like most of us, I was shocked to see Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine, as land invasions feel oh so 20th century.  We all have a different take on these events, and while I do paint Putin as a villain, so too are the heads of state whose bullying and aggression propelled those tanks into motion.  And now many of those same “leaders” seem dead set on bullying China in a similar fashion.  How do they not see that war is a failure, that all military gains are temporary?  The world order today is nowhere the same as in 1918, 1945, 1991.  Politics change, borders shift, ideologies prove a mere product of their time. We should have evolved intellectually to a place beyond war, where we can sit together to find compromise and solution. Yet war continues to flare up time and time again.  It is the place where man devolves into animal, and the passions that serve as ignition are equally beast-like.  

My travels through a vast number of long-dead civilizations and empires along the Silk Road have proved to me that in the end, only the land is eternal, and the letters carved in stone to mark long forgotten heroes will themselves fade with the eternity of time.  

 

On the turntable: Dinah Washington, " In the Land of Hi-Fi" 

 

After the Fire, the Fire still Burns

 

 

The pandemic kept me away for three years.  Emotionally I’d held up well during the whole global implosion, but when I eventually did hit rock bottom, it was inextricably bound to this place.  The heavy rains that bombarded Kyoto during the summer of ’21 had already done a number on my spirits, as I felt imprisoned within my house, unwilling to distract myself in some risky indoor venue, and unable to spend time at the lake or in the mountains, places that my soul craves desperately.  But it was the fires here in France that summer that threatened to sink me through the floor.     

The flames started a few valleys to the north, but high winds had coaxed them down toward the sea.  Day after day I followed their progress online, feeling such hopeless as I watched this disaster play out in slow motion, from such a distance where I could do absolutely nothing.  Lai Yong too watched from England, fatalistically optimistic, but her voice betrayed anxiety, a tone I rarely hear from her.  

We had assumed the house lost.  But as is often the way with these things, the winds shifted suddenly, the flames reaching 100 meters from the front drive but mercifully no further.

The drive in last weekend betrayed little fire damage, as five seasons had coaxed out new vegetation.  Things were beginning to green, as the odometer had rolled over into September. But flashes of black seen from the car increased as we entered the long straight drive that led away from town.  The steep little bridge that Sora so loved to hop at high speed in the Jeep had been replaced, and the forest beyond was all thinned out.  It reminded me of the old Matthew Brady prints of the American Civil War, great debris-filled spaces bordered by the agonized twisting of charred trees. The hillsides too bore scars, but you had to know where to look for them.  

But the house and the land surrounding it looked as they always had.  It, and all it contained, had survived.  Yet it is the scars within, a week’s worth of memories growing less and less visceral, that lead me to finish this paragraph with the words, “survived yes, but for how long.” 

 

On the turntable: Bola Sete, "Tour de Force"

Gift from the Saharan South

The original idea had been to continue our Van Gogh pilgrimage that had started in Amsterdam last February.  Though it had started before that, with Vincent and Theo, Irving Stone and Lust for Life.  After Arles we'd loop through the Nimes of Truffaut and the Romans, then further west to Uzes and Durrell.  But the forecast showed temps over 40 degrees, every day.  So rather than the hot south, 
we'd climb into the hills a little north.   

...at Ventabren, the double-tiered bridge begs to be called Roman, but instead is as young as 1849.  Like paper dolls, hand-in-hand across the gorge.  Stones interlaid into arches, rough hewn to inadvertently create steps, as if predicting the sport of rock climbing to come a few decades later...

..the trio of windmills, at Ventabren, Saint Saturnin-les-Apt, and that of Daudet at Fontvielle...

...the parched earth somehow giving life.  Wheat fields stretch to farm house outside Éguilles, the lavender of Valensole (now fenced off the the selfie hordes),  and the ever present grapes.  A pair of vineyards built upon the soil of the Romans:  the old chapel tucked behind Chateau Bas in Vernègues, an apt setting for this repurposed temple that honored older Bacchanalian rites; and the old agricultural settlement near La Roquebrussanne, where the ancient blood in the soil feeds the grapes of the Domaine du Loou...

...Les Baux and bauxite, the latter carved into crumbling citadels with steps slick with the feet or invaders and tourists, and quarries on whose walls shine Van Gogh.  Arm of a trebuchet raised toward to hot sun. Catherine Wheel of roof lines when seen from above. Washi exhibited by an American woman from Arles. The nativity dolls in an old church converted to a gallery space, with marble floors and elaborately colored walls. The valley of Enfer stretches along the valley, complete now with new resorts with glistening pools.  Scrambling through low brush across private land to get to the old church, and its ancient Roman Trémaïé...

...the ancient Roman aqueduct outside Fontveille, a long straight dusty line of stone spilling down hill into vineyards below...

...Tarascon and the tarasconcon.  The town's idiot inhabitants, not quite plugged into the reality of common sense. (My greatest take away memory of the place, though Ford Madox Ford adored the place.)  Denied lunch, a quick hungry ascent of the old castle, spiraling up from tower to tower as if in a video game.  Gazing across the The Rhône at the parallel castle of Beaucaire, left for another time...

...quick peek at the old Frigolet monastery.  A very old tour group rests in the shade, probably post-lunch.  Interior of Gothic church almost velvet, with columns of purple and gold...

..Finding the Frédéric Mistral birth house closed, a modest boxy farm house in a garden of shade...

...Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole filled with Americans.  I get a few minutes along in Van Gogh's old room, spartan, nearly bare.  The cloister below quiet, but for the occasional ringing out of the nasal twang of middle American. Thumbing through catalogs later to match the paintings with the real locations... 

...scrambling around Glanum in the late afternoon, the heat still high.  Moving from the lower Roman to the upper Greek sections of town, lingering among the latter's temples to the gods.  Then a higher climb to the overlook, back to a more primitive time of the Celts...  

...refreshing dip in the pool of Hôtel Le Saint-Rémy, simply bobbing awhile after a full day visiting hot ruins.  (While we'd tried to escape the heat, the high for Europe was ten kilometers away, hitting 43 degrees C.)   Long dinner in the shade of plane trees, served by an Italian waiter (and all the female staff Asian for some reason).   Wandering the maze of little lanes at dawn, passing the birthplace of Nostradamus, and the Hotel de Sade.  A cluster of Muslim women in the main square...

...The chapel of Saint-Sixte, in Eygalières, subject of a hundred tourist posters...

...the stunning wall of the Orange amphitheatre.  Seeing a performance here is now on my To Do List.  Wandering the adjacent lanes on market day, looking for lunch, then finding it at a small and hot bistro just across from the old theatre...

...a pair of walks around the ruins at Vaison-la-Romaine, at sunset, and again early dawn.  The geometric perfection of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth de Vaison, and its stunning cloister.  A pair of beers in the shaded square below our room.  Late night dinner across the Roman bridge in the old town, at Bistro d'O, with its friendly chef and wrap around view, the patrons seemingly melting at their windowside tables.  Strolling the old town in the fading light of the day, topping out at the old ruined chateau, the lights filling the valley below...

...looping through the valleys of the Drôme, in search of old villages and Roman bridges.  Backtracking up and over the bald peak of Ventoux, passing the Tom Simpson Memorial, and its forest of water bottles left in tribute.  Winding through the forests of the southern face back to the Vaucluse... 

...rapid wandering of the lanes of Apt at midday, between ordering of lunch, and the usual lackadaisical arrival.  Pop into Cinema Le Cesar, built into an old church. The Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, clock tower, arched entryways to the old town.  Post lunch drive out to the 2000 year old Pont Julien, crossed by a bicyclist who comes out of nowhere.  Then circle toward home...
 

On the turntable:  Daniel Lanois, "Belladonna"

Beneath the Song of the Cicada...

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "The Freewheeelin' Bob Dylan"

Sunday Papers: Geoffrey Wolff

"Language, or more properly, grammar, is the obstacle that blocks the path of anyone ambitious to fit within the skin of a cultivated Frenchman. English is a language in which literacy is achieved by the expression of a huge vocabulary, through the interstices of a loose and easy syntax. It is a language that prizes evolution and surprise, one that requires curiosity and diligence rather than the kind of compulsive analysis and repetition by rote that French children--to their later, greater glory--are obliged to suffer. In all languages, the illiterate may be recognized by their ignorance of approved syntactical arrangements, but in English, once grammar has been absorbed, only vocabulary and perhaps accent distinguishes one speaker from his "inferior." 

But in French, grammar is a tyrant. It is monstrously difficult, & within its labyrinths are hidden all delicacy and sense, all meaning, all purpose, everything we think of as literature. The grammar of literary French is not available for appropriation by an adult. It is the reward for a childhood nightmare in which the simple thread must first be unraveled from a tangle, and then again and again. French writers come from the unassailable elite whose mark of class is its linguistic style." 


On the turntable:  Lambchop, "Is a Woman"
On the nighttable Geoffrey Wolff, "Black Sun"

The Pipiers at the Gates of Dawn...

On the turntable: The Jam, "All Mod Cons"