Marie de la Falaise

Ok. You asked for it. Here comes quite a long post, an abbreviated version of what happened three years ago when I went to a small town along the Normandy coast. They say it sometimes takes three years for an experience to sink in properly.

The hitchiker I mentioned in my previous post had gone there with their horses and home-wagon and had hoped to spend the night there. However they had been equally freaked out by the atmosphere of the place. It is funny, since I now find on internet that two months after I visited that place, the church held a religious ceremony celebrating 50 years of the statue's reinstatement and how it helps people to find their way through difficulties in life. It doesn't mention anyone intending to place fencing. Which would seem to make sense.

This is also the experience that led me to believe that it's always best to travel in good company. And also a lot more fun.

Forgive me if this is too long to read. But there you have the story.
S2

I’d bolted for the sea, taking the quickest route without looking on the map. “The grass is always greener in Normandy” my friend Pierre had written that morning. The seaside town was larger and greyer than I’d expected. As soon as I drove up to the waterfront a car drove away, leaving an ideal parking spot. All I cared about was spending some time by the sea. Even if the sky was foggy. I scrambled down the steep pebble beach, along an edge, which revealed a sheer drop, with huge concrete, cross shaped boulders, overgrown with damp, mossy seaweed. I turned away from it, and climbed down until I reached the water. I called a friend who was happy to hear the sea in a country opposite his own. It has its own cliffs, opposite the white ones of Dover. Here the cliffs are yellow, like an old Frenchman’s teeth stained from smoking too many Gauloises. I filled my pockets with stones as smooth as dinosaurs’ eggs. The wet pebbles in the sand looked like the gems in the fountain of life, in the Ghent altarpiece, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Or the Virgin Mary’s crown, and her bejewelled, blue robe, which the brothers Van Eyck rendered to such perfection that it looks like they can be picked off the painting. I had taken a friend to see it once. He hadn’t been interested in the least. His pleasure had been my pleasure, a private joy confirmed by the sight later that day of some plastic gems on a lady’s jeans, as if the painting were following me. Now I picked up a red pebble, different from all the rest, and placed it in a larger, unusually shaped stone with a hollow in it that seemed made for it, it was such a perfect fit. I remembered some words in my dream: “Peaceful in thee”. The sea washed over the arrangement and the two stones stayed safely lodged together. At my feet I saw a dead white moth just like the living one that had fluttered down beside my knee a day earlier, as if to show itself to me. This one’s grey spotted markings were the same. Its wings were torn and dry. The healthy moth had fluttered away effortlessly when I had brought it to the doorway. As I ate, I saw in front of me a blue parakeet in a cage tapping its reflection in the mirror it was swinging against. Still, it seemed to be enjoying the breeze; it just kept singing. Two old men beside me were laughing at the decadence of my chocolate pancake. I asked them what that white figure was up on the cliff. I fancied an after dinner walk. There were bunkers too on that cliff, they looked like wounds in the landscape that no-one had bothered to heal. I remembered them saying: “Yes, you can go up there, that’s Mary of the Cliff, a statue of the Virgin Mary; the bunkers are from the wartime, RAF planes used to cross over here, and the bombers that raided London used to take off in a wood near here. It was an awful time. So many people were killed.” The war past seemed to be as much an open wound in their minds as it was in the landscape. “Take the path behind the church, it will take you up there, only don’t go too close to the edge, mind.” They had repeated that last bit several times. Now I found myself face to face with a big seagull standing motionlessly on a car roof. As if time had stood still. I found the way up to the church, walked under an archway, made a wish to be able to sing fearlessly, in front of the sea that lay stretched out below. It felt like a passage of sorts. The sun was a white ball in the pale blue sky, while the sea flickered below. The road went up the hill, with the edge to the left. A fat, neglected cat looked at me from a wall: when I tried to greet it, it hissed and ran away. A man was standing on a rock close to the edge, talking into a mobile phone. A woman ate her dinner on her balcony. She didn’t look up so I couldn’t wish her “bon appétit”. At the road’s end I saw a convent or a school building. There were children seated inside, visible behind huge windows. They couldn’t be heard, as if they were in a sealed chamber. The road became a steep path. A sign prohibiting vehicles marked the start to the ascent to the cliff. From a distance it looked like a “Do Not Enter” sign. I wondered what the white statue would have to say, and went on. Passing the bunkers I thought: “this is the sort of place where people get raped”. It looked sordid, uninviting. But I wanted to see the white statue, it was drawing me to it, so I ignored my intuition. Climbing up the path with the sun and the sea and a small stretch of grass to the left, before a great drop, I reached the top of the cliff. The statue was much bigger than it had seemed from below. It wasn’t really beautiful or serene, it was just big. Oversized in a pompous 19th century kind of way, but it possessed a kind of beauty. It had been taken down by the occupation in 1942, and the inscription said the population of the town had followed its descent in an act of quiet resistance. Thirteen years later it had been reinstated. I walked around the statue. A road at its back beckoned me to go down it but still I stayed. I wanted to know what the statue had to say. From the back the statue was ghostly. Her cloak formed a funny shape, not natural at all. Walking round to the front again, I stood with my back to the Madonna: now I had the same view as the statue would, if its metal, white painted eyes could see and if it had the mind to know it. The view, straight ahead, over the grass, reached past the sign which read “beyond this point your life is in your own hands” and over the rising grassy edge beyond which, a sheer drop down, was the sea. I found a spot some metres away from the statue’s base and sat in the grass. I didn’t have a nice feeling. I tried to relax. After a while I still didn’t feel better. So I called my friend, told him “I am so happy to be alive”. The pockets of my jacket were filled with stones I had collected, in my bag a letter to a friend with the attempted description of the resplendence of the sea and thanking him for everything. Had I tripped and fallen over the edge it could have been construed as intentional. I looked up at the statue. I was sitting, I noticed, under its outstretched hand. Its left arm held the baby Jesus. From below the hand it looked as if it were saying: “Get down. Stay down.” We spoke for a good while. When I hung up I became aware of a strange crackling noise I hadn’t noticed before; like an electronic interference, or an inconsistent radio signal. I couldn’t make out where it was coming from. It felt like a Hitchcock movie. I went over to the horse grazing on the grass behind the barbed wire a short distance away. It ignored my grass offering blankly. I became aware that I wasn’t alone, and turned to see a police car coming towards me. I lifted my thick black sunglasses, smiled, walked towards the police car and said: Is there something wrong? Are you here for me? They said “Yes. We were wondering how you got up here, without a car. How did you get up here?” “I took the path” and I pointed towards the edge. They said: “a lot of people throw themselves off the cliff here. But we can see you are smiling so we know you are okay” I thanked them for their concern. “I was just about to leave. Thanks, good evening.” Looking down, the path seemed different; my mind was hazy, it looked narrower than on the way up and the edge seemed a lot closer. I turned to ask them if it was the right way down, and saw one of the policemen had already gotten out of the car and was on his way to stop me as if I needed protecting from myself. I asked: “is this the way?” They said “yes, be careful!” I walked down the hill close to the inner side of the path. I passed the bunkers. In the white building the children were wearing odd white paper hats and were moving in a silent choreography, playing a game I couldn’t know or understand, their top halves showing above the window sill. I still heard the crackling sound. As soon as my feet touched the ground on the road every inch of my being heaved a sigh of relief. I looked at my watch: it was 10 pm. I walked back onto the street where the seagull was still standing on a car rooftop staring out in front of itself. Only it had moved up a car roof or two. Up by the statue the unusual words “I am so happy to be alive” resonated a while. I didn’t sleep that night, and the experience haunted me for weeks. A month later in a singing lesson I learned to sing as if I were flying off the cliff, in full safety, to new heights that I had never reached.

Walk through the rainbow: San Francisco visit cont.

In a way, the day fit together ingeniously, like a Chinese puzzle should do. After dropping Rosie off at school, S1 and I went to meet my friend S. at the Opera House where she was working, to meet her happy recently born son F. over a cup of coffee (having failed to do so in Brussels for the last many months, San Francisco seemed a good place to finally meet). We had a glimpse in the rehearsal, then left S. to her finetuning, and we tuned into an exhibition at the Asian Art Museum as curated by and with work by Hiroshi Sugimoto entitled History of History. It was a masterpiece in understatement, and of just the kind of finetuning I imagined S. to be doing a couple of blocks away in the big orchestra run-through with the singers, in tandem with our viewing. I realised (perhaps a little late in life) that I would never fit in in the classical music world. Must be something to do with its formality, although I do think it is a prerequisite for getting great works of music on the road. S. on the other hand has great patience and insight at many degrees, as well as a vivid poetic imagination and a profound sense of beauty, and that's why I think she is good at her job. But I am still studying my friend and hope to come up with a more comprehensive description of her sometime soon. As I do of her sister who also does extraordinary things.

After the Asian Art Museum (boy, if the US was as hugely sensitive and together on the world stage as it is in museology, what kind of a world would we be living in?)we headed for SF Moma. There, Jeff Wall revealed himself to be much more of a romantic, absurdist with an art historical bent turning photography in its end, than I expected. The audioguide helped significantly in accessing the works, although I had no idea his work was so diverse and that it looks so different from the reproductions I have seen of it. Size does matter...when it comes to art in any case.

S1, you then scooted away in time for picking up Rosie. I stayed. I went to Joseph Cornell's exhibit; it was almost too much: room after room after room after room of his universe. While I thought the Jeff Wall show was just right, let's say even modestly sized, Cornell's had me saturated with his vision. This is not a bad thing, and I can understand the curators' desire for offering something comprehensive. After I don't know how many rooms of his boxes I just needed to get out for some air. Stendhal syndrome no doubt.

After having the strange experience of having someone ask me if I preferred my green tea "grassy or flowery?" (I wanted grassy and it was grassy) I went back in for more, this time for Olafur Eliasson's exhibition. One optical phenomenon after another. What I liked very much is that he did not hide the means by which these phenomena were created. Naked truths as it were: it's sheer trickery, but such beautiful trickery.
One room, black, and dark but for a spotlight, had a curtain of fine droplets descending, creating a diagonal rainbow. I noticed not many people walked through it, because they didn't want to get wet. I am glad I did, because I got the present: as you walk through it, the rainbow becomes whole: a perfect circle. This is another rainbow showing the same effect since I was not allowed to take pictures in the museum.





Later I hit the streets and realised that all the Joseph Cornell boxes with their glitter had spilled out onto the street and followed me.

A final little treat: I did not know that Cornell had made films. He had. Here, in part one and part two, is one of the most mesmerising, ahead of its time films I have ever seen. He originally projected it through a piece of blue glass, and Dali is said to have knocked over the projector during the screening..so aghast was he that Cornell was doing something that seemed to him to be JUST RIGHT.
Cornell has often been described as an "outsider artist"; but what I learned in the exhibition, is that he assisted Marcel Duchamp in making his suitcases, and was a sort of protégé of his (Duchamp is said to have called him a genius) and that he frequented many other artists throughout his life. So whatever denegrating undertone is held in that term, outsider, is plainly untrue. I also found the works to have great coherence. I shall be reading more about the man, but the work really does speak for itself; I would venture to say that it was simply, to use a worn phrase, misunderstood and ahead of its time. In a wholly refreshening way. Or, before I slip into hagiography, let's just say I really enjoyed discovering the work even though the volume of it was a bit daunting.

Ok I shall leave it at this. I think I shall have some tea to soothe my second brain. This has become a url-packed posting, it does not even start to describe the inspiration of a friday in San Francisco. I had written this a couple of weeks ago and thought it had not been saved. Thank goodness for autosave!
love from s2

petits taxis

In Casablanca the honking streets are full of ‘petits taxis”, which are basically battered red Peugeot 205’s which have seen better days, with an iron bar into which the seats rest. No seatbelts. The law allows you not to wear one, but even if you wanted to, finding one is rare. People prefer to sit behind the iron bar. The rides are cheap. Maximum three passengers, and if there is still place the driver may pick up other passengers, if they are going the same way. This is nice for mingling with the locals. Since everyone except for the least educated people speak French, communication is easy.
Some samples:

What does that piece of writing say?
It’s a prayer for travellers.
Oh, so it’s for us then?
No, not for you, you are Catholic aren’t you? This is only for Moslims.
Don’t you pray for anyone who is non-Moslim?
No we can’t. It’s only for Moslims. I don’t want to talk about it.
At which point the lady next to me specifies: we do pray for other people, don’t worry. It’s not the way he says, it’s hard to explain. But Non-Moslims are not allowed to read the Koran, really, and you have to be clean.
At which point the driver ejects us at our destination.

Another sample:

Ooh! A boat! Look, I’ve got a boat brooch on too, I got it in Prague where there is no sea.
What does it say in the middle of the boat?
It’s a prayer. It’s for Moslims. I presume you are Catholic?
No, I’m English. (wrong answer!)
At which point we drive past the American Embassy which has commandeered half of the street and has containers filled with geraniums for protection..we travel in a week of heightened alert and thankfully nothing untoward happened in that dept.
Your country made a big historical mistake, you know.
I know, but you know one million people protested against the war? Not everyone in Britain agreed with that disastrous decision.
Still, Tony Blair will go down in history as a fool. You know, it’s not even The West or the United States who dominate the world; the world is simply colonized by money and it's everywhere. The Arab nations are part of it as much as any other country.

This conversation was held as we headed to the Belgian Consul’s house for a garden party celebrating the national holiday. It is amazing how Belgium becomes an entity (ie something whole) when abroad. Something it struggles to do internally. As we got out of the taxi our museum director friend gave him 20 dh for the ride and 10 for what he said. This could be construed as colonialist given that last comment, but I assure you it was a kind, elegant gesture. He was a nice man and this made him happy. Phew. I was worried about him for a moment. He seemed so sad. About the state of the world in a powerless kind of way.

There was the taxi man I told to calm down when he got annoyed with me for telling him where to go. We ended up laughing because we had both lived in New York and both loved and hated the place in equal parts, but possibly loved it more than hated it because we both said we missed it. And he missed working for dunkin’ donuts as a computer man. He said he particularly missed the donuts.

There was the taxi man who worked every day except on Sundays. He was looking forward to Sunday. He also asked me if I was Catholic. Next time I shall wear a t-shirt which says: No, I am not a catholic, a protestant, a Buddhist, a jew, a Jain, a Moslim, I am a bona fide human being just like you, and I like it that way and I think you are very nice too, and headscarves are okay I think, I wear things on my head too sometimes, although when it’s hot I don’t like to cover myself up if you don’t mind, but I hope I don’t offend you by being my beautiful self, and I respect your choices please can you respect mine. And sometimes I even smoke cigars. And I pray for Moslims too and sufism has taught me a lot and rumi is my favourite poet as well as Emily Dickinson, and please let me read the Koran, as I might learn something new.

Or I might just wear a penguin suit.

Cars don’t stop for pedestrians, by the way.

NB. I am not so much bothered about the conversations themselves, which are a delight, and a discovery, always, but the black/white contrast in expectations can be a little disconcerting. It is interesting to find that the only alternative to being Moslim is being Catholic.Which must be the kind of polarities of perception that immigrants meet while living in Europe all the time.

The best taxi ride was after the hammam, with my new friend Bérénice. Going to the hammam together is an excellent basis for friendship. And rekindling them, if I remember *Istanbul* last year! :)It's something about the shared experience of being scrubbed and pummeled, and basically letting everything go. The ladies doing the pummeling said: should we say Madame or Mademoiselle? I said I didn't know. When do you become a madame? The lady pointed to her chest and said: when you get boobies as big as these. Neither B. or I qualify in that department so we settled for still being demoiselles.

We got into the taxi and B. got out her I-pod. Soon we were whizzing down the boulevard listening to all her crazy music, a mixture of Gnawi rhythms, Marvin Gaye and finally, Nina Simone: it was that song I posted earlier: Ain't got no... I got life. This was the best!!!!

There was a strange electric blue light in this p'tit taxi. The driver looked a bit worried in the rear view mirror, and then smiled, and it seemed some people didn't want to get in to join us, and the car was probably bouncing with our dancing, but we had the most beautiful ride through the city.

So we are coming back.

Hasta la proxima!
sestra dwa

more about casablanca

My room perplexed me: above the twin beds with yellow covers was an upside-down sunset. It intrigued me for days. What did it mean? On the last day, after we had been to the hammam together for a heaven on earth total treatment experience of steam, scrub, clay, wrap, bubble bath, full body massage, followed by a cool down with freshly squeezed orange juice at the Ziani baths, I saw Bérenice’s room when I went to borrow her nail clippers: she had a blue and pink sunset, horizontal. Hers was the right way up.

The curious dinner I had one night also perplexed me: at La Presse I received a Merlan Doré, which infinitessimally had its tail in its mouth. Its white eyes stared at me and it filled me with trepidation, was it horror, or fascination? But the taste of that fish was so rare and delicate that the memory will stay with me for a long time to come. A gold porcelain object broke.















The man at the olive stall with the tasteful mintgreen bobbly walls had laughed when I asked whether he was selling olives with mint. “we’ll have to try that combination sometime” he laughed. I believe it was olives with parsley or coriander he was selling. And his was the most tastefully arranged booth on the block, so simple, just an olive stall, but such style he had. The others were raucous, commercial, his was arranged with care, and it smelt nice.

There was the contagious laughter of my little friend Y. who continued laughing in my head as I tried to get to sleep, which only had me laughing again. A beautiful, intelligent child, the daughter of one of the artists in our group. They had travelled from Tétouan, it had been eight hours on the train, and poor Y. only had one book with her, about the story of Karim, which she had read again and again. I asked her to tell me what it was about and she proceeded to relate the story of the baby boy and his many brothers and the old man in the forest and the sharing of the bread, in great detail, as we both ate our delicious tagine. She had this magic laughing trick. We met up several times during the eight days, she is so on the ball, I love it when people are so much in the present. There were times when she was tired and turned inwards like a flower in the evening, and others when her energy was hard to keep up with and her laughter had me reeling. On the evening before last she translated some words for me from Arabic into French, as her mother looked on in disbelief...














greetings, next installment soon, thank you sister three for reconnecting me with those fine people you met in ghent, it was a warm reunion in a circle of trees which today was my livingroom. Tiny spiders fell on us from above and the sun only graced us with a few splatters of light, for the rest it was muggy grey and portions of free-jazz and fizz (that's a gin fizz without the gin - excess inclines one to moderation).
ahoj
s2

of the size of sparkles

A vignette: imagine flying to Morocco on a budget airline flight (which in the end wasn't that cheap) seeing all the beautiful sassy ladies with their light blue headscarves, having a little hand come from the chair behind me touching my arm halfway through the flight cos the baby wanted to say hello... the planes are bright green, interesting colour concept. I was reading the latest novel by Oscar van den Boogaard, Magic Man, now there is a man if ever there was one who deserves to be translated and widely read in the english language (no self interest in that comment of course!) well before I get all preachy on you, well no, let me do just that. He is brilliant!

So there we were flying on the fourteenth of July over France. Last year we were celebrating at the Fireman's Ball in Montmartre, me swatting the men off my younger art school colleagues, who are very naughty, feeling like a right chaperone, and having an amazing bubbly pastis marinated time, having spent time earlier that day taking funny pictures with bananas at Versailles and basically on a collective aesthetic high, but that was a year ago. Look at me now! I thought... so high!

Below us in the darkness we could make out the contours of villages and cities, and suddenly there were flashes of colour, little lights, what were they? Suddenly they connected, this was no isolated incident, simultaneous mini flashes of exploding colour, tiny, miniscule but visible in the night. Then suddenly I remembered the date, and how we crane our necks backwards, and look up at the high!high! sky; fireworks that make you dream. And there I was flying what felt like a million miles higher, watching the silent popping below. So much for our dreaming and our wishfulness. A humbling moment, sheer delight. And then to be so very much touched, having wanted to go to Morocco for such a long time; and then to find, for me, it is such a simple operation. Of the one-way-ness of the trafic flow I am well aware. We saw the queues in front of the embassy of people waiting for a visa to get into Europe. The humiliation people have to go through to visit a relative (yes, a lot of people have family in europe) or even in the wish of finding work, is terrible.

With this ease of travel for us in mind, my gratefulness accrued, and we flew over France and Spain and landed in Casablanca in the dark. And I was ever thankful to land..I shall tell you more soon. Let it be said that I love Morocco and I hope I shall return soon.
tbc.
s2