CURIOUS MEN GO 2011-07-08

Call him Ishmael or call him Marlow, it is clear that there must be a narrator. It is the voice from the other side of the table, as darkness falls and as glasses get empty, the voice from the ancient mariner that you cannot but listen to. It carries a whiff of the illusion of life, a sense of time, and of a tale which defines a passing moment.

The narrator is the centre because Man is the center and nature is all around. The only way to escape is to open the door of adventure and leave reality aside. Get the map and go up river now, the jungle might no longer be there tomorrow. The world is changing fast and so are symbols. The sea. Freedom.

Chauveau is his name and it is fitting because he is bold and French, and “chauve” means bold. He regularly checks the top of his skull with a slow wave of this hand, but it remains without growth, a shining globe that can betray a tendency to storytelling. His left eye follows yours more easily than his right one, but not many people dare ask why. He does not talk easily and if you are in a hurry you won’t get anything good out of his mind. He grows plants for a living, in a down to earth sort of way : makes good money too, enough to travel and have a few flights of fancy.
His concern is Air and not Water. Saint-Exupéry not Melville. We are entering a new century. Sailors race around the globe with the wind, but pilots still need engines. Rockets burn a lot of fuel. Earth is getting overcrowded.

Space has few inhabitants and fewer permanent ones. Other planets still keep some of their secrets.

Words live on : the pilot no longer takes the ship around mud banks or coral reefs; he has the stick at his fingertips. Heading, altitude, flight level.
We do have a few accidents due to bad weather. Ships used to sink in tsunamis. When you grow plants you know that nature always wins. Gravity is part of nature on this planet. But we can still fly and drift with warm air currents like birds of prey, like when you spread your arms in Hollywood movies, or jump out of a plane or off a cliff, with a wing suit. In that case you mostly fall, but let’s no argue.

With our magic wings we take off and land on our feet, even if we sometimes have to run. One of us was actually a magician. He recently died of a short illness.Chauveau had known him well.
We were close to the landing field on a late summer evening and it was an invitation for reminiscences. Some people write memoirs, some talk; and share memories. We have had a common past. We mentioned when the magician turned newspaper pages into bank notes (like lead into gold) in front of disbelieving gypsies, who, for his next trick, were no longer smiling when their money looked like yesterday’s paper. This was in the South. Many people remember that. That is not the story though; the story is what we had together, a feeling for the air, like the lure of the sea for Gordon Pym.

It was a calm evening, buzzards no longer shrieking for their territory, swallows and swifts going easy on mosquitoes; the shadow started creeping up on what we liked to call the mountain, the forest of fir trees was getting darker, while the recently harvested wheat field was almost shimmering like a lake. We are not far from the "old" uranium mines, but it is not a matter of glowing or not, except for the colour of the drink in your glass. "Pass the bottle…" says he.
“A glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine”. This is what J. Conrad writes in “Heart of Darkness”.

For us it means the spectre of Brocken, a mountain in the Harzt in Germany: You see your shadow on a cloud below, in the middle of a rainbow circle. Another illusion of our presence here I guess. A fleeting moment.
"We need roots, even more so as we are wanderers, we are going to sail from one planet to another, from one galaxy to another. Airship of old, spacecraft, starcraft, whatever you say ! It will leave the earth’s orbit for another one; as we used to see the top of the lighthouse sink below the horizon we will see the blue planet vanish in haze, a rosy vanilla one with a tone of azure, as the rolling hills of the blue mountains fade away."

Chauveau gets carried away sometimes. It happens when you grow turnips all day.

"The roots: you can only get a feeling. This is what we are doing here, like on the ship which just dropped anchor, we take a look around, check the bearings, the currents, see that the anchor holds. We have landed here on this farm; we know this was a place with sheep and rabbits and people taking care of the peach and apple trees, Some are dead and some are gone, and who knows how long we are going to be able to come and enjoy our quiet summer evening here ? You, Jedi Joe were the first trailblazer to fly here. You cleared the trees and built the ramp. You made it possible to surf the wave. You lighted up the columns of thermals, making the invisible appear, circling like a knight-errant of the air, building temples, drawing lines or nympheas.
And yes, sometimes we ended up with our nose in the trees, our feet in marshes and mud. But we kept pointing at this blank spot on the map: “some day, I’ll land there”.

And you Barlow, with a B like the line - as you often say- I know you have been there, and back sometimes, but it is never quite far enough. You always have to land at the end of the day. Can’t sleep on auto pilot, says the rule. The wheel has to come full circle, the coma has to end, Buddha will become aware and the frog will be the prince. Pass the bottle…

I know that might be a bit too much with the frog and the prince, but it is an old story and kids do see a lot of weird stuff on their screens today: like algorithms painting a landscape repeating itself on the edges of the programs. Tighten that turn; watch the hedges, not the HD or the GPS. Follow the swallows and the swifts."

Chauveau was losing the thread. Barlow and Jedi Joe had to let all this sink in. So I suggested the end of “Youth” (J.Conrad,again) to conclude:
“We all nodded at the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love;our weary eyes looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone – has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash – together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions”.

Why is this less known than the end of “The great Gatsby”, you know, “boats beating against the current? “

The farm will be sold. The fields will remain. Will there be cattle? Will the loggers work on the slope? Will our Nature survive? Will the next Chauveau still listen to the Valkyries and the sounds of the choppers landing Kurtz on the beach?

This indeed is a place where even angels fear to tread in the midday sun.
What a romance of illusion this all is.


Pascal Legrand

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