Liberated from the reporting of my day to day b.s., I can muse freely this week. Because this week was like last week was like next week will be. That’s why I come here. The environment is stable and always the same things are on the menu--sun, beach, wine. So, my body and mind can unravel, they have the space. Often my body just collapses. I sleep for hours at a time during the day, and still crash at ten, and sleep til 8. In my head, it all comes apart. It’s like a coke comedown--I know to expect it, I know it’s ‘just’ in my head (as if I have any other instrument to measure the environment) but it’s a hard wave to buffer--I run the emotional film of my year in reverse--sadness, anger, joy, fatigue, hope, despair, disappointment. It comes out of context, or sometimes, brutally contextualized. You’re a joke, you’re too old to do anything that matters. You’re on the right path, you’re living a great life. It all sprays around, like an untethered garden hose on full blast. And then it moves on. So it means, go with it, right? Ride out those triumphs, ride out those doubts. They are telling you versions of the truth and to not look them in the eye is to waste an opportunity. It’s here you gain your courage. It’s here that you grow, in the month where you feel like you’re doing nothing. When you are screaming ahead at a mile a minute during your working life, what can you achieve but holding on and keeping just current emergencies under control.
Favorite activities last week: --watching the Perseid meteor shower in the front yard. --The swarm of thousands upon thousands green leaf hoppers for just one night, invading our hair, our bedrooms despite our best efforts. In the market today I saw them piled up like green confetti on the big light at the base of the church in Le Bois Plage. --Standing in perfectly calm, clear water, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of tiny fish.
So, my essential beach reading this summer:
The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. Perhaps one of the most stimulating and fascinating books that’s entered my life. An exploration that seeks to define the role and value of the artist in society at different times in history as well as the present--it’s philosophy, anthropology, history, and has two in depth examinations of the life and work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound as illustrations. I can’t do the book justice in description. It’s simply too complex and subtle, but at the same time will make so much clear.
Will Work For Drugs, by Lydia Lunch. Lydia gave me a copy of her latest work this year. I read it one sitting. It’s a series of short essays, raps, rambles, rants--call them what you like. But the voice is clear, gifted, relentless in its honesty, and great fun. So many killer one liners, they snap over the net like Federer forehand winners. Also in this volume she interviews other writers--Nick Tosches, Jerry Stahl, Hubert Selby Jr.
You know, it’s true that I passed many pleasant days in France before I lived here, and always enjoyed spending time in this country. The Posies 2 week run at the Chesterfield Cafe in 1995, as ill-advised as it was for our career, was one of the highlights, lifestyle-wise. Spending a week at La Colombe D’or in St. Paul de Vence on REM’s dime in 1999 was amazing. And many great shows in the 90s with the Posies--in Bordeaux, at Festivals, in Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand, Angouleme, and of course we had some amazing shows in Paris. I had been developing my food and wine palate over the years, and it was inevitable that the exploration would lead me to conclude that life outside France (and Spain) would always leave me wanting for life within it. And then there was Dominique. Not only did she enable, nurture and share my tastes in culinary delights, but she was an inspiration and a fantastic partner in crime. And when, after a decade of knowing each other, we finally took the hints that fate kept dropping, I found another thing, far more exotic to me than pig innards or gizzards on salad: the Latin family. Noisy, nosy, under your feet and in your business. The ‘patria’ may be indifferent, but the value of ‘familia’ is without question. In a traditional French family as I’ve come to know it, at least as I’ve come to know this one, they take it seriously. All thru my wild gyrations, Dom & her folks have been there to scoop me up and make me feel welcome. My environmental background, despite my Slavic blood and its brooding, obsessive passions, is 100% WASP--’The Ice Storm’ depicts events happening about 100 yards from where I was living in that time period. It’s not that my parents didn’t love me, cuz they did and do, and they continue to show it. But perhaps I needed to join another family to see what blood does and doesn’t do--not having any blood relatives, I was never sure what family was all about, and if I was getting/doing the right stuff. And now I know, of course.
Love
KS
St. Martin de Re
