From the inner tent to the living quarters; out across a stony patch; down a woodland path to the river and a sight of the limestone cliff beyond.
At first a pale yellow light – yellow with a rosy gauze like quality about it, filtered and timeless in its guarded ambiguity; but suddenly, overwhelmingly, merging into a blaze of red and blue.
In the blue the familiar objects of everyday life – long slender loaves hanging in net baskets, gherkins in bottles, scattered onions and shoes, a brush in the corner, and a myriad other odds and ends, all under the detailed scrutiny of the small cohort of flies which constitutes a temporary part of the household.
An hour in their vibrant lives, a few moments in human terms, then beyond the red the enclosing dry hot afternoon, a pit of sunshine, dazzling, claiming existence as its own for now and forever – primordial, crude and, above all, eternal.
Grey stones in the sand, with a scatter of white, brown and pink – relics of some winter deluge – lost in the heat, absorbing the sunshine until they are too hot to touch, then radiating a silent invisible barrier.
All the ages of time are in that barrier – the matter of the world from which we spring, broken and rounded and worn, from rock to stones to sand; unthinking and unknowing. Limestone from seas crystal clear as the dreams of youth, mudstone from deeps darker than human treachery, granite born in an inferno more vast than any man-made holocaust.
On the edge of this scorching spread of mindless world-stuff, it seems that all of life’s problems must partake of the same quality – they just exist, unfeeling, springing like ourselves from the same insensate roots as that stony barrier.
Break through the barrier to the cool leafy tunnel with its promise of relief; under the tree of the cigalle and then to the little beach and the twinkling waters. Twinkling waters shaded by twinkling leaves and inhabited by twinkling fish – all around a rustling and shimmering and twinkling – euphoric mixture of green and gold, sunshine, water, leaves, blue sky, darting fish and darting dragonflies so swift and sure of their private niche in space and time.
What, one might ask, is there to ask?
Look up now; look through the glitter at the brooding towers of rock beyond the river. Honeycombed by the work of human fears and hopes, struggling through pre-history into the deeper sadness of the Dark Ages and forever shaded by a monstrous ivy, the northward face never saw the sun which brightens the dragonfly land at its foot.
A thousand thousand years means little to this teeming graveyard of a time ancient beyond belief, now slowly crumbling and dissolving to a second death.
Plunge across slippery stones into and under the twinkling water. Wandering golden bars on the brown sand. A filtered yellow light strangely like that at the beginning.
All our journeys seem ultimately so, at the end and at the beginning I mean – like crossing giant sand dunes on the ocean floor – forever travelling and forever seeming to start again.
RAE, Ardèche 1970
From the inner tent to the living quarters; out across a stony patch; down a woodland path to the river and a sight of the limestone cliff beyond.
At first a pale yellow light – yellow with a rosy gauze like quality about it, filtered and timeless in its guarded ambiguity; but suddenly, overwhelmingly, merging into a blaze of red and blue.
In the blue the familiar objects of everyday life – long slender loaves hanging in net baskets, gherkins in bottles, scattered onions and shoes, a brush in the corner, and a myriad other odds and ends, all under the detailed scrutiny of the small cohort of flies which constitutes a temporary part of the household.
An hour in their vibrant lives, a few moments in human terms, then beyond the red the enclosing dry hot afternoon, a pit of sunshine, dazzling, claiming existence as its own for now and forever – primordial, crude and, above all, eternal.
Grey stones in the sand, with a scatter of white, brown and pink – relics of some winter deluge – lost in the heat, absorbing the sunshine until they are too hot to touch, then radiating a silent invisible barrier.
All the ages of time are in that barrier – the matter of the world from which we spring, broken and rounded and worn, from rock to stones to sand; unthinking and unknowing. Limestone from seas crystal clear as the dreams of youth, mudstone from deeps darker than human treachery, granite born in an inferno more vast than any man-made holocaust.
On the edge of this scorching spread of mindless world-stuff, it seems that all of life’s problems must partake of the same quality – they just exist, unfeeling, springing like ourselves from the same insensate roots as that stony barrier.
Break through the barrier to the cool leafy tunnel with its promise of relief; under the tree of the cigalle and then to the little beach and the twinkling waters. Twinkling waters shaded by twinkling leaves and inhabited by twinkling fish – all around a rustling and shimmering and twinkling – euphoric mixture of green and gold, sunshine, water, leaves, blue sky, darting fish and darting dragonflies so swift and sure of their private niche in space and time.
What, one might ask, is there to ask?
Look up now; look through the glitter at the brooding towers of rock beyond the river. Honeycombed by the work of human fears and hopes, struggling through pre-history into the deeper sadness of the Dark Ages and forever shaded by a monstrous ivy, the northward face never saw the sun which brightens the dragonfly land at its foot.
A thousand thousand years means little to this teeming graveyard of a time ancient beyond belief, now slowly crumbling and dissolving to a second death.
Plunge across slippery stones into and under the twinkling water. Wandering golden bars on the brown sand. A filtered yellow light strangely like that at the beginning.
All our journeys seem ultimately so, at the end and at the beginning I mean – like crossing giant sand dunes on the ocean floor – forever travelling and forever seeming to start again.
RAE, Ardèche 1970