In the absence of changes derived from time, how does a person find novelty in the horizontal changes of meaning and space? That seems to be one of the questions behind Solvej Balle’s series of books, On The Calculation of Volume, which explores a person’s experience of a date that perpetually repeats. I haven’t read the books yet, but on the strength of this review, I’m all in. If you have read these, let me know.
On writing about what frightens you, Josh Weil says: “But all of the dangers contained in writing what scares you pale compared to the greater one of doing anything else. For any of us to turn our gaze away, to waste our time on work that isn’t wrestling with what’s most urgent for us, to diminish the import our stories should hold, deny our characters the impact they deserve, to do anything other than put our most vulnerable selves out there as openly as we can: for an artist there’s nothing more terrifying than that. Sometimes my long-ago mentor would say it another way: if what you’re writing doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not worth writing.” That’s not always about fiction. Sometimes that is also about working through the little existential crises that a growing and learning human experiences as one changes through time.
Walking and birdwatching on the Camargue, near Saintes Marie
I have just finished reading Frederic Mistral‘s Mirèio in English through a florrid but free translation hosted at Project Gutenberg. I was slowly reading it during the two weeks we spent in Provence on this trip to the south of France. It’s amazing.
It is an epic poem, about the silk maker Mirèio who comes from a a family that owns land and livestock, and who falls involve with an itinerant basket weaver called Vincen. It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet story, of star crossed lovers. The plot is simple enough: boy and girl fall in love but their class differences make marriage impossible. The girl repels all suitors, and her parents angrily forbid her from ever seeing her true love. She runs away across the bleak plains and salt marshes of The Crau and the Camargue until she takes sanctuary in the chapel of the Saintes Maries. She is pursued by her father’s harvestmen and by Vincen but by the time everyone catches up with her, she has succumbed to heat stroke and dies in the arms of her true love.
The poem is structured across 12 cantos. The extended form allows Mistral to slowly move the action across the various regions of his beloved homeland in Provence. The poem is a love letter to the land and is written in Provençal, as an artistic expression of his cultural work, to revitalize the language and tell the stories of the land and the people in their own tongue. It was largely on the basis of this work that Mistral received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904. The poem is a love story, a geographic meditation, a travelogue, a history and a collection of myths and magical experiences.
Mistral’s very name is soaked in Provencal lore. The mistral wind is the strong cold northwesterly that blows down the Rhone and clears everything away, especially in the winter months. It is the predominant atmospheric feature of the region and even in mid May, as we were walking between hill towns, it blew relentlessly for several days, a few hours at a time, but with a force and character that was unmistakable.
We weren’t walking through the region that Mistral describes in Mirèio; we were walking further north in the Luberon and Vaucluse, but we did visit the Camargue and stayed a night in Saintes Maries de la Mer, the town in which Mary Magdalene and her entourage were said to have been blown to in a storm as they escaped the Holy Land after Jesus’ crucifixion.
Nevertheless, the landscape, the architecture, and the way of life that Mistral describes in Mirèio are all present to this day in some ways in this part of the world. Having his words and impressions, lovingly committed to the page with dedication to his people, history and culture that is unparalleled. It was a beautiful gift to walk with.
I have been paying close attention to my sleep patterns, aided by my Apple Watch and a new CPAP machine which is helping sleep more deeply. As a result I am becoming increasingly familiar with how sleep works, from the phases of REM, to the waves of light and deep sleep I go through. I've been surprised to learn that waking up is a normal and healthy part of sleep (although waking up because you can't breathe is not, hence the sleep therapy).
So things catch my eye, and today's rabbit hole is aided by this article which describes more ancient and natural human sleep patterns during which a period of wakefulness is common and expected.
For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.
Sleep patterns and managing the kind of light I am exposed to before bed and in the morning is radically changing how I feel during the day in the first couple of weeks of this new regime. Combined with the therapy, I am much better rested, even with less than 8 hours in bed. No midday sleepiness, less grogginess in the morning. On this trip I have handled jet lag better and recovery from a cross-country redeye has been easier on my system than usual.
Ann Linnea goes for a walk in the woods on her island home in the Salish Sea, 160km to the south of me. She loves spring, as do I. The sea lions have started to leave here and there are only a few left meaning that, for the first time since November, there is actually silence at night. And like Ann also observes, our two most common early warblers are back, the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned. On top of that the dominant sparrow call is now the white crowned. Over the past week they have been appearing and singing more and more.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of their breakfast table, Ann’s beloved partner and one of my mentors Christina Baldwin turns 80. Happy birthday dear one!
“Thunderous and well rehearsed improvisations,” relates Edward R. Murrow when telling an anecdote about how an acquaintance described a lunch meeting with Churchill. But watch until the end, when Murrow shares his opinion on human rights and the obligations of the powers that command world-ending violence.
On a related note, Peter Levine makes the case that not only has a war crime been committed with the President’s foul utterances on Monday, but there is a collective and moral guilt that flows from that. This guilt dogs generations, and extends beyond borders. His reflections on Jaspers’ types of collective and personal guilt are a good roadmap for reconciliation and repair.
On the eve of a tyrant threatening to totally eliminate one of our planet’s civilizations, the astronauts returning home from the far side of the moon shared this photo of an earthset.
These two events offer us a choice.