Michael Peverett: Autumn cleardown

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Autumn cleardown

Brewer Spruce (Picea breweriana). Victoria Park, Frome, 11 September 2023.

Preparing for a road trip. Every bit of space in the van is important, so I've been emptying the accumulated cultural artefacts into self storage or giving them back to their owners. Yesterday I finished Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a sort of dark family comedy that keeps disclaiming what it's doing, as it quietly unwraps the delusions and horrors of animal research. That was borrowed from Laura, and I've given it back, but I'll drag the internet for a quotation or two. The novel has touched a nerve, evidently; there are more than 30,000 Amazon reviews.

The first few chapters: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312665/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-by-karen-joy-fowler/9780142180822/excerpt

Language does this to our memories – simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture...

There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. When humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science....

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me....

The only book left in my bag right now is a miniscule Troilus and Cressida, but I reckon I've already said all I can about that.

I've reduced the CDs in the van from twenty to five; when we travel we don't listen to anything except the landscape. So it doesn't really matter that what's left is a strange unbalanced mix; Mildred Bailey, Mattias Eklundh, Duffy, The Jam, and Liszt's Années de Pélerinage (the Swiss part). (Last time I listened to "Vallée d'Obermann" I felt suddenly sure that this piano piece was the key inspiration for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde music.) It seems strange not to be carting around armfuls of Haydn, my current delight.

It would be nice to say more about that. Alas, my classical music thoughts amount to little more than "Oh my God I bloody love Haydn..." (or Chavez, or Berio, or Andrea Torrodi, or whatever is currently playing). Maybe that's the place of music in my cultural life, an art I can truly surrender to without being the least bit preoccupied with what I'm going to say about it.

Well, if I need any Haydn there's always YouTube. But we won't be using our phones very much either, the charging is a bore and reception is fitful. The latter, at least, won't get in the way of finally finishing Claude Simon's The Flanders Road and probably immediately starting over. My Kindle download dates from last year's trip, when I found myself eating quiche outside the house of this amazing author that I knew nothing about.

[Basically, you stop at the Aire du Château de Salses on the A9, take a short walk across fields to the stupendous Fort de Salses, a massively fortified stronghold of Ferdinand and Isabella, then keep on walking into the village. Claude Simon's house is in the village square. (In Salses he was principally a winegrower, only secondarily a Nobel prize-winning author.)]

When I'd written this much, I decided I'd gone too austere. I should take at least one paper book for when I didn't want to use the phone, I thought. So I revisited self storage and picked up an early Zola novel (Fatal Intimacy (Madeline Férat)). It was published in 1869; weird to think that's only twenty years after Cousin Pons.

In the first chapter (in Alec Brown's translation), it says "Skirting under the hill where those enormous castanea Robinsonia chestnuts rear their domes, they reached Aulnay". I know this has nothing to do with the story, but I'm instantly intrigued, having totally failed to find any reference to such a tree. *

For good measure, and because it was so slim, I also grabbed Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971). I hardly ever read that kind of book of ideas -- it's something to do with distrust; as soon as someone delivers their opinions in their own voice, I worry that it's a performance, or not what they really think. Consequently, such ideas as I receive from books usually come from novels or poetry. But I'm hoping that, in the bubble of travelling, I might be more receptive.

[I read a couple of pages of Deschooling Society, enough to see that this was a most inapposite rant. Illich's book was the fruit of vast experience and its ideas emerged communally from much debate with colleagues. All the same, I left my copy in Spain and who knows when or if I'll get back to it.]

This will be the last blog post before we set off. Probably there won't be much for the next month or two.

* I think I've worked it out now. Alec Brown invented the quasi botanical Latin; he didn't know what else to make of "châtaigniers de Robinson" in Zola's original text. Consulting the map of SW Paris made it clear. The lovers are walking from Fontenay (Fontenay-aux-Roses) to Aulnay by a direct route avoiding Sceaux. To their right is the area still known as Robinson. It was named for a well-known guinguette (cabaret) called Le Grand Robinson, opened in 1848. Unlike most guinguettes this one didn't have a waterfront location; instead, its iconic feature was the interconnected "tree-houses" set among large chestnut trees. The guinguette's name alludes to the tree-house in The Swiss Family Robinson (1812 novel by Johann David Wyss), whose own title is an allusion to Robinson Crusoe. Anyway, those are the chestnut trees that Zola is talking about.