Motherwell Delights

So I am so delighted that I get to go to P'town this next weekend and talk about Robert Motherwell (whom I loved and loved talking with and love the works of) and various writers, and it is every time I think how fortunate I am, we are, that Rene Char gave us the Vaucluse and Motherwell gave us Provincetown as well as Greenwich and since I am still still still (yes, I haven't forgotten Pascal) thinking about something called "gathering places" or the equivalent, like Worpswede and Provincetown and the Florence Griswold house and Prague's literary cafe, it is especially heartwarming!

middle of the night

and you do wonder who gets up or never gets down or/and finds the only time of quiet and unanythingaroundness is this time of night/morning/inbetween? I know Rene Char did, those times were respondible for his most beautiful works, I think -- I love the ones he gave us, those images-- the real art -- maybe that is the art of waking, never mind what the titles and terms: IT WAS THE REAL THING 

moments in provence

When I first came, to be in the same part of France as the poet Rene Char, it was all about a kind of life that hasn't changed much in all these years since 1973. I still wash clothes in Genie and hang them on the clothesline, I still try not to have to make soup or whatever if it is the time of the sunset over the Dentelles de Montmirail I can see in the distance, i still find a white butterfly coming by the table a good omen, as one did right this minute. Of course, after 7 times of purchasing -- little by little, you will say, and that is true -- this land and field in front of me now, it has enlarged, the space around the cabanon. So has it itself, now having an upstairs structure, and some stones undergoot -- given me by Rene Char (you will build your house on poetry), all of that. But the birds and the sounds are the same.
My great neighbors have planted trees for me -- a parasol pine, that stretches up and around, two mulberry trees, one of which has mulberries, one not, a fig tree I got with a friend years ago now, and the little olive I planted upstairs when someone took the middle tree of my olive grove downstairs, to sell it, I guess.
Things are different, but are attached to things the same, so the Queen Anne's lace or the dandelions now grown into tall white flowers -- I don't always know what I'm looking at, but savor it all.
Today, one of Matthew's green coathangers I got for him, the same color as a mulberry leaf, is hanging from that tree, and I have spread out the very beautiful paintings Sooky Maniquant did -- ah, so long ago, but in no way sadly -- to go with poems of Char I  translated: Rencontre dans le vent, have spread them out on a bed in the room  Matthew and Theodore are sleeping in these days, visiting us. They are walking up the hill to the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges now, and will be back for the  now 35 guests about to arrive.
Boyce has made salmon mousse and a jellied lamb concocion with star anise, and i will fill endive leaves with Tapenade green and black, and some pesto spread, and Janet has brought great wiine containers of rose and red, and we will serve those in large pitchers of gres (that clay everything used to be made of) and white wine from Cassiis for nostalgia's sake, when I used to go to the Camargo foundation in the summer to write.
And we will spread out in the field, children and bfalls and frisbies and we'll all stand around and be happy it isn't still storming -- if it isn't.  it is all so much a part of living here, even for a short time.
Which stretches out in the mind.

puttering

So today promises a total delight of a day: Matthew is here, with his son Theodore, and they are doing that most wonderful of things: puttering. We just defined it at breakfast (just JUST enough baguette with grains and a bit of Festival which is local baguette that has won lots of honors, to go around for us four, with honeys and confiture with " fruits rouges" and so on), then to the local pizzeria at the bottom of the hill for lunch: La Farigoule , very thin crust kine, then preparing salmon mousse and lambBoyce makes with all sorts of things in a mold, and so on, for our drink party tomorrow night, about 28 or 29 by my count, some children, all our really good friends in nearabout places, with their visiting families, and luckly, our field is immense, can't see any other property from here, so people can just take a glass of pink or white and wander, and Matthew is in charge of wine and Theodore can  pass plates and that is about it.
Tonight Alexander Swan, Malcolm and Janet's son with a beautiful voice, is giving a concert in nearby Bedoin, and their truly lovely daughter Lucy and her children will come as well almost everyone we ever met here, then of course  a glass after with the musicians, then we will have our little fish in the shape of fish we get once a week, onTuesdays, in our local tiny market of Mormoiron, same day you can get the roasted on a spit chicken... on Sundays in the big market, where producers come from all over the Vaucluse, we get our Salers, tat wonderful cheese with its ctust you have to eat, and our raw ham, if that's the word for this delicacy, sliced thin, i won't go on about it, but will serve some tomrrow night, iguess you roll it and put it on toothpicks... ah, life in the Vaucluse summers.
For Matthew's birthday, Aug. 5, we will go to Les Florets, a lovely outside restaurant at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail, those toothy-lacy hills Matthew and Theodore went up last year -- and hope to every year. I first read Faulkner there, way up in a hollow in the hills, because Rene Char said the Pythie would speak to me there...

Wind and the Ventoux

So when it blows here, iin the field outside my cabanon, or on the road (where I don't drive, given my history of narcolepsy and my three last accidents) or at the table, some of us just say: wait until it dies down, or sinks, or stops, whatever seems to wish it to go away.
Last night we had supper with friends at La Ballade des Saveurs, in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where I used to spend my Januarys, when I was working with Rene Char, and translating his poetry and essays. I would go up the Route de Saumane on my motorbike -- no, not a motorcycle, just a putt-putt -- anyway, I loved it. Ah, you work with the poet Rene Char, would say the hotel-keeper (small hotels in those days, and friendly to foreigners like me, impassioned as I was -- and am-- by the language and the literature), C'est un pur. Pure in the sense of unconteaminated by society and commerce and the other things he so despised.
Anyway, we were there, almost blown off the tiny sidewalks by the gusts -- Boyce, being very very thin, might be knocked over at any moment, so Iworry. The meal was so-so, my fish, a bar, rather tough for a steamed fish, was poised on some sweet something, perhaps turnips, but it felt like sweet potatoes. I won't go on, because we had loved it  the first time,, with Christopher and Mette Macrae, two of our oldest friends here, by the Sorgue, with the ducks and the narrow boats passing by under the bridges and near the meeting of the waters.
We used to go to the Pescador, a restaurant by the "sharing" or Partage des eaux, right off the main street,  as a family, and I used to go there, as a nostalgci move, with Alice Mauron, the widow of Charles Mauron, the translator of E.M. Forster, and T.E. Lawrence, and others, even of Virginia Woolf -- so i had writtten on him and his translations for our Virginia Woolf in Europe, an exhaustingly big book, published by Continuum a few years back. Alice would always bring her Opinel, a large bladed one, to cut the meat with. I loved her, and enjoyed her caustic sense of humour.
Well, the wind might rasie up one's sense of humour! or cause it to sink....
AND I AM INDEED WRITING A BOOK ON BLAISE PASCAL, who has haunted me ever since graduate school. It will be with Reaktion Press, for whom I have done a Salvador Dali, a Pablo Picasso, a Motherwell with Pen and Brush, and a Modern Art Cookbook: in short, I like publishing with them.

cabanon living

So it takes loving or at least liking the informality, sort of primitive delight in taking 2 hours to do something you have 14 and 1/2 minutes for in New York... Really, taking out one chair or two to the field with the dandelions knewwhigh and the trees swaying in the mistral, under the overhanging clouds, and grinning foolishly at the sparse sun, or making your way down the narrow passage and the still-too-tall stone steps so labriously put there so many years ago by some cousins. Treading delightedly on the flagstones brought over from Rene Char's all those times back, in our 2CV -- it was the yellow one, I think -- so that we would, as he said, "build our house on poetry." That we did, and still do. 

ah, and of course,   before leaving for France, where we live because of having been involved with Rene Cha before, is that odd ore what? the town won't acknowelege the association for ReneChar that has been set up, and that makes poetic sense
I guess poetic senseis the sense I truly and from always believe in

privilege

and reading Julian Bell's Mirror of the World  in a room surrounded by paintings by Clive Blackmore, and drawings by Jacqueline Lamba she gave me at the same time as her first love letter from Andre Breton, and one by Angelica Garnett I purchased from an  exhibition where she was signing books -- one she had tiven me -- with Alice Mauron, whom I visited so very often -- and posters about exhibitions with Rene Char, and another about Spanish still lifes, and pictures of Carpentras with its former walls, and something from Pont-Aven, like a history of what I've loved..

everything at once

It somehow seems more exciting to me to do several things at once: nothing gets done as deeply perhaps as it might, were I to be solidly committed to one thing at a time, but there it is, and here am I, early morningish, translating a Rene Char passage on Goerges de la Tour for a poet-painter friend, doing an outline for an essay on Andre Breton and Rene Char for a new Princeton reader for the "general public," preparing (or not really) a talk for tomorrow night at Hollins University in Virginia,
and the catalogue essay for an Andre Masson exhibition -- and, oddly, each under or overtaking seems to nourish the others.
That's an early morning, optimistic view, I well know. And next week for my seminar on Letters and Lives, I have to think about WHAT exactly is so moving and so essential about Van Gogh's letters to Theo his brother -- yesterday we tackled, well, discussed, the letters of Proust and some of the various pieces and books written around him, like Richard Goodkin's more than thought-provoking Around Proust. It goes from Bergson and Mallarme to Wagner and film and everything else: I can't even pretend to read enough of anything, but perhaps a suggestion works as well as a whole massive entity. I surely hope so.
AND i was just invited to participate in the defense of another dissertation in Paris, where I really do love going, always staying in the same hotel if not with my beloved friends, always breakfasting in the same cafe, often dining in the same place -- all in a small radius. And this time, I will go to meet the wife of Gherasiim Luca, a Romanian surrealist poet whom I've been translating, thanks to Rainer Hanshe and his new publishing house. Before that, though, many other talks, including one on Gertrude Stein and literary cubism, whatever that turns out to be.

looking at mulberries

Perhaps wherever you sit, in a place you love, it works. Here I am, looking out at my field, intimate -- said a classicist friend last night -- and yet, sort of expansive. Things expand: visiting my smallish cabanon a few years ago, Barbara Johnson, now not with us (oh how alas that is) said, this place gets larger as you sit here. It does indeed.

Now I am looking at our mulberry tree, with one branch hanging down, don't know why -- one branch of the fig tree, on the right side, hangs down also. But not sadly.

Today we walked out into the field, unarmed with gardening gloves, and tried all the same to pull out the offending creeping vines from the trees -- coming blackberries shot their thorns into us, but we will have gone back to New York when they are ripe.

Some nearby dove is cooing -- horrible word, yet the sound is nice.

So many friends coming up the hill, to see us or our neighbors. Our path is unmarked, no driveway, no anything, I have to hang out a scarf for anyone who hasn't been here, hasn't walked up our high stone steps to sit in our field. Folkloric, to be sure.

Our olive tree is unhappy since we moved it, refuses to grow -- last night the classicist poured a libation of the fresh and fruity dry wine from the Domaine d'Urban at Beaumes de Venise, and recited a bit of Virgil, as he had before, perhaps ten years ago, when the olive tree was in its rightful place, right in front of my writing table. I had an olive grove long ago, and then one winter, someone stole the central trunk, the motte from which everything grows; no more olive grove, but I remember it. The olive is a jealous tree, said Rene Char when he came to see us, and I then removed the larger trees around it. They have returned, to replace the olive grove.