INTO THE WOODS - 15 October 2011

15th October, 2011  

As so often happens when making a creative work on site, in this case a book on Provence, getting the balance right between working and, well, working is quite tricky.

By this I mean that it is our job to gather material which in this instance means going out into the world and looking. Of course, this is extremely pleasurable when what you're looking at is Provence. But there is a difference between sight-seeing and seeing beneath the surface of that which you are looking at; one must both allow oneself to open up fully to everything - as one must if one is to find the thing that truly speaks to one - and at the same time as one is open, applying a little pressure to the looking. In other words, the lens must be wide open and extremely focussed. And, much like pan-handling, you have to sift a lot of dirt to capture a little gold.

So, there's that part of the work. Then, if you are a writer, you must let all that you've seen accumulate and settle, deep down, almost to the place of unreachable, before picking up the pen and working on making that which has already been seen by countless others somehow come alive on the page in a manner that is both highly personal and yet universal. I often tease Joel on how easy he has it. Oh, I say, (usually when I'm struggling) all you have to do is look and press the button. All right for you.

So there is the gathering of the material, the writing about it and finally will come the editing stage, or revision as we say. Although with a book such as this can one really re-vision that which has already been seen and experienced? I'll let you know when I get there.

This preamble, as preambles often are, is part of the writing process in that it is both a procrastination and the sort of slow simmer necessary to reduce something to its essence. This sort of procrastination always happens to me when there is something I want to communicate and am afraid I won't be able to.

Yesterday we visited the market here in Bonnieux and then went on to the market in Lourmarin, the main object being to buy a present for a friend in American whose birthday is coming up. Mission accomplished, we came home, caught up with some emails and pulled out some more hair re the selling of the Cape house. The latest drama in this horrendous process being an email from our lawyer's office saying that the records show we have not one, but two mortgages on the house. What the f---? For a few minutes it looked like we owed an additional $200,000.00. But guess what? A bank error. When the bank "bundled" our re-financed mortgage they forgot to strike the old one off the Registry of Deeds. This is just one example of how well our banks are working for us. After Joel revived me with the smelling salts we saw that it was 4:30 and the light was exquisite, so we decided to go explore a nearby village of Bories. Here endeth the preamble

Bories are the beehive-shaped little stone buildings you see dotted about the Luberon. We've been wondering what they were and recently found out they were shepherds' huts. Each time I've seen one I've had a sensation close to goosebumps, followed by an almost visceral lurch as if I've just woken up.

Where we went yesterday magnified the visual and intensified the visceral. This enclave of Bories numbered perhaps 20 of these stone huts, many completely intact, some in partial ruin and a few returned to piles of stones. These stones were taken from the ground, not only to build the shelters, irrigation channels and the seemingly never ending wall around the enclave, but in so-doing, made the land arable.

It's hard to describe what it's like to walk into these woods and come across this:

I actually couldn't move at first. It was as if, in this place, man and nature had truly married. The energy vibrated between stones and trees and if you let your focus go soft the entire scene seemed to time-lapse into an overall woven scrim that, far from reducing it to an obscured 2-dimensionality, rather gave one the sense of the infinite nature of time and perspective.

I wanted to stay there, rooted like that, for truly I felt as if I had grown there a century and a half ago. Maybe it's my Celtic history, for these shepherds and nomads were Celtic too. I felt both a longing to live there and an unquestionable feeling that I had lived there. We were there for 2 hours. We barely spoke. Everything was quivering with light. The sun, low in the sky, came through the woods at our height and fell in golden droplets to the ground. We wandered in and out of low stone doorways, looked up to ceilings as spiritual as any cathedral, saw the niches where the woven straw was hung for the bees to deposit honey and wax, the light itself now that honeyed wax dripping all around us. The moss, a still carpet, yet every thread alive. And every leaf held its breath. How can it be that nothing stirred and yet it and we were all a-quiver?

In a trance we walked to the edge of the woods and saw, on the far hill, our village ablaze with the setting sun. Saw our big window, saw ourselves sitting there looking out to here and then, looking down, saw my beloved lavender field. The one with the 7 cherry trees.

And now we let Joel's photographs finish describing what I can't put into words.