On Friday night, a group of Moulin à Nef fellows walked up the steep road to Auvillar to take an Occitan Dance class at the Auvillar Party Hall. Everyone was having so much fun! I attempted it for a few minutes, but honestly, I lost my nerve about halfway through the hour-long class. Part of it was the language barrier, but mostly it was because I have never been comfortable dancing with strangers. Line dancing is A-OK, but dancing with just one other person, whom I do not know and whom I must now link limbs with—well, it’s hard to wrap my mind (or my arms) around that.
Maybe next week I will be more courageous; however, my reticence does highlight for me an essential truth: wherever you go, there you are.
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On Saturday, we traveled to Moissac, about twenty minutes from Auvillar, and spent some time in Moissac Abbey.
For a complete description of the tympanum pictured here, refer to this.
What I love about this particular Romanesque sculpture is the emphasis on mysticism; on the hierarchy of perception.
The sculpture depicts Ezekiel’s Old Testament vision of all the players who will reappear during the Apocalypse. At the center, “the Divine One,” is surrounded by a cosmos in motion, all the lower peeps moving simultaneously toward the “still center” and simultaneously regressing away from it. The universe is portrayed in perpetual ebb and flow; the Divine in a constant “process of self-revelation.“
The three levels of the angelic realm are the Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones. The three levels of the terrestrial are shown as a division of society according to those “who labour, those who fight, and those who pray.”
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Wouldn’t it be great if those divisions were not still so true and so clearly delineated here on earth? My next prayer will go up this coming Saturday at the No Kings March in Toulouse.
News reached us today that Donald Trump posted this about the death of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director:
“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
A man far from the still center.
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While in Moissac, we discovered that the French eat on schedule. We missed lunch, and at 3 pm, when we were famished, we arrived at Le Florentin, only to be informed that lunch was over and that dinner would not commence until 7 pm. We settled on macarons and muffins from the local bakery and returned home to Auvillar. This was a grave disappointment to us because, aside from the Fellows dinners on Mondays and Wednesdays, we have all been fending for ourselves foodwise, and for me, dinner has consisted mainly of cheese (fabulous here!) and apples.
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It is quiet here in Auvillar—especially at night. I have been reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs. So far, the protagonist, Natsuko, has just drifted around, mostly alone. The isolation doesn’t seem to bother her, and there is something soothing about listening to her ramble, but 300 pages in, she remains fixed. Even after she morphs from an impoverished want-to-be writer in Part One to a literary sensation in Part Two, she peers at life like a waif through a window.
And this reminded me of something I recently heard in a class, which feels very true. Our minds like routine. Our minds don’t like novelty.
New = unknown.
Unknown = unsafe.
So your mind doesn’t want you to accost the cheese man with your mangled French and hold up a line of disgruntled shoppers. It wants you to skip the cheese and slink away. It doesn’t want you to dance with strangers. It wants you to sit on the sidelines far away from other people’s toes.
Perhaps that’s why Kawakami’s novel feels so apt right now. I get it. I’m alone here in a foreign land.
Leaving the known world is hard.
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I have been a member of the Conscious Writers Collective for the past year. At CWC, I am also part of a small cohort of ten writers, overseen by Maya C. Popa, that meets monthly to work on our manuscripts. While I can’t say I have finished my manuscript, I have grown immensely as a writer (and as a human) thanks to her gentle instruction and the vast array of instruction on offer at CWC. I highly recommend checking out the collective if you are either a prose writer or a poet.
My manuscript had been about gun violence, specifically about the aftermath of the Michigan State shooting in February 2023; however, as the year progressed, I realized that, even though that particular event was the impetus, it is not the whole story. As George Saunders said (I believe via Albert Einstein):
“No problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.”
So I’ll press on.
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Poet of the week:
After our manuscript cohort’s last class this past Saturday, Maya offered us all an ARC of her forthcoming collection, If You Love That Lady.
I read it in one sitting, friends. My review is up on Goodreads here.
This is not hyperbole: I felt as if I were reading a missive from the upper echelon; the still center.
K
