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vendredi 23 mai 2003
 

RibblesdaleOne or two visitors to my little abode have ventured to remark on a lack of family among all the paintings and photos. No mum or dad, none of the brothers and only two other relatives. Most of them have whole picture-boards full of us all.
But they're here, filed away among hundreds of others in albums and packets which one day when I have a year to spare I will turn into digital form. It's my way: I prefer the paintings, several by friends, while the framed photos have another significance.
For the family, perhaps somebody more gifted than I can make the most of a very faded small one always in view, taken at my late maternal grandmother's 70th (though Graphic Converter's worked wonders). This was a clan gathering as big as almost any other we had (but who took it?).

I've been reflecting this week on my "mentors".
When a lad, I read some eccentric or esoteric people. I've mentioned the redoubtable Madame Blavatsky and my own passage to India before. Another was G.I. Gurdjieff. I devoured more than his best-known 'Meetings with Remarkable Men' (and the film of it by Peter Brook. Wikipedia has so much on the fellow, as on almost everything, that I'd better "blogroll" the place. Now there are prize-winning videos about him too.

medecine manWhile long hooked, I wouldn't describe G.I. G. as a key teacher in my past. He's not up there with C.J. Jung, a number of physicists, Buddhists and artists, and the long deceased Chinese sages I often mention. The most remarkable "guru" in that sort of way was a man whose real name I never knew, for an encounter which almost stopped time.
In Senegal in 1997, I wanted to meet a real "marabout", not some charlatan, to learn more of African traditions of healing, spiritual thinking and folklore
It wasn't easy, beginning with a mystery "rendez-vous at the swimming pool at midnight", in the place Marianne and I were using for a base. I got a long grilling from Pape, the man who became our highly amusing guide, about my motives. What and who was I after? It seems I passed the test.
The drive took the best part of a long morning, deeper and deeper into the bush and down dirt tracks from one village to another, Pape asking the questions until at last we tracked this man down.
One of two odd things was that he was standing outside his hut, waiting for us. Nobody had told him we were coming. Such news doesn't travel from village to village as rapidly as we did. The other was that before he would speak to me, he snapped his fingers at Marianne and she instantly fell asleep on his bed.

poundingWith Pape translating, we talked for almost three hours, occasionally breaking off for shy villagers who wanted counsel or medical help. A couple of them let me take their pictures, along with many others and notes I took of the things I was shown and told.
The marabout very swiftly opened up, showing me his plants and powders, his writings (a mixture of Muslim verses and animist "recipes" and charms), and explained that he knew enough of "western" medicine to help raise money to send villagers he could not help to the clinics. He also took any medicines off people as soon as they came back, telling them to come to him for the daily doses. Otherwise, he said, they might swallow the lot in one go.
When he was done, he snapped his fingers again. Wide awake in an instant, if bemused, Marianne much enjoyed the gift-giving that formed part of the exchange (we had brought grain, rice and sugar for the sage and his village). She also soon discovered that pounding the millet, as women do while singing and gossiping, is harder than it looks. Those pestles they wield are very heavy.

GNBA man who would have adored this encounter - which came to me as one I only knew I'd awaited for years when it happened - was my uncle, father of no fewer than seven kids, occasional tyrant and godfather, George Bales. His photo isn't a great one, because it comes from the newsprint of his obituary in 'The Times'.
George spent much of World War II as an increasingly senior officer and flyer in bomber command. His love of aircraft and travel was such that he set up a business with the assistant he eventually married, Molly. Bales Worldwide, as it's known today, is still going strong, having embroiled most of the family at one time or another, but forced steadily upmarket by the competition from the mass tour operators we've got now.
The business, however, was but one facet of a man who voted Tory in Britain but got on famously with Chairman Mao - George in 1969 wrote 'China. The East is Red' ("the story of someone who knew China in 1926 and went back nearly forty years later and found an utterly different world. In this book he gives his own very personal account of his experience," says the only place I can see any copy left for sale. In Australia, which would amuse him...)
His achievement in being the first to get the Forbidden City open to foreigners again came, I believe, some years after the night he spent inside the sarcophagus of the pyramid of Kheops, incidentally scaring the living daylights out of the first little group of visitors to arrive in the morning and wake him up. Several screamed when he sat up. George was as physically big as his mind was broad.
Among his gurus was a real one in India, a country he loved. Virtually blind in his last years, long after his admired Nehru had gone before him (I can't imagine in which heaven or dimension they may have met up again), this minor handicap didn't stop him stumbling down a long Indian train and finally falling over from his great height on top of a gentleman whose suit was covered with spilt tea and newspaper shredded, but survived. Yet another of George's remarkable conversations with strangers was struck up on the spot.

GrandpaAs to real gentlemen, when small, I lived on the lower two floors of a Victorian suburban house with my family, while my maternal grandparents had the top floor for their "flat". The only room in between was my grandfather's study, where he introduced me to journalism. Albert Edward, known to everybody as 'Teddy', was the world's worst driver but one of Britain's greatest garden lovers. He was always out there, when he wasn't travelling or writing articles and books about the growth of the frozen food industry.
Son of a butler, he seemed to lack the crippling notions of "class" that bedevilled his wife, my mother and father for a long time. Such things were beyond his gentle nature. Among the most uncomplicated, upright mentors I knew, he was at his happiest in his last years turning the retirement estate where he died (in that family picture) into a magnificent garden in its own right. Everybody thoroughly approved, but nobody else had thought to bother. I hope his beloved and giant acacia tree is still standing among the banal blocks of flats that have long since replaced my childhood home.

Monsieur FreundThe real lessons in journalism and the many pitfalls of the profession came from Andreas. If you've seen 'The Killing Fields', then you've heard of Andreas Freund, but you may well have missed the brief scene where his name crops up for a phone call that changed the whole course of the tale near the end.
After the divorce, I had the amazing luck, coming back to Paris, to find a flat at number 90. Andreas lived just down the road at number 98. A terrific friend, but a fearsome table-basher when it came to failing to put up with fools, when I wasn't visiting him we often ran into each other outside. From my bedroom window, I could see him making his slow way down the street, stopping often to talk here and there, a great bear of a man going about his business.
My "ex-", Catherine, still has my pictures of him, in albums it hurt too much to take when we split up, and which I've since forgotten to loot. We are both honoured to be among those he thanked in the preface to a first-class book which, I see on the Net, is now a widely referenced standard, both in articles and in journalists' training. (My copy was one casualty when the hole in the roof first started leaking, and it shows.)
Immensely proud of his French citizenship granted after the war, Breslau-born Andreas was a life-long "Red" and foe of fascists, authoritarians and deceitful politicians whoever they stood for. But though he spoke fluent French, his first tongues were German and English. The hardest task in helping with that book of his was getting him to cut the darned thing!! Every time you thought you'd persuaded him to drop unnecessary bits or references, you'd get back to find more in the manuscript from the daily newspaper clippings that surrounded him in dozens of files. When cancer claimed him, the Paris branch of the NUJ lost somebody totally irreplaceable.

la puceMarianne adored Andreas, and he her. The finest teachers are very often one's kids. Lucky enough to watch the magical appearance of her head into the world from the womb, I've been even more fortunate to be close to her ever since. I wouldn't quite say she tells me everything, while some of what she does reveal as her English grandfather's "moulin à paroles" (word-mill) is the product of a most inventive imagination.
But for all the kindly warnings from friends about "what happens", she's not the kind of teenager to start clamming up on me all of a sudden. The biggest challenge Marianne's long given me is always to be a father, as well as a friend and one of her confidants.

first flameThey say the first great love of your life can be the strongest. But I haven't opened the "Ghyslaine box" for years until now. Good heavens! I must have been either very angry or, more likely, totally heart-broken - a regular occurrence - to have torn the best of the rare pictures to tiny pieces. I wonder what made me relent and keep the bits.
Those were stormy times, though any quarrels we had I've forgotten, but for one. (Which reminds me of an April Fool's Day tale of a tiff from "her round a few corners", Ann ... Lee Ann ... Lee A. ... Lee, which had me chuckling. "Sweety-pie," in my humble experience, it's every bit as hard to get a "sorry" out of some women as you think it is of we blokes.) I did "get over" Ghyslaine and two others as well, if it took longer than it might have done (confessional tucked away).
But a mentor? Oh yes. Not just a language and a culture, but lessons of the heart I dismally failed to learn at the time. A bisexuality which then fascinated but ... alas, also scared the naïf, inexperienced lad that I was. Passion and poetry. Art cinema too.
With no Internet then, that lass could make a letter of a line of verse, one wild thought cast into a post-box. Her life was almost constant spontaneous combustion: an imaginative fire I'd never experienced before and rarely since. Rum with coke and Gustav Mahler, an equally tempestuous hero of the time, along with the likes of Leo Ferré, that was a good start to a night. Last I knew, she had three kids: Chanel, Alma and Tadzio. I hope she's happy today.
Oh, and after a youth of nothing but dogs, it was certainly Ghyslaine who convinced me of the merits of cats. The wilder, the better.

For some reason, all this makes me think of one of many passages in Ventus (a different review from my last fleeting reference to my current reading), which pulled me up for a moment:

"I was alone, trapped here perhaps for eternity, with my own thoughts. How I wanted to stop thinking! But my emotions continued to evolve as well, and they commanded me to exist! to persist! and to think.
"Oh, I inherited my emotions from Calandria May, and I understand now that each human has a ruling passion, one that serves as a fountainhead from which flow all semblances of happiness, sadness, anger and joy. I understand you better for this, Axel; oh, I thought about you for long hours and days, make no mistake. I wished that I had modeled myself after you, instead of her, for your fuel is a kind of rage driven by joy that finds no outlet. But hers–she is like a wave of sorrow, swelling slow and implacable across the earth she treads. She is nothing but sorrow, and that is what I inherited. So I walked, and I wept."
The speaker is a starship, the Desert Voice, which is par for the course with a Karl Schroeder whose first novel is constantly surprising me.

golden jackalI shall be thinking more about that passage for a while, along with the tendency I sometimes have of finding people's "right animals". This last was no teacher, not really.
I surprised myself, scared the heck out of Marianne and earned the wrath, at first, of a Tunisian keeper when I found myself undoing the bolt on this beast's cage in a dingy oasis zoo and walking inside. The first thing it did was to leap angrily at me, but it was frightened and I wasn't. The only anger I felt was a quiet one that it should be there at all, and malnourished as well. We had a bit of a "chat" and he let me take a few snaps.
"Why did you do that?" asked a much calmer keeper when I was done.
"C'est mon frère," was the answer that simply fell out of my mouth. To this day, probably only the animal and me know what that ... kinship was, but it's stuck. Not quite a wolf. Certainly a desert voice.

11:53:03 PM  link   your views? []


ORLANDO -- Some day, diagnosing that nasty stomach bug could be as easy as passing gas.
British scientists say a hi-tech test focused on flatus -- the pungent gas emanating from stool -- is highly effective in quickly identifying tough-to-spot viral or bacterial infections of the gut. (...)
"We did at one stage discuss the possibility of a 'smart lavatory,' so that you could have a device that could sample the gas in that way," (Dr. Christopher) Probert (of the University of Bristol) said with a smile. "There are a lot of things that we might want to do someday."
I know. Another day. Another promise broken. And "stale news" at 'Wired' already. But you'll forgive me my current keen interest, when I caught up with this one at Journalized, where Mike Little gives a good story the treatment it merits.
Quickly diagnosed "gas fingerprints" could genuinely save scores of thousands of lives.


1:14:07 AM  link   your views? []


nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit
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