Subbed after a brief night, a day all over Africa and some hard talking, which -- with luck -- means an imminent end to a tedious saga.
When one tough point of a hectic week of hard work, marked by sad and sometimes bizarre tidings, had me making an unplanned overnight trip a long way from my usual haunts, I found the bank had done its worst.
My journey to spend a sleepless night under a stranger's roof seems like a "Dreamtime Return" trip, was made to keep an old promise and began late in the night with no time but to chuck a change of socks and underpants into a plastic bag. The next day I was back at my desk, after a start so early that I saw almost nothing of the place I visited, and so tired I could scarcely remember where I'd been apart from a person and the inside of a house.
It's a remarkable story, but telling it would betray a trust between the living and the so suddenly dead. However, the mention is a chance to put in a word of admiration for Steve Roach (home). The double album linked to above is a classic of ancestral music given a contemporary approach, while his full site is that of a musical adventurer into places out of time, who rightly stakes claim to a fascinating capacity to weave "all things electric and organic."
With the synchronicity that seems to have become part of my life since last year's decisive commitment to a desire for harmony with the "natural order" of the world, I've found others coming to me these past few days with the hard to describe feelings we get when friends die unexpectedly, that "Oh no, we can't do that, he -- or she -- has gone."
Much of Roach's music draws on that of cultures so unlike our own frenetic lifestyles, if we live in places that leave as little space for ways of being I find so much more natural than the demands of city life, clock time and deadlines.
Such thoughts, along with a determination somehow to pursue such so-called "primitive" patterns of existence, but adapted to an almost completely artificial environment, have become very much a part of the 'Lotus' screenplay project and my own life.
It's a long way from the behaviour of bank staff and their inaccessible bosses.
I again mention mine, who works one of this country's biggest, BNP Paribas (Fr), because while I've occasionally jested at the feller's expense, a degree of financial "irresponsibility" on my part -- mainly regarding all those "voices of women" though I do have a serious scheme in mind apart from the sheer pleasure of them -- was worsened by what would amount to downright lies on the part of routinely polite voices at the other end of a call centre number, were it not for the amount of contradictory misinformation involved ... and greed.
The hard reality was that this week somebody at the BNP decided, without warning, to hard freeze my accounts. I ended up with 10 euros in my pocket, a Visa card rejected overnight in wall machines, stores and railway stations, and a cheque book I'd be crazy to use. A bunch of letters to "explain" this decision arrived only two mornings after it had already been implemented, though I'd rapidly done what was asked of me on Saturday to start sorting out the mess I've landed myself in.
After people at the call centre had wrongly said all was well, I thought "OK, try the boss man," whose signature comes at the bottom of the threatening letters from my bank branch, to be told that he was of course, unavailable, but would call me back. The call centre number is now the only one for the general public. But did he?
When first I wrote this, no. However, four phone calls later, each to a different "Hello, this is Anaïs ... Murielle ... take your pick," all sounding around 16, the man called me, was rude to me for two minutes, got the same back about his minions and their stupidity, found excuses to hang up but didn't, and after 10 minutes I was talking to a human being and discovering that we even had relatively similar views on a long-term solution to many years of short-term problems.
Meantime a genuinely independent advisor, as opposed to the bank's so-called counsellors, bluntly informed me that the BNP are "thieves" and a French word for "bastards", a view long shared by my ex-wife, who has concluded that anybody who dispenses financial "assistance" is self-interested. It's smiles all the way until the shit hits the fan, whereupon the coddled customer becomes a piece of dirt overnight, as I reminded the bank manager on being allowed to address this demi-god for the first time.
It may be of note that the Kid's mum mentioned a part of the underwear of one of those minions, whom she confesses she would have "slapped in the face" for a financial hole then sold me as a "solution".
I don't myself recall that part of the woman's clothing, but when I told Catherine that I'd have rather taken a different physical approach to the sales lady, it earned me a generalisation about the male half of the species. That's merely an observation on people's capacity for deep change. Even maybe a year ago, I don't think a conversation with my ex-wife about a topic once as dangerous as what I do with my money -- even when it's not, yet -- could have changed tone so swiftly and ended in a "Je t'embrasse" exchange.
What annoys me is knowing that I'm fortunate in having the wits, contacts and experience now to handle this kind of mess and land on my feet without losing much sleep over it, while it suffices to set foot in an average Parisian street or Métro train to stumble over or be accosted by some poor beggar who is neither alcoholic nor a drug addict but has been down a road like this, hit the same brick wall, and wound up with no roof, no self-respect and virtually no chance of any real social reintegration.
I have two thoughts on such fundamental injustice of a kind profiteers from misery regard as a "natural law", based on self-interest and the survival of the most ruthless. First, uncharitable as often I am about the follies of the Factory, the inane demands of journalism without thought, and the absurdities of any vast institution where respect can tend to be demanded according to the pecking order in the hierarchy rather than for people and their human qualities, at least such places do also include people with hearts as well as brains.
They bailed me out of immediate disaster with my own money, rather than trying to sell me more.
The second is that while anybody's survival in our society is contingent on a willingness to be a team player and go along with "the rules", the only way I clearly see now as a means of making the world a better place to live lies in subversion as a practised skill and signing on to that Quiet Revolution many people prove to be part of once you ask them -- like my departed friend Tony, though few would have thought it on a casual acquaintance with him.
The ways I'm being encouraged to pursue my insights into this "change of mind" I find in some people around me -- too complex and multiple in its shapes and manifestations to write up in one blog piece, since they entail the replacement of absurd and outmoded moral and social values by some that reflect a real intelligence in harmony with more natural laws than those long established as norms -- also make two more things evident, at least to me, to be further explored both here and in the Lotus Project screenplay.
Our species has reached a point where going "back to nature", as a necessity for its mere survival let alone evolution, is more subtle a process than a wholesale rejection of modern technology or attempts to set up communities that simply shut out a world people who do this can't accept. It's far too late for that.
In the same way, any genuine revolution now in ways of being and creating a new society can no longer be modelled on most historical ways of setting about it.
Such words are hypothetical stuff, thinking to myself on paper at your expense with no more real explanation yet of workable theory I draw from various sciences and their daily applications -- the aspect that most intrigues me -- than I've had from the BNP to "explain" the bank's vulture in golden goose feathers' treatment of its customers.
When it comes to a recent revolution in the unfolding and its impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, one online journal to explore at leisure concerns 'The Orange Revolution,' a "hastily composed" photo journal about Ukraine.
 We have BJ to thank for a link here to this remarkable woman's work and her warning:
"My name is Elena. I run this website and I don't have anything to sell. What I do have is my motorbike and the absolute freedom to ride it wherever curiosity and the speed demon take me.
"This page is maintained by the author, but when internet traffic is heavy it may be down occasionally ('Kidd of Speed, chapter 1').
Click on that last link and you'll find yourself headed to a 'Ghost Town: Chernobyl,' with Elena (home page), camera and a bike ridden where "time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now."
In the red corner, a bank manager and the values upheld in his job, an establishment currently causing me a minor pain in the ass, and a problem to be tackled, with a little more diplomacy than here and some help, next week.
In the grey corner, Elena (stolen picture), a young woman with many a gripping tale ('The Serpent's Wall') to tell and a heck of a way with photos and words.
If it came to a showdown called 'Get a Life,' I know which of the two I'd bet on for a quick knock-out, tonight and any night.
1:27:49 AM link 
|
|
postbox