It is crowded here, but there is always room for more. Our foxhole. Think of the Bakerloo Line during rush-hour transposed to the wilderness. I remember once driving south from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco several years ago. We had rented a car in Marakesh, a red fiat 127 as I recall which had brakes and an accelerator and a gear called third. After we had crossed the mountains and passed through Ouzerzat (sp?), we were out beyond the foothills of the anti-Atlas, and there was only the border town Zagora ahead of us and the empty sands of the Sahara were beginning to press in on all sides.
We stopped in a pull-in at the top of the last big hill, still maybe 10 km away from Zagora which was out of site in a low depression ahead. We got out of the red fiat 127, standing by the two car doors not so much to admire the view as to catch our breaths. The desert. Everywhere. Not a soul to be seen. No habitation in any direction. Only the road. Empty in all directions. And the wind.
We were there for only about five minutes, but in the time at least five men in ones and two's, and a large group of veiled and thickly dressed women had appeared out of the landscape as if by magic and joined us. Some asked if we were broken down. Others came to sell us something from their previously hidden positions in the ditch beside the roadside, maybe a wood or stone carving, some jewelry, or a pineapple. Others simply came to stare at us, or light fingers to explore what was available to take from off the back seat of the red fiat 127. One old woman took my arm, screwed up her face tilting her head sideways and began to moan. And the wind.
"The moment when a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political." I had not read these words by Adrienne Rich's poem 'The Blue Ghazals' before a couple of weeks ago, although they were written many years ago. The feeling was charged, heated. It smelled of heat and dust. it was the smell of bodies close together. Old sweat. Resistance. Pilgrimage.
The red fiat 127 was becoming very overcrowded, our personal space was dissolving, and I could now see there were yet more small groups of people walking along the road towards us. A rusting bus with no glass in its passenger windows had also stopped in the pull-in, its diesel engine roaring and belching blue smoke from behind, and more people were spilling out from its door. A pick-up truck had now pulled up in front of our car and two thickly bearded young man had got out and were coming towards us. One held a shiny black tubular metal object in one hand, the other was carrying a thick rope.
Of course at that point we reverted to being tourists and got back into the red fiat 127. I started the engine, engaged in third gear and moved slowly forward on the slipping clutch. My window was open, and the old woman put her hand through to take my arm again, calling out and moaning with her face screwed up as before.
According to Tim Ingold in his book Being Alive (the link here is to one of his online essays which is included in the book) we should understand all life as "experimental" - P. 16... I have only just begun dipping in, and there is the excitement of opening to a wide open brand new territory... having to pull-in and stop from time to time to take it all in, as it were 'to catch our breaths'. He does not mean experiments undertaken by white coated people in laboratories. Not closed experiments, but open experiments, he is describing the relationship between mind (the thinking we do), tools (the things in our hands - both symbolically and in the physical world), and tasks (the criss-crossing paths we follow); the same as the old woman who was holding my arm on the steering wheel of the red fiat 127, the same as the two bearded young men stood in front of the car. As well as us in the red fiat 127, and the wind.
And the wind. "We say 'the wind blows', because the subject-verb structure of the English language makes it difficult to express otherwise. But in truth, we know the wind is its blowing. Similarly, the stream is the running water. And so, too I am what I am doing. I am not an agent but a hive of activity" (P 17 Tim Ingold, Being Alive).
A compost heap something like us all here wriggling together and squashing up in this foxhole, getting hotter.
"ouarzazate et mourir: voyage introspectif et digressif, partition poétique de mots mis en sons, est un Poulpe atypique, très loin des canons de la série, voire même du genre polar. Comme tous les personnages habituels de Prudon, Gabriel Lecouvreur ne va que dans une direction : contre le mur. L'intérêt est de savoir s'il va freiner ou se détourner et quand. Ici, aux prises avec son passé, ses noirs à l'âme et ses démons intérieurs, il va aller rechercher sa vérité -un temps lâchement abandonnée au bord d'un trottoir parisien- au fond du désert marocain."
'contre le mur' seems to stand for a form of resistance.
You make the steamy foxhole sound more appealing by the minute.
Posted by: IaBookSmith | May 04, 2012 at 11:44 AM