Our Brief Italian Adventure

We moved to France in June 2022. I figured “hey, living in Europe we can really see Europe!” But we’d started a small business. Then, my wife added a non-profit organization. We hired a contractor to do some work, we did some work. The garden in itself is a full-time job.

After a year and half, we hadn’t really seen Europe. We saw some really spectacular France (all within a couple hours’ drive of out place): the Correze of course, Lot, the Dordogne… But we’d had little opportunity to get out and explore new places beyond France. Our three trips since arriving here had been to Tunisia when Patricia got a teaching gig for a week, and two trips back home to the USA.

Then, friends from the International School of Panama got in touch. They were teaching in Croatia and Italy and planned to meet up in Civezzano in the Dolomites. It gave us the excuse we needed to shut down operations for 10 days and hit the road.

First Stop: Turin

Statues of Augustus and his uncle/step dad Julius bookend the Palatine Gate.

I’d heard about Turin as a small child watching the old “In Search of…” TV series with Leonard Nimoy. They did an episode about the Shroud of Turin, and showed monks dutifully tending it in its glass case high up on an altar. There was even a re-enactment of a monk saving it from fire in the 14th century. We went to see the Shroud, but because it is old AF and fragile (and likely also because it has been conclusively proven a fiendishly clever medieval fraud designed to milk cash out of pilgrims and wealthy donors alike), it is not on display any more, but is stored in an enclosed box visible through a glass window with a replica on foam core mounted for the curious. The faithful still come in droves and genuflect, and though I did not actually see the Shroud I did score a truly tacky holographic post card.

Just next to the cathedral housing the Shroud were some fab Roman ruins. Also nearby was an excellent outdoor market and an indoor multi-vendor restaurant space. Turin has many grand plazas and exquisite architecture spanning centuries and styles. It also has one of the greatest Egyptian museums outside Cairo.

We spent four hours exploring the magnificent Egyptian Museum in Turin.

Stop Two: Milan

We headed over to Milan where we were promptly stopped by the local police. They were very polite about detaining us by the side of the road for twenty minutes and carefully checking our French residence visa cards and passports.

Nobody does outdoor public spaces like the Italians, with their marble paving stones and extraordinary buildings. Walking into the Piazzo del Duomo is quite an experience.

Piazza del Duomo, Milano

I’ve been visiting Europe since the early ’90s. Many things about travel there are far superior and more efficient than in the past. But one truly hateful change is the fact that access to these magnificent old structures is often via paid appointment. Gone are the days when tourists could wander into the Duomo and other nearby monuments with a Bedaeker’s in hand. Now you have to wait in a queue to purchase a ticket, or pre-book online, and travel guides have been replaced by Rick Steves videos and TripAdvisor.

But, totally worth it. I’m more of a Romanesque/Gothique guy, and the Duomo has been Baroqued to death. But it is spectacular and overwhelming. And you can ride a lift to the various roofs. Get up close and personal with those gargoyles!

Spectacular views of Milan and every square meter of the exterior of the Duomo is packed with luscious art. What’s not to like?

Milan is a bustling and vibrant modern city with all the restaurants. Because we live in remote rural France we often crave international foods we can no longer order for delivery–Indian, Thai, Mexican, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, etc. But you can get anything in Milan, and often a lot of food for under 12 euros. We had perhaps the best pizzas we ever tasted for lunch our second day and paid less than 23 euros.

Stop Three: Verona

I was a bit suspicious of Verona because of the whole Juliet’s House thing. Tourists waiting in line to touch the breast of a statue of a teenage girl who exists only in literature? Yeah, whatever. But we managed two days here without Romeo or Juliet interfering at all (I was curious about the museum in Juliet’s house–but we saw plenty of remarkable art in the Castelvecchio, the GAM, and at the Maffei Palace).

And, like Milan and Turin, the city Verona is itself a work of art. Every street and plaza in the old city is lovely. Check out the Roman Arena, stroll Piazza Bra, and head off in any direction at random. There are a handful of remarkable churches to see, in particular the Basilica of Zeno with its bronze doors and crypt to the African saint. I was terribly amused by the centuries of graffiti carved into the 13th century murals: “Hugo was here, 1453,” etc.

If you visit Trento, go to the Tourist Office by the Arena and immediately buy the Verona card, it is TOTALLY worth it if you plan to visit more than a couple museums or sites. We paid 35 euros each for the two-day card and it paid for itself and then some.

Ride the funicula up to Castel San Pietro for those money-shot pics. Even on a smoggy hazy global warming 70-degree February day it’s a great view of the city.

Stop Four: Trento/Civezzano

We toured a bit of Trento with friends from ISP in Panama. I said to Chris, who currently lives and teaches in Rome, “no one does public space like the Italians.” He said “it’s true–but good luck finding a park with trees!”

Civezzano, where we met friends and stayed for a couple nights, is a cute little town which functions as a base for skiers, but there was no snow on the surrounding peaks because of draughts and far warmer than typical winters. It has some nice old homes but not much else going on. On our way there we found the MART museum, which is a magnificent facility. And, we had the great luck to see an exhibition centered on melancholy featuring several engravings by Durer and Rembrandt, as well as more modern masters. There was also a massive show of current Chinese painting. The permanent holdings are substantial and definitely worth a stroll, even on aching 20,000 steps a day tourist feet.

Bonus: The MART museum accepts the Verona card for free admission!

Civezzano has a tiny pizza joint which produces gigantic pizzas. Here is Harper wondering what the rest of us would eat.
Truly a pleasure to get up close and personal with several Durer etchings at MART outside Trento

Stop 5: Bergamo Alto

Perhaps the most walkable and warmest of the cities we visited. Magnificent shops and restaurants in centuries-old buildings, public art, more museums, more towers and churches.

Every corner of Bergamo Alto is a treat. Catch it in the late afternoon for that remarkable golden light.
clever marketing to put the Hello Kitty and other cartoon shaped treats at child’s height

The Relation of My Imprisonment (Part 2)

I had this damn spigot attached to my arm for 8 days

I’d never spent the night in a hospital before. I’d had two surgeries over the years, but in each case was ejected callously onto the street after the anaesthetic wore off. This was to be a new experience.

Before I was shuttled upstairs from the ER I was told that the MRI was normal. No sign of stroke, bleeding, or clots in the brain. The EKG was normal and healthy. All my vitals were strong, and were in fact quite good for a man of a certain age.

And yet I was being kept for observation. I asked why this was so if the tests were negative, and was told it was because the doctors believed I might have clots in the veins of my neck.

My wife was informed she could accompany me, and then was told she could not when we got to the fifth floor. My roommate was asleep and they did not want him disturbed, so she was told to go home as it was after 11pm. She did manage to sneak in and make sure I had my phone before she left me there in the dark.

Needless to say I passed a pretty miserable night. I was put on an IV of anticoagulant meds. I was disturbed every two hours by nurses who pricked my fingers for blood sugar tests, who changed my IV bag, who cheerfully asked “are you sleeping well?” before jabbing a syringe into my thigh or giving me a paper cup of pills. I was routinely subjected to blood pressure, temperature, and pulse checks.

a few meals featured wrapped cheese and yogurt. little else was edible.

On top of all this my roommate was an old codger whose breathing was reminiscent of Regan Macneil sorely beset by Pazuzu. Any time I managed to drift off he would explode in a coughing fit, after which he would get out of bed, turn on all the overhead fluorescents, and shuffle around the room banging into things.

At 5am the nurses entered cheerfully chirping good morning and asking if I’d had a good sleep, to which I could only respond with sarcastic laughter. Again with the poking and prodding and the taking of blood vials. “I’m sorry to inform you” the older and more sour nurse said in French, “but you are restricted to bed rest and must remain prone until further notice. You might break off a clot and cause it to travel to brain, head, or heart. This would not be good.” She placed a urinal within reach and left.

So my first stay in hospital was to be the full experience indeed!

Over the next 5 days of strict bed rest I was subjected to all the requisite indignities. The staff were extremely polite and empathetic as they stabbed my fingertips and blasted a fat injection needle into my thigh once day. When I asked about the injection I was told it was another anticoagulant, as were the powder and pills I received with each meal. I was bathed in the bed and changed, and my linens were swapped out by rolling me to one side and then another. From the bed I could see only the sky and the tops of a few trees.

I think 18 vials of blood were drawn over my stay. It got to the point where the nurse could not find a vein which had not been pierced and so she told me with profound pity that she had to reuse a hole and it would hurt a lot. “Je vous pique” was the standard greeting after a while.

I met the attending physician around noon on my first day. His French was accented and I pegged him as North African, which proved true. He asked what I was doing there and I told him my story and what the ER doctors had said. He shook his head, and replied in French “I don’t think you have clots at all. I think you had a brief episode as a result perhaps of a sudden drop in blood sugar, or maybe some sort of migraine. By the way you are in gerontology in the gastro wing because there are no beds upstairs in neurology available, but the neurologist is in charge of you and checking your test results.” He informed me I had further tests coming, and was not scheduled for discharge today or tomorrow.

My roommate was an affable old guy who’d had a stroke and collapsed on the floor of his kitchen. He was a lifelong bachelor and had come to after several hours and called the ambulance. He’d been in the joint 6 days but was scheduled to leave on Monday. We chatted a bit and he was interested to learn that I was American and living in Treignac, as he lived in Madranges a few km away. His French was a bit difficult to follow and it turned out he was Portuguese but had lived in the Correze since 1987. He had a portable radio and liked to blast it all day. His favorite program was a contest during which the announcer would play animal sounds. People would call in to guess the animal. “Nope, sorry, it’s not a dove, it’s a pigeon, you lose!” or “No this is not a pig, it’s a wild boar, better luck next time.”

On day 5 in the hospital I was still on bed rest. My muscles had atrophied and I was having spasms in my back from lying prone so long. I’d sat up to relieve the pain only to be clapped at and scolded by a nurse. When we’d left for the ER I’d brought a magazine in case we’d be there a while, and had read the entire thing the first morning. My wife brought me my tablet and several books to keep me busy, and while laid up I read even more than the typical daily allowance. My roommate had checked out and I’d actually had a couple nights of reasonable sleep. I’d made friends with most of the nurses and staff, and was joking a lot with the doctor who really regretted my situation. He wanted to release me but the neurologist was adamant that I should stay.

I was adjusting to the “food” served in hospital (the most edible thing all week was pureed peas with coriander). On Day 5 two interns arrived and rolled me out and up the elevator to another level. I was given an ultrasound of the neck to check for clots. After I was all lubed up and scanned the tech showed me my veins and arteries and declared me perfectly clear and healthy. “No signs of clots or even of plaque. You have the neck of a 20-year old, with nice flexible vertebrae.” So the anti-coagulants and mandatory bed rest were completely unnecessary! I was allowed to not only sit up, but to get out of bed and move around. I celebrated my new limited freedom by walking slowly and stiffly down the corridor from my room to the Christmas tree at the end of the hall and back. Then I had a sort of potato salad with vienna sausages mixed in for dinner.

Sitting up, and looking out the window–an unimaginable luxury

Friends visited and brought more books. I called my Mom and told her what was up and why I’d not told her days earlier. On day 6 I was walked downstairs by the doctor to another lab for an electroencephalogram. They attached a few dozen electrodes to my scalp and chest and then put on Pink Floyd and made me close my eyes. I had to breathe in different patterns and move my eyes in certain ways as they took readings. For ten minutes they flashed bright light patterns into my closed eyelids. Geometric patterns danced around my skull. I visited the Dark Side of the Moon and returned unscathed.

After the ECG I asked the doctor if I could go home. He gave me a wry smile and patted my shoulder. “The neurologist wants to do some more subtle cardiac assessments first.”

Day 7 and Day 8 were the same old same old, except that I was permitted to use the toilet and walk around on my own. Day 8 was the Friday before Xmas and I was starting to wonder if I’d be in hospital over the holidays. A nurse woke me at 5 am to drain another round of blood vials for further testing. They were looking at causes like epilepsy, migraine, tick-borne illness, MS, diabetes, but had found nothing. I had not been roofied at the bar. My blood pressure and pulse were healthy, my cholesterol was a bit high–but there was no indication as to what had caused my incident.

Around 9 am on Day 8 the doctor arrived and teased me by asking if I was prepared for another week in the hospital. I told him I would throttle the neurologist and he laughed and said many had promised to do so, it was why he stayed upstairs. My ECG results were completely normal, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The neurologist had finally cleared me to go. They wanted me to consult with a cardiac specialist and a neurologist over the next few months but they’d found nothing to explain what had happened to me. French hospitals are the exact opposite of American hospitals, it turns out. Back home if they find nothing wrong after a superficial exam, they put your ass out on the street; over here they will search thoroughly and do every possible test to make sure there is no problem before sending you home.

I bathed myself, my IV line was removed, I changed into street clothes. I felt like a new man, reborn and full of strength and hope. After 8 days and nights of dismay and fear and uncertainty I was bursting with optimism. I took a last look at my prison cell, and even though it was cold and rainy and my wife would not be there to fetch me for another hour, I went outside and walked around the parking lot gleefully.

I’ve logged onto my national health web account and seen all of my test results. I have a lot of health data indicating that there is nothing wrong with me. As for the strange incident at the cafe last week, it remains a mystery. I did learn a lot of new French vocabulary in hospital, at the least!

Room 530 at Tulle Hospital–good riddance!

The Relation of My Imprisonment (Part 1)

On Friday December 15th I was riding high. We’d been to the Prefecture in Tulle the day before in order to retrieve our renewed visas–applying was a somewhat arduous process which took almost six months, and we were quite pleased to find our renewal was not only for one year, but for four.

We’d had a successful year with our gite rental business, and had also expanded to host several successful events including multiple concerts and a huge Christmas Festival. We were considering maybe getting away for a week to explore a new part of Europe to celebrate. All in all, our move to France appeared to be going quite well 1.5 years in.

We went to the Treignac Christmas market and ran into friends outside the Salle de Fete, and after a quick tour of the vendors decided to go to Cafe du Commerce for a quick coffee. As we made our loop around the market I’d had a strange kaleidescopic prism worm its way across the top of my left eye, after which I felt a bit out of sorts–a tad tired and grumpy. I chalked it up to being spent after so many days in a row of work and stress, and continued on my way.

At the Cafe we had a wide-ranging conversation about spirituality and shamanism and drugs and Jesuits and life on an Indian ashram. I’d continued to feel a bit out of sorts and then realized that I was having trouble forming words. I finished my point speaking to the Irishman to my left and remember thinking “well, just stop talking. Be polite and nod and smile, but take a rest from speaking.” I’d only had a coffee to drink, but felt as though I were intoxicated. I could see everyone and was able to follow the social niceties, nodding appropriately, smiling, laughing a few times, but I realized that the conversation had grown beyond my capacities to follow. My awareness, my conscient core, was shrinking rapidly. Everything grew dim, and the people around me were all faceless. I could only recognize their hair, it was too much to decode their faces. A friend across the table was speaking to me directly and I knew I was being addressed but had no idea what he was saying. He handed me his phone to show me something, I took it and mimed looking at it, and nodded, but could see nothing on the screen. I felt like I was becoming smaller and smaller, and yet my main concern was an adamant focus on not alarming anyone or causing some sort of scene.

I took out my own phone to occupy myself and found that I couldn’t read or understand its function. I leaned over to my wife and said something about “all these messages, I don’t understand them, who is messaging me” but I couldn’t hear what she was saying in reply and did not even know for sure if I’d spoken.

Another friend arrived and joined our group. I reached over and shook his hand and smiled but had no idea who he was. At this point I realized there was a dog at the table but I had no idea how it had got there, and then looking around I discovered that I didn’t know anyone’s names. I sat back down and my wife was saying something and clutching my arm and suddenly I snapped back to myself. She was saying “I’m taking you to the emergency room, you’ve had a stroke!”

My full awareness returned so suddenly and all at once that I responded indignantly “what are you talking about, I’m fine!” But as I stood to pay our bill I staggered a bit, and then could not summon the basic French to interact with the bartender. I managed to pay and walk out and the entire time my wife was hammering me about going to the Emergency Room, but I felt completely fine. I drove us home, where she kept telling me names of people I didn’t recognize at the bar, and I kept saying that either I didn’t know such a person or that they hadn’t been there. She got very frustrated with me and called our German friend who drove over to assess me himself. After he left thinking I was OK I drove us back to the friend’s house where we were staying while we babysat their hound dog. I fed the dog, let him out, and played with him, and then the entire episode came back to me. The confusion, the sense of shrinking awareness, the inability to follow or participate in a conversation, not recognizing familiar people.

I agreed to go to the ER in Tulle, and after explaining in French what had happened, was quickly taken in the back, given an EKG and an MRI and told that the results were normal/negative. I thought “Ok, no stroke, no aneurysm, I’ll be on my way!” But no, they took me upstairs, admitted me and kept me 8 days in the hospital.

(End of Part 1)

The (Oppen)Hammer of the Gods

Typically during a debate or argument I maintain my cool, and rarely get emotional even when provoked by claims I find distasteful or offensive. But last Thursday at dinner with friends I totally went off the rails during a debate about covid and vaccines and mask requirements. Perhaps it was the full Blue Super Moon pulling tides in my brain and causing me to lose it and show my exasperation? Whatever the cause, I regretted my display–which included repeated interruptions and a contemptuous tone and several loud “that’s not true” interjections. This behavior was disrespectful and atypical of how I usually handle such situations: listen quietly, seek to understand, and respond out of interest and love.

I was arguing that mask mandates and stay-at-home orders were perfectly understandable given the circumstances. Even ancient civilizations knew that when the pestilence came around it was best stay indoors until it passed. In retrospect we can see that some covid restrictions were too severe and perhaps even ridiculous (I had to sit behind a thick plexiglass wall at a desk while masked, for example, with a classroom of masked students present and the other half at home on the internet–definitely overkill). As for vaccines, I was all for them, and the idea that vaccines based on more than 40 years of laboratory research were “rushed” and were killing more people than the disease set me off. And when one friend suggested that covid was a hoax and not really serious and that hospitals were never overrun I went into the stratosphere. I heard a lot of “they’re saying” and “they know” arguments to which I kept responding “WHO, WHO says, WHO knows?” The evidence almost always was a slickly produced YouTube video, or a politician referring to one.

A friend said “I’m surprised you of all people would take the side of government agencies and defend Big Pharma.” This was a good angle of attack, and hit hard. But like Noam Chomsky, I see that there is a move underfoot by oligarchs and major corporations to undermine trust in public institutions because these are the only remaining restraint on the power of super-wealthy amoral elites whose avarice and contempt for law and ethics is having profound and perhaps irreversible impacts on not only the social fabric but perhaps the survival of humanity as a species. And like Chomsky, I know that even a long time skeptic and critic of government can realize that public agencies at least somewhat responsive to the will of the masses are the only brake we have on the continued destruction of Earth for profit. Yes, agencies like the FDA and CDC have been corrupted by Big Pharma and Big Insurance, but this is a simple tweak to fix by law. If the corruption comes from corporations, why blame the government agencies? Instead blame those who pull the levers and clean up the agencies with regulations about conflict of interest and ethics requirements.

Do I share skepticism of gigantic corporations like Pfizer and Moderna making billions of dollars from mandated vaccines? Of course I do. I don’t think medicines or health care should be for profit at all. I also respect suspicions that the vaccine was rushed, and particularly understand the reluctance of many people of color to get the vaccine given the long and sordid history of medical “experimentation” and abuse by authorities. But there is a great deal of wholesale quackery disseminated on the internet–remember how vaccines would magnetize your blood and make keys stick to your body? And a lot of the goofiness is given a veneer of scientific respectability by doctors who create videos on YouTube and get click/view money for saying unproven outrageous things to scare people to death (so they rush out and buy herbal supplements to counteract mythical side effects).

But I think a more important and often ignored moral and ethical question is why do these companies get all their R&D and testing paid for by public money and then they get to take government funded drugs and vaccines, patent them, make enormous profits from them while paying executives and stockholders huge dividends, while in turn they don’t even pay taxes. THAT is the real problem, and Big Pharma is certainly content to have people debating whether or not Dr. Fauci is a lizard being from the Pleiades or whether sheep medicine is a valid treatment instead of “why is the system rigged this way?”

All of this is my roundabout introduction to having seen the Oppenheimer film. I thought it was a strong attempt to address a lot of the concerns raised in our discussion last Thursday about science and ethics and who decides what is right or wrong, etc. Should we get vaccines during a raging pandemic because scientists and government officials say so? Or, more in line with the themes of the film: Should we detonate a device which the government wants but which has a close to zero chance of igniting the atmosphere of the entire Earth?

Oppenheimer was of course a brilliant scientist, but he was also steeped in the humanities and was well-aware of the ethical considerations complicating his work on the Manhattan Project. The continual butchery on two fronts during World War II, the likelihood that Nazi scientists were themselves close to the bomb and could give Hitler an unspeakable weapon, the ongoing Holocaust–all of this provided enormous impetus to successfully construct a nuclear bomb and test it first. But Oppenheimer was also a literary-minded guy who’d read his John Donne and Bhagavad Gita. He was also a socialist flirting with communism and had profound doubts about what might become of the United States if it had this ultimate weapon. These doubts were of course later shared by President Eisenhower as he left office. And the film makes it clear that the second use of the bomb in Oppenheimer’s opinion was unnecessary overkill and was even more likely than the first to provoke a disastrous arms race–which proved correct. (Of course Paul Fussell would disagree that the 2nd bomb should not have been dropped on Japan.)

Oppenheimer is a massive film and will sap all your energies, but if you like dense character studies full of moral ambiguity and difficult ethical questions, you will dig it. In its scale and tone it’s reminiscent of Scorsese’s long films with their questions about ethics and violence (think Taxi Driver, or The Silence, or Raging Bull, or even Bringing Out the Dead). I think all the performances were excellent, and appreciated the use of a brief interaction between Einstein and Oppenheimer as a bookend to the plot. This is clearly Christopher Nolan taking his best shot at a Best Picture nod, and he might pull it off. There are of course problems with the film–after the excitement of the bomb build-up, it’s difficult to reset and endure the political persecution of Oppenheimer by right-wingers and professional rivals which goes on for another hour. But this part of the story also must be told. And yes, because everything else is thrown in, Nolan should have at least mentioned or shown what happened to the residents of New Mexico, largely Latino and Native American, before and after the tests, and though the horrors unleashed on Japanese civilians are suggested in a kind of panic attack hallucinatory sequence, I’m not sure it’s an adequate portrayal particularly given the thematic concerns of the film and its focus on the dilemmas navigated by Oppenheimer, et al.

One of my dinner conversation adversaries pointed out that we might not know the answers to many of our questions about covid and vaccines for many years. And, just like the atom bomb, Pandora’s Box has been opened and we live with the consequences.

Side note: nice to see Robert Downey Jr without a goofy super her0 costume!

Another side note: Twin Peaks The Return Episode 8 is still the pre-eminent cinematic exploration of the ethical questions around the explosion of the first bomb. In the Twin Peaks universe the explosion results in the birth of Bob, a demonic character who causes some chaos in the small town. Bob–Robert Oppenheimer? Or Bomb? Or, Bob’s Big Boy?

A further side note: I’ve recently been re-reading books which had a profound impact on me as a young person. One of these is a volume of science fiction stories edited by Harlan Ellison called Again, Dangerous Visions. I’d just read two stories in the volume which were not sci-fi, but rather fiction with science involved. These were by Bernard Wolfe. One was about a woman who takes her poofy expensive pure-bred dog to witness a test of napalm at a local military base. Her dog gets immolated in the test, which is so sad and terrifying for her and the other witnesses who fail to make the leap that this stuff will be dropped on actual human beings elsewhere. The other was about sleep experiments gone awry. But at any rate Wolfe’s accompanying essay excoriates sci-fi authors and the scientists they idolize. Further, he damns US-style hyper- capitalism and its “fawning upon scientists” while exploiting them and “their fake charisma.” He thought scientists exploited by capitalists were set to unleash profound and unforseable horrors on the world, and bemoaned the privileging of science over the humanities. Like Colin Wilson used to say, the “library faeries” will drop the reading material you need in your lap when you need it.

Darkness, Visible

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Pexels.com

Recently I’ve seen several articles about the dire consequences of continuous and increasing global nocturnal light pollution, not only on the ecology and natural systems and plant and animal species, but also on humans. It has become apparent that artificial light at night disrupts our physical and psychological well being in profound ways.

I’ve known this intuitively since I was a teenager. I grew up in a small town and enjoyed darkness at night. As a child in the yard on Main Street in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania it was possible to see the Milky Way overhead. This changed with the installation of bright mercury street lamps which illumined automatically at dusk and which stayed lit until dawn. After that, I found myself unable to sleep more than an hour or two at a time, and often woke and saw light on the ceiling and walls, an insidious unnatural silvery light which penetrated cracks between curtains and small holes in blinds. This made falling asleep again difficult. When I moved to even more rural Pennsylvania at age 7 we regained the Milky Way, and in the headlights of cars at night it was possible to see an impossible blizzard of flying insects.

As a teenager we lived in a very rural area away from any town, but the local community installed a terrible single sodium street light 20 meters outside my bedroom. Despite being filtered by an acre of woods it substantially affected my sleep patterns despite heavy dark curtains. Fed up, I disabled the lamp by bashing its power cables in with a baseball bat, and did so every time they repaired it.

Then for my entire adult life I lived in cities–Baltimore and its environs for more than 30 years, and Philadelphia for 2 years, and Panama City Panama for 4 years. I had miserable sleep patterns and suffered anxiety and manic depressive episodes. It was virtually impossible to filter out all of the artificial light at night.

My mother still lives in a remote rural corner of Pennsylvania, 30 minutes by car from cities or towns and in a nice wooded lot. And yet when I go outside her house at night the sky is not dark at all–there is murky orange glow all around the horizon from the continuous lighting in New Freedom, Shrewsbury, and York. Only a few very bright stars and planets are visible at all.

When I became a school teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, the first thing I did to manage behavior in my classroom was to turn off the glaring and merciless fluorescent lighting and to put shaded and colorful and DIM lamps around the room. Other teachers noted how calm and productive my students were, but the administrators would often burst in and shriek at me and turn on the overhead lights. Immediately students would become agitated and go bonkers. Many of those poor kids in Baltimore have NEVER SEEN STARS OR PLANETS. It is impossible in the confines of the city to do so, because the sky is orange with light at night. When there are clouds they are illuminated a dark malevolent reddish hue.

We need darkness. We are designed to experience extended periods of darkness, and it is necessary for our natural rhythms and health, including physical and mental health–and I would add, our spiritual health! Being inside the house with lights off while glaring lights burn all around outside is not being in darkness. Plants, birds, animals, and insects need darkness–not what we’ve come to think of as darkness, but total, immersive night.

One of my favorite things about living in Treignac is that a law was passed here in the Correze last year forbidding the use of public electric lights between the hours of 11 pm and 6am. We now live in an International Dark Sky Reserve, and I love it. When we first purchased our house there was a glaring sodium lamp outside our front door lit all night, which unfortunately lit half our garden and wrecked an astonishing night sky view, and which cast an orange haze into our bedroom despite metal hand-cranked blinds and a curtain. Since the law was passed we have an incredibly clear night sky and the Milky Way is majestic arching directly above our building. For the first time in nearly 40 years I sleep 8 uninterrupted hours almost routinely. It’s delicious. I don’t feel the continuous jangly kind of nervous anxiety I always felt before. (Of course being self-employed and no longer in the USA hypercapitalist rat race might also be responsible for this improvement).

Recently an Englishman and I were discussing our appreciation for the new dark sky initiative, which not only heals and allows an appreciation of the beauties of the night sky, but also saves electricity. A friend chimed in and said she wanted the lights back on until at least midnight or 1 am. “If you were a woman you would understand. I like to walk home safely from the bar at night without fear of rape or other violence. Women and girls who carry torches at night are made into targets that way.”

I would never advocate for anything which might increase the likelihood of violence of any sort, and especially of violence against females. I grew up in a household where my father used violence against my mother, and where as a small child I would get pummeled for attempting to intervene. In fact, the town where I grew up had the attitude that this was OK. If my mother showed up at the grocer’s bruised or with a black eye, the women would say “wonder what she did to deserve that,” or “she must’ve spoke up when she shoulda shut up.” But I don’t think artificial lighting at night protects women and girls at all.

Every major urban area I’ve inhabited or visited worldwide is brightly lit all night every night. In Baltimore, for example, every alley, street, highway, park, garage, parking lot, yard and bridge is completely saturated with yellow, orange, or green light from dusk until dawn. Yet in these places rape and sexual violence have not stopped or been diminished at all. The idea that street lights staying on past 11pm will mitigate rape or sexual violence in a place like Treignac where it does not occur, while it has not done so in every major city globally is simply ludicrous. I’d argue that all this light at night provides a false sense of security, and that a woman or girl walking brightly lit spaces at night is actually more easily targeted than one using her cell phone to light a path. It’s far easier for a stalker to watch and plan an attack or abduction if everything is well-lit, and to find that one wooded area or dark lot where they can drag a victim off the lit street. In fact the area of Baltimore where girls end up abducted into trafficking at the highest rates is incredibly well-lit all night long.

I suggested that the bar should close BEFORE the lights turn off at 11 if you really want to protect girls and women from potential violence. This idea was scoffed at, but think about it. What fuels more violence against women than booze? Women drinking alcohol are more likely to be victimized, and men drinking alcohol are more prone to violence. Turn the damn lights off completely and even earlier I say, so we can all heal and dream. Go to the city to if you’d like to hang out in bars later, or drink in our pub and walk home under the stars. I will gladly escort anyone home who feels unsafe, and would post my phone number to do so, so long as we keep the lights off!

“But someone is going to fall and break a leg!” We don’t need to destroy the environment and our health in order to prevent someone from possibly breaking a leg.

Taikoza @ Moulin Sage

It was our great honor to host Marco Lienhard and his student Mark as Taikoza performed in our garden by the river. We’ve known Marco for more than 15 years, and he and musicians touring with him often stayed at our home in Reservoir Hill in Baltimore. To have musicians of this caliber perform in our garden for an audience of 90 people was quite special.

In my introductory remarks (in clumsy French) I tried to express that we host these events to share our garden space with as many people as possible, and hope to curate events which allow artists and audiences to forge connections. We actually met a man who lives in Paris but has a second home in nearby Veix because of this concert. He is French-Vietnamese and is a huge Taiko hobbyist, collecting drums and doing workshops for young people. He was so thrilled that Marco and Taikoza were performing in the Correze that he offered the use of his larger drum, and helped Marco carry it down to the garden and set up. Connection forged!

This was the third garden concert we’ve hosted, and by far the largest. It was the first time we charged admission and were able to give the musicians money, and a local Japanese caterer made and sold lovely Bento boxes which added substantially to the event.

Also, for the first time, we had a substantial number of French attendees–the previous concerts attracted a few but those audiences consisted mostly of Anglo-Saxon expatriates.

The evening was a huge success and we received positive feedback across the board. Excited audience members interacted with Taikoza during and after the show and asked about the drums and several T-shirts and CDs were sold.

Marco also performed on the Shakuhachi. He is an internationally recognized master of the instrument.

I must, however, address some concerns shared the next day by a friend who attended. I’ll preface my response by noting that this is an important topic and that I’m happy to have this conversation.

Concern “White Europeans should not dress in Japanese clothes to do such a performance. This is like white dudes who play the didgeridoo barefoot and think they are woke when they are actually appropriating and exploiting another culture.”

My response In this era it is common to assume that any white person performing music which is not of European or North American origin is appropriating another’s culture. Marco is of Swiss German heritage and his student Mark is American, so I can understand this assumption, and again raising this concern is important.

BUT, it is vital before making snap judgments to at least look at Marco’s biography. A “white dude barefoot playing the didj” likely learned to play the instrument betwixt snapping bong hits and most probably did not travel to Australia to study with an indigenous musician, perhaps deserving a bit of contempt. But Marco went to Japan and learned and toured Japan for 18 years with a famous Taiko group. Further, he attained mastery of various Japanese flutes in the traditional manner by studying in Japan with Japanese masters. He speaks and reads fluent Japanese and is deeply passionate and knowledgeable about the culture and history of these instruments and the music. It is his life-long mission and his career to share his knowledge and expertise of these art forms and this culture. In Japan he tours regularly and is regarded as a master musician and he performs regularly with Japanese musicians and in front of Japanese audiences. Any concerns that he is exploiting another culture are easily dismissed by a glance at his resume. Marco is hardly exploiting these traditions–he is a recognized master of these traditions, and has been a highly regarded teaching artist of these forms for decades with audiences around the world.

As for the costumes, they are a requisite part of the performance, and to perform this music in Western clothes–t-shirts and sweat pants or even suits–would be deeply disrespectful to the tradition and could not be advertised as a Taiko performance. Were Marco to do so it would actually be cultural appropriation.

I asked a Japanese friend who lives in Treignac and who was in attendance if she was worried that Taikoza was exploiting Japanese culture. Her response was simple: “This was a beautiful and authentic performance of Japanese music. I know many Japanese who go to the West and study violin or piano for years, and who perform Beethoven and Mozart around the world in Western dress. This is not stealing another’s culture.”

While it is important to raise these issues and have these conversations, we must not rush to judgment. We also must be cautious not to confuse cultural appropriation with cultural exchange. Artists of different ethnicities, cultures, nationalities have always traded ideas and learned each others’ music and instruments and traditions. They take each others’ art forms and are inspired to create new and evolving forms. Taiko itself owes heavy debts to Chinese art forms, from which it borrowed heavily and eventually evolved. In our quest to avoid exploitation and further colonial degradation, we must not stifle genuine work to promote cultural forms and to share them.

You can find links to Marco’s recordings for sale here

Tongue Tied

Photo by Skylar Kang on Pexels.com

After 13 months in France my confidence with the spoken tongue has developed reasonably well. I try to push myself to read French daily, to read literary French and also news media French. But I should listen more to the radio and watch television and films in French because my ear needs work–sometimes I simply don’t hear things correctly, and I need much more facility with he idioms and also the shortcuts French speakers use, their means of simplifying and contracting and making musical the language.

Also–I need to speak French more regularly with locals. I do speak to clients often but these are formal and simple interactions, well-rehearsed host-client stuff, typically very basic. Occasionally a client will have more complex questions, or will venture into questions about my origins or accent or how we ended up in remote rural France from the USA, and I’ll get to push my French a bit. Often I end up in these situations trying to remember the subjunctive form of a verb and stalling out. Nobody cares, however, about the subjunctive and I should simply throw the verb out in any form because the sense will be understood and that’s what matters more than grammatical exactitude and precision. I need the confidence to say something incorrectly rather than the confidence to speak fluently.

I was outside last week speaking to a gite client from England and a small white van pulled over. The driver said something to my guest but he did not understand, and waved me over. There was a woman at the passenger window nearest me. The driver asked from over her shoulder “Is there a store in this town which sells paint and paint supplies?”

I replied, in French, “Yes, there is a store called Brico, and it is about 800 meters up the road on the left at the circle.” The driver of the van looked at me and was a bit confused. Then I realized he had asked the question in SPANISH, not French, so I replied in Spanish as best I could and he smiled and waved and drove off.

It was a weird experience to understand his question and how to answer but to have not realized which language it was. For a moment I was in that zone where instead of thinking about language and response I was simply doing it. But in the wrong tongue!

Recently I’ve caught myself mixing Spanish into French again. At a local flea market yesterday a French woman asked how I was doing (“tous va bien?”) and I replied “Muy bien,” which made her laugh. I’ve also been saying “y” instead of “et” for and regularly–not sure why!

The quest for speaking and listening fluency I suppose will last as long as I’m here. I want to learn some German or Italian also to make things worse.

The Devil’s Eye

When I think of Bergman’s films it’s always the dour, troubling, magically shot despair engines which come to mind. Films where characters look directly into the camera and harangue the viewer with an uncomfortable scathing monologue about hypocrisy, some blunt sneering assessment of another’s faults, or a damning and unprovoked confession of immense guilt and trauma. Those films are so much fun!

And yet despite his reputation for making punishing and anguished films about tortured relationships and miserable empty interior lives, he could be quite funny. Smiles of a Summer Night, for example, is a delightful and light-hearted little romantic comedy.

And I’ve only recently seen The Devil’s Eye which I highly recommend. The plot: Satan develops a sty in his eye, and quickly he and his advisers realize that there is a young woman who is virtuous and intends to remain so until her wedding night. This fact causes Satan no end of annoyance, and he and his counselors hit upon a plan to divest Bibi Andersson of her virginity. They will send Don Juan from hell on a mission to seduce our heroine and thus remove her virtue and thence the cause of the Devil’s sty eye.

Hilarity ensues. My favorite bits are the scenes of Don Juan being tortured in hell. Knee-slapping!

Le Croix en Haute

This morning I had a To Do list, which I’ve been working through this week. I glanced at it around 9am, and looked at the weather forecast, and thought: “I’m not going to get most of this done before it rains anyway.” I did a bit of gite prepping for guests arriving tomorrow, I put a first coat of paint on my antique window greenhouse, and I hopped in the car to do a bit of site-seeing.

Just around Treignac and throughout the Correze are multiple layers of history: neolithic sites, Druid/Celt sites, Gallo-Roman sites, medieval ruins, Romanesque and Gothic churches and abbeys, painted caves, etc. We’ve lived here a year and have done some exploration, but it’s easy to get into a rut of “I’m working in the garden” and to forget one of the primary reasons we chose to live here: to see cool shit.

Today I drove 10 minutes over to the small village of Lestards. Sprinkled about Lestards in the forested hills are several medieval crosses–some dating back to immediately after the fall of Rome. I’d passed a small sign next to the main road several times which read “Le Croix en Haute.” Today I parked alongside the entrance to the trail and hiked up.

“En Haute” is an apt description. The hike was short–perhaps ten minutes, but it was steep. The path is an old rocky lumber road mostly overgrown and it runs directly uphill between pastures dappled in the typical French wildflower display.

There is on the left hand side a forest after a bit of a climb, and at the edge of the forest is a grove which feels different somehow from the rest of the landscape. One gets the sense immediately that this is a sacred spot, and likely was long before the Croix itself was placed, probably by monks desperate to convert the local pagans to Christianity by decorating their holy sites and sacred wells with crosses and saint’s names. The air is fresher and cooler in the grove, the loamy moss-covered earth invites one to move slowly and thoughtfully. The birds sing but they are less raucous than elsewhere. Whatever spirit or deity was originally evoked in long-forgot rites at this place still whispers around the trunks and amongst the grasses and flowers.

Le Croix en Haute from behind

But there is room here for the early Christian sentiment as well, and it pervades the spot with a more dense and contemplative mood in counterpoint to the brisk and playful fay. I spent a good 40 minutes at the site, examining the cross and its surroundings, then doing my daily Qi Gong routine at the grove’s edge. As I moved through the sequence of slow movements, village church bells rung 10 am–the first sounding deep and bronzy from Lestards, then a moment later from Veix somewhat tinny and a bit further down the valley. The long-stemmed flower varietals swayed in a strong steady wind up the slope from below, indicating an approaching storm. Somewhere above and behind a woodpecker did his tapping devotions .

Christ on the cross is pretty clear in this rough carving, as are the faces of two others beneath his arms. Are they those crucified alongside him that day? Or witnesses to his execution? The two Marys perhaps, or Roman centurians? Were I to scrape away the lichen and moss on its base would I find any markings? Or spots worn smooth by the touch of generations of genuflecting seekers?

Definitely a mystical aura to this place

I imagine I’ll come here often over the years we spend in Treignac. It’s a very evocative place, and Lestards with its small thatched-roof eglise and spring water fountain is a favorite regular destination for us. I might later this summer or fall have to tackle the trail which hits several of these crosses around the village.

Down the Vézère

This weekend in Treignac there was a water sports festival. The local power company turned on the taps at the dam upriver from our house and let loose a torrent from Friday to Monday. Last year Treignac hosted the world kayaking championships, and does so regularly–but this year they hosted the championship trials. Our home is on a bend in the river and it was interesting to see how dramatically the water level and mood of the river changed behind our garden.

We signed up for a rafting excursion which started on the north end of town and wound around to the south end. Our total time in the raft was about 45 minutes.

My wife and I have rafted several times in the USA, and once on the border of Panama and Costa Rica. She got a group of friends together to join our team and after the typical safety gear and instruction period we were off.

Our guide was a bit adventurous. There is a small dam 300 meters upstream from our house which has a gentle ramp built in for kayaks and rafts. He told us “We are not going down the slide, we are going over the wall.” Quite exciting to take a 4-foot vertical plunge into churning foam!

The Barrage du Pisciculture at the end of our property–our rafting guide took us down over the wall!

It was lovely seeing our building from the water. The most tranquil part of the river floats around a slow bend which borders our garden and then goes under the Pont de la Brasserie, built in 1840. A friend was stationed at the wall to snap photos of us as we passed. Poor soul–she was originally a team member but fell and broke her arm a few days before the adventure and could not participate! We definitely owe her a bottle of wine for waiting so long at our place.

Photo by Kate Gratton, taken from our garden as we passed Moulin SAGE

I was pleasantly surprised by the course–I thought it would be rather tranquil and had no idea how choppy and full of attitude the water would be. There were a few really rugged spots of more than 100 meters and at least 3 substantial drops of class 3 or more. Fortunately our raft was equipped with foot straps or we would have lost crew members at different points. On one steep drop by a large outcropping we almost tipped over.

Photo by Barb Wigley, taken from her garden near the Vieux Pont, Treignac
Photo by Barb Wigley. “You two look like marauding Vikings in this one,” she wrote.

We got to pass under the medieval Vieux Pont in the center of town, and see the famous post card view of Treignac from a raft. My favorite spot however was seeing the Rocher de Folles from underneath. We’d done the hike to the outcropping previously, and got to see it from a different vantage.

It was quite an experience, and already we are looking forward to doing it again next year. Today is all about recovery after the strenuous workout–and also about cleaning up the gite apartment after a 5-man kayaking team checks out later this morning!

When your gite guests are kayak bros