The Celtic Bretons

Brest 2 – Le Havre 1
14 January 2010. Today, in large measure thanks to the chevalier effusif Bruno Grougi (my main man), Brest defeated Havre AC in Ligue 2 football; the cordial boys are now tied for first in the division with Caen (38 points) assuring themselves of promotion to Ligue 1 next year, as Grenoble and Boulogne seem fated to relegation back down to Ligue 2. Relegation is a word of terrible beauty, and I often wish I had the power to relegate certain vain people to the monkey league.
Brest (Breizh, Breton, Brittany) is a beautiful oceanside city. In 1945 my father boarded a ship in Brest, at the conclusion of the war, bound westward across an again-benign Atlantic. In Paris he and a buddy had stolen an abandoned German motorcycle and had joyridden up and down the boulevards. I do not know if one can steal an unowned motorcycle; perhaps he was the just first of his platoon to realize he could easily abscond with it. Later he bumped into Marlene Dietrich shopping in a store, and she signed a program he happened to be carrying. She vanished, and he returned to Ithaca, where he resumed his craft as a printer, stole no motorcycles, and never even considered watching a Dietrich movie. But he did discover boats.
Much of Kerouac’s book SATORI IN PARIS takes place in Brest, where Jack had gone to find his people. He did not go the village of Kerr’och (as I did), and he did not learn that his ancestors had lived in and departed a town very near Brest for North America. Kerouac: house on a hill.
When I was in Brest in 1991 I took a nap in the park quite near the bay, and I spent a few vague and sleepy moments regarding the very beautiful Plougastel Bridge. The English call them boatyards, the French call them marinas. My feelings about that are mixed.
Breizh was one of the six Celtic nations of antiquity, and the Celts had a skewed way of looking at and doing things; they made much of brass, and built a fabulously complex, allusive language; their architecture was stout, and their seafaring was undomesticated. The Breton Celts tried to make large circles in the earth with stones (cromlechs!) where pi equaled three point zero. That endeavor was naive and poetic and pure, and one might prefer to live in a world where they had actually succeeded, and had rendered a hale song people in Wales and Romania and the Mississippi delta could now understand.