Dark nights in Arles

My new friends in Brittany, AC Brestois, defeated Arles-Avignon a few days ago (3-1) extending their heartening string of wins in Ligue 2, French football, marching toward promotion to the bigs. [video from Brest, here] Have we not always thought warmly of Arles, where Vincent van Gogh painted raw darkness and embraced love’s remourse? The city’s Roman amphitheatre on a warm evening pulls the skiff in which we’re reposing into the most gracious aspects of antiquity. Guillem de Cabestanh flourished between 1181 and 1196, a troubadour with whom is associated the most mournful story of romantic loss.
De Cabestanh was presumably more Catalan than Provençal, though the troubadours‘ sort of dharma-bum wandering and seeking of ever-more interesting inamorata and remunerative favor rendered them a key part of the tableau of sea and hills. Contemporary Arlesiennes hover at the hatch of heaven by smoking cigarettes and drinking in backstreet cafes, speaking with one another in the language of love, the closest approximation to which we read as Provençal, the language of the troubadours.

L'aur' amara fa.ls bruels brancutz
clarzir que. l dons espeys' ab fuelhs,
e. ls letz becxs dels auzels ramencx
te balbs e mutz pars e non pars.
per qu'ieu m'esfortz de far e dir plazers
A manhs? per ley qui m'a virat has d'aut,
don tern morir si. ls afans no.m asoma.
Arnaut Daniel

"The bitter breeze makes light the bosky boughs which the gentle breeze makes thick with leaves, and the joyous beaks of the birds in the branches it keeps silent and dumb, paired and not paired. Wherefore do I strive to say and do what is pleasing to many? For her, who has cast me down from on high, for which I fear to die, if she does not end the sorrow for me."

Graduate school in Chapel Hill, Romance Language, did not erase or much contradict the impression I had discovered-by-moonlight while earlier living by the lake in Aurora, New York, that the troubadours had painted the first rosy fingers of dawn of literary Modernism (and the music they embraced was the purest satire – somewhat in the manner of PDQ Bach) though neither form of art would be entirely revanched until June 16, 1904.
The lord of Rousillon had, in a manner the probable shady ways of which are not recorded, secured a wife: Seremonda. Pursuing the only kind of amor that means anything, Guillem de Cabestanh and she aerated the blood of their veins and dreams with the magical mad oxygen of illicit and fervent allure. The lord of Rousillon, brutish and mighty, employed lauzengers (spies, and invidious malfeasant assholes) to unveil the currency of the affaire de cœur, and thereafter murdered Guillem. An epitome seemed to develop when he cut the heart out of Guillem, and caused it to be roasted and peppered and served to Seremonda. I have done insufficient research about the culinary arts at the very end of the Twelfth Century in the south of France, but I should think that peppering was the very least of the disguising. Fennel, flavoring wines, suave sauces; piquant near fruits, sherries, kef.

Seremonda’s delectation was divine. It is remarked that the expression that rests upon the visage of a person who is sublimely delighted by some crème brulees or other mimics pain, but this is something of a red herring, and was made so especially when Rousillon revealed that she had been eating and rather extravagantly enjoying the very heart of her lover. She did take a moment to swoon away, according to the many versions that tell this story in song or sestina, but she claimed as her own the monumental and essential timelessness of the story by articulating a punchline in the form it must have, transforming it into the metaphorical brilliance of language:

then I shall never again eat a more delicious meal.

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.