the photos, the pub’s walls are hung with newspaper reports of the great fire, and a yellowed, framed bill, announcing, in letters of different sizes that after the royal family’s visit to the Festival of Empire in the glass colossus in June 1911, the Crystal Palace, together with the Concert Hall and central portal, and also the pavilions of the Chinese, Ancient Egypt and Rome, the Byzantine, the French Farmstead, the Chambers of the Moorish Alhambra and the Renaissance era, besides a Medieval English Court, and also the adjacent park with man-made lakes, with their humpback bridges and small islands – will be put at once up for auction. But even then, no-one was actually willing to stump up any cash for this onetime pride of the empire.
It’s a short walk from the pub to the park, where you can still see amongst the weeds the wide flights of ruined stone staircases, imperial lions and statues that survived the flames. But the Palace itself has merged with history and become not merely transparent but invisible. And it comes to mind that those everyday worries that force us into alien schedules burn and crackle away to nought, and so do those imaginary palaces of the heart and chambers of the soul – those Chinese pagodas on Formosa lakes, those ancient stone-pines of Cyprus, those Byzantine churches and Roman temples, those luminous lagoons of Renaissance Venice, our own personal Alhambra, our Sinai deserts, our English Middle Ages – are all blown through the gaps of consciousness, through any imposed reality, like the Mistral sweeping down through the French valleys from the Alps, verifying that the past is not completed … that everything is being accomplished and everything happens outside time, outside the here and now, as in the human soul.
And that’s quite enough justifications for these apparent confusions of thought before those who won’t welcome them anyway, just as they won’t welcome in spring the insane winds of autumn – like that furious mistral in ever-sunny Provence that recently and yet so infinitely long blew in our presence with such energy that it almost blew us and our love off the famous Avignon bridge into the chill font of the deep, plethoric Rhone …
Oh Allah, what was I meant to realize at that moment, when it was so freshly and so terribly imprinted into my memory and consciousness, that moment which could so easily inspire, but even more easily bring grief:
Sur le Pont d’Avignon,
L’on y danse, l’on y danse
Sur le Pont d’Avignon,
L’on y danse tous en rond15
Out on the remains of the medieval bridge stranded in the river: around us the penetrating, maddening mistral that knocked you off your feet, below the icy azure waters flowing as they had for tens of thousands of years, and behind, on a hill, the vast and imposing Palais des Papes – its thick walls faceted with cubes and rhomboids and corresponding spaces: a labyrinth, a charade, an enigma, a conundrum of history that stimulates the imagination perhaps more than it should.
And so we wandered through the deserted stone halls, quietly pleased that the mistral had already blown away most of the idle-eyed tourists, leaving only a handful to shuffle around that palace where, like a repository in time, the papacy was exiled for a century when the light in Rome was dimmed. Through the empty palace, through its connecting echoing halls and galleries and through the wide open doors, gusted the mistral, the one visitor which had a right to visit freely, earned by long service.
And who were we with our lonely earth love in this stone shell, this ancient masonry undefeated by time which we naively touched to sense immortality? The chill of the stone shot through the fingers and penetrated the heart, which so rarely obeys the mind. And again there was the question – what is in the world beyond the illusion of our historic existence? After all, if history itself is a mirage, an illusion of the mind, a delirium of the calendar, an unembraceable dream, then you cannot touch it, and you cannot just feel the truth. We can only reckon when we want to feel and be present, because only when we are present does this seem an action. But there was only the mistral, the sun-stirred wind and the Rhone, rolling its full, blue, icy waters past the Avignon bridge, which you can’t cross.
Everyone has their own tongue. Everyone has their own truth. Everyone has their own history. And these variations of people’s sufferings interact only on dates, in the numbers that rule the world of people. The age of the Avignon retreat, the age of Babylon’s captivity, the age of purgatory before the brief deceptive paradise of the Renaissance – you can call them what you will, and all will be true and nothing will be true. Yes, these ages that overload us with knowledge and lure the mistral in the mind to murmur to the heart. The age of the Hundred Years War, the age of Dante, of Giotto, of Bocaccio, the time of Petrarch, of the Great Plague, the years of darkness and foreboding, the times of plots and brutal dictatorships, the ages of grumbling by the illiterate rabble forever seeking bread and circuses … And in the mirror of ages, this present age of quiescent changes that are neither visible nor yet have brought anything but lost illusions and everyday suffering. The trap of ages.
Who else but us will remember our presence in the Pope’s palace, when, chance visitors, we strolled from hall to hall, from one floor to another, witnessed only by the secret eyes of the ancient stone walls newly uncovered by restorers? Yes, stones can see, but it takes them long to learn how.
In the streets of Avignon – a poor village compared to Rome even though stubbornly electing its own pontiffs – cattle both large and small loiter in the day, while at night lurk restless gangs of medieval lads. In the echoing halls of the palace, its bedrooms and corridors, trail vile intrigues and the smell of death, mingling with smells of cooking as smoky aromas fill the lofty refectory from the spit-roasting of a lamb the size of a small bull. Aromas of death still linger secretly in the palace chambers where the mistral can’t reach, where lived and died the first Avignon pope, Clement V – who tried to unite Europe with a new crusade against the Saracens and met his demise after treating indigestion with crushed emeralds; who outlawed the Knights Templar and blessed their brutal execution; who smiles at us from a dark corner with his public smile, since he went down in history as a pious, placid and pleasant priest, and there must be some truth in the reports.
Accompanied by that unsettling smile, we escaped the Pope’s chamber, recognizing that it was locked up in time – a time not ours.
And outside, the mistral was blowing, the wind that drives people mad, that confuses the mind of even the toughest husband, by blowing out from the soul and from the heart the dusk of self-possessed pride.
The mistral blew, filling up the sunny spaces of autumn with the ghosts and memories of things unhappened, unhappened because everything that truly was, was different from how we imagined.
The mistral blew, turning the heads of northerners and driving Van Gogh crazy in canvases of scarlet vineyards and twisted cypresses near Arles, yet invigorating the mind of Cézanne who, as it turns out, did not invent, but precisely impressed with his brush the motley, smoky scene around Mont St Victoire. That is what Provence is, with its Aix, its Arles, its Avignon and Marseilles, and its vivid blue calanques that gnaw the rocky coast, overgrown by the stone-pines of the infinite imagination.
A human being – seeks to justify his being and his wanderings through life. A human being – understands that his brief stay within nature and geography is like the existence of a leaf that once quivers on a plane-tree branch then is carried off by the wind in an unknown direction, and there’s no human being whose existence is fixed like a stone.
Everything that happens, happens inside the soul. Only the soul can sense invisible connections that slip away unnoticed from so much knowledge. But the soul can slumber, or shiver in fear, and only earthly love and God’s mistral can help it see and comprehend how everything in the world is interconnected – even those things that seem utterly disparate.
