A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  ‘The dune world is a civilisation in itself,’ Lacombe told them, as light dappled by the large leaves of the fig tree played on his face. ‘Though admittedly its main inhabitants are meiofauna, tiny creatures that thrive on the organic debris amongst sand. Years of observing these creatures, and their interaction with the sand environment, has possibly affected my view of human society and politics. Under the influence of all this, I believe that what is needed most now is a more profound human revolution than we are currently seeing. What is required is a patient revolution, a long view, a recalibration of our society to the pace of the earth’s workings, to the speed of the wheel of time, the way a bird waits in a tree.’

  Alain Soubret nodded thoughtfully, listening to this eminent Parisian with genuine appreciation.

  ‘Patience,’ Lacombe continued, ‘but not complaisance, or submission to those who do otherwise. As you well know, in the years of the Nazi occupation such a balance was required, between patience and commitment. It is required now too. Always, in fact. We must shun the drama of the cultural avalanche, the blinding dazzle of the spectacle, and recommit to the slow realities of earth, the accumulation, rather than the sudden outbreak, of life’s meaning. Otherwise all this momentum, this supposed fecundity that has taken over France in the last few days, will take its place in historical time as a momentary and rather pointless paroxysm – and an illusory one at that.’

  Alain Soubret nodded again, then raised his finger to interrupt the professor’s flow.

  ‘Professor, if I may. What do you mean, exactly, when you suggest that we move in step with the earth? Are you, for instance, recommending a return to bows and arrows, to walking the prés salés on stilts? How will this work on a day-to-day basis?’

  Lacombe smiled at his host, who likewise smiled in return. FB observed in his journal that the two older men were like a pair of hungry insects happy to feed off each other.

  The professor sipped his wine. ‘It means a reordering of priorities in the mind,’ he said. ‘So that we understand the exact possibilities of our participation. Our role in the accumulation.’

  Alain Soubret now laughed a little, as if questioning the professor’s rather abstract language. ‘I said “in reality”, Professor, on a day-to-day level.’

  Lacombe returned his glass to the garden table. His face became serious. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘there are many mechanisms to undo, or even replace, but really what I mean is that society needs to reconfigure itself metaphysically. We need to re-embrace the natural world, not as a holiday from reality but, well, as our only true guide and teacher.’

  Alain laughed more expressively now, and affectionately. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘but what about here and now, on a day-to-day level, Professor?’

  Now Lacombe also smiled. ‘The concepts of here and now to which you refer are in fact more accurately described as space and time, possibly the most theoretical concepts of them all!’

  ‘Yet they are also the most real . . .’ replied Alain, raising his wine to his lips, while simultaneously pushing a small ceramic dish of walnuts towards Lacombe.

  Mathilde and FB were listening attentively, sitting side by side across the broad green table.

  Alain Soubret went on ‘. . . the most real concepts, yes, the most affecting in the heart too. Space, for instance, is our physical home, and time is memory, exile, forgetting.’

  Lacombe nodded, as if to say ‘of course’. When pressed, however, he refused to outline precise programmatic solutions for the problems of urban modernity, preferring instead to state that as far as he was concerned the students in Paris were acting from a pastoral impulse, without even knowing it.

  At this Mathilde shifted in her seat.

  ‘It’s true, I think,’ Lacombe said, addressing the daughter now and not the father. ‘But you must remember that landscape, the paysage, is not in itself a festival. Life, in fact, is not a festival. This impulse to disturb the grid of the cobblestones in Paris for something organic is the correct one, but only as long as it is understood that a life lived with nature, with soil, sand, wind, stone, sky and water, requires more patience and deeper discipline than a life of urban abstraction.’

  Mathilde looked glum now. ‘This is something I think about,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Let us take insecticides as an example,’ Lacombe went on. ‘The farmers spray their crops for short-term gain while at the same time removing the very forms of life that will sustain us in the end. They have removed small risks but created a much bigger one. It is all very well to say that the CRS are barbarians for spraying their citizens as if they too are pests, but the farmer that is killing nature is often held up as the very essence of France!’

  Alain Soubret shifted in his seat, growing impatient now. He was glad Madame Soubret was down at the port helping to size the oysters. She would most certainly have objected to this academic from Paris lecturing them in a most undialectical fashion about the so-called ‘realities’ of living with nature.

  At the time FB was surprised that Mathilde did not challenge Lacombe more directly – not his views, but the pedagogical way in which he delivered them. Yet despite the events in Paris, one thing he had learnt about the French since he’d arrived was their intrinsic respect for process and comportment. It was one thing to stand with the gang at the barricades hurling refuse at the police, but quite another to criticise a professor to his face. Especially not in your father’s garden.

  It was Alain who spoke next, and quite firmly, in keeping with how he had been with Mathilde since she’d arrived home.

  ‘Professor, I find your ideas interesting, and there is much to like about them, but with due respect, they are also about as light and loose as the sand you have been working on for so many years. I would suggest that what you call “nature” is, frankly, never divisible from culture, certainly not from our human subjectivity. Your plantings and palisades, your gourbet barricades, are culture. They will not, however, solve the problems at Renault, at Citroën, or at the Rhodiaceta plant, nor will they humanise Papon and his thugs. What will bind the students and workers together will be an urgent sense of human decency. It is always a cultural issue, not one of nature.’

  Lacombe’s back straightened a little but he nodded slowly. Then, opening his arms wide and gesturing at the fig canopy dappling them all, he said, ‘Yet here we are!’

  †

  Later that evening, when Mathilde and FB were walking through the prés salés in the moonlight on their way to the water, FB suggested to her that her position was somewhere halfway between that of her father’s and Lacombe’s.

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ she said. ‘It is I who am blown by the wind. First here, then there. It is exhausting. I envy them both their certitude, their stability. I am not stable.’

  It was true. She had torn up the steel fasteners at the base of the plane trees of Saint-Michel with her own hands, she had roared and chanted, she had hurled not only cobblestones but glass bottles, broken and jagged, at the enemy. Yet she had still felt the need to retreat to the Rue des Quatre-Vents, to the Galerie Sarcon, to the sanctuary not of political ethics but of Mondrian’s dunes. Back and forth she had gone over those few days, needing one thing just as much as the other. The urgency of the real, the truth of the imagined. Timelessness, and time.

  †

  Although Professor Lacombe had only stayed at the Soubret house for a little over an hour, it was a visit that would long be remembered. When he had left, with polite farewells from Alain and Mathilde and a commitment from FB to meet him for lunch the next day at the Loup Garou, FB was invited to dine with Mathilde’s parents. He accepted.

  Over dinner he was asked to tell them about Australia, its politics, its culture, its treatments of the Aborigines, whom Alain had read about the year before when they were finally given the right to vote. FB was asked to describe the culture of Australian cities, their
demographics, architecture, landscape, literature and music. Then, after the meal, FB was given a tour of Alain’s bookshelves. Once again, though, as amongst the low hummocks at Cap Ferret, he was distracted. As Alain Soubret expressed his preference for Montaigne – un garçon local – but then grew discursive about Frantz Fanon’s sanctioning of violence, FB could manage no stimulating response. This was partly because of language difficulties, partly because his private turmoil was now silting up any fluency he had attained, but looking back he also felt he had ‘behaved as dully as a dutiful schoolboy’. It is possible that Alain Soubret did not expect much more from his Australian visitor, distracted as he was himself not only by the conversation he had had with Professor Lacombe but by the arguments with his daughter and the ongoing tension such conflict was causing between himself and his wife. Earlier in the day, while FB was off on the dunes with Lacombe, and Alain and Mathilde had sparred, Madame Soubret had scolded her husband for being so eager to risk his daughter’s safety. The whole little family had exploded. Madame Soubret had stormed off, hence her absence during Lacombe’s visit. What FB and the professor had walked into on their return from Cap Ferret was the smouldering aftermath. FB had noticed straightaway that Mathilde seemed sad and distant. They’d kissed briefly, but in front of her father and Lacombe he found this unbearable. As Alain and Lacombe were taking their seats at the garden table, Mathilde and FB had gone alone to the kitchen together to fetch the drinks and walnuts. She asked him how it had gone with Lacombe and he replied that it was both good and bad. ‘Pyla is a monster,’ she had said then. ‘It can never be satisfied.’

  As she’d brusquely picked up the tray and begun to move towards the garden, FB had said, to try to lighten the mood: ‘Yeah, I prefer the Mondrians.’

  A smile had briefly come into her eyes.

  †

  When Madame Soubret had returned in time for dinner she was loving towards Mathilde but perfunctory with her husband and also with FB. Over the meal she seemed to relax a bit, as the young Australian’s exotic tales from the southern hemisphere distracted her from their disagreements, but when Alain and FB got up to look at the bookshelves FB noticed how she immediately turned to Mathilde with a look of fond distress.

  The mother knew better than the father, and certainly better than FB, the decision the daughter would make. She was already grieving, even before her daughter had uttered it.

  When the tour of the bookshelves and coffee was over, FB excused himself in order to return to his lodgings in the mill to write up his notes. What, we might wonder, could he possibly write of sand and dunes, of slat fences, palisades and marram grass, when so much was going on inside his heart?

  He sat downstairs instead by the cold stove, his blank page lit by the kerosene lamp. He smoked. He waited for her to arrive.

  †

  When she did eventually arrive it was almost midnight. She found him cheek down on the pages of his writing, the lamp wick low, the mill bitterly cold. What had been heavy-humid rain earlier in the day had now thinned and freshened. The drama had begun to appear in the sky. Brief ziggurats of lightning could be seen out over the prés salés and the passes towards Cap Ferret. A wind had picked up, too, in the marine dark the rain was silver and intermittent.

  She had come to tell him she was catching the train to Bordeaux in the morning. She was returning to Paris. She would say he had a special place in her heart, a natural connection to her deepest self, but their paths must diverge. They each had to be comfortable in their own skin, he amongst the dunes in Australia, she in Rue Monge, helping to ensure that this progress was not squandered.

  For Mathilde, raised as her father’s daughter, the world was political, be it in the streets of Paris or in the farmhouses of Gascony. It seemed that only the bassin was the exception, the wild seaway that gave her, and her father, their situation originelle. But life had to evolve, to be lived, one could not simply stay rooted at the source. If so, the source itself may become fettered, entangled, dire.

  For FB, however, the landscape had little to do with politics at all. He was not driven along his childhood coast visiting heroes of a resistance. Instead he was part of an invading force, marched off to mass, drilled in the catechism and presented with his books and violin as a trophy-child to the rest of the extended family. Dunes were for running down rather than allegories, and the sea itself was an ever-sibilant stranger.

  He lay sleeping on the record he had inscribed in his own blank page. Dreaming of her. His dream come true. The passage on the page was the description of his imagined sighting of her from the ferry. Coming by in her pinasse. At one with her world: the sparkling glare, the turquoise sheet of water beneath her, shifting this way then that.

  But now the water was dark in the reaches between streaks of lightning, waiting beyond the steady quiet of the prés salés.

  †

  She was crying as she lit the stove, knowing that decisions like the one she had made deny entire worlds. Her heart was rent, like in a nineteenth-century novel. But back then, when such novels were being written by the likes of Balzac, Zola, Hugo and Flaubert, the local people around La Teste-de-Buch and Arcachon were walking across the squelching marshes on stilts. She had been born too late for that but nevertheless had been taught how to light a fire, to handle a pinasse, to fight for justice. She had always wanted that honour, that dignity, but it did not lie for her in remote parts of the coast as it once had.

  She touched his arm. He became aware of her now. He stared as she joggled the coals with the fire tongs.

  As she turned from the glow the rain weakened outside. Her freckles were golden, flickering, framed by the open door of the stove. He did not think of these golden freckles as grains of sand but, in different circumstances, in a more distant and luxurious mood, he might have.

  ‘J’y vais, Francis,’ she said. ‘Retour á Paris.’

  †

  Sometimes, in the years afterwards, when he was reading a book and marvelling at how geological words were, how they contained whole strata of emotion which depended on the way they were said, or when they were said, he thought of those words Mathilde uttered by the stove as he was emerging from his dream. He knew what they meant, in a way that went well beyond the details of the La Teste railway timetable.

  ‘I’m going, Francis. Back to Paris.’

  Six words that could have been said in any number of happier, or more ordinary situations. Six words only, but in this case FB knew straightaway that the meaning of those six words transcended their literal meaning. This transcendence was akin to the difference between a map and its landscape. One gave the literal facts, the other contained emotional infinitudes.

  It was as if he had known those six words were coming, and had already thought a lot about them before they arrived. She had never, after all, pretended that she was not conflicted.

  So when he replied, ‘I’ll come with you,’ it was already in a crestfallen voice that would return in his nightmares for decades. Why was it he who was doomed to represent the politics of nostalgia, a retreat from the real and the truth? Was it something about him, or something about where he was from? In a congested urban world where a life lived with nature is nearly impossible, a desire to do so can appear fey, childlike, stupid, or even insane. Yet he had known when they stood together by the black telephone in Saint-Sulpice that Mathilde understood that insanity. Understood it, yes, but with those six words in the mill she confirmed her conclusion that such madness was irrelevant in the struggle for a better world.

  They boiled the iron kettle on the stovetop and in silence drank black Darjeeling from the tin he’d brought all the way from home. Outside in the night the Atlantic breathed its ancient breath against the handmade windowpanes of the mill.

  16

  Grain by Grain

  Everywhere, peppered amongst even the most technical sections of FB’s papers, are small aperçus, aph
orisms and general quotes he has written down. These lines, thoughts, reflections, derived largely from his reading, make obvious the deeper resonance he brought to bear upon his technical work. There is a life in his archive which one could describe as philosophical, even poetic at times, as intricate wind-vector diagrams and hard observational graphs on sand drift are annotated with the thoughts of Baudelaire or Guillevic, Hélène Cixous or Guy Debord. No matter how humdrum or perfunctory his fieldwork had necessarily to be, it became clear to me, by what I saw in its margins, that a thinking heart was always present in the tasks. There would therefore be no way of eviscerating the emotion and feeling from this scientist, this civil engineer. Nor from his sand archive.

  If you follow nature, you have to accept whatever is capricious and twisted in nature.

  Piet Mondrian

  Autrement – ‘otherly’

  Now, of the music summoned by the birth

  That separates us from the wind and sea

  Wallace Stevens

  He was now more than ever determined to make his life an unbroken echo of what he had perceived when he was young and to teach other men in poetry what he had learned in sorrow.

  Halldór Laxness

  So that the loss itself is not lost . . .

  Dune 42 in Area 16 was extensively reshaped to a profile based upon that of the artificial littoral dune which exists along the French coast south of Bordeaux

  The earth, the earth does not lie.

  Patrick Modiano, La Place de l’étoile

  I have been looking on these layered ‘archaeologies’, these gold and red piles of different histories and systems as a metaphor for the human psyche; the way each of us could be seen as a walking many-layered world of passions, ancestral memories, neuroses, genetic patterns and ancient archetypes.

  John Wolseley

  Sartre preferred food that had been transformed to disguise its natural origins. Raw vegetables were ‘too natural’, but okay ‘after human intervention transforms them into a puree.’ Cakes and pastries were ideal because they had ‘been thought out by man and made on purpose.’