Life in the maintream: Octobre

I'm careful not to be "radical" all the time, because I don't want to end up hard-hearted and judgemental. Fortunately, there is always so much to love to life in the maintream:

Le vent fera craquer les branches
La brume viendra dans sa robe blanche
Y aura des feuilles partout
Couchées sur les cailloux
Octobre tiendra sa revanche

Le soleil sortira à peine
Nos corps se cacheront sous des bouts de laine
Perdue dans tes foulards
Tu croiseras le soir
Octobre endormi aux fontaines

Il y aura certainement,
Sur les tables en fer blanc
Quelques vases vides et qui traînent
Et des nuages pris aux antennes

Je t'offrirai des fleurs
Et des nappes en couleurs
Pour ne pas qu'Octobre nous prenne

On ira tout en haut des collines
Regarder tout ce qu'Octobre illumine
Mes mains sur tes cheveux
Des écharpes pour deux
Devant le monde qui s'incline

Certainement appuyés sur des bancs
Il y aura quelques hommes qui se souviennent
Et des nuages pris aux antennes

Je t'offrirai des fleurs
Et des nappes en couleurs
Pour ne pas qu'Octobre nous prenne

Et sans doute on verra apparaître
Quelques dessins sur la buée des fenêtres
Vous, vous jouerez dehors
Comme les enfants du nord
Octobre restera peut-être.

Vous, vous jouerez dehors
Comme les enfants du nord
Octobre restera peut-être.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHNrIiuTbiM

Leeds

I’ve been thinking about blogging about this for a little while, but it took some time to settle in and I’m still not sure what it’s going to lead to. In a way it’s still premature to blog, as I’m just confused.

When I passed my viva in May I was quite anxious as to what I was going to do next. I applied for a number of jobs, not as many as I should have, ten maybe, although I was happy to let everyone believe that I’d been way more active than I really had been in this respect. But the vulnerability of not having a job got me thinking a lot about all those around the world who shared this with me, and in somewhat more dire circumstances.

I became a lot less judgemental about people who took jobs at big supermarket chains, and wondered if it was true that many in the developing work actually do want the exploitative jobs they have, because they’re better than none at all. The constant talk of economic downturn and the lack of response I was getting from the places I applied to was on the whole depressing, and made me feel totally irrelevant with my ivory tower Ph.D. in social science.

I developed a bit of a thick skin, thinking that sending in applications was very much like sending resumes into the stratosphere. Once you sent it, you stop thinking about it, and you write the next one, maybe at some point you’ll hear back from the stratosphere, but don’t count on it. I told myself and everyone around me in the same situation that we could hope for 5 little bites out of every 100 applications and a “little bite” was not a job yet. Then, on my 11th application, I got an interview. Two hours after the interview, I got the job.

I had planned to spend some time in France with my family around that time, but I shortened the holiday and started on the 18th of August. I was eager to start as, for some reason, my new colleagues reminded me of my Durham bunch of Quakers, very socially and environmentally aware, they were the type of folks I hung out with in my free time anyway. This new job was going to be a big fired-up-coffee-time-after-quaker-worship affair and I was looking forward to it.

The job is at an infrastructure organisation, i.e. an organisation designed to be available for and assist voluntary sector organisations in their everyday activities. So I get to meet lots and lots of voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises. I’m also meant to be useful to them, which means picking up a lot of the information, knowledge, skills and red tape which they might need. The job includes setting up social enterprise fairs, volunteering fairs, and picking up the brains of random people and activists for a database of third sector intelligence. I’ve met the some of the most touching, exciting, dedicated people of this fair island just by turning up to work. And I’m picking up some serious compassionate practical wisdom eight hours per day. It’s like I’m being force-fed the stuff.

The job is also in Leeds. I’d picked up in countless conversations that Leeds was one of the most activist cities in the country, very unlike Durham, but I’d never actually been there. The place is very vibrant but also in many ways very fucked up, it has the best and the worst of Britain, all of it very much in your face, so you can’t pretend that either don’t exist.

I didn’t even do that well in the interview. But I fell into this thing I needed so much, when I was too lazy and clueless to go seek it out. I feel like I’ve been pushed out of my inertia, which I loathed with all my heart but was too discouraged to address. You want to mix with the best do-gooders under the British rain? There you are, enjoy the ride.

Rue du Pont Louis Philippe

I should remove my blog from google. I already feel for the random web surfer googling "Rue du Pont Louis Philippe" and landing on my bizarre musings, but anyway...

Rue du Pont Louis Philippe is one of my favourite streets in Paris. Not far from it, on the Rue des Barres, there's a cool little tea-shop, l'Ebouillante, where I go back every time and where I've got memories of some fantastic brunches surrounded by friends, and of rainy afternoons reading Zola.

On the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, there is also a small craft shop, kept by a monastic order. The way it works is that Paris has got so many churches by square mile that some of them have been "given" to monastic orders for them to bring life to the building with whatever it is that they do. So the St Gervais church is run by the Fraternites de Jerusalem. From what I gather, they're a pretty benign bunch, a far cry from the acerbic conservative catholicism that regularly invades the streets of Paris.

I spent a few days there in January and the communaute's shop had some beautiful santon-like statues. The most impressive one, however, was a shepherd, about 50 cm high, which they had displayed right at the centre of their vindow shop, with almost nothing surrounding it. It was so stunning it beckoned you to stop, and for a moment it filled me with longing. For all I know it could have been a solemn shepherd carrying a sheep, but it could also have been a visual depiction of the parable of the lost sheep. There was such tenderness in that little statue that I could never forget it, and it propped up in a number of conversations, notably with my dad.

I walked past that shop-window again in August with H., the santon had been replaced by an angel (which looked almost as good) but the shop itself was closed. Then last week, while visiting my best friend and looking for a present, I walked back there, hoping to get one of those if I could. To my delight the shepherd which had been displayed in the window several months before was still there, tucked away in a corner. Trembling with excitement, it took me about 30 seconds to purchase it. My best friend and I were both quite excited because we both found the statue stunning. And, because she's nice and because it's true, she said it reminded her of my lovely fiance, who is also full of that same tenderness.

A day later, H. unpacked it, and loved it. But strangely I found it less jaw-droppingly stunning in H.'s living room than I had when it was at the centre of a shop window on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. And I felt a bit strange for having brought it into private ownership, it seemed to belong on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe where it had literally glowed. In H.'s living room it was just a pretty statue, which looked a little sterner, and a little bored. I'm sure shop lighting had a bit to do with it.

Then I thought about all the other passer-bys on that street, who maybe had once interacted with the statue of a good shepherd who would leave behind ninety-nine sheeps to go look out for a lost one. Jesus for once not depicted dying on a cross, but tenderly caring for the oddball sheep. I thought about Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, a street which had been the centre of the jewish community, and from whose flats children and adults had been sent out to die, less than seventy years ago. The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, in whose letterboxes came the last postcards of young dads who knew that they would never see their families again, and who hoped against hope, and prayed to God, for their wife and children to live.

The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe finally, now at the centre of the fashionable gay district, a pretty posh street, but I could imagine quite a few sad souls, me included, walking past on some nondescript days, wondering if God's tenderness was for them also.

I wasn't the worst person to take the little statue out of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. For one, it was no longer on display in that window. It might be produced as part of a series and there might be several more of it. And then of course I gave it to an Anglican priest. I wonder if someone will interact with it again. I'm really not into auras and things like that, and it's embarassing to write this, but that little statue seems to say, sadly almost, "I was the good shepherd statue of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe". And this gives art, and material culture, a whole new angle.

(grrrr... I'm ambivalent about this post. I don't like writing cute reflexions that end up sounding like Zondervan fodder, but I'm unwilling to take the post off, because it's got something in it that is quite important and that I like, though I don't really know what it is. I wish I could postface it with Hemingway's scathing observations of the way in which the rich and comfortable kill art. It's at the end of A Moveable Feast. But I don't have the text with me and it's not available online.)