An impossible Morning

Last night I finished reading the second chapter of the book by my new love Chiang Hsun , on language. This morning I wanted to write about it. But somehow, I could not. My mind was occupied by some other thoughts, some other images, some other feelings. I know why. In that chapter, Chiang was talking about the nature of language, its precision, its imprecisions, its meaning, its lack of meaning, the emotive content of language, the importance of silence, of absence in language, the subversion of language by novel ways of treating it and the importance of such subversion. All these ways of looking at language seem both strange to me, in that I was now reading them in Chinese with examples drawn from Chinese novels and at the same time familiar, because I had come across such ideas more than 30 years ago, when I was a  still a young student in France. 

Suddenly my mind was flooded with memories. It was as if in a flash, a floodgate had been opened. Behind the floodgate were tens of images, voices, like so many neglected little children, all clamoring to come out from their musty dark rooms into the sunlight again. The images appeared in the theatre of my mind, one after another, in great profusion but in no particular order, as if from a film projecter run wild. I was back in my room in Village V, at the University of Bordeaux III, a tiny room furnished simply with a bed, behind which was a book shelf, to the left of which against the wall close to the window at the foot of my bed was a long built-in working desk in matte white above which hung a further row of booksheleves upon which sat a row of books lit by a fluorescent tube hidden within an aproned groove immediately beneath the bookshelves, consisting  of all the novels and 2 film scripts written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, all the novels and short stories written by Franz Kafka, books of criticisms or literary theories by Nathalie Sarraute, Roland Barthès, Félix Guatarri, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Serge Doublovsky, Jean Ricardou etc.some books on impressionist painters I like, Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Chagall, and other painters like Bonnard, Soutine, Utrillo, Braque,  Pisarro, Mondrian, Modigliani, Dali, Margritte, Miró, Edvard Munch, Ernst Escher, Picasso, Dufy, Buffet..., sculptors like Giacometi, Rodin ... from various publishers like Gallimard, Hachette, Payot, U of Paris, Union Genérale, Gonthier, Editions du Seuil, Editions du Minuit etc, some teach yourself books on playing the guitar, various musical scores on classical and flamenco guitar, books on various auteur-type film directors like Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini,  Antonioni, Truffaut, Malle, Chabrol, Buñuel, Ozu ... I still remember when I first entered that room, how surprised I was at the way they folded the bed, including the blanket, wrapped in another white sheet which would fold back in the direction towards the foot of the bed with about 8 to 10 inches of white sheet exposed just in front of the white pillar shaped pillow. I never saw pillows like that nor that particular way of folding blankets before. You never do that in Hong Kong.

Suddenly the images of the scene at my open window fitted with metal shutters appeared. I could see the vast lawn below my third floor window fronted on the near side by the road on which I must ride my bicycle to the Restaurant Universitaire III for my meals and on which second, third, fourth hand Citroen "deux chevaux" ( 2 HP cars fitted with just an engine, oil tank, most primitive seats, steering wheel and wheels) or little Purgeots or those peculiar contraptions which are a cross between bicycles and motor cycles called "Mobylettes"" , fitted with just a small engine placed inside a little metal basket hung in front of the handle-bar, would race through or sputter along. In the distance I could see the seldom used tennis courts and further in the distance, the two other Villages behind which were rows and rows of trees mostly evergreens. I remember the strange quiet after 10 a.m. when all the courses had started when I did not have classes. I was reading one book or another. I came across vocabularies whose meaning I was not sure of and had to look them up in the Petit Robert or if I still did not get it I would then have to consult the little two-way French-English dictionary by Collins. When I was tired from reading, I would pick up my Ramirez guitar and practice a little against a rickety collapsible metal music stand and when I was thirsty, I would fix myself a hot chocolate drunk from a big bowl or a café and perhaps take a few biscottes with French cheese spread or butter.

I remember the university restaurants serving meals at very reasonable prices and I would have to pay with the food supplement ticket at the ridiculously cheap price of about 2 francs! You would have to line up with a wooden platter on which you placed the  forks, spoons, knife and paper napkins and as much sliced French baquette as you wanted, which you picked up from wicker baskets close to the entrance of the huge hall seating may be more than 400 people in rows of long white benches. I remember I liked yogurts (called "yaourts"), either "naturel" or flavored with various kinds of fruits, the cheese cubes and biscuits, sometimes flans or apple strudels, sometimes peaches, apples, strawberries or melons. You could have red wine at an extra 1 franc! They were served by fat middle-aged ladies in blue uniforms rather like those worn by nurses with cap and all and you could ask for more at no extra charges if you felt particularly famished. It was there that I first learned about an Arab dish of mutton chops cooked in tomato sauce served with "cous cous", a kind of tiny grain rice like sago. It was there also that I first learned that you could cook rice in an open pan in rizotto form. Below the restaurant was an open air cafe fitted simply with tables and chairs and a bar at the back serving coffee at 1.5 franc and wine at 2 francs. I do not know how much time I spent there, talking to various students in lazy autumn or early winter afternoons: students from the surrounding Garonne or Gironde river valleys, students from Africa, Middle East, Madagasgar, Ivory Coast, Sychelles, Mauritius, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, America, Canada, England, Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Holland, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Puerto Rico etc about their countries or the latest films on show in the three cinema clubs at the campus and about any and everything. There were hardly any Chinese. There was only Yip who later returned to Hong Kong and became the chief film censor. He is now retired. Then there was Cheung who went there to study Geography and is now a research fellow there. And there was Paulus who is last heard of as being in Canada working as a translator. 

I remember the cloudless blue skies which seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth in summer, the days of dull grey skies entirely covered by dark clouds which seemed to be constantly churning and swirling. I remember the sudden draft which would make the metal shutters at the window clatter and the paper on my note books flapping about when caught by the gust. Then you would hear the patter of the rain, striking on the ground  below and on hot days, you could  smell that peculiar pungent smell from the ground when the rain first hit sundried earth or grass,  wafting through the window. You would then have to rush quickly to the window to close it. The storms would end as suddenly as they started. But I like to hear the sound of the rain pelting against the window, creating tens of tiny streams which would grow bigger upon their squiggly descent as they picked up more and more droplets of water clinging stubbornly to the window panes. A strange sense of bliss and cosiness would rise within your breast as you heard the sound of the wind struggling to get in through the crevices at the side of the window and as it hit the window panes making sounds like "foom, foom foom"s.  You'd then continue either your reading or your guitar playing, practising your classical Bach, Albeniz, Villa Lobos....or your flamenco arpeggios, rasgueados in 4- 6 rhythms.

Occasionally, you would turn on the radio sitting at the end of the long working desk close to the window for better reception and would listen to either the news, classical or pop music and occasionally jazz. You'd  hear the peculiarly high pitched tone in a kind of artificial or make-believe enthusiasm in the voice of the radio announcers. You only heard people speaking normally from those people being interviewed. That was one of the ways in which I learned to hear French spoken in daily life. I still remember the horrible experience of being deaf and dumb for almost three months after my first arrival in France and then feverishly reading the French comic Asterix to get a feel of the "real" spoken language, paying particular attention to the abrreviated or the sonically collapsed words and slangs within those "clouds" above or at the sides of the cartoon characters. People just didn't speak in the way we were taught in our French lessons in Hong Kong! They slurred the sounds. They rolled up the sounds of several words into one! And they spoke with their regional accents!

There were other images, sounds, smells of course. But if I were to go on, I would have to write a book, not a blog. Enough of my reminiscences. I couldn't help it. It seems that we are in much less control of how our mind functions than we normally give ourselves credit for.  But having gotten at least some of those impressions off my chest and pacified some of those unruly children from the realm of long forgotten memories, I suppose I could now close and do what I intended in my next blog.