"Now I'm nostalgic for the future, which was my native land."
-Hari Kunzru, White Tears
Melanie at City of The Sun, Occupied Cohokia Territory , 2014 - photo by Mackenzie Stewart
Here is my summer newsletter. The voices of Black, Brown, Indigenous, & People of Color must be celebrated, uplifted, listened to, and passed on. Not 'now more than ever', but always, and consistently. The first part of the letter will focus on voices I have heard and want to pass on to you. I don't know if I'm doing anti-racist work right, or well, especially in the context of this newsletter. But to be silent for fear of making mistakes doesn't make any sense. If you're seeing a way I can do better, you can let me know. I hope we can all be in a continual state of learning, communicating, and acting for racial and social justice. Thanks :)
The second part of this letter was going to be an address of the most pressing questions of our time. If you are me. Such as: Am I, the young writer taking refuge in a remote village in Crete, witnessing the end of tourism? What does it mean when tradition, in this case Breton Fest Noz Dance/Musical culture and Salish txwəlšucid Language, get passed on in digital space? How do languages of English and French have colonial/capitalist concepts written into them, and how can this violence be rectified? When will America be worthy of its founding ideals? Can white people admit failure, and actualize healing by articulating our white supremacy?
But I only got to the Crete/Tourism inquiry. Otherwise this letter would have been way too long. But… Melanie… this newsletter IS way too long. Like, the entirety of it won't even fit in the email and I have to click a link at the bottom to see the whole thing! Touché.
The third part of this letter is some writing about Bretagne. It’s a story about a cabbage and a Queen with whom I intermingled in winter.
Disclaimer: There are going to be typos in this newsletter.
Without further ago, let’s get this party commenced. (that’s a direct quote from TV show Dickinson)
PART ONE
Je ne peux plus respirer / I can’t breathe
George Floyd wheatpaste in Brest, France
Here is a potential map of an anti-racism practice based on my own.
Begin by considering the symbolic action of breath in the movement for Black Lives with this podcast featuring Jungian analyst Fannie Brewster. Accompany this with M. NourbeSe Philip’s book Zong. It’s a literary object expressing wordlessness, loss of language, lack of breathe, drowning, and the voices of slaves murdered during the Middle Passage, stilling echo from the Atlantic Ocean in fragments of legalese.
Continue by imagining America begins the moment enslaved people arrive on its shores, in the podcast by Nikole Hannah Jones called 1619. Interrogate the trajectory of Black Life in America. The film Daughters of the Dust, the first person accounts of the Slave Narratives , Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, this documentary from 1968 about the heritage of slavery following Emancipation, the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, this documentary about the life of a young woman in the Watts Section of Los Angeles in the 60s, this industrial film from Budweiser in the 70s which outlines a strategy for marketing malt liquor to Black communities, the Black Panthers documentary by Varda, Martin Luther King’s Beyond Vietnam speech: A Time to Break Silence, Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Fill in the past centuries of American history with what you never learned in school. Learn that the past stays with us re: Jesamyn Ward’s novel Sing Unburied Sing. Know that the above is a non-exhaustive list, but a representation of one white person’s incomplete learning.
Dialogues Bookstore in Brest June 2020 - this major display of books about American racism
vs. selection about French colonialism same store same day.
Turn to music. Listen to this podcast by Wesley Morris about how white appropriation of Black expression is the basis of American popular music. Learn this again and again. Listen when banjoist Rhiannon Giddens says anything (What Folk Music Means...) I have a big vacancy in my mind regarding Black culture and experience throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s and now. I try to bring nuance to my understanding of this time. I’ve started with a book of poetry called I’m so Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On by Kadijah Queen. Or American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. With Cheryl Dunte’s film The Watermelon Woman. With Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's story collection Friday Black. With Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Childish Gambino/Donald Glover’s This is America music video. Donald Glover’s TV show Atlanta. The film Get Out. This Vince Staples music video for Señorita wherein white people are entertained by the pain of People of Color from the protection of their/our own white privilege. I start to decompose my own. To do so, I must stay centered, pull together the energy for the long-haul, and create an anti-racist practice at a pace which is sustainable.
For this, I heed the following words of composer/producer King James Britt (twitter @kingbritt):
To all my black & brown family & our true allies, I wanted to express a few ways of centering yourself in this revolution that we are in.
One - Find a spiritual center. Whatever that may be for you, an altar, church, ritual, but something where you can tune into divine spirit. If we aren’t spiritually centered, we can’t find balance in the fight. It’s also a powerful revolutionary act. You are in full control of.
Two - detach from all of the noise. Social media has been a great tool for exposing the atrocities that are happening to our humanity and culture. But there is so much noise in these feeds which become distractions. Find your 3 favorite information sources and focus on that. Also a few friends you trust as information curators.
Three - do things you love. We can get swept up in the constant fight and forget our joy. Joy is one of the most powerful weapons because it creates contagious vibrations of loving feelings. It also helps keep your spiritual equilibrium.
Four - do what you feel you can do to help in the revolution. Don’t get guilt tripped into feeling you aren’t contributing. Find whatever resonates and feels good to you, to contribute. It could be just calling your friends for support. All forms of contribution count. Only you know your capacity to contribute in a healthy manner.
Five - continue to be your true authentic self. This is why we are here in physical form and is a powerful statement. To continue to be authentic in the eye of the storm. We need to continue to envision positive realness in the midst of the violence.
Six - gain the knowledge, laws, statistical breakdowns of wherever you live, your rights, all of it. The more you know, the less it can used ‘against’ you.
Seven - use your intuition. This is probably the most important of all. This applies to every single action in your life. If you are centered, your intuition is your antenna for what moves you will make at what times. It could be as simple as not walking down a certain street because you sense danger. Trust your gut and don’t always listen to all the advice that is given.
Eight - music. The universal language and vibrational healing. If you create your daily soundtrack to steer your emotions, that is a radical act of self care. Be intentional about your sonic diet. You can shift not only your mood but others as well thru the vibrations you push into the world.
Nine - self defense. With all revolution, there will be violence. You may not be subjected to it but if you are, be prepared. Whatever that looks like for you
Ten - Thank you.
Okay, this is Melanie again. I’m going to keep giving my suggestions for things to read and think about. With this newsletter and any other information you’re coming into contact with, don’t forget to breathe. Take in as much as you can at a time. Ignore what I write completely if needed. What I glean from King James Britt’s words above are to take care of my mental health, my spiritual state, so as to stay strongest in times of struggle.
Recommencing.
Listen to Code Switch podcast episode Why Now, White People? Do not let this revolutionary moment be a trend. It has all the hallmarks of a trend. Find others to hold you accountable in the process of dismantling white supremacy. Hold them accountable too. (Code Switch also just released an episode on Karens)
Read Peggy Mcintosh's list of 50 examples of white privilege. Read them aloud and with family and friends. Purchase Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy workbook. Do it. Take a break from it. Start again. Encounter the extensive world of google documents available to all: Scaffolded anti-racism resource guide, resources for anti-racist parenting, policing alternative resources, and this Black Lives Matter master document. If the phrase Black Lives Matter makes you uncomfortable- ask why that could ever possibly be true. Why would that statement ever need to be qualified. Read this piece, written by fellow Fulbrighter Sterling de Sutter Summerville on what allies can do to help the Black community. Check out episodes of Wyatt Cenac's TV show Problem Areas.
Treat Racism Like Covid-19 Protest Sign Guy
Acknowledge the systemic nature of racism/colonialism, embedded in the foundations of America, and especially the American economy. Of France’s too. In the institution of law enforcement. Note the difference in the words systemic and systematic. Educate with the de-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon. Or the episode of 1619 podcast The Economy That Slavery Built. And Ta-Nehesi Coates The Case for Reparations. Figure out how to invest your money and/or time in Black businesses and institutions. Here is an incredible directory of that information by city. Put your money in Black owned banks, eat at Black owned restaurants, buy from Black owned clothing businesses. If you're like me, you dream in beautiful, flowing, colorful clothing. Here is a Black owned resort wear company, and another, and another.
Donate to the organizations propelling the Black Lives Matter Movement. A couple are Black Lives Matter and The Black Visions Collective. Find many more here under the donate tab.
With this video from The Root, come to question the white capacity to digest (Rankine) Black pain, and death, and suffering. Especially in videos of police brutality and killing.
Let's Talk About Race - image by Chris Buck
Know that Blackness is not a monolith. Focus and uplift the beauty, creativity, joy, pleasure and multifaceted richness of Black life. Highlight Black virtuosity, excellence, brilliance, creativity as much if not much more than the narratives which cast Black people as only victims. Introduce Black power, art, and expression into your everyday consumption of media. Know that doing so is an act which subverts history in the most generative of ways. Imagine what it would have been to grow up in a world where few of the characters on TV, in books, in films, in toys looked like me.
Black Power Naps - Image by Avi Avion
Support Black artists, collectives, and projects. A few which come to mind are the Black Power Naps project. Is the artist Rachelle Brown (@reshell-brown) who creates the NUDE events in LA. Is the Cave Canem Poetry Project. Listen, listen, and dance to Zakia Sewell's weekly show Questing W/ Zakia on NTS radio which freaking rules. Appreciate the stand-up comedy of Duclé Sloan.
I remind myself that there is no arrival. The goal is not to be a perfect white person who knows all. That’s not even possible. So I embrace two practices. The capacity for apology, and my own perpetual student-dom. Alishia McCullough lays out this idea:
from Alishia McCullough's '7 Circles of Whiteness' post
This concludes what I have currently culled in a beginning, ever-evolving, anti-racist practice. I’ll now transition into the second part of the newsletter. My life as an artist, writer, musician, stranger, tourist, friend to many, are enabled by the infrastructure of whiteness, affording me things I have not earned.
Readers, please feel free to disregard the next parts of this letter. To give all of your attention to the work of the artists, thinkers, leaders, activists, and causes that are not emanating from me, a white writer musician vacationing in Crete.
PART TWO
The End of Tourism?
Tour Mat. Great for Tourists.
"Who knows the tradition? We do. We own that shit."
-Hari Kunzru, White Tears
I’m in the small village of Sougia (Σούγια) on the south coast in western Crete. At this point, I’ve moved out of where I was living in Brest, vacating to a small room here at the Lotos Seaside Hotel. Though a month-long vacation may seem extravagant, I assure you I am here on business. Someone has to write the ethnography of umbrella shading practices, tanning strategies, moisturization customs, wifi-finding traditions, and various techniques of consuming Cretan olive oil. In addition to these anthropological investigations, I am also researching my own relaxation threshold as I develop a habitus of swimming, piano playing in bar, and consistent vitamin D exposure.
Crete tourism is pretty new. Joni Mitchell is the prototype of Crete tourist. In 1971, she lived in a cave in Matala, not far from this town. During her dulcimer accompanied sojourn, Joni wrote songs that would become the album Blue. On this album, one finds the song Carey, which describes in detail her lifestyle in Matala. The song is a gem of musical ethnography. Joni is my spirit guide right meow. I’m writing songs on the banjo and at the piano in the lotos bar (I guess it’s not capitalized). Originally I wrote it off as a place where retired men go to day drink. But now I’m observing a diverse clientele. It’s like the town’s rec room, and the town is made-up of all the people you might find at a neighborhood block party. The customers cannot be typecast.
I was told by the waiter, who is also an energy healer (He says spraining my left ankle means I have female problems and a lack of self confidence. Great.) that earlier this summer a group of 10 or 20 friends lived at this table for a week. Yes, this table where I write you from. They slept on the bench seats, charged their phones with that lime green power strip, and lived beside this pile of backgammon boards. Other people in Sougia stay in tents and semi-permanent campsites by the cliffs. It’s not unlike Matala in 1971. Except there’s a lot more electronic music coming from bluetooth speakers.
I watched this Crete British travel video from the 60s. We can see here the creation of Crete’s ‘peasant authenticity’ as a consumable tourist thing. I’ve been having a weird nostalgia about a tourism era I never experienced. I guess others are too. Evidenced by this playlist, and this one too. I’ve noticed cool honky tonk buddies displaying appreciation, in a totally non-ironic way, for the early work of Jimmy Buffet. Vacation music. What’s up with it? It articulates a fantasy of place and much as it does a remove from being anywhere real.
The tourist comes as consumer of 1. The vacation experience which supersedes any complications the place may put up against a smooth experience of pleasure and relaxation. And 2. The authenticity experience wherein the tourist encounters the messy stuff that makes the place special. Even if that stuff is performed as spectacle or simulacra.
Reassuring message from a knife store in Chanià. Crete is known for its tradition of knife crafting.
We went on a little jaunt in Bretagne to beautiful tourist trap Post Aven. This year the music and dance events that make Bretagne famous in France for being a place with an authentic culture, are cancelled. The Cercle Celtique groups who dress in traditional Breton costume and perform the dances and songs are on 2020 hiatus. The Festoú Noz and Deiz I was attending in Bretagne went on live stream. This deserves a post/chapter/exposé of its own.
Fest Noz de Confinement on Facebook Live.
Cute Tourist Trap Pont Aven... How do you wear a mask at a restaurant?
Authentic Breton-ness in Pont Aven is limited to what can be purchased in the shops. This includes striped shirts, Breton cookies, crepes crepes and more crepes, cider, raincoats, and butter. I spent a lot of time looking at a rack of greeting cards which cast the Breton people as backwards, old-fashioned, janky people. In the cards, rotund women in full traditional Breton wear including decorative coifs navigate a cartoon world of tractors, crass sexual innuendo, barn animals, and remove from modern technology. It’s like Bretons are to France what Hillbillies are to America. Also maybe what indigenous people are to America. What does the tourist to Bretagne want to experience? What do they get instead? We got an experience of an abandoned go-kart rink.
Abandoned Go-Kart Rink near Pont Aven Bretagne
Photographing the Breton Flag in Go-Kart Rink - image by duskin drum
In any case, the regional expressions of a place are smoothed over and made less powerful because of mass tourism to the region. The tourists, in seeking to experience “the real thing” are complicit in its erasure. A tourist returns a decade later to find the quaint eccentricities they loved there are no longer there. This leads to a bad case of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’. A new friend, honky tonk singer and anthropologist Kristina Jacobsen tipped me off to this concept. She’s doing cool work in Sardegna, collaborating with traditional singers and players there. The Sards too have had to protect their language and traditions from same-making effects of mass tourism. Blink and the complex-awe-inducing-terrain-of-mystery-and-meaning-you-know-as-home will become just another Italian island with good photo opportunities.
case n' point. Chanià Old Town.
Vasso at the bakery here in Sougia estimates that tourism is down by 50% this year. Michele at the Cafe Santa Irene tells me that if people don’t start showing up, some of the business owners are going to… [pantomimes gun to head]. Crete has had thousands of years of shifting rulership. There have been many seasons of vibe here. Scholar and boyfriend duskin calls what we are living in the Season of Petroleum. I believe that contained within the Season of Petroleum is the Month of Mass Tourism. That month is probably also July, and we are probably also at the end of it. Sorry about this newsletter being a month late. Happy summer solstice.
The corona confinement moment represents a clear rupture in the Month of Mass Tourism. The ease of movement afforded by cheap fuel for planes, trains, and automobiles is a thing of the past. The dream of making seamless transitions between metropoles, rural enclaves, and scenic locales is one we collectively are waking from.
Crete is refreshingly messy. France is formulaic as fuck. America is chaos. My expatriated uncle told me in all seriousness to apply for asylum. Around here I say I’m from France first. Originally from the United States- I say that as a follow up. “It’s a war zone over there,” a stranger said to me the other day.
Stefanos at the grocery store tells me to move to Sougia. What would I do all day? That’s the thing though, about a small place. It becomes more intricate the longer it is witnessed. Tourism tells us a place is its surface. Through a combination of AirSpace and Millennial Premium Mediocrity, we are supposed to slide in and slide out of travel experiences unscathed, and with formulaic documentation of the experience for social media.
I cracked up the other day watching two teenage female appearing people get their younger brother appearing person to take “hot bikini beach photos”TM for them. Returning the favor, the young women took a video of the brother dabbing. I think for TikTok. I note that the process of procuring content is never equivalent to what that content conveys as is happening. More likely getting the content involved the coercion of siblings/girlfriends/grandparents/friends/strangers into photo taking.
A menu in Sougia
I was at the Anchorage restaurant last night paying close attention to the songs playing. I asked the waitstaff about them.
This is a revolutionary song, says Costas. For what revolution? I ask. There was never a revolution in Greece. He says. The songs are like a stockpile for when the real thing happens.
Then a song about labor.
Then a song by a woman whose voice sounds like a man.
Is this Rebetiko music? Yes.
But this one is a Cretan song from a place close by here, in the mountains I drove through to get to Sougia. There were two families, Jason says, and a vendetta between them. The song talks about the arrival of a cool, clear February morning. On this morning one family will attack the other family. Leaving “children without mothers, wives without husbands”. Hundreds were killed in this feud over the generations. Over what? I ask. The same usual thing. Someone stole someone else’s sheep. Then it just escalated? Yep.
Jason has a friend from one of the families who is best friends with a guy from the other.
Surely they know the history?
Yeah but they don’t care. It’s over now and no one cares.
Another guy at the table is camping down the beach. Do you work here? I ask. No, I’m a client. He says. The client/camper is happy because it’s not too busy in Sougia this year. He can camp longer. But sometimes, there is a bit of trouble with the police. It’s illegal, the camping? I ask. What, it’s legal in your country? No. It’s not the town that gives a shit, he says, but police who come in once in a while and make people move who are too near the riverbed.
The riverbed is dry. I put my hand to it on the new moon and feel the moisture below the sand. The shadows of two cats pass by. There are the outlines of cement infrastructural implements on the banks. Around here somewhere are Roman ruins. I’ve only strolled down here at night. Each time I’ve gotten a feeling to turn around.
This place does not feel dangerous though, overall. Already I know the names of enough people that if I was in danger in any place, I could call out to one or two of them.
The shipment truck pulls in front of the bakery. Mythos beers, Amstel light, kegs, Coca Cola, and six packs of liters of Samaria bottled water. So many bottles.
My first night, I go to the Santa Irene Cafe and I ask if its okay to drink from the tap. Michele, bar owner, says, yes, of course, he’s been drinking it his whole life, now he’s 57. Sure, he drinks the bottled water now, but only because it’s around. You know what’s in the bottled water? Formaldehyde he says. The same thing they put in a corpse.
The water is dead. He says this not about the bottled water but about the ocean, the Libyan Sea which once provided the commerce this place operated on. When I am at the Mediterranean, the consciousness of refugees crossing the water, sometimes drowning and sometimes arriving, is always with me. The disparity between my pleasure and the fact of this horror, this humanitarian crisis, is with me. I don’t know what to say about it more than this. I imagine these people every time I swim.
High tourist season 2020, Sougia, Crete
When the first campers came here fifty years ago, says the client/camper, this place was nothing. It was a place where two families fished and brought the animals down to (The feuding families???). All there was on the beach was a little dock and storage facility. The first tourists were full on camping hippies. (Joni? Is that you???)
The tap water is calcium rich. If you drink it, you will become a statue from within, says another man in the bar. By contrast, raki liquor is referred to as “Covid-Killer” by Costas.
The virus has not come to Crete, but as tourism returns this summer, there will be cases. All the locals I talk to know and accept this. I was swabbed on the tongue in the Heraklion airport. A gust of wind blew the paperwork corresponding with the test tubes onto the floor. I went to help pick them up and passed them back to the man in the hazmat suit, maybe in the wrong order. Outside of the airport, masks were in mild abundance. In Heraklion proper, there were even less. Now here in Sougia, they dangle from the ears of some waiters, bartenders, and vendors. No tourist or off-duty local wears one.
I wonder how much of the “casual, haphazard” narrative I am imposing on this place. Coming from France, the differences in social protocols are striking. The camper/client is unloading raki into a glass. He’s drinking it like water. Also next to him is a bottle of red wine he drinks from. Which do you prefer, I ask, wine or raki?
Raki, this isn’t raki, he says. The clear liquid he’s been drinking like water is water. He’s just put it in the plastic bottle that raki is sold in at the store. See, he says to me, that’s your preconception.
Welcome to Touristland! Old Town Chanià, Crete
A similar thing happened the other day. I was reading the Crete guide book, which described a traditional village day of celebration on the 20th of July. The people at the Santa Irene Cafe said there was a party on Saturday, the 19th, up on the hill above this town. There will be singing and dancing.
An image was conjured in my mind- the traditional summer festival in the rural outskirts of this ancient place. I asked some other people about the party. They affirmed it existed.
The night came and I missed it. A couple days later someone says, I thought we’d see you at the party- where were you? Oh, I got my days mixed up. Vacation, you know? How was it?
It was crazy. He goes on to talk about this event, which was actually the opening of the town’s nightclub for the season. Fortuna is the only nightclub in town. Maybe the tradition is buried in there, but more likely it was my own wishful thinking.
The garbage truck drives by during closing time at Anchorage restaurant. It’s just a regular pick-up truck like those smattered all around Jefferson County, Washington. Jason pops out of the restaurant with garbage bags in his hands, at the ready. This is a synchronized moment. Precipitated by what? He and Costas throw the restaurant’s garbage in the truck. The action takes about ten seconds, then, as quickly as the truck emerged, it drives down the road into the night.
They see the look of awe on my face. How did that happen? How did you know they were coming? “Crete Magic” they all say. Like many tourists, I come with a pre-packaged conception about Crete’s ancient supernaturalness. A waiter Tonya is nice enough to write down the Greek alphabet so I can at least pronounce the things I misconceive.
mmm… tourist products…
Do the old people on the post cards know that they are on post cards? How did the photographer find them? The thing that is similar between all of the faces is that they are wrinkled, tanned, missing teeth, and displaying a friendliness which makes you think that if you ran into them, they would take you into their old stone hovel and share with you their food and drink. Though they are poor, they are generous.
I walk over to a couple teens choosing postcards from the rack. They are going for more general scenic Crete ones, not the faces of the old people. 1 euro a postcard. Did the postcard subjects get any kickback? I think of the anonymous faces dispersed without consent or payment. Walker Evans’ portraits of Sharecroppers. Edward Curtis’ of Indigenous Americans. The horrific practice of lynching postcards. The lady in the postcard is somebody’s γιαγιά. Below each picture is written in script, Authentic Crete.
What does this term, authentic, mean in this context? Authentic in the Month of Mass Tourism means anything that survives in-spite of the world the tourists are coming from. Any practice that is resilient to the future the tourists return to.
mmm… sunset on the era of mass tourism…
Now the world we tourists came from has no form. It is too busy trying to decide what it is to impose itself on other places. This life in Crete for me is my life. It’s the only place I actually live. I’ll leave in a month, but I don’t know what world I’m “coming back to”. How can tourism exist when humans can’t go back home?
The answer lies in there being no back or forth, in time as a construct of capitalism, in possessive verbs in French in English, in America not being worthy of its creed, in Black Lives Mattering, in Indigenous language resurgence, in ending carbon dependence, in colors other than “red or blue”, in all the other stuff I wanted to write to you about. But instead, we’ll pause and shift to another story. Something about traditional music in Bretagne. It all started with a cabbage.
PART THREE
That Most Impervious of Qualities
Marthe Vassallo is one of those figures. Incomprehensibly cool and talented, she carries on the Breton signing tradition with what I identify as European cosmopolitan grace, mixed with an aura of bygone times. Her kind may have been standing on the cliffside, singing a long ballad for the return of a sailor. Not a sailor she loved but one she’d hexed with hydrangea petals and roses in the barnyard, with cidre and blood in the root cellar, or fire and metal at the lighthouse’s apogee. She was the emblem of the Bretange I’d imagined through the internet. Her presence on Youtube was as visceral to me as the moment I actually saw her, at the Saturday market in Vieux Marché, a small village in the Trégor region, where gangsters and cult leaders are said to be hiding out in estates far from the gaze of the world, and where activists for refugee rights in France are also the organizers of Fest Noz events.
I can hear Marthe’s voice even when she is silent and searching through winter vegetables. She reaches for a green cabbage a couple market stalls away from where I am standing, before a glass case of spiced chèvre. I have chosen a ball of cheese caked in turmeric, fennel seeds, and red pepper. As I pay, I turn my head to my coins, trying to decide wether or not to approach her. I turn my head back, and she has disappeared. All that is left of the woman I so dreamed of meeting was a vacancy in the pile of cabbages.
I was brought to this place by an important friend. Gabriel held the cheeses we’d purchased and I turned in the direction of his car. The smoke from chimneys laced the clear morning air. A church of sand colored stone rung 10:30 AM, ringing in yet another weekend of local life. I couldn’t tell Gabriel, a talented fiddler of many traditions, deeply engrained in the Breton music circuit, that I’d caught a glimpse of my hero, and was now wallowing in the tragedy of not having approached her. The words I might have said to Marthe floated in my brain. My regret billowed with the steam from villager’s cups of hot coffee. I cut my losses. Beyond the honey stand was Gabriel’s car, the Citroen which would carry me from the sting of missed opportunity.
“Where are you going?” He said as I walked toward the vehicle. “We have more business in this town.”
From base of my spine to nape of the my neck, I was filled with a sense of enchantment. The air was cold and I was still fragile, having spent the bulk of that month laid up in bed, suffering from the most severe flu that has ever befallen me. Perhaps it came from spending too long on the cliffside in the rain listening to the sound of distant bombard squealing in the harbor. Perhaps I’d caught my malady from the revelers at New Years festivities, from attending Fest Noz after Fest Noz, where the chains of country dancers held me close in rhythm, sweating into the night, warm with cider and the pleasure of company. The lack of food, lack of human contact, and the lack of physical movement endured from the couch had turned me into the kind of thing sensitive to invisible forces. I was the last leaf on a tree in the square, coming unstuck of its branch and floating now to the door of this ramshackle village house where our business was to be carried out.
We walked into this barn-like entry room, where antique furniture and farm equipment were situated in contrast to a stack of many fresh copies of the same magazine. Shoes and boots still warm from their wearers sat aligned next to another door. On the other side of it, I sensed the warmth of family life, peppered with another ingredient. I could taste it. The ephemeral thing which follows the kinds of people whose lives are made for art. There were people nearby whose work schedules do not align with regular business hours. There was a wooden table here in the entry, crooked with age and scarred by coats of paint. Upon it sat a green cabbage.
We entered a long stretch of living space, at the back of which was gathered a kind of council, circled around the woodstove. I passed through the air around me alert, as though every painting, every sculpture, every photograph hanging about the walls whispered yes, and urged me forward.
Her face is the same shape as the moon, yet carved to produce a jaw sharp with shadow. Her skin is like honey poured over parchment whereupon the first songs in the Breton language were scrawled. Around her were grown men paying rapturous attention to her words. They look up and greet us.
One is the owner of this home. He’s the director of a documentary about the Fest Noz, at the moment it became a piece of “immaterial patrimony”. This distinction is given by UNESCO, which keeps track of endangered languages like Breton. I sat by the director as Marthe was speaking. He and I said words to one another in hurried whispers. Each piece of language lingered in the air above the fire a moment and splashed upon him like a squall of rain, to which he responded by bursts of thought in turn. He did not have the vocal cadence of anyone I’d talked to before in this land. Artist! I had the feeling I was conspiring not so much with somebody but with something. There were chickens outside of the window in a courtyard. At one time this place was the home to a farming family. Now posters for the director’s films hang on the thick stone walls. Yet I could imagine him bent to the earth, humble, nurturing the soil outside, just as well as I could see him focused, taking in this world with a digital camera.
The place smelled of sweaters. Wet wool commingled with the steam of hot beverages and I was offered something to drink. In my hushed voice I said yes and introduced myself as writer, whose subject was the oral transmission of musique Bretonne itself. The weight of the room then shifted to envelop me. I was amidst and one of them, part of a covert operation. I’ll call it a resistance, but the threat is invisible. It is silence itself. We operate just under the surface, carrying the old way, through the tall grassed soaked with rain on a moon-drenched night.
The men are important. Along with the film director, I am introduced to the person who runs Dastum Media, which is the online archive of all Breton music recordings. The project started as a magazine at the critical juncture of the early 70s, when the last original speakers were approaching their deaths. Two my left were two professional and powerful instrumentalists. Across from me was a man from Poland, who ran a Breton music and dance association there, and was here to create a film featuring the interview he is now conducting with the queen of all of them.
She speaks in a way where I can imagine, that if elongated, her words would turn to song. She is calm and surrounded by that most impervious of qualities. Rapt attention from a group of men.
I have a hard time focusing on the words she speaks. We have shaken hands and have been formally introduced, but I am of not of the illusion we have connected or that she will remember me. This is not my goal. My goal is to be soaked by this environment. I want to remember everything. Her words crash over my ears as I sip the strong black tea. I rock in the wicker chair and notice a cat on the prowl. The window beyond Marthe’s head reveals the back of the church. We are all but meters away from the altar. I am aware that this has long been a sacred mound of land. Now the council has gathered to protect the thing with no true boundary. It is not God. It is music.
She speaks of a woman who gave her a hard time for having learned a version of a Breton gwerz from a 1990s field recording found on Dastum. She is then talking about a spring fed fountain. These stories go back and forth. She speaks, turning into the Polish man’s microphone. It is hard to catch every word. But she is talking about the limits of acceptable tradition in Breton music. I have already manufactured a belief, having seen her on Youtube, that she is the vanguard of what acceptable evolution of tradition is. Though the Breton music scene is dominated by male musicians, she shines brightest to me. She is neither pop star nor hometown hero. I’d put her age between 35 and 52, but her eyes scream childlike whimsy, and her comportment is that of a wise woman crone.
Marthe finishes a final talking point. The men start to murmur, and the circle is humming with the ideas of these people. I have a hard time accepting that this meeting should be adjourned. For I’ve arrived at the heart of my inquiry. I want to stay forever in the the unnamable core, in this world of tradition bearers, whose shared goal is to be of service to songs and melodies, which, I remind myself, are in French called airs. They are the stuff we breathe.
How will I elongate the morning so as to never make it end? I want to take a picture, or a covert video of the moment. Could I back up to the end of the room and take a shot of the group? No. Too corny. I opted instead to go the bathroom, leaving the company of all of them, and committing as much of the space to memory as possible. In the bathroom I looked over the chickens in strutting int he yard. The plucked away at the earth, scratching it with their talons, creating impressions.
There is something about that day I can’t hold onto no matter how hard I try.
I returned to the living room with desperation on my tongue. If I was smart I would ask her if I could call her and arrange an interview at her home. I should get the contact information for all of these people. By what means could I manufacture this feeling again? The sense of wonder and intrigue brought a lightness to my stomach, which was lately so twisted with flu and angst, because the constant search for comfort, as this comfort which now fades from me, drives me to want to consume the room. With a picture, I could at least prove that it once was like this. That I found the one I sought. She was putting on her coat. These people had places to be. She pulled her dark hair back and it poured over her shoulders like black water over river stones. I am not the customer, I am not the customer. I am the witness, I am the stranger, and I have heard the secrets of an ancient world, refracting through her vocal cords in this special time that she was alive, and I had the fortune of her company.
A badass from history - don't know the origins of this picture. But I found it on my computer right next to this one which was weird:
Melanie at a California Motel, 2014
OUTRO!
Before we part, here’s an announcement. I may or may not have an online birthday party wherein I show 0-3 music videos. I’ll keep ya in the loop. My birthday is August 30th.
Here are a few more recommendations too. Molly Young is a new friend made online who wrote this incredible thing about being in confinement, and has an awesome newsletter with book recommendations. Read the book White Tears by Hari Kunzru. I've been quoting it in the newsletter- it's about 78 collecting and white people stealing Black music. The miniseries on Netflix, Unorthodox, is really freaking good. There is this musical moment that brought me into a state of hysterically crying.
Selfie With Kitty - Chanià, Crete
