FROM STASIS TO FLUX…

Stage 8 / Monday 4 May / From Vernoux-en-Vivarais to Le Cheylard / 25 km

 

“Monday morning, the emperor, his wife, and the little prince … Came to my home, to shake my hand … Since I had left … etc” Kindly mischievous, this little childhood ditty which comes back to me just as my conscience and I are resuming our walk from Vernoux on this Monday morning! The play on words … Vernoux and “vers nous” (toward us) … has perhaps contributed to my imagining these three important dignitaries coming to meet us … coming … vers nous!

 

Us? Who is us? Yes, it’s me and my conscience, which I tried to rid myself of yesterday—in vain! I am not even sure that I managed to assuage this conscience of mine. But my little song gives impetus, and the cadence of its melody helps me adopt a more serene walking pace. There’s no doubt about it, singing and whistling put me in a good state of mind. And this more frivolous condition soothes the avalanche of questioning which rolled over me the first week of the pilgrimage. Singing at the top of my lungs, I trot down the path which has taken a more westerly direction, in a landscape still a disorderly one, with ups and downs. Valleys follow hills, I plunge and emerge, dreaming about the waves of the ocean, much further to the west.

 

I see myself as a child again, experiencing flux and reflux for the first time on a shoal in Britanny. Such emotions at this spectacle, constantly changing in its detail, and yet always unchangeable in its regularity! I watched the tide rise towards me, admiring the beauty and strength of this nature, previously unknown. And soon my feet, then my pelvis were in the water, and I tested myself against the strength of the waves, with fluctuating success. To keep standing depended on my ability to negotiate the force of this incessant unrolling over which I had little control. One wave was never identical to the preceding one.

 

Similarly, walking up hills and down dales, the flux of scenery comes toward you in vaguely identical but always different waves. This flow of images, sounds, and odors destabilizes your mental state and awakens in you new states of perception, new degrees of consciousness! Reality or fiction? Concrete or virtual? Objective or subjective? How does one qualify the interaction between this wave (the flux), which actively assails you, and the passive representation that one makes of it (the stasis)? Am I the observer or the observed?

 

I resume my dream, there in the west, at the edge of the Atlantic. I imagine myself becoming one of these breakers advancing in the bay. I seek its origin out there, much further out in the ocean, before it comes crashing onto the beach. The farther out the wave is, the more I enter it in thought, inhabiting it. Within its exciting surge, I am not yet bruised by the finality of all life collapsing into the sand of the shore. In imagination, I am myself this swell, coming from nowhere, striped with sea-blue and jade-green, proudly crowned with a foamy spray: I am the emperor nobly advancing day after day, with wife and little prince, without ever believing that this conquering might someday end!

 

“O time, suspend your flight … and you, happy hours, suspend your race!” (Lamartine –The Lake).
In surfing on my wave I’m seizing the moment, and in holding onto the fearless billow I lose track of time: it suddenly seems that there is no limit to my advancing toward the future. Like a boat whose sail is filled with the wind, I believe myself flying and I no longer worry about the past nor the future! This is the joy of total release. I let go and fly who knows where, without having to make the least effort. State of grace! Totally unmerited, for I have not had to row a single stroke!

 

Which is the better choice, stasis or flux? Remain in place grasping the crumbling sand of the beach, submitting to the force of the oncoming waves relentlessly pounding their rough answer every few minutes? Or instead, adventure out to accompany this majestic billow sweeping across the ocean. If living means going forward, if the passage thrills more than confinement, then yes, each swell carrying me away can lead to a beneficial surge. Lamartine’s melancholy state in the same poem, his “spleen” resonates in my memory: “Man has no harbor, time has no shore; it flows, and we pass!”