…INSTRUMENTED…
Stage 10 / Wednesday 6 May / From Chambonnet to Saint-Front / 20 km
To the song of the cuckoo beginning its spring migration, I set out on the path winding through the forest of chestnut trees, as it did yesterday. The chestnut was an essential food in the past: these trees were crucial for survival in these stony mountains of the Ardèche region. Each tree had its role, each one its destiny in serving a rustic population.
And I, amidst my fellow-humans, don’t I also often serve as an instrument to people more crafty, if not more ruthless than I? Manipulated by others, have I not often “been used” when I was given the impression of “managing!” A poor laborer in the hands of those more powerful, was I a slave to their concerns for enrichment? Victim of this servitude, did I not also contribute to it in using others around me to my advantage? This apparent interweaving seemed to inscribe itself like the thread of an accomplishment which was beyond me; actually, it was a thread of what one could call “social fabric.”
It must be the cuckoo’s song that has turned me toward this reflection. These birds know so well how to take advantage of other birds, laying their eggs in the others’ nests since they don’t know how to build them for themselves! Ah, stroke of luck, right here is such a specimen, a beautiful bird very easily frightened and difficult to observe. He eyes me from head to foot for an instant, then flies away without a sound. Shortly after, the cheeky bird teases me from the opposite slope: “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
Lost in deep thought, I don’t feel like passing a group of three nonchalant lady hikers: they would probably want to have a conversation. Like the solitary cuckoo, I prefer to escape by an intersecting path which will lead to the hillcrest rather than going round. What luck this detour! At the top, I discover an enchanting panorama that I would have missed contemplating if I had stayed on the main path. The three unknown women were the unknowing instruments of the sublime moment I spend admiring the flowering meadows of the Mezenc hilltop. Sometimes, mere instruments do bring some good!
Am I not also, willingly or not, the instrument of subjugation as much as of success for others? Yes, a tool serving a sly willingness to manage actions and feelings, sometimes giving them a negative tone (slavery), sometimes a positive one (success)? Yesterday’s image, that of the sailboat, comes back to me suddenly, but the idea is much less pleasant. Did I think I was at the helm, when in fact it was the ocean that was steering me? It seems that I am at the mercy of forces which push or inspire me, while laughing at my fate as an individual? And there they reappear, rejoicing, these legendary gods of ancient Greece and Rome for whom each humble mortal were only a toy they could play with as they wished! Hidden in the clouds on mount Olympus, they rule my destiny like a bottle on the sea!
What am I saying, “my destiny”? I should say “our destinies”! For like each tree in this forest that surrounds me, I melt into a collective whole, a mass of humans attuned for the pleasure of this superior and omnipotent court. One day a student later a teacher, one day client and later salesman, one day employee and later manager, I am first the handle in order to then become the sharp edge of the ax invented by the mysterious caretakers of this forest. “All have labored to one end, some ignorantly and some unwillingly; all have been blind instruments” in divine hands (Alexis de Tocqueville – De la démocratie en Amérique [Democracy in America])
Okay, I’d better shake myself! It’s I alone who’s walking, my own decision to make this pilgrimage to Santiago! I’m the one who chose this physical effort I’ve been enduring for eight days already. It’s too easy to think of myself as a victim, inexorably submissive to a hypothetical Zeus who, from his burlesque Olympian domain, would have planned my fate in its least details. Aren’t there too many independent lives mixed up all around me, too many possible twists and turns flowing out of the choices of all at every moment, too many possible paths for me to see myself as a marionette manipulated in one setting? I straighten up, ready to confront my destiny as I enter the village of Saint-Front!
