…STAMMERING…
Stage 38 / Wednesday 3 June / From Aurensan to Arzacq-Arraziguet / 27 km
In studying the map for my itinerary on for today’s stage, I notice that I’m going to touch three departments: I’m going to leave the Gers, then cross a bit of the southeast point of the Landes, and next ente the Atlantic-Pyrenees from the Northwest. This reminds me of primary school where they tried to teach us to recite by heart the list of French departments! The teacher asked the older kids to help the younger ones to recite their list. What childish stammering in our rural school’s big class in those days!
Why do adults want so much to imprint certain knowledge on children? It is so difficult between adults and children to communicate on a level of “being” to “being”. Parents too often consider that their first duty toward their offspring is the transmission of knowledge. Shouldn’t the natural relationship with others be rather one of “learning together”? There is such pleasure, for example, in seeing a great-uncle entering into the game of his little 4-or-5-year-old nephew in his discovery of life during a walk. He lets the child marvel at a flower, insect, or stone, and is amazed with him at these other beings or minerals. He gently invites the child not to throw the stone, nor pull off the petals of the flower or the butterfly’s wings … Why destroy the beauty?
I remember the enthusiasm which happened in France in 2002-2003 when Nicolas Philibert’s film “To Be and To Have” [Être ou avoir] appeared. It was a moving documentary on the transmission of knowledge in a rural school in Auvergne, similar to what I had known in my youth in the Alps. The teacher George Lopez does not make the mistake of assuming as known what the other has the right to ignore, nor to assume that what he tries to explain has been understood. He treats Jojo and Marie (aged 4) with the same gentleness and respect that he gives to Julien (10) or Nathalie (11) without enclosing himself behind the mask of “the one who knows,” but on the contrary showing himself as “the one who accompanies.” He makes them discover what is most important in life: “being” rather than “having.”
It seems to me that there are two difficulties in our relationship with others, due to the over-rated quest for knowledge: 1) making the other an object—trying to categorize, to classify in a certain drawer based on what communication with him can bring: very useful, useful, of little use, useless! 2) the incompleteness of language – words exchanged have different meanings for one and another, to the extent that confusion and misunderstandings abound. Notice how adults pass each other in the street carefully avoiding eye contact, while young children who can barely speak observe each other carefully from their strollers!
Confusion based on words is so easy: thus, the term “partisan” is opposed to the word “enemy,” and yet in the end these two words mean the same thing in the expression “partisan, or enemy, of the least effort” (i.e. neither side favors an effort.) What an etymological haze in “Lucifer, the light-bearer”, in “hurly-burly [tohu-bohu], originally desert and void, therefore a place of silence,” in “chastity, sign of opening, not abstinence,” because chaste spouses envisage their union essentially as manifesting hope in the opening of a new life, very much beyond an egoistic satisfaction!
There is also much haziness in the concepts supposedly revealed by very common words: time, space, one, real, possible. We have felt it all along my long reflections in some of the preceding stages. It’s even worse with more abstract words: love, thought, spirit, etc. Science itself is often obliged, for lack of a satisfactory word, to give an account of certain realities in negative terms: indivisible particle, inseparable corpuscle, uncountable infinity, etc. All that can be expressed can never exhaust a truth, never fully explain: my best enemies are my words, and my worst friends are also words!
This tends to confirm that ordinary language is more apt to describe “the Reverse” (naturally) visible in the world, than “the Right side” which remains (supernaturally) invisible. From whence the very strong emotional surge which emanates from the word “God,” weighed down by all the imagination we try to attribute to Him or that we refuse to attribute to Him … This explains the very great research in forms of communion with our fellow-men through channels other than our language which is so full of fuzzy and deforming screens: we can commune deeply by the intention or emotion arising from a work of art — painting, sculpture, music — which are in fact tools of communication. Unfortunately they often give rise to so much money trafficking, so many “haves” when they were destined only for “being”!
I also notice how much, in my conversation with others, I often learn more from the other by what is not said — the look, gestures, body language, tone of voice — than by what is spoken. Body language is demonstrated so well by dancing, where movement is added to sight and sound (and why not smell in certain cases!) to signify attraction or repulsion, quite real and finally no doubt potentially less dangerous than verbal exchanges: one can always leave the dance floor discreetly, alone (if not in agreement), or together (if of one accord!) Remember the meeting of Tony and Maria on the dance floor in West Side Story, the mythic film on the theme of Romeo and Juliette, with that captivating music of Leonard Bernstein and choreography of Jerome Robbins.
Like the dance, many other cultural forms try to explore ways of more direct relationships. I can cite sports, meditation, and why not add this pedagogical reality: the pilgrimage! Did this not draw me closer to my friend and author Guy Trainar, and in an absolutely unexpected way? Could I have anticipated this when I left for Compostela ten years ago, that I would seek to stammer in reply to what he had imagined in using the storyboard of my stages then as the means of structuring his book?
In another register, it is always good to question if the religious inspirations and aspirations, which preach the love one’s neighbor and fraternity, are sufficiently adapted by their rites to obtain the effective adhesion of those they seek to touch! The intention is good, but aren’t there mishaps in the realization? A mass of people give the ritual Sunday mass a miss because they find it more a mess than a must! … Now, in truth, this is not always the case, fortunately!
Is there an ineffable place, secret and mysterious, where all source of incommunicability from being to being will be abolished? I arrive in Arzacq-Arraziguet, and I stammer trying to pronounce this name. Will I find in this town of Béarn a new light on the “Right side” which intrigues me? In any case, I will regale my “Reverse side” this evening with a good thick cabbage soup … something to “dis-cover” and which will help me “re-cover!”
