by Mike

Last night we went into the allee (it’s an alley of trees) to take some pictures from inside. Azure said that with two people there it wouldn’t be as frightening so she offered to chaperon me. When she was there it wasn’t as terrifying as it was when I’m alone, in fact it seemed a little silly to be so afraid. We took some nice pictures then started walking back toward the chateau.

I decided I wanted to take a few more pictures but I didn’t want Azure to be bored, so I said she could go back inside since we were so close to the driveway and I was over my fear. Well, that was a bad idea. She went to do some emailing and when I clicked the first shutter for a long exposure (Click, 1, 2, 3, 4….) the night started growing larger and I felt like little eyes were watching me. I heard noises like a tin can being swept in the forest and another bird took off and my heart went from 70 to 150 bpm in a flash. So I ran out of the allee and when I was finally in the open I set up for another picture. I opened the shutter and counted. I heard a noise in the forest again, but then it got really silent. There are really no good options for night in a forest. You don’t want it to be too quite nor too noisy… I was crouching down for the photo and at that moment there was a loud splash behind me that seemed to be coming at me. I turned and in a moment of completely unplanned instinctual response I literally hissed in the direction of the noise.

I thought, “ok, this shit is getting to me,” so I went back to the chateau and found Azure and we walked briskly back to our room.

by Mike

We’ve lucked out again and found ourselves staying on the grounds of an 11th century chateau near Poitiers – it’s in the middleish of France. Azure’s cousins (hi!) were caretakers here back in 2002 and Azure stayed with them for what’s become a legendary stretch of three months of roaring fires in the medieval fireplace and drinking games and long dinners and various other shenanigans. This year, having nothing to do and no more scooter, we decided to head to the chateau for the end of our trip.

The chateau seems to collect characters, one of whom is Patty, an American ex-ish-pat who’s living on the chateau grounds for now but nothing’s ever really declared here. Where will you live next year? Eh. What did you do for a living back home? It doesn’t really seem to come up. What’s the latest on the financial cri- don’t even think of bringing that here. Here’s one thing I’d love to share about her, though – she collects bones for soup stock. She boils the bones “to nothing” over days, mixing them with lettuce or brandy or whatever’s around and adding water as needed. Her last stock was 72 hours of boiling. We haven’t tasted one yet, but I’ll write about it when we do.

During the days we walk the treed trails on the grounds, we work in the garden, we cook a little lunch, we investigate mysterious buildings on the 50-acre property. The days are great. Night, though, surges onto the place. It paints the windows black, it suffocates flashlights. It squeezes my ribcage until it itches and it makes footsteps sound like faint music. Night sneaks into every empty room, making noises along the way, and waits, and you can hear your breath the whole time. The chateau is enormous, it’s too big for the night.

At dinner Patty talked about the ghosts. There’s one that sits down on the edge of her bed while she’s sleeping, she can feel the impression. Someone else talked about a man in a long coat coming into the room at night and speaking French. Apparently the long coat man has been seen a couple times here – he belongs to the chateau, the story goes. I was wondering what I’d do if I came face-to-face with the man in the long coat one night, too late, maybe too drunk. I’d like to think I’d talk to him and find out what he’s about. But that’s not what I’d do.

After the ghost stories I stayed up to take some night photos of the chateau from the entrance. It was midnight and clear, a moonless night. Here’s how night photos usually go – I click the shutter and start counting. I look up at the stars, I look for other angles I could try, I listen to the night until I get to whatever I’m counting to and then I close the shutter.

Here’s what happened last night on this ancient property: I clicked the shutter and started counting. I was counting to 50. When I got to 10 I heard footsteps in the trees that never materialized into a person. I noticed that the vapor from my breaths wasn’t disappearing and I wondered how many breaths the air could accumulate. When I got to 20 I could sense someone was behind me. I looked over my shoulder into the thick darkness but I kept sensing they were behind me after I’d turned. At 30 my heart was racing and I was taking shallow breaths so I might be able to hear anything coming at me. My ribcage was itching and I was imagining my death. At 40 the tree I was under burst into noise as an owl decided to flee right at that moment. At 50 I closed the shutter, grabbed the camera without looking at the photo and sprinted back to our room where Azure was waiting for me.

So that’s what I’d do if I saw the man in the long coat – I’d sprint.

(this was written on the wall when we got here….)

by Mike

Last night I met some very nice railings in the chateau’s stairwell.

by Mike

Philippe’s grandfather was found dead in the Maquis with his back against a tree and his rifle across his lap. Philippe sat in the position to show us as he retold the story, holding his arms to his chest as if clutching a rifle. “The Gestappo – the Italian police, you know? – they were in the Maquis on a full moon night and saw the light shine on the barrel. When they found him he was dead. Heart attack at 46.”

Philippe shares his grandfather’s passion for guns and hunting, as many men do on this island. A common scene was the Hunter’s Bar in Ota: a bunch of men sat drinking Pastis and looking at guns on a computer or in magazines. They wore camouflage jackets and hats and there were boar’s heads and stuffed birds on the walls. They poured more Pastis and played cards and other hunters came and went, everyone greeting everyone else.

I asked Philippe if he hunts with dogs and he said he doesn’t, he prefers to hunt at night. “Wow, that’s intense,” I said.

In the book we’re reading about Corsica (Granite Island by Dorothy Carrington) there’s a chapter about other night hunters, the Mazzeri. The Mazzeri were improperly baptized individuals who lived in the villages but apart from the people. They had the gift, though, of foretelling death. At night they’d hunt in the fragrant Maquis and kill the first animal that came along – a dog or a boar or whatever. Then they’d roll it onto its back, look in the face and recognize somebody from the area. In the morning they announced the news that the person they saw would die within a year.

Carrington writes that the Mazzeri didn’t actually cause the deaths, rather they interpreted what was sent to them. They were compelled to go into the Maquis to hunt just as the animal was compelled to cross their path. It was Destiny, and their only part was to read it. But she writes that night hunting becomes addictive for some Mazzeri, despite their reluctance to read more deaths.

The closer you look at the tradition of the Mazzeri, the further back you look “into the night of time,” further back even than the megalith builders who inhabited the island thousands of years ago, whose works you can still see and touch, faces carved into upright, human-sized stones. The Mazzeri reflect a people grappling with the basic human activities of hunting and dying at the dawn of cognizance.

When I asked Father Joseph if the megaliths were interesting to visit, I was kinda annoyed by his answer, “Well, they’re ok if you’re interested in rocks and old stuff.” But now that I better understand the historical context I can see why he answered that way. The megaliths (“rocks and old stuff”) were symbols for the beliefs and traditions that Christianity struggled for a thousand years to dislodge. The megalith builders were active on the island since 3000 B.C., while the traditional customs & beliefs lasted from the dawn of cognizance deep into Christianity’s crusade – even up until the Second World War Corsica remained an island writhing in the coils of busy myths. By contrast, Christianity has only been here since about 500 A.D. That means that in the year 3509 A.D, it will still be another 2000 years before Christian beliefs will have been on this island as long as the megalith builder beliefs have been here to now.

A couple weeks ago I wrote to you about touching the stones that ancient people touched and trying to imagine what compelled them to build. I wrote that I hoped “my mind would be refilled with the mind that built those walls” and maybe I’d tap into something fundamental to the human experience that I’m missing now. Only I failed to connect. Obviously I don’t believe I can conjure the minds of the past, I don’t believe in that. But I’m starting to realize that a fundamental piece of human experience that I’m missing is the very instrument that allowed people to communicate with their ancestors – magic.

The disappearance of magic is a symptom of the changed pace of the world. I think that the key to understanding another person’s experience is living the rhythm of their life, and to understand the wall builders I’d have to quit using a car and stop working a job and extract the internet from my body and ignore the media. It would mean living with the seasons and working with my body and living a shorter life but maybe living in constant wonder.

Philippe, stroking the barrel of his gun, said, “This is my dream, realized. I wanted my life to be hunting, guns, motorcycles, cheese, goats.” He didn’t mention his wife and daughter in the next room. “And now I have it.”

We left his house late at night and as we rode home I thought about what it would be like going into the Maquis with a rifle and just sitting and waiting and listening. I thought about what I would feel if I sat still for a night, and what I’d hear if I didn’t talk, and what I’d see if there were no lights, and what I’d sense if time and rhythm slowed to heartbeat and breath. I wondered if Philippe was addicted to night hunting like the Mazzeri and if I could be too.

The scooter pulled through the night to the crest of the hill and from a height that felt like floating, we looked down the spine of Corsica. There were a few towns hidden in folds facing the sea. It felt mythical at that time, and the next night we went back to the same spot to take pictures. I thought about my own dream realized, honestly: traveling with Azure by motorcycle (the scooter has done fine) with a camera and my journal, trying to learn the rhythm of other people’s lives.

In a random little town on Cap Corse there was a random little street whose trees had blue & white Christmas lights. Under the trees were a few old cars and every night we drove by we thought, “we’ve got to take pictures of this.” We finally did last night, here are the results:

That last one was a new technique – I took a long exposure and at the same time zoomed out. Voila.