After his farewell to Maurice, one that inspired trust in the circumstances, I confided in my new acquaintance my lonely restlessness. The topic arose from pertinence with a natural development unaccustomed to strangers and an effortlessness found next to a streetlight without judgement. I saw myself listening to James’s philosophy of acceptance, unpacked from his untroubled small backpack, during our walk back to the hostel. In the chilled wind that lit the sleeping trees of the hostel’s front courtyard, Le Rhone swam downstream within itself. With the walled city of Avignon at its side, the river watched us, just as a silent gardener would water the greener grass at the centre of the field.
James told me nothing I didn’t already know and nothing with which I didn’t agree. When writing of the evening, a difficulty impedes my typing fingers: I hesitate, backspace, delete and re-write. The presentable dewdrop leaves behind the universe in the attempt to describe its destination. To summarize the enthusiasm of the dirt on the car’s windshield as the natural happening of the nights and days makes no sense as an equal to the listless futility of man’s invention of the windshield wiper. And yet, during the course of that evening, the universe wasn’t left behind and the dirt did make sense. The simple repetition of events is hollow and empty of the infinitude of the evening’s complexities. And still our discussion was nothing if not simple.
James had an authority that I was far from owning. In the sharpness of the night and his speech, he seemed to preach a horrible indifference with an intense, enlivening and well-rehearsed sincerity. At first, I played along with the aloofness of an intellectual interest in diversity. But when he saw diversity, it was not intellectual interest that transformed it into magic and light that he could paint with chirping whistles and imaginary brushes. It was something that lives in the mottled bark of trees, the seam of the corner of a metallic picture frame, the fold of a poorly ironed curtain and the left half of the circumference of a well-cooked pancake. A grand master in the art of paradox and confounding contradiction, James spoke of and with the certainty of simplicity: given a big field, a dog will run around; it will smell the wonder of the grass, the rara avis of the fence post and the cynosure of footprints; it will jump and catch and burry and scratch but…eventually, it will lie down.
James elevated the patience of the river to such heights that it threatened to spill, torrent, plummet and crash. It did and didn’t and mattered and didn’t. Its unashamed importance, its sublime beauty and its humble celebrity were me but never mine. My desire to own his authority was humiliated as if I were slapped in the face on a busy morning in the centre of town, which James was instinctually obliged to provide the next day (seriously, and I laughed it off as you would a ghost story). That morning was ugly and instead of it, in place of the smell of sweet open-door patisseries, sitting in for the romance of France, substituting for space and time themselves and replacing my ridiculously long shoelaces, there could be nothing…Far from the scepticism that denies all existence, the latter is a revelation hidden by forgetfulness and escapism…Stop, man! Look!
On the bank of Le Rhone, James abruptly stood up after a silent twenty minutes of watching the river. I was freezing and sitting on a small travel stool that James had made. You’re leaving.
I stated. Keep the stool,
he replied, pass it on.
I’d find out later he didn’t look back.
Sleepwalking through the streets and gardens of Avignon, dinning and parting with Brynn that evening, the next morning I left for Arles.
