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Bruno Lacombe was born in 1937. An elder’s turn toward, his embrace of, technology is perhaps akin to the fresh perspective of a child: to misunderstand the adult world, and to misuse it, are the precursors to innovation.
Lucien pointed to a building along the square and said the writer Victor Hugo had lived there. He moved his arm so that it made glancing contact with my arm. I didn’t move mine and he didn’t move his. We lay with our arms touching.
After a while he turned toward me and ran his thumb over my face very lightly, and then he kissed me. I kissed back, but with a prim hesitancy. No need to rush this. Let him believe he’s making every move and every decision. Let him be certain he is in control.
He sat up on an elbow and looked at me. I was aware that my hair was fanning out over the grass and that this was the repose of a woman in bed, her hair spread over the pillow, a man above her looking down.
While lurking around Orthodox Williamsburg, I saw large groups of Hasidic men or Hasidic boys. I would see one woman, on the street or on a subway platform, in her shapeless long skirt and her orthopedic shoes, and I wondered if the reason I saw her at all was because she had dibs on the wig that morning.
The shared use of both the housedress by old French matrons and the wig by young Hasidic women keeps the riot potential down, making it so that these women have to emerge single file, or rather, one at a time.
If I witness an army of women in housedresses occupying town squares or breaking shopwindows with their rolling pins, I will know I was wrong, and I’ll be amused to have been wrong, but those are scenes I have yet to see.
lol
She was in her seventies. Old people should not drink, but watching her, and these men, their minds partly trained on the level of rosé in their glass, on how much was left in the shared carafe, their awareness of the waiter’s location on the terrace, gauging the degree of his attention to their table and their need of replenished rosé, I had the thought these people were gorging on joy, as Bruno had described this ancient instinct.
All day long, ambulances and CRS vans pulled up in front of the public beach, sirens blaring, either to intervene in violent altercations or to cause them.
lol
For nine-tenths of human time on earth people went underground. Their symbolic world was formed in part by their activities in caves, by modalities and visions that darkness promised. Then, this all ceased. The underground world was lost to us. The industrial uses of the earth, the digging, fracking, tunneling, are mere plunder and do not count, Bruno said. Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse, also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community. They think, I’ll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death. But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.
i do like this
A little background here, Bruno said, is important to understand: For thirty years the peasants had been conscripted by the nobility to fight the religious wars. For a peasant who had never strayed more than a half day’s walk from where he was born, these wars were abstract, wars he was told he must die for and also must pay for, whether through taxation or extortion or land seizure. This situation and its discontents partly explains how it was that peasants and Cagots, historical enemies, suddenly conspired and came together to attack the nobles.
Peasants had targeted the Cagots for generations, and so this collusion between Cagot and peasant was shocking. It was as if, Bruno said, the poor white overseer and the Black man forced into chattel slavery had colluded against plantation owners in the American South, as if the poor white overseer all at once discarded his racial superiority, recognizing it as a dirty prize and little more, for his own servitude.
“Does this ship take passengers,” Vito and I would say to each other, in emulation of Monica Vitti in Red Desert, a despairing housewife clutching her coat, looking for an escape from her neurosis. Does this ship take passengers? she asks a sailor from a docked boat. There is no vessel that can remedy what ails her, but the sailor cannot understand her question, doesn’t speak Italian, and responds in untranslated Turkish.
The banner photo on grown-up Franck’s Facebook page was of a race car. It would be acceptable to me in the what-became-of-Franck genre if he were a race car driver. But this was a commercial photo, an advertisement for Lamborghini, a make whose broad fan base has never owned and will never own actual Lamborghinis. Lamborghini fans own a poster or calendar. They have a T-shirt.
Franck had thirty-one Facebook friends. His interests and hobbies included Nescafé, Burger King, and a Facebook group called I Love My Daughter. Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable.
But what did I expect? As he had made clear on film—it was all there in the record—Franck’s plan for adulthood had been: go to work, come home, shower, eat your dinner, watch TV, fuck your wife, go to sleep, and the next day, do it all over. Work, eat, fuck, sleep, over and over and over.
Grown-up Franck is driving an Amazon delivery van right now, in his Lamborghini baseball cap.
oof
“ ‘You’re always talking about your status, your role, the part you played,’ they tell me. ‘Victories aren’t about credit,’ they say. By Pascal’s rules, everything must be an invisible ‘we.’ Well, you know what, Pascal, some of us were born an invisible ‘we.’ Some of us are from a nameless nothing, and we want a name. When you’re one of six mouths to feed and your parents can no longer work because their bodies are broken from labor and stress, you want a name and a place and respect, as part of a movement. Pff. Renouncing individuality, that’s for rich kids. Pascal can go ahead and get rid of himself. But me, thanks, I’ll stay me!