I’m wondering about programmes like “The weakest link” or these talkshows where people talk in a loose manner and the host is paid to throw in nasty putdowns. Some people defend these shows, by saying something like: “They’re showing something which is also true about human nature”. So, these shows would work like astringents. Those who enjoy them, are suffering from sacharrine overdose, from watching neat Hollywood movies and detective television series. Mainstream Hollywood only deals with mainstream reality. It leaves great wildernesses unexplored – pure greed and nastiness ( “The Weakest Link”), the joy of seeing a starlet being put down in a talk show are just some nearer approaches of these vast prairies.

The mainstream audience is aware something is missing from the stuff it is rationed, which is supposed to represent its tastes. Chips and hamburgers are nice, but it also wants pickles, thousand year eggs, Sichuan pepper. I used to think, with dread, that after decades of being fed the standard stuff, the audience would have been conditioned to like only that ( we are talking about the mainstream audience, the neat big block of the population). Mass production culture was to engender Mass production man. What went wrong with the corporate politburo’s indoctrination programme?

Maybe the fault lies with television itself. It is like a salesman endlessly, 24 hour, 7 day a week wedging its foot in your door. Its grab for people’s attention, which started 60 years ago , has become more and more desperate, with standards reaching new abysses every year. While sinking in the mud, the beast has thrown up to the surface some things which the audience should not have gained access to – odd sensations.

It could also have to do with internet. Through email many people have actually started enjoying expressing themselves in a written form. I remember when I was small, if someone would go to live abroad, his friends would tell him “Well , take care. You know I’m not very good at writing…”. Writing letters was considered bothersome. After two or three awkward attempts, people would fall on to the yearly christmas card. But with email, people do write, and many even enjoy it. Of course, they send each other endless jokes and photos but still, a lot of writing does go on. And that opens new rooms in the brain, it starts enjoying odd turns of the phrase, puns, allusions, bold assertions, what if’s.

Another extraordinary phenomenon: blogs. Who would have thought people , yes, standard issue people, , would regularly put their ruminations and doggerel on the web for the whole world to see ? Instead of just watching Dallas, they would write what they thought of the last episode, and disagree with someone else about it, and discuss the thing over ?

Maybe programmes like Skipe are not so good in this respect. Email is getting out of fashion, blogs could also be in danger. You can just talk yourself silly now. You can even have these making- up conversations with your lover where at first everything one says is followed by a long silences to think and digest and prepare a reply, and after three hours, when everything’s repaired, both are mumbling fervent promises and kissing the phone receiver– and one is in Cleveland and the other in Nauru. It is great for lovers, but it does cut in the woods of written language. SMS also doesn’t work good in this respect because it represents a sort of fast food version of written language, very compact and emphasizing short punchy lines over deeper expressions.

Unless an equilibrium is reached, just like the normal mail has survived the arrival of internet. Except that the mail has become a strictly utilitarian medium, there are not so many love letters anymore. Maybe email will also become increasingly associated with communicating on serious matters, or with people you are not so close to. That will be a loss because people will de-learn all the skills they had acquired in the 1990’s in expressing intimate thoughts in writing.

What about blogs ? Telephone is great for reaching to the people you know, but blogs and discussion forums enable one to meet new people – and the beauty of it is that, unlike cocktails, where you first see a pretty head, and say “hi” and then don’t know what to say next, here you know right away that the other person in the forum is into thai food, which is wonderful if you like this too. The only problem is that you don’t know whether you are talking to a pretty head or to a convict in Sing Sing.

The great battle of our times is about meaning. The more the web is like a school playground at noon, with children playing everywhere, the more hope there is. But if the schoolmaster succeeds in having drill maneuvers at noon, so that children can get physical exercise in the correct manner, instead of wasteful and dangerous playing activities, then we are truly lost. Or if the children themselves, instead of playing around, just sit there fiddling at GameBoys, then we are also lost.

I can’t resist the pleasure of adorning my blog with this gem of French poetry, the last part of Booz Endormi , in La Légende des Siècles by Victor Hugo. The first part is already glorious, there is the description of Booz’s uprightedness ( "il était vêtu de probité et de lin propre", which has entered the language), and his amazement at his dream, of a great tree sprouting up from his tired body ( "Un roi chantait en bas, en haut mourait un Dieu") : "Une race naitrait de moi !" "Quand on est jeune, on a des matins glorieux" " Je suis vieux, Seigneur, et mon âme penche vers le tombeau/ comme un boeuf vers le ruisseau). Dazed by his dream, he does not notice Ruth, his kinswoman, who has come to lie down at his feet, in the hope of being taken as his wife. Then Hugo wraps up of one his greatest poems by an entrancingly beautiful evocation of a nocturnal atmosphere:

"L’ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solenelle
Les anges y volaient sans doute obscurément
Car on voyait passer dans la nuit, par moment,
Quelque chose de bleu qui paraissait une aile

La respiration de Booz qui dormait
Se mêlait au bruit sourd des ruisseaux dans la mousse.
On était dans le mois où la nature est douce
Les collines ayant des lys sur leur sommet

Ruth songeait et Booz dormait; l’herbe était noire;
Les grelots des troupeaux palpitaient vaguement;
Une immense bonté tombait du firmament;
C’était l’heure tranquille où les lions vont boire.

Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth
Les astres émallaient le ciel profond et sombre;
Le croissant fin et clair parmi ces fleurs de l’ombre
Brillait à l’occident, et Ruth se demandait,

Immobile, ouvrant l’oeil à moitié sous les voiles,
Quel dieu, quel moissoneur de l’éternel été
Avait, en s’en allant, négligemment jeté
Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des étoiles"

( from a letter, written in Summer 1999, in Beijing)

Here,life goes on its own sleepy space. Beijing also has been under a heat wave, and looking at old chinese people sitting under the shade fanning themselves made me feel very like I was back in Port Louis. But here it is different, in the sense that I feel a liking for the people, whereas back in Port Louis, I would walk in Chinatown, see the sights, smell its strange smells, a mixture of dust and eucalyptus oil, and taste the food, but it remained a bit alien. Diaspora Chinese are rather distant people. In Mauritius, I’ve had long, close friendships with Creoles and Muslims, I’ve been to their places, gone to church and mosque with them, and generally spent so much time in their company that I can safely say that a little bit of me is Creole and Muslim. But the Chinese kept to themselves. The other day, I was speaking to a sino-mauritian, like we call them, who lives here. I said: "So, you’re from Port Louis. Maybe you know my father’s family, they were from Madame Street, near the pagoda.." She said: "We were very Chinese, in my family…", meaning by that, that they knew only Chinese people.
But here, like I was saying before, it is impossible not to like them after some time. They are a warm, welcoming people, although it takes some time to get used to their crude manners. Most of them look like they are fresh from the villages. Also, the Red Guards crushed the old middle class during the Cultural Revolution, and condemned all forms of bourgeois behaviour. So, the working class lost that elite whose manners they could have taken on. And as for the nouveaux riches who have appeared since the early 80’s, they imitate American manners, which only makes things worse.
Despite the Chinese in mauritius generally being an aloof bunch, still, China was part of that kaleidoscope of cultures I grew in, but as a distant star. My neighbourhood friend was a Muslim, and I remember eating beef once at his place when I was small, which is forbidden for us. The house behind mine was that of a mulatto, who spoke english to her dogs for one week everytime she came back from visiting her son in Australia. China only came to the fore whenever we went to visit my mother’s family in Port Louis.
Port Louis, boiling in its hyper humid bay surrounded by hills was a rather strange, fascinating place for me. I have ever since been using images from my childhood visits there in my writing. But if I could paint, I would have liked to paint a huge, crowded, picture in the naïve style, like the folk painters in Haiti, showing the people of Port Louis, in the 70’s.
In that picture, somwhere near the centre you would have the pot holed streets in the northern part of Port Louis, with afro-hair style creoles hanging around near little tin-and-wood shops. In the 70’s when I was a kid, afro hairdos were in fashion. I was frightened of ,yet fascinated by the creoles in Port Louis loitering near my grandmother’s place, with their huge James Brown heads, open shirts, big gold-plated chains, platform shoes. They radiated sexuality and danger. Their women had short skirts and a defiant come-get-me-if-you-can look. The men flicked a knife at you, gangster-style, if you looked for trouble with them. Then somewhere a bit to the south of the creoles, in the picture, you would see a hindu temple, with a pink dome half hidden by trees. The street where my grandmother lived was almost an indian village, and the temple near her house was a quiet place with a big banyan tree whose trunk was surrounded by the threads tied by people who had made vows ("promesses"), and the priest was an old brahmin who could interprete dreams and cast horoscopes.
My grand mother’s place was also a quiet little house made of iron leaves and wood. Near one of the doorstep, one could see a bit of a old newspaper which had been pasted on a wooden rafter to protect it from rotting. It started with: "The Allied met yesterday in Tehran…" but I don’t remember the rest. My grand parents were pious people, and you could see old hindi books on the shelves and a painting of Krishna bought from the bazaar on the walls, but one room had a different atmosphere. That was S..’s room. He was my mother’s little brother, a bachelor, with bad habits.
That room had pin ups on its walls, beer bottles, an ashtray, and there were always some comic books on the bed, some for children, some for adults. Looking out by the window, I would see my uncle S... squatting by the roadside with the creoles, drinking beer with them. Many of the comic books were westerns. Westerns were in their last days of fashion – Clint Eastwood, especially. The young crowded in the hot moist cinemas in Port Louis to see them. Looking beyond my uncle having his beer, I would see a dry yellow hill – Port Louis is surrounded by a U-shaped chain of hills. That hill was always dry and dusty, and it looked like the canyons in the Westerns. Even now, when I see that hill, I think of cowboys and apaches. So, in my imaginary picture, I would have , to the left of the creoles near their shop, a yellow hill
with Geronimo at its top.
There was another hill, touching the dry one. That one was always very green. It was covered with a thick forest - it received the rains coming from the central plateau of the island. It was rather high, and the clouds often gathered around its summit, which was like a thumb – it is called Montagne Le Pouce. That one, I associated with the war in Vietnam, because in another of the comic books in S...’s room, I once saw american planes flying around jungle covered hills which looked strikingly like Le Pouce.
So, in my picture, you’d have, a bit above my grandmother’s house, a green thumb-like hill with jet planes flying around it, throwing bombs. And, running out of the house by one of its doors, there would be a naked girl hiding her limbs with a bedsheet.
That would be not an allusion to the famous war photo of the little vietnamese girl running naked from the american bombs, but to one visit my mother made to the house, after her parents’ death, where she fell upon a girl whom her brother had brought to his room. She chased her out of the place.
This is a long digression, but I am presenting first the other elements of the picture then I will last talk of China, which comes at the South East of the house.
Further South of the house, coming out of the Hindu temple, you would see a cavadee procession. The cavadee is a feast of penance and vow-taking made in honour of Muruga, the son of Shiva. On that day, the penitent, after having maintained abstinence and vegetarianism for eight days, pierce their chest and arms with little needles to form the pattern of a peacock fanning his tail, the peacock being dear to Muruga, and carry on their back a miniature Muruga temple with a wooden frame covered with flowers on a long procession. My uncle S..., for all his bad boy habits, often carried the cavadee. Let’s follow the penitents.
Coming out of the temple, they lounge the border of the muslim quarter of Port Louis. That is to the left of my grandmother’s house in the picture, and I paint it as a casbah of white little cubes crowding each other, a bit like the old towns in Algeria. Do you remember the story of Naushad and Ayesha I gave you? Ayesha was a surtee, one of the rich trading families from Surat, near Pakistan The surtees are a beautiful people, a handsome mixture of persian, indian and arabic, and if you are walking in the surtee section of the muslim quarter, through which the cavadee procession is presently passing, sometimes a breath-taking beauty from the Arabian nights may pass by you on the street. So, let’s have a languid eyed shaheen (queen) peeking at the procession from the balcony of her opulent house. And notice the little wizened figure with a skullcap observing the procession from the door of the mosque. That’s the mullah, who is carefully looking at the faces of the penitent, to check whether none of the Faithful is indulging in these abominable bhut-parast (idolaters) practices.
And now the procession enters Sun Yat Sen Street. The children of the Middle Kingdom are, appropriately enough, right in the middle of Port Louis, and they look with amusement at the strange procession. The Mauritian chinese are only faintly interested in the other cultures on the island, and that kind of flamboyant penitence – at that stage many in the procession have fallen into a trance and are dancing ecstatically – is not to their taste anyway.
The Chinese. Like I’ve been saying before, they have meant little to me. I have been madly in love with a muslim girl, whose father, incidentally, finances a good part of the running costs of the mosque in front of which the procession passed earlier on, and even if I was jilted, she unintentionally set into motion a chain of events in my life which is still unfolding. It was following the advice of another girl that I once became a journalist. But when it comes to the Chinese, I have only a few stray images.
I remember my mother telling me, one rainy day, in the streets of Port Louis: "Guette enn bonnefemme in mette kabai" ("Look at that old woman. She is wearing the kabai") –effectively, among the passer-bys, I saw a bent old little chinese woman wearing the kabai, the traditional blue shirt-and-trousers worn by chinese peasants. I don’t know if she was carrying the bamboo pole with two baskets hanging at each end, or if my imagination is adding things to my memory.
I also remember, in a very old Chinese shop, a dusty red framed picture of Sun Yat Sen. He was sitting with his back very straight, in an austere setting. It looked very ancient. It reminded of the pictures of Nehru and Gandhi, which you could still see in the waiting room of any old Indian lawyer or doctor in the 70’s in Mauritius.
The idea of dust often came to my mind when I thought of China. Chinese historical films were often filmed in the arid provinces of Shanxi and Kansu, near the desert, since the stories of "old" China often occured in these places. Looking at those places, one had the feeling that China was a drab, dusty land, a bit sad. I haven’t yet been far outside Beijing, so I can’t say if it’s true. The rare old buildings one may see in Beijing, apart from those in the Forbidden City are big grey stoned houses, with the typical horned roofs, military looking in aspect, which goes in well with the rather sad "siberian" looking vegetation in the region – there are lots of pines here, and other severe-looking trees whose name I don’t know , but which all make me think of Russia.
The problem is that, already, I am starting to pick up the regional stereotypes, and stereotypes are hard to get rid of. In this case, l’idée reçue is that North China, where I am, is the "old" China, especially Shanxi province, a bit to the east of Beijing. The North is where the imperial capitals have traditionally being located. It is said to be more intellectual and conservative. These grey buildings do have an austere aspect, with their crenellated walls. It seems like a land of soldiers. Northern India also has that imperial character: a vast plain dotted with forts, castles and ancient battlefields. The North is said to be a bit narcissic: the emblematic image here is that of a chinese soldier in armour standing sentry over the Great Wall.
South China, on the other hand, is a gay tropical country, of great natural beauty. Here in the market we get mangoes and litchis from the South, and they evoke images of sandy beaches, cyclones, tropical jungles, all of which ye may find downe there. The South, with its long tradition of commerce with the rest of the world, is said to be more open to change from outside. The fact that it is where the boom started in the 80’s reinforces the stereotype.

A lazy winding conversation in the beginning of the afternoon

The other day, on a hot sleepy beginning of the afternoon, I was talking with Miss G., our young, and quite pretty, typist cum translator. Beijing was nodding, reminding itself with difficulty that Deng Xiaoping had abolished the old chinese custom of the one o’clock siesta ( but when I phoned Wuhan University, in Hubei Province, to talk to a friend, the girl at the other end of the line said– "Everyone’s sleeping here! We open again at three!", a reminder that Beijing’s imperial edicts are often disregarded by the rest of the country. Just like in India, where a provincial administrator will often quip: "Dilli door hein"- Delhi is far away )
I am reproducing bits of our conversation.
She:- "So did you go to the Fragrant Hills in the weekend?"
Me: -Yes! It was nice!" (actually it was raining. But still it was good to be a little bit out of beijing).
-You took the cable car to the top?"
-No, I walked up. I met a French family on the way. They are in Beijing for a few days, then they are going to Mongolia to do horseriding" Those crazy french.
-Oh! Really!"
-Is it safe there in Mongolia?"
-Of course it is. They are very warm people. But very rough" (coming from a chinese, means they are really very warm and rough)
-Oh. I know little about Mongolia. Do they look like the chinese?"
-Yes, they do (after a bit of reflection) Their skin is less smooth"
-How so?
-It’s a very windy country.."
-When I think of the mongolians, I think of very strong warriors, on horseback.. with moustaches"
-But that was in ancient times. I had mongolian friends at the university. They were good people..and Mongolia was part of China before, during the Yuan and Qin dynasties" now the Yuan were a mongolian dynasty, so it was rather China which was part of Mongolia, but I did not want to offend her by making that correction. Chinese people are terribly sensitive about their country. Which is one more reason why it is extremely difficult to discuss politics with them. Not only would it be dangerous for them, but also they are often too proud to admit to a foreigner that they are unsatisfied with the state of things.
She continued: "So that before, with Mongolia, China was shaped like a cow" I tried to imagine an old Qin dinasty map of China but could only conjure up images of Tintin, of japanese soldiers and of the streets of Shanghai and Kunming as described in an old english travel book I had read in a house boat on the Dal lake in Kashmir, last year, none of which images correspond to the times of the Qin dinasty.
She added: "Now, China is shaped like a rooster" ( the head being Manchuria and the tail being Xinjiang province) and continued "So, people say, the cow is a peaceful animal, which is why China was…" she hesitated.
-Dominated by foreigners?"
-Yes. But the rooster is very.." she looked for the word
-Proud? Likes to fight?"
-Mmmm , yes"
The Chinese have that thing about the "power" of animals, and plants. It is not a coincidence that the chinese horoscope is made up of animals. What she said reminded me of two things. The first one was an article I had read about the golden dragon fish. The dragon fish ( I think that is its name) is a very old species of fish, with no dorsal fin. It has a smooth gliding way of moving in the water, which can be quite hypnotic. The chinese have great respect for it, and can pay millions to get the red or golden variety, which are very rare. The article was about a young man in Hong Kong who had spent a huge fortune to buy a golden dragon fish. It was not for speculation. He said: "I love it. To have it for me is a blessing. I can watch it for hours. I have no doubt that it is a very old and wise fish, and I can feel it giving me protection" The man was not a soulful old chinese, on the contrary he was one of those bland utterly hollow looking young executives .
And the second thing was a little bit of a book I had been leafing through some time last year in a bookshop. It told how one day a great chinese wushu fighting nun ( wushu being what is known in the west, mistakenly, as kung fu) in shaolin, saw a great white heron near her window. She teased it by touching it with the end of her fighting stick. The heron smoothly pushed away the stick with the tip of its wing. Puzzled, she touched it again. The heron broke the stick with its beak. Whereupon, said the book, the Wushu master immediately understood that this was the spirit of a great animal who had come to visit her. She fell down on her knees, and the spirit of the heron entered her body, whereupon she was infused with its power, and became the first master of the Fighting Heron wushu style.
There is a streak of animism, I think, which runs in the Chinese soul. Strange, for such an old civilisation. And yet one more common point they have with the Indians.
-But I thought China looks like a dragon" I said. We looked at a map of China. "Look" I said, pointing to Manchuria – that looks like its mouth, its crest.."
-Yes, a bit"
-You have dragons for the rivers, the mountains, the air ?
-According to legends, dragons are in the water, and in the air. They are especially in the rivers, and in the sea"
-Like in the Chanjiang river ( the YangTseKiang)? So, when there are floods, it would mean the dragon is angry?"
-Especially when there are droughts. People then say, the dragon is burning the earth"
-And Sun Wu Kong ( the Dear Monkey King, much beloved of the Chinese– you remember the story I told you in my previous letter, about Sukumong’s fight against Heaven ) stole the magic stick from the dragon, right?
-Yes ! And he hid it behind his ear"
-Then he and Xuan Zang went to the West (India)…"
-Yes, he and Xuan Zang they went to find books. And they became…Fu " she looked for the word in the dictionary "Buddhas" she finally said. Having acquired merit by finding the books, the Monkey King and Xuan Zang became buddhas.
-But they went through a lot of adventures.."
-Eighty one"
-Oh? Exactly?
-Yes. Because the Chinese say that nine is the greatest number. So when we say 81, that is 9 by 9, that means the maximum. Xuan Zang and Sun Wu Kong were already buddhas when they were coming back from India. They were flying through the clouds. But Xuan Zang said: We have undergone 80 adventures. We have to go through one more, then our merit is complete. So they fell down on the earth, and had one last adventure"
-Oh. Very resolute’
-And in the Forbidden City, there are 999 and a half rooms" meaning, I guess, absolute perfection.
Then the phone rang and it was time to work again.

Les Chinois sont des Français qui ne le savent pas, ou est-ce l’inverse?

As you must have noticed, I have a habit of comparing the Chinese and the Indians. It’s automatic for me, because I’ve always thought of the Chinese as "our neighbours". Despite my mixed feelings about the sino-mauritians, I’ve always had great admiration for the mainland Chinese. I consider them as a brave people, who have always kept their head high through innumerable tragedies. A good many of the things I read about them came to me through the French.
I suspect French intellectuals, especially the right-wing variety, of having a deep fascination for China. De Gaulle certainly had. Both countries have a lot in common. They have a history of high centralisation, heavy bureaucracy and both are now nominally republics, but headed by Presidents who enjoy near monarchical power and prestige. They have a ritual attitude of reverence towards their literature ( the French, when speaking of Chateaubriand or Voltaire, will sometimes make a little bow and say : "comme disent les classiques". Like old chinese quoting Li Bao or Du Fu) and a deep inner conviction in the age-worn superiority of their civilisations. Was it a coincidence that the French sometimes talk of their writers as "les mandarins de la littérature"? And of course, both are stiffly proud of their cuisine.
The other day I was talking to a young Chinese from the bureaucracy who had just returned from a course at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration.
-Et avez vous été en stage en préfecture à la fin de votre cours, Mr H?
-Bien sur, bien sur, cher ami. J’ai travaillé durant deux mois comme adjoint au préfet du Pas de Calais. J’étais là-bas lorsqu’il y eut un accident dans l’euro- tunnel. Comme vous le savez sans doute, le service des pompes à incendie relève, en France, de la Préfecture. Je suis resté dans le tunnel, en compagnie de Monsieur le Préfet, pendant 36 heures, à diriger les opérations de secours. Ce fut fort intéressant".
Fort intéressant, indeed. Who else but the Chinese can instinctively grasp the complexities of French administration…
Both countries were the main land powers in their respective continents, and both are being outshone by countries over which they exercised cultural dominance in the past: Germany and Japan. And better have a good life insurance if you bluntly point that out to a Frenchman or a Chinese.
In this case, are the Japanese the Germans of Asia ? I rather tend to think of them as Asia’s british: stiff, formal, monarchical, looking down their nose at the yahoos on the Continent. But the Japanese have, like the Germans, a classless set of mind, a great tradition of consensus-seeking between syndicates, employers and government. I’m in two minds about their "European nationality" then.
India is the Asian Italy, I’m a bit more sure about that. Both are hot, corrupt, colourful and chaotic peninsulas. Theatrical, overemotional people. From India, buddhist monks spread the faith all over Asia, and from Rome , Christianity reached the farthest reaches of Europe.
About Spain, I would think of Indonesia, although Philippines has obvious credentials for that sobriquet. The Indonesians are a macho people, a bit death-seeking. The Koreans are the Dutch, a medium-sized, sea-faring nation. They have a family air with the Japanese, (like the Dutch with the Germans) but they don’t like to be told that, because they have suffered a lot from the Nippons.
Hong Kong is Monaco, a prosperous southern beauty spot living in symbiosis with a hulking China/France. Taiwan is Corsica, but a Corsica where the independentists have won. Rich, bland, boring Singapore is Luxembourg. Nepal is of course Switzerland.
But of course these comparisons have only limited value. The Chinese may have common points with the French, but there is one big difference between the two: the French, for all their hauteur, and streaks of xenophobia, are "condemned" to be a crossroads of cultures and of people, by reason of their prestige and location. In the last two centuries, they have received many migrants from Poland, Russia, Spain, Italy, North and West Africa. In the 30’s France was the second biggest immigrants destination in the world, after the United States. Culturally, Paris has always been a magnet for writers and artists. In the 30’s it was the American writers – Hemingway, Mc Fitzgerald. In the 50’s, the Africans – Césaire, Senghor. And, less well known, Paris has constantly been the home of many american jazzmen who later became famous in the States.
China, on the other hand, has not been blessed with that influx of foreign talent since many centuries, not since Chang’An ( now known as Xian) was the great metropolis of the Tang Dinasty, during China’s Golden Age.
Anyway, I’ve got to end the letter now. Cher ami, the letter you posted me this week should be at my doorstep some time next week, I guess. That will be a nice moment.

( Another letter from Beijing, also in 1999)

I'm listening again to a cd i had bought a few months ago. it's nice how when you listen to a tune you know, it brings back memories of the days when you had heard it for the first time. in the present case, the cd, despite its ghastly title of (i'm respecting the ortograph): "the moon reflected on the 2nd spring. it is the best of music television karaoke collections coppact disc" is actually a cd of classical tunes on the pipa ( a sort of luth). my favourite is "the autumn moon on the han palace", a lovely old melody full of nostalgia, which judging from its title, should be 'bout 1500 years old. it is a very popular tune, but it's not easy to play because, like debussy's "clair de lune", it requires heavy soaking by the performer in the highly romantic, very tender and delicate mood of the piece.another popular tune on that cd is "surrounded in ten directions", one of those melodies you'll hear everywhere in china if you spend a few days here, it's one of the staples of chinese classical music, like beethoven's 9th symphony in the West. It's about the death of a famous warrior at the end of the civil war period which preceded the founding of the han dynasty in the 3rd century bc. It's a tragic and powerful tune, a bit like the death of karna in the mahabharata would have sounded like if it had been put to music. interestingly, in that piece the pipa often sounds like the guitar background in sergio leone's westerns ( by the way, i loved that comment i read the other day about a japanese film where all the actors are intense, introverted types: "the dialogues are sparse words falling like rare dewdrops into a pool of silence, making slow and lengthy rings in it. it is like a Western where all the parts are played by clint eastwood").forget about the syrupy classical tunes they put as background music in chinese restaurants ( at least in mauritius): if that leads you to think that chinese classical music is the docile sort, you're dead wrong. the other day at the san wei bookstore ( a very studentish - chinese translations of derrida, sartre, joyce, proust and the rest on the ground floor - place, the first floor is a bit gauche with its puzzling sculptural hymns to maternity or whatever, but still a very nice hiding place on grey sunday afternoons) i too was tempted, after the first half of a cozy late night concert to conclude that the classical chinese musical heritage was a castrated repertoire of soporific tunes meant as background for the breast fondling afterdinner conversations of emperors with their concubines when suddenly, that evening's performer, a twenty year old guqin player, seemed to have an intuition of my thoughts and she suddenly embarked on the most amazingly brillant, tormented interpretation of a very strange piece, she tore at the strings, a lock of hair escaped from her hairpin and waved across her sweating brow, her eyes flashed wildly and the rather dumbfounded audience, to whom she had seemed up to then to be a slightly plump, not very bright looking, peach perfect product of some starchy conservatory, suddenly found themselves listening to what sounded like the musical rendition of a hurricane in the south china seas being played by a overpowering passionate woman of stunning beauty. i was chastened, even frightened.

--II--

( Part of an email sent to me by my friend Leonhard, during that same period – I’m sure he won’t mind):

Well then, let me give you Benjamin's code to begin with once I have the
book with me. It is really a beautiful insight into someone else's mind
to have their motives listed up so conveniently - inconveniently only for
Fouche's police, whom Constant in true French romantic cloak-and-dagger
style seems to have feared rather more dramatically than was perhaps necessary.
Nor was he in fact particularly good at tricking them, for while it may be a
clever idea to write your journal in cyphers, there is not much of a point
in doing so if then, for fear of forgetting the - fairly elaborate - code
yourself, you actually note it down on a page of the very diary. After
using this system for 3 years, in 1808 he must have got tired of it and
instead began to write the French text in greek characters, before finally
under the restauration he got so worried that he packed off the whole set
of diaries, gave them to a reliable swiss banker, immediately afterwards
forgot that man's name and never saw them again. Only when after his death
his heirs announced publication of his Oeuvres did the forgotten banker's
family remember the little treasure they held and sent it back to Paris -
to the benefit of, entr'autres, J. Christopher Herold from whose classic
life of Mme de Stael the following is taken. "The Code tells more of
Benjamin than anything else could in so little space:
1 Physical [i.e., sexual] pleasure.
2 Desire to break my eternal chain [with Mme de Stael].
3 Reconciliation with this bond, because of memories or a momentary charm.
4 Work.
5 Disputes with my father.
6 Tenderness for my father.
7 Travel projects.
8 Mariage projects.
9 Tired of Mrs Lindsay.
10 Sweet memories and revival of love for Mme Lindsay.
11 Irresolution in my projects with regard to Mme du Tertre.
12 Love for Mme du Tertre.
13 Indecision about everything.
14 Plan to settle at Dole [with his father] to break with Biondetta.
15 Plan to settle in Lausanne for the same purpose.
16 Projects for a voyage overseas [i.e., America] (1)
17 Desire to make up with certain enemies [i.e., Napoleon].
Numbers 9 and 10 gave Benjamin some slight trouble during his remaining
weeks in Paris. On July 3, after receiving a letter from Germaine which
prompted him to write fourteen 2's in a row, he left for Coppet."

This morning I was writing a short message to someone, and I had at one point, to make a choice between giving the sentence a striking effect, but one which could be somewhat offputting to the receiver, who could feel emotionally unsatisfied by it, and giving it a warmer touch, though losing the aesthetic impact. I chose the beautiful formula, and it did not go down too well with the receiver.
It is the curse of Enoch Powell, who in his famous speech on immigration, said that he saw "rivers of blood" if immigration continued unabated. He was referring to a passage in , I think, the Aenid, where a seer has a vision of a river turning to the colour of blood, as a presage of disaster. Powell, a haughty, brillant man, felt that his audience would understand his allusion, and if they didn’t , well they’d better get themselves an education . Of course, his audience preferred to straight away understand that he meant the rivers would be awash with the blood of civil war. He was termed an extremist and his political career went crashing down.
When you are in love with language, you could forget that apart from its intrinsic beauty it is a tool to talk to people, and the context can ask for platitudes, even outright lying. Even in the most perilous situations, say as a maitre de cérémonies at an occasion crammed with pompous fools, you utter your formulas ( "Thank you for your kind words. You have perfectly well expressed the feelings of all of us here tonight") with such a face and an undertone of irony that you kill the effect and send sniggers across the room. You have sold your soul to the language and you risk a life of solitude in a hut in the woods, amid yellow parchments, trying to transmute plain English into gold.
I am a latecomer to English, it still has the feeling of a foreign language to me and my vocabulary is limited – I keep a dictionary at hand. This morning I checked "tassel" and "brocade". My first love was French. One reason I loved that language was that as a child I used to watch the Reunion island television channel ( Reunion is the island next to ours, and it is a French département), primarily for the Japanese and American cartoons ( dubbed in French). Talk about a complicated world. At some point I picked up, in a box, a mouldy French history primer, which had been my mother’s back in the late 1940’s. On the cover was a pattern of field flowers, acorns and berries, and it said " Sur cette couverture tu vois les fruits et fleurs de la France. La France est ton pays, tu dois l’aimer de tout ton coeur" ( " On this cover you see the fruits and flowers of France. France is your country. You must love it with all your heart"). We were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in what had been a British colony from 1810 to 1968 ( it was a French colony before that). My family was of Indian origin like most of the population. I still remember what I read ( to be recited in your best sonorous voice):
"Alors Clothilde, qui était chrétienne, épousa Clovis, roi des Francs, qui était paien.
Alors Clovis s’en alla guerroyer contre les Alamands, sur le bord du Rhin, mais la bataille était fort rude
Alors Clovis leva les yeux vers le ciel, et s’écria: "Dieu de Clothilde, si tu me donnes cette victoire, je me fais chrétien"
Alors Dieu donna la victoire à la FRANCE"
( Then Clothilde , who was Christian, wed Clovis, king of the Franks, who was a pagan. The Clovis went to war against the Alamanic tribes, on the banks of the Rhine river, but the issue was uncertain. Then Clovis raised his eyes to the sky and shouted: "God of Clothilde, if you grant me victory, I shall make myself a Christian. Then God granted victory to France")
I also remember reading about Attila and Vercingetorix in that primer, which made me sneeze from its dust. Sometimes a silverfish wriggled away urgently, when one turned a page. On the television, they were showing Dallas. In my heart I rooted in for France. I was a bomb at Hindi, at school ( it was taught, but a pass mark was not obligatory to receive a Certificate of Primary Education), though I did learn the alphabet. The teacher laughed at me and said I was a Creole, the other big group in Mauritius. I did not like Bollywood movies, with the crying and dancing, and badly done fight scenes. It was a very televisual patriotism. I liked France, in part because French movies were better than Indian ones, and what I called French movies included Star Wars and Rambo ( dubbed in French in the local cinemas). For example when they showed the Star Trek series, but in the original American English, I watched it but with a feeling of painful struggle- I did not understand the accent, but then I have a difficulty understanding most accents in English, except BBC English. I watched it to look at Mr Spock’s ears, and in the hope of spectacular spaceship fights. But Star Trek was an altogether more cerebral affair than Star Wars and was lost on a kid of my age.
I also liked France because of the childrens’ books , which included Noddy , and the Famous Five ( all in the French versions). It is only recently that I realised that both were famous British children’s literature. It was then that I realised that the policeman in Toytown was a Bobby. I was dismayed, in part because, sometimes, I still have a slight feeling of apprehension when faced with things British. It has to do with the English movies they showed on television, and which my parents insisted I watch to improve my English. It was television versions of Victorian classics, surely very good ( donations from the British Council, probably) but which , to my eyes, featured extremely cold and pale people, clothed in black, in dark wood panelled rooms, and speaking in a tone of perpetual offense. The children looked like miniature adults, which was what children were supposed to look like, in those days.
I also remember picking up "Great Expectations" from a bookshelf when I was about nine. In a black and white illustration, next to the first page, was a drawing of a huge ugly man, strangling a boy, in a cemetery. The first paragraphs of the story said that the boy was named Pip, and that he had been set upon by a runaway prisoner, while passing by a cemetery. "Bring me food tonight" said the prisoner, " or else I shall come to your house, I shall eat your heart, I shall eat your liver".
In the middle of all this dread, I had also managed to understand, from watching French television programmes, that in the eyes of the French, the British were a sort of ironclad people, a race of men dwelling in a wet grey island, living on cold meat and hot water, unbeatable at war, however much one may have the advantage, at the last minute some dogged and implacable energy set into motion in their hearts, by which they eventually won the day. I also picked up the silly notion that British girls had horsy faces and wore dreadful clothes, and was surprised by their loveliness during my only, and short visit to England, a few years ago.
How come I am writing this blog in English then ? I came to love French partly because of Japanese cartoons, and Rambo and Star Wars. I switched to English, a few years ago, partly because I married a Chinese girl. Such is the world we live in. But there were also an undercurrent of interest for English. In the middle of adolescence ( a period, for me, more blurred than childhood, maybe because of its transitions and embarassments) I remember learning by heart poems by Keats and Byron, though it was in Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Proust and Flaubert that the greater part of my affections lay. Still, oddly, it is images from books in English that I remember vividly, as giving me a feeling of the beauty and vigour of the world outside my house, and of wanting to write about it. I remember the beads of sweat on the chest of the black fisherman, coming from a day’s work at the end of "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llossa ( a translation from the Spanish) , and Saleem listening to Tai the one toothed boatman’s fantastic stories, with their narrow Kashmiri boat slowly drawing a big "V" on Dal Lake, in the beginning of "Midnight’s Children" by Salman Rushdie. French literature is grand, but a brown man like me could not help being fascinated by Saleem’s adventures, or by those of the guide, the painter of signs and the talkative man in R.K. Narayan’s novels, and how not to fall at Ms Zadie Smith’s feet ? She is a dream, I have read "On Beauty" at one great gulp, barely stopping to drink water. "White Teeth" is my world, even if I don’t live in London.
English literature – the little I know of it – strikes me with an impression of swarming life, there is so much of it. Just American literature is already a colossus by itself. I remember noticing, when I watched "Apostrophes", the French television literary magazine, how, almost ritually, at one point, one of the ( French) writers had to pay hommage to William Faulkner. I also remember Bernard Pivot launching in a dithyrambic introduction of John Updike, his guest one evening, who went all red at the ears ( I did not know, at the time, who he was).
Then there is India, which keeps beaming out good writers ( in the last few years it was Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and others. Now Anita Desai’s daughter has won the Booker. And Pankaj Mishra looks promising).
And then there is what I am embarassed to call the "rest", because it is so inappropriate, but for want of a better term: Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, which punches way above its weight, Nigeria, Kenya and the rest of Anglophone Africa. And still there’s unplacable writers, like Kazuo Ishiguro.
But a slight problem remains : Mauritius is a French speaking island. English, though the official language, feels like a foreign language here. Also, I sometimes feel the swell of French in me, that extraordinary lyricism of Malraux, whom I read at 16 , an activity which should be forbidden for people below 30. He hits you in the brain like drinking absinth. " Car c’est en Inde que se sont le plus déployées les ailes nocturnes de l’humanité…", don’t ask me to translate that, I am unworthy. Or I see the steeple of the church of Cambray, in Du Coté de chez Swann.
But I guess I’ll have to make do with that. I am happy talking Creole and French in Mauritius, and learning Chinese, slowly, word by word, and reading and writing English, who is like a new girlfriend to me, or like a girl one whom one has married out of reason, though one does like her a lot.