France Ho!

A few days ago I came back from my voluntary exile in Southern Europe. For many weeks I’ve been hiding myself in a land far far away, in sunny, exotic and inspirational places. I completely closed myself off from “civilisation”. No radio, telephone, internet, newspapers or talking to anybody for a month. I was free from society and its Trojan Horse of mindless babble. This got me involved with ‘natural’ topics, like the colour of shadows, the rationality of a street or the apatite of mosquitoes (what did those animals eat before Man? I’m sure they can’t penetrate the pelt of a beaver or cow). I have travelled seven highways, climbed seven mountains and I read seven books. I made many drawings (178), photographs (740 digital + 4 rolls oldfashioned film photos) and wrote one letter.

So here I sit, repatriated, blond from the sun and filled to the brim with stories to tell and images to expose… and something is stopping me. Perhaps all the stories are blocking each other like a bunch of old tampons in a narrow plumbing system, or, to be a little more graceful: like mighty wildebeasts all trying to get to the other side of the river at the same spot. I can see no great composition emerging from all this material, so I guess there’s no other way than just begin by telling some basic facts for now and wait for the wildebeasts to be unleashed. Pure realism is really not my thing, but in this case a necessary wall onto which the paintings can later be hammered.

Dramatis personæ: just I, your much-beloved, handsome, clever, visionary, hunky, good-to-his-mother, lonesome cowboy & decadent bastard of a narrator. Place of action: after a start in my hometown Hoorn, we almost instantly translocate ourselves to the South of France. It was 6pm on a typical Friday when I waved goodbye to my house (it never waves back) and boarded the blue 1998 Peugeot 106, licence plate number SR-RX-40; leaking a little oil, the passenger door closes badly, the cassette player is broken and the axes produce a distinct rattling noise when cornering, but otherwise it’s in pretty good nick. (Let one be precise.) In the (nameless) car I had my little fold-in bicycle (named Bliss), my beautiful tent (later to be christened Le Château Rêve, and later still Circus Tinus), ten books, drawing material and a lot of doubts (known as Demons & Dreams). The only thing I had forgotten was a corkscrew.

These facts are as boring as fat free yogurt… Hurry! Hurry! It was the third time I saw my beloved Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne’s stomping ground and heart of the Provence region. I aimlessly walked around in the city, the museums and in the unsurpassable nature. I climbed the mountain, Mount Sainte-Victoire, in the rain, I went through the valleys in blazing sun. I cooked, I camped, I read, I ate, I drew, I drank, I dreamed. I was loving nature, I had fits of laughter, I sat with the bums, I mingled with the chic, I thought about the troubles at my work and my lost friends, I had nightmares.

One day, it was time to leave Aix. I decided I needed to go see Nice on the coast again and be in its delightful and ridiculous surroundings. Yes, this was a goal! I zoomed to Nice driving 100 miles an hour and playing 'Radio Côte d’Azur'. When it came on my tuner, I fell into a godallmighty great rock song with an epic guitar solo that went on for at least ten minutes, and I was shouting and slapping my knees and steering wheel and rocking my head. Well, you all know how it is with rock 'n' roll. I tell you… then & there, it was The Greatest Song Ever! Too bad I never heard who it was by. When I reached my destination, “Holidays in the Sun” by the Sex Pistols were on. I was transformed. I was manic, free and happy and stayed so for nine days. Nice is one of the last strongholds for ‘real life’ on that bizarre strip of coast of luxury living, with Monaco in the East and Antibes and Cannes in the West. Nice still has ‘folk’ in it. It is superb. It is alive.

I drove my bicycle a lot, wondered around the cities and museums, swam the refreshing water, made underwater pictures at Antibes and got seriously involved with obsessions and vacation madness (I don’t know how much of this can be disclosed – some things are too private to be vulgarized with realism). Obsessions and madness are good things to have. I pity the indifferent, the bloodless and the sane.

I moved again. To Cassis, a friendly, touristy fishing village near Marseille. I wanted to see for myself why so few people went to this second biggest city of France. When you hear about Marseille, it’s always about organised crime, heroin traffic, highway robbery, right wing extremists and race riots. So… let’s go and check it out, I thought. I can report: Marseille is a fine city. I was neither mugged nor buggered… And this too is a real live city, with original inhabitants, a culture and a pulse. The other attraction of Cassis was the natural area called Les Calanques. That was completely unbelievable and made it into my personal Top Three of Most Beautiful Sights Ever Seen, in no particular order, accompanied by The Autana tepui in Venezuela and the island of Værøy in the Norwegian archipelago the Lofoten. Les Calanques is a series of electric blue sea inlets deep in the stunning, harsh Provencal landscape. It was a magnificent thing to see from above and absolutely sublime to swim in with goggles, for the sea was as clear as a baby’s bottom. It had 15-20 metres of vision. And the laughter and simple, sunny, innocent enjoyment of the many (all French) people ricocheted between the rocks and Love filled the ravine that afternoon. Perhaps one day I will tell the story of the two young women with whom I climbed down to the beach who started to sing a long and beautiful old song about the ill-fated love of a goat herder for a fickel young damsel… or so I imagine, my French is not that good. But this was a moment of sheer Magic and Enchantment and, therefore, it has no place in this account of facts and realism.

I finished this trip with a few days in the Burgundy town called Tournus. “I started out on Burgundy, but soon I hit the harder stuff” the Bard sang. And he was right of course, as he always is, even when he is talking undiluted nonsense. The harder stuff is the coming home. And hard it is. Please forgive me my realism.