For a long time I used to stay up late in bed writing by the light of an IKEA uplighter lamp — an IVNAR — with a broken foot-controlled dimmer switch. Back then I usually wrote lying down, as do and did a number of famous writers I have read or have wanted to read. Including, apparently, the famous French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And the equally or perhaps even more famous French writer Marcel Proust, whose seven-volume novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, was, for me, from start to finish, a complete waste of time. Don’t judge, this was before the hum. The hum, the hum, and the bed was an UMKAN, also from IKEA, which, as many of you must know, or will know, is a Swedish company, founded by the Swedish industrialist Ingvar Kamprad and named after his initials, IK, E for Elmtaryd, the farm on which he grew up, and A for Agunnaryd, the closest village to the farm (pop. 220), and, more famously, a “ceiling lamp with a 122 cm (!) long rail with 3 metal lampshades in black with brass-coloured inner sides that give a warm, soft light. Perfect to hang over a long table or kitchen island.”
The village of Agunnaryd, actually a country parish, is in the southern Swedish region of Småland. It’s only other notable is Catarina (1792-1857), better known by her nickname Halta-Kajsa (Lame-Kajsa). She was a story teller—ghost stories, mostly, and fairy tales—and the illegitimate daughter of a farmhand by an unknown father, which is why she had no last name.
The lamp is in the lighting department (17) of the Market Hall on level 3.
In the late spring of 1999, my wife and I met Ingvar Kamprad through a mutual friend from Agunnaryd. This was on the Cote d’Azur, on the grounds of his estate winery, Domaine Navicelle. The mutual friend, a descendant of Halta-Kajsa, had organised the rental of the domain’s guesthouse for a May weekend. Our seven-month-year-old son was with us, still in diapers, still unnamed, recently weaned, not yet toddling. I was 38 and my wife was 32. Ingvar Kamprad was 72.
The gîte, the guesthouse, this is how it was described, was actually a bunkhouse used by migrant workers during harvests. The beds, chairs, table, shelves, plates, cups, glasses, duvets, pillows, pillow cases, lamps, bowls, pans, pots, utensils and cutlery were all from IKEA. The banal plurality of these objects makes further description unnecessary — except for the shelves, which were HEJNE storage system shelves in untreated pine, sturdy and strong enough for garages, utility rooms, basements or attics, but not something you’d normally see in the other rooms of a house.
The walls of the guesthouse’s kitchen, bedroom, bathroom (actually a shower room) and garage were lined with them.
This was almost a quarter-century ago. Judging by the very positive reviews recently posted on travel experience websites, the guesthouse and its amenities have improved. But back then, there was, well, for example, there was no toilet paper. Nor was there any washing-up liquid. Nor were there any towels, which was especially surprising, as IKEA prides itself on its “different sizes, colours and styles of bath towels, so you can choose ones that make you happy to have around. Any choice feels good since they’re all soft and absorbent for a drying job done well.”
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.― Marcel Proust
Some backstory is perhaps required. Ingvar Kamprad, whose beds are the loci wherein ten percent of the developed world’s present-day population were conceived, was, at the time of his death in 2018, one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires. Yet he was notoriously frugal. He bought his clothes at flea markets. He reused tea bags. He filled his pockets with condiment packets pilfered from restaurants. He went to the food markets in Provence just before closing time, to get groceries from exhausted merchants at discounted prices.
No surprise, then, that the shelves in his guesthouse were HEJNE storage system shelves. Or that the beds were MYNAL bunk beds, the least expensive beds in the IKEA catalogue. There were four in the bedroom, and two more in the garage. Next to the one that we arbitrarily chose for the three of us to sleep in, someone, a grape picker most likely, had scratched “NAZI ROCK, NAZI” on the wall; I later learned these were lyrics from the chorus of “Nazi Rock”, a song by Serge Gainsbourg on his concept-album Rock Around the Bunker, recorded with a group of English musicians in the Philips Studio in London in 1975.
What follows is a machine translation of the first two verses and the chorus:
Put on your black stockings, guys Adjust your stocking clips well Your garter belts and your corsets Come on, it's gonna get tough We're gonna dance the Yeah, we're gonna dance the (Nazi Rock, Nazi, Nazi Rock, Nazi) Make up your lips, boys With delicate reds Make your mouths bloody Or black or blue if you want
I don't have time for dying. — Ingvar Kamprad
The grounds of the estate, we had been told by the mutual friend, were off limits; but on the first day, we found a patch of thick lush green grass in the sun, out of sight of the main house, where we sat and ate an early dinner of spaghetti bolognese and drank a bottle of the domain’s rosé out of IKEA 365+ drinking glasses. The wine, which we had purchased at the gatehouse, was not very good. A decade later the vines and the chai were converted to the biodynamic agricultural methods of the famous Austrian writer, occultist, philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. These methods, we are told, harvest the cosmic forces in the soil, resulting in fresher, better tasting, non-hangovering wines. But in 1999, the wines on the IKEA domain were made following conventional viticulture methods and practices, including the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and they were insipid. In fact, they were, in my opinion, imbuvable – undrinkable.
The spaghetti required two MOPSIG forks, two GODMIDDAG dinner plates, an IKEA 365+ serving spoon and, finally, a BLANDA BLANK bowl, into which our son repeatedly shoved his chubby little hands, pulling out clutch after clutch of noodles and pawing these directly into his mouth.
This was his first experience with solid food. Thrilled, we refilled our glasses and toasted his progress.
And then we saw the swimming pool.
The mutual friend from Agunnaryd had mentioned it; she had told us we could swim in it and lounge next to it, but only when it was not being used by the inhabitants of the main house.
We went back to the bunkhouse. We were feeling the effects of the wine. We put the dishes in the sink and changed. My wife put a new diaper on our son while I looked for the towels, which were nowhere to be found. Then we went to the pool.
A towel waits patiently for its moment of glory.— IKEA catalogue
A month before, while on holiday in the Périgord with some of my wife’s deacons and disciples, we met a young couple whose three-year-old boy had, six months before, drowned in a swimming pool. The couple were still in shock. We decided on the spot that upon our return to Paris we would enrol our son in a bébé-nageur swimming program. But, as so often happens, other things took precedent, and we forgot. And now here I was, drunk on bad wine, floating on my back in the Domaine de Navicelle pool with my son cradled on my stomach, watching the beads of silicon inside his disposable diaper swell and the tomato sauce on his hands bleed into the chlorinated water.
There seemed to be way too much chlorine in the water. The smell was overpowering. In reality, however, the smell we associate with chlorine, I had learned this just before the trip, is from the chloramines, especially trichloramine, which form when chlorine reacts with the nitrogen-based compounds in sweat, urine, hair, skin, hair products and body lotions.
My wife photographed me holding our son on my stomach as I floated on my back, sniffing the air and thinking about the dead boy and the silicon and the tomato sauce and urine in the water.
It was almost dusk.
The photo has been lost.
And then – this is the part I would have put at the top of the online review — we learned that our mutual friend had been mistaken: she had swimming privileges, as did friends of the Kamprads and of the brand and certain other guests. We, however, did not. As was soon made abundantly clear, for when Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish industrialist who stayed in budget hotels and drove an old Volvo was told by a staff member that the three of us, myself, my wife, and our disposable diapered son, were swimming in his private pool, he immediately left the main house, coughing twice as he descended the steps, and again, louder, three times —this was the moment we became aware of his presence — as he crossed the parking lot to the pool area, whereupon he slammed open the white metal gate, and glared balefully at my son and me in the water and my wife with her camera at the side of the pool. Coughing again, twice, — were these real coughs? I didn’t think so — he walked to the closest MYSINGSÖ sun lounger, kicked off his TÅSJÖN slippers, undid his ROCKÅN bath robe — revealing, under a white paunch that looked peculiarly out of place on his tall, thin, reddish and reedish frame — a second-hand pair of red maillot de bain swim trunks. He coughed again, twice, sat down on the MYSINGSÖ and, in short succession, as if firing warning shots into the air, forcefully emitted wind from his anus three times.
Forcefully? Was it deliberate? Was it performed? At the time, I thought it was designed to provoke a response. So did my wife. We got out of the pool and went to the guesthouse. The next morning, we left the domain.
Today, older, if not wiser — closing in on the age of the old man on the sun lounger and sharing many of his indispositions and afflictions — I am not so sure.
Only those asleep make no mistakes. — Ingvar Kamprad
Like the IVNAR, the UMKAN came with the apartment, which, as is true of many apartments in Paris, was meublé — furnished — when we rented it, and as there were no closets in the apartment and no cave in its basement, and as we had signed the état de lieux — the inventory of the apartment’s fixtures — at the same time that we signed the bail (lease), we couldn’t just replace the lamp or pack it away, any more than we could the UMKAN, the GLOVNAR sofa, the MELLTORP kitchen table or the four SEPKA kitchen chairs.
This was back when we were living in the 18th Arrondissement, not too far from Montmartre, in a working-class neighbourhood made notorious by L'Assommoir (1877), the seventh novel in the famous French writer Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart.
The apartment, our second in Paris and our fourth together, was what the French call a deux pièce. It had a bedroom and a living room, plus the rooms that the French don’t count as rooms — cuisine (kitchen), salle de bain (bathroom but in this case a shower room) and toilette.
The latter, the toilette, which for the French is not a piece of equipment (they call a toilet a cuvette, a bowl) but a room, communicated directly with our kitchen. Such a configuration back then (1992-1995) was illegal; it contravened Article 12 of decree no. 55-194 of October 22, 1955, which codified the general construction rules for residential buildings.1 According to Article 12, French apartments, to be considered décent, had to have an sas, an airlock, a sealed chamber like in a bank entrance or a spacecraft or a submarine — separating the apartment’s lieu d’aisance (water closet), from its pièce à vivre (living room) and/or its cuisine. This could be an entrée (the space next to the front door or vestibule leading to the rooms directly and/or indirectly) or a couloir (an elongated hall, which we call a hallway, passage or corridor), neither of which we had; or it could be a chambre (bedroom), which we did have, and which we had done up like the famous Austrian engineer, philosopher and writer Ludwig Wittgenstein’s room in Cambridge: blue carpet, black trim, yellow walls. Thankfully, the black trim eliminated the IKEA associations. About which, I now realize, I have nothing more to say. Except this: I am sure IK would not have been upset with the results of last week’s general elections in Sweden, which saw the Sweden Democrats, a party founded by neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists, win 20 percent of the popular vote.
These details may seem insignificant, but I assure you they will be of importance later.2
Of course, the idea of space being “taking up” by objects is a question of subjective perspective, not objective truth. Because of the broken foot pedal, the light from the IVNAR could not be dimmed; it gave off very bright cadaverous light, and the loud and mournful and constant buzzing sound it made was impossible to ignore (and in retrospect, not unlike the hum3); whereas, if you sat propped up on the UMKAN or on the GLOVNAR or on one of the SEPKA chairs, with your back to the other IKEA products, you could forget they existed, just as the famous French writer Guy de Maupassant, who loathed even the idea of the shadow of the Eiffel Tower (“an ink stain, the odious umbra of an odious column of bolted metal”), could banish it from his mind by eating his meals on its second floor, as that was the only place in Paris where he couldn’t see it
Tomorrow, we will be cured — Emile Zola
I’ve often wondered whether my lack of taste wasn’t a defence mechanism against my mother’s cooking and my father’s aesthetic pretensions. There. Phrases like that. Utterances at the threshold of meaning. Snags of words lodged in the softest and numbest tissues of the brain. Or the Pope’s maxim at the very top, the Pope who sympathised with Albert Dreyfus (a Jewish French Army officer sentenced to lifelong penal servitude for espionage), but who wrote antisemitic articles in the pages of Civiltà Cattolica and fostered the charge that Jews required human blood for their worship; or the title, or the sub-title; or phrases like this one or the one before, or just words, succotash, smidgen, synapse, Swedish Democrat, thresholds of potential, the limina of the sayable, whatever came into my head. At a certain point, right around here usually but sometimes a little further on, my eyes would close and after I’m not sure how long, it seemed very quick, almost instantaneous, they would open again, and I would find myself face to face with — and half-blinded by — the glare of my Dell laptop (this was in 1993) and the glare of the IVNAR, and astonished to be awake, without having ever been conscious that I was ever actually asleep — awake and fully conscious under the FJÄLLARNIKA duvet in the UMKAN bed next to the buzzing IVNAR uplighter lamp and across from the cheminée, which was a cheminée condamnée, which meant it was sealed up and not serviceable as a fireplace or for any other purpose, except, arguably, for its marble mantelpiece, its manteau de cheminée, which provided the living room with an extra showcasing zone for some of my wife’s prized objets, her beloved tchotchkes, most of which came from Brooklyn and Israel and some of which were valuable, and even interesting; but in reality the mantelpiece served as just another clutter-collecting surface, a place where things — keys, salt and pepper packets, broken bits of crucifixes pilfered from abandoned cemetery plots, a pink piece of coral from the Great Barrier Reef, lighters and ashtrays, empty beer bottles and wine bottles, electricity bills and phone bills, loose change — were dropped and, if possible, forgotten; and at this point I would blurt out, not out loud but to myself — “intrapersonally” as they say in the Church — so as not to awaken my wife, who was and I am sure still is a light sleeper, and very stroppy if awoken unnecessarily: “Was I just asleep?”, and then puzzle over how the words that I thought I had been writing were not actually the words I was actually writing, but words in sentences I had only dreamt I was writing; and then I would realise these so-called only dreamt sentences were no less meaningful or important than their fully conscious counterparts; just of a different order of meaning, and perhaps an even higher order of meaning; and this would make me think of Wittgenstein and his Denkbewegungen, his so-called “thought-movements” or “thought-transitions”, and this would churn me into the wake of another famous Austrian writer, Wittgenstein’s fellow Viennese contemporary, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud; and then I would close the laptop and lower it to the floor, which was covered with books (“a man,” Francois Mitterrand, at the time the President of France, once said, “loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books”), magazines, newspapers, bottles, ashtrays, cigarette packs, matches, lighters, open and unopened mail, wine glasses, candles in candlesticks, clothing, KLEENEX tissues, plates, and other detritus, and turn off the broken IVNAR foot dimmer switch with my hand, and close my eyes, but not fall asleep, not even come close to falling asleep, as my mind was too busy trying to remember what a Denkbewegungen was, and what the id and the ego were, and what their relationship was to the superego, and all the rest of that, while at the same time reviewing the sentences, going back over them over and over again, both versions of them, the real and the dreamt, and my place in them, and their relation to the events of the day and my place in these, and the state of the world, and my place in that, which, at the time, seemed incomprehensible; and it was then that the darker thoughts crowded in, thoughts of sickness and death, thoughts of failure, thoughts of my complete insignificance.
And it was at this point that I would register the earworm.
The first law of history is to assert nothing false and to have no fear of telling the truth. – Pope Leo XII
This was, as parenthetically mentioned above, in 1993, Labour Day to be precise, the first of May, la fête du travail, which that year was marked by the irreparable consequences of an impulsive and, in many people’s opinion, excessive gesture by Pierre Bérégovoy, the just-ousted French Prime Minister, who, after giving the traditional International Workers’ Day speech to his Socialist Party supporters and staff in Nevers — where he was both the elected National Assembly député and the city’s mayor — and handing out sprigs of muguets de mai (lilies of the valley, which the French sell and buy on May Day) and glasses of the local wine (Côte de Nevers Brouilly, 1991) to an assembly of trade union representatives, attended a family lunch, as he did every Saturday, at his little sister’s house in Pougues-les-Eaux. He then drove with his chauffeur and bodyguard to a bicycle race in Parc Roger Salengro, where he gave medals to the first, second and third finishers, shook their hands and the hands of their parents, got back in the car with his chauffeur and bodyguard, and drove to a pleasure-boat marina on the Loire, where he shot the starting pistol for a kayak race and a canoe race, shook the hand of the new manager of the municipal camping grounds just upstream, posed for seven photographs and a short video (now on Youtube) and made two telephone calls; after which, having left his bodyguard at the marina, he had his chauffeur drive him to his favourite weekend walking spot, a towpath next to a footbridge on the poplar-lined right bank of the Canal de la Jonction.
There, after requesting a few minutes alone to make another telephone call, Pierre Bérégovoy, Prime Minister of France under François Mitterrand from April 2, 1992 to March 29, 1993, preceded by Édith Cresson and succeeded by Édouard Balladur, took the bodyguard’s .357 Magnum service revolver out of the glove compartment and slipped it under his coat.
He stepped out of the car into the rain and told the chauffeur, who was smoking a cigarette under a birch tree, to drive back to the camping ground and pick up the bodyguard.
As the car pulled away he walked off into the trees. He waited for the car to disappear entirely. Then he aimed the gun at the ground and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the shot. The force of the recoil. This is happening, this has happened, and yet — and this he found preposterous — I am still in control. Similar thoughts had come to him earlier, in the park, during the bicycle race, triggered by thoughts about the man after whom the park was named, Roger Salengro, the Minister of the Interior during Léon Blum’s first mandate (June 4, 1936 – June 22, 1937), who, slandered by the Royalists, accused relentlessly of being a deserter in the Great War by communists, fascists and antisemites, went back to his apartment in Lille, put his cat in his bedroom, wrote three letters, sealed the door to the kitchen — the same kitchen where, the year before, he had found his wife, slumped over in a chair, face down on the table, dead from cancer, cancer caused by the same calumny that gave his mother inoperable tumours and now drove Roger Salengro to seal the room, make it airtight, and turn on the gas.
In one of the letters, found next to his asphyxiated corpse, these words, which became his epitaph: “If they did not succeed in disgracing me, at least they will bear the responsibility for my death.”
Bérégovoy’s death they will say, Béré’s cowardice they will say, his ears still ringing from the shot, eardrums punctured probably, the baffling torn, just like the baffling in the intercom haut parleur in his apartment in Paris. “If you think it’s too loud you’re too old.” He had seen this on a t-shirt on a girl in the park. The birds now, in the air. He can’t hear the wings, their movement catches his eye and he turns to watch those in the trees and in the water and on the canal banks flap into the air, frightened by the shot, abandoning new nests. Have eggs been laid? This is the week sheep have their tails sliced off, to prevent maggots from infesting their anuses.
He has never liked farms. He has never slept in an IKEA bed. He has never heard the ghost stories of Halta-Kajsa.
The rain, now heavier. No one coming. No one will react, he is alone, there is still time, it can move now in different directions.
The chauffeur and the bodyguard will be back in five minutes.
He takes out his phone. No signal. He sits on the wet ground, on the edge of a ditch in a dark grove behind a thicket of high scrubby grass, and raises the gun to his temple, mechanically, as if in a film or a dream, a gesture tied to nothing, part of nothing, performed by someone else, unimportant, a detail in the corner of the frame. He can smell the irises and the wild blackcurrent, he looks for them, desperate to see their colours, but he can’t locate them. His head, pounding, from the wine, from the shot, from the thoughts. The crumbling stone wall behind him covered with moss. He looks at the trees, focusses on the rain on his face, on his lips. The taste of rainwater. When was the last time he tasted rainwater? Where did the sun go? How did this happen?
The question is this: where does man come from? Where does man go? I resolve it triumphantly by saying: man comes and goes in the night. – Emile Zola
In September 1902, Emile Zola, after whom my eldest daughter is named, whose famous “J’Accuse” article four years before accused President Félix Faure’s government of antisemitism and falsely convicting Alfred Dreyfus, was found dead in his bedroom, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. According to the autopsy report, the death was accidental, due to a faulty chimney.
Two days later, La Libre Parole suggested it was a suicide, as a bottle of chloroformed water was found on Zola’s bedside table: "One would understand that the man, looking at life in his work, felt an irresistible disgust for it."
The Catholic newspaper La Croix wrote, "He did a great deal of harm to France, whose rest and fame he sacrificed to the satisfactions of his formidable pride."
The French government of President Émile Loubet — Félix Fauré had died just over four years into his term of a stroke suffered while his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil, was performing fellatio on him in the Salon Bleu of Élysée Palace — did not send any representatives to his funeral. Albert Dreyfus, recently pardoned by Loubet but not exonerated, was in attendance. The famous French writer Anatole France, during his eulogy, said:
Only grave and serene words should be spoken over a coffin and only signs of calm and harmony should be given. But there is no calm except in justice, no rest except in truth. I am not speaking of philosophical truth, which is the subject of our eternal disputes, but of that moral truth which we can all grasp because it is relative, sensitive, in keeping with our nature and so close to us that a child can touch it with his hand. I will not betray the justice that commands me to praise what is praiseworthy. I will not hide the truth in cowardly silence. And why are we silent? Are they silent, his slanderers? I will say only what needs to be said about this coffin, and I will say all that needs to be said. Let us not pity him for having endured and suffered. Let us envy him. Built on the most prodigious heap of outrages that stupidity, ignorance and wickedness have ever raised, his glory reaches an inaccessible height… his destiny and his heart gave to him the greatest fate: he was a moment of human conscience.
Six years later, on June 4, 1908, the French government of Armand Fallières — Félix Faure having retired from politics at the end of his seven-year term, in 1906, making him the first president of the Third Republic to leave the Élysée Palace after completing a full term — had Zola’s remains transferred to the Pantheon. Alfred Dreyfus was again in attendance. Two years before, he had been definitively rehabilitated by the Court of Cassation, exonerated, decorated with the Legion of Honour and reinstated in the French Army with a promotion to the rank of squadron commander.
Near the end of the ceremony, the infamous French writer, antisemite, royalist, nationalist and militarist Louis Grégori, an admirer of the third famous French writer to be pantheonisé — Victor Hugo — dismayed at the spectacular honours being given Zola, and by the humiliation of the French Army troops forced to participate in a military parade before the ceremony’s guests of honour, which of course included Dreyfus, drew a 8mm pistol and fired two point-blank shots at Dreyfus, hitting him in the arm and forearm.
Grégori was then wrestled to the ground, arrested, and charged with attempted premeditated homicide.
.
In 1928, a ramoneur (chimney sweep) from Sarcelles, a certain Monsieur Z, a member in his youth of the antidreyfusard and nationalist League of Patriots and Les Camelots du Roi, confessed to Zola’s murder, saying he had plugged the chimney flue. The confession was not made public until 1953. In 1978, the chimney sweep’s name was revealed: Henri Buronfosse.
People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything. – Molière
Pierre Bérégovoy’s death was not instantaneous. Nor, by all reliable reports, was it painless, far from it, though the explosive force of the bullet immediately liquefied the front part of his brain. His body, face down, writhed and churned in the damp grass. When the chauffeur and bodyguard returned (five minutes later, just as he had predicted), they found him still face down, moaning softly and muttering unintelligibly about Roger Salengro, whose hand his father had shook. A passerby under a black umbrella, a woman in her 40s out for a walk with a younger woman, perhaps her daughter, gave him CPR. The bodyguard had tried to stop her. “Someone is coming, madame,” he said. “I am going to give him first aid,” she said, pushing past him. She turned Bérégovoy over to reveal his face. His eyeglasses were still on his nose, though skewed. His eyes were open. She saw no exit wound.
There were two soldiers nearby, dressed in civilian clothing, watching the road. There was a woman with them, an elderly woman with a dog.
The ambulance came. Then three sedans and a van.
Soon it was dark.
All the explanations in the world will not justify handing a man's honour, and ultimately his life, to the dogs!— François Mitterand
Pierre Bérégovoy died, without loss of generality, several hours later, in a helicopter parked on the tarmac of the Nevers Hospital, now called the Hospital Pierre-Beregovoy, just in time for the evening news.
Bérégovoy’s hospital. Bérégovoy’s impulsive gesture. Bérégovoy’s death. The evening news. Thoughts of Roger Salengro. Henri Buronfosse. This sort of fey horseshit is why my wife left me in the first place, why all my efforts to articulate my thoughts and experiences fail, why no words I write here are worth writing here, why every page will be discarded or destroyed. Gestures, even these, are actions, events, things that express things, ideas, meanings, feelings, intentions, as solid and stable as any object in the universe. Bérégovoy’s was deliberate, and deliberated, and honourable, as honourable as Lucretia’s or Cato’s, it had nothing to do with the television guignols or the cruel caricatures in Canard Enchaîné, though it was undeniably triggered by intense and insurmountable feelings of dishonour and shame, in turn triggered by campaign slush funds, giant overdrafts, questionable loans and gifts. But it was nevertheless an act of honour. By an honourable man. An honest man, a man of honour, a man who, only 11 months before, as the newly appointed Prime Minister of the Republic, stood before the National Assembly and declared:
I intend to empty the abscess of corruption. If there are cases that are still pending, believe me, they will not be pending anymore. Do you think that I would take responsibility for such remarks before the national representative assembly, which I respect, and before public opinion, if I did not intend to honour all the commitments I make before you? So I ask you, eye to eye, to hear me. As I am a new Prime Minister and a cautious politician, I have here a list here of personalities that I could eventually talk to you about. But I won’t.
A gesture of anguish and a decisive deed, an authentic act of conscience, a pledge of allegiance to a code of moral conduct, to devotion to truth and justice, to civic duty, just as Lucretia’s was when, cruelly raped by the tyrant, she demanded a promise of vengeance from her husband and father — “it is only the body that has been violated,” she told them, “the soul is pure, death shall bear witness to that, but pledge me your solemn word that this violation shall not go unpunished” and then drew a dagger concealed in her dress and stabbed herself through the heart; just as Cato’s was when he ripped open the self-inflicted wound in his belly with his bare hands, pulled out his entrails and threw them to the floor. “If I disappear,” Bérégovoy told a colleague, a few days before, “it would fix it for everyone. A strong new beginning, a founding act that would wash everything away.” And then, here, on this May Day, International Workers' Day, watching the boys pedalling their bicycles, some of whom he had played babyfoot with
in the Maison des Jeunes the weekend before, his thoughts turned to his own youth, and to his own bicycle, and to the time he saw in a car the man that the park was named after, Roger Salengro, the Minister of the Interior in the short-lived Front Populaire government of Léon Blum. Bérégovoy was 11 years old, just awakening to politics, just awakening to deeds of violence, to denigration and slander, for this was 1936, the year the Royalists, members of the Camelots du Roi, attacked Léon Blum in the centre of Paris, in broad daylight, pulled him out of the car he was in by the hair — a 67-year-old man, the same age as Bérégovoy in 1993 but frailer, a man of quiet habits in very poor health — and tried to lynch him, shouting “Au poteau, au poteau, Blum!” and “Death to the Jew” and “We’re going to hang you!” Kicking him to the ground, kicking him in the head, repeatedly, rupturing his temporal artery, leaving him on the ground for dead, covered in blood. During the struggle his hat, a very special broad-brimmed black hat, a gift from the Party, fell to the pavement and was snatched up by the Royalists and taken to their headquarters, where it was put on display in their trophy room.
This was the year before Bérégovoy took his first factory job in Déville-lès-Rouen, a commune on the banks of the Cailly, near Rouen, in Normandy, the northwesternmost region of France.
And then, May Day, 1993, in the late afternoon, Pierre Bérégovoy, who, like Roger Salengro, had given all his life and all his joy to his party, standing in the tall grass among the trembling poplars, looking up at the leaves twinkling silver in the rain, desperate to hear their quivering shimmer, to hear the ducks and the geese on the canal, the wood pigeons bubbling contentedly on the banks, the tractor spreading muck in a nearby field. The type of place, he thinks, remembering the Chekhov of his childhood, that makes you want to sit down and write a ballad.
A flyboat passes. Dutch voices. Off in the distance, the steady tide of weekending cars on the autoroute. What else was he thinking about? He was thinking about the Great Barrier Reef, which he will never see, and what his father had told him, how in Ukraine — his father’s homeland — the poplar is a beautiful woman, a lonely woman, a woman in love. The thought was interrupted by the roar of a TGV, the first thing he hears, and feels, the ground trembling, the world’s fastest train, which set a new record the week before, 511km/h the week before on the new Atlantic line. He had been there, at the Gare de Vendôme, he had caressed the still-warm engine, and then he had gone to confession, for the first time as an adult, for the first time since Confirmation, in the abbey of the Trinity, which holds a tear shed by Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. I hold information that will destroy lives, he told the priest, but will purify the nation.
The TGV shot past. He pulled the trigger, the shot rang out, the birds flew away. Other performances are to be expected, he thought. I am in favour of this, he said to himself, on one condition: that safety does not suffer. This made him think of the Channel Tunnel, a year from completion. He had watched the last tunnel boring machine move into place, a giant burrowing beetle, a mechanical mole. All the machines on the French side were named after women: Brigitte, Europa, Catherine, Virginie, Pascaline, and, the last one, Séverine, the one he watched disappear into the dark shaft, swallowed by the hole. Cutting through the chalk marl. Ten men dead so far. TGV East will go as far as Berlin – this was Chancellor Kohl's wish – and as far as Warsaw and probably as far as Moscow. This will be possible within a generation. Take in everything, he said to himself. The rain on my face, on the gun, beading on the dark oiled steel. The grass under his feet. The fish jumping. The tractor. The bridge. The muguet sprig in his lapel. Another branch of this TGV Est, envisaged and studied by the French and Germans side by side, Europe’s bitterest enemies, will go from Strasbourg to Munich and reach Ukraine. This is undoubtedly the future, he said to himself. A railwayman, always.
But by then he had pulled the trigger and shot himself in the head. The reassembled birds had flown away a second time.
There was no third shot, no magic bullet, no military commandos, no frogmen in the canal. Three days later, standing next to Bérégovoy’s flag-draped coffin in the main square of Nevers, the President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, in the presence of the Bérégovoy family and the top ranks of the French political elite, declared:
He preferred to die rather than endure the affront of doubt. All the explanations in the world will not justify throwing the honour of a man – and, ultimately, his life – to the dogs for the price of his accusers’ double failure to respect the fundamental laws of our Republic, which protect both the dignity and the freedom of each of us. Will the emotion, the sadness, the pain that has been running deep in the popular conscience since the announcement of what happened late Saturday near Nevers, his city, our city, on the banks of a canal where he had often come to enjoy the peace and beauty of things, be the signal from which new ways of confronting each other while respecting each other will give another meaning to political life? I hope so, I ask so, and I make the French people aware of the serious warning that the deliberate death of Pierre Bérégovoy carries with it… I think of these last words of the great writer and scientist Jacques Monod that everyone repeats in himself until the end: “I seek to understand.”
Mitterand himself had thrown him to the dogs. They all had.
Pierre Beregovoy is the first victim of a new culture. In its way, it prefigures a holocaust to come, not one of hate, but one more refined and more modest-of derision… [He] has left of his own accord from a story that was not his. A story that he abandons to us in his last moment of disdain, with a single gesture – becoming thus superior to us all. – François Léotard
The affront of doubt: What had been discussed at the Bérégovoy family lunch that afternoon? Stella and I discussed this the following day in the café down the street. I was at that time estranged from my own family. The idea of them all gathered around a table was preposterous.
Bérégovoy’s father, Adrïan Bérégovoï, was long dead in 1993, as was mine. His mother, Irène, née Baudelin, died in 1991. Mine, Hélène, née Stephenson, was still very much alive. Bérégovoy’s father was an illegal immigrant, just as I was. Adrïan was from the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine, a Tsarist officer, a Cossack, a Menshevik, a White Russian, then a man on the run, desperate to make it to America, to the great city of Chicago or a small town in the prairies — he had read Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis — where he dreamt of being a taxi driver, but he missed his boat, never got beyond Déville-lès-Rouen.
My father was a Canadian Air Force navigator from Swan River, Manitoba, a boreal town near the Saskatchewan border, between the Duck Mountains and the Porcupine Hills.
He was Roman Catholic but had little interest in the church and even less in politics. He sold electric appliances door-to-door. And then went into real estate.
Bérégovoy’s mother had been a barmaid in her parent’s café when she met Adrïan Bérégovoï, who was lodging in a room upstairs. Every morning she would serve him a café au petit sous — coffee with a shot of Calvados. He ate his lunch on a stool at the bar, and usually had a glass or two of wine there after his shift, and ate his dinner there, and stayed behind after, chatting to the barkeep and his wife but especially the daughters, one of whom, Irène, Bérégovoy’s mother-to-be, he married the following year.
When he applied for naturalization, the mayor of Déville-lès-Rouen, with whom he often rough shot partridge, pheasant, snipe and woodcock, wrote, “Bérégovoy is an excellent boy, of irreproachable conduct, of exemplary sobriety, of excellent character. He is a good patriot, and a sincere and fervent republican.”
Adrïan became a French citizen in 1930. He worked as a metalworker, a café-épicerie owner, a pig breeder — until foot-and-mouth disease wiped out his and every other drove in the region — a café owner again somewhere else, a cider maker, and a manual labourer in an industrial weaving factory in Elbeuf. In 1940, the factory was bombed by the Nazis and in the weeks that followed, Adrïan destroyed his lungs clearing the rubble. Pierre, 16, had to quit school and take another factory job, first as a messenger boy, then on the assembly line. He hated the work, hated the repetitive tasks, and was grateful when anti-Jewish laws shut the enterprise. Three months later, he joined the SNCF, France's national state-owned railway company. By this time, Léon Blum was in Buchenwald and weighed 42 kilos. Six months later, Bérégovoy joined the Resistance. Two years later, 80 years ago, the SNCF transported 76,000 French and foreign Jews to extermination camps in 74 trains.
My father was named after Wilfrid Laurier, the seventh prime minister of Canada, who was once was a passenger in my great grandfather’s hansom cab. Adrïan Bérégovoï was named after his grandfather. The name Adrïan comes from the Latin word for “sea” or “water”. Bérégovoï means “the riparian” or “the man from the riverbank” in Ukrainian. Mooney is derived from the Gaelic maoin, meaning “wealth” or “treasure of treasure,” or “the descendent of the wealthy one.”
My mother’s maternal grandfather was Isaac Angel. He was born in Tottenham, London. His parents were Polish. His father was a boot riveter. The family moved to Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, when Isaac was a small boy. There he made the acquaintance of Victor Hugo. Isaac emigrated aboard the SS Great Eastern in 1866. During the voyage the first transatlantic cable was successfully laid on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
The boat docked in Heart's Content, Newfoundland. Isaac secured a position in the cable office.
My mother was a cub reporter for the Halifax News Chronicle. She met my father when he came calling on her roommate. She caught his eye, and then she ironed his shirts, and caught his heart. On their first date (things never quite clicked with the roommate), in the car, on their way to a dance, my father, who had been drinking and playing poker all day and the night before, performed some sort of geste in the back seat of the car that so offended my mother she opened the car door and kicked him to the curb. I am not sure what he did or tried to do. I only know that he attempted to compensate for it by offering her money, perhaps as a joke. It was not the right thing to do. I know this because of the letter he sent her the following day.
January 30th, 1945
Dartmouth, N.S
Dear Helene,
I hope this is not a cowardly thing to do, writing you instead of trying to phone you. Mrs. Twomey assures me that you neither want to see or hear from me again. However, the real reason for this letter is that you may, if only for curiosity’s sake, read it, whereas you probably would never listen to a vocal attempt at apology.
When your car drove away and left me on the curb I was shocked, at least temporarily, into soberness. It is the one clear moment I had that evening. I know that I've never felt more hurt in my life. I've never had anything like that happen to me before. It was like a kick in the face. It was the first time in my life that I have ever been thrown out of a friend's car or house. I distinctly remember leaning against the wall of the drugstore across from the hotel in complete horror. I imagine I resembled a frightened rat which, I suppose, I was. I know I took the bottle I had for the dance and after one drink threw it away.
What happened after that? In fact, what happened after that, when I was in the hotel for a short time, is or was, very hazy, with only partial remembrances here and there. This morning it all seemed a nightmare, but as the day went by I became, as usual, very angry, and until I talked with Christine last night and the boys, Rimmer, Knobby and Shag, who were at the hotel, I had decided that I had been horribly mistreated and had written you off.
When Christine, who as usual knew all about it, enlightened me as to what an absolute boor I had been, I realized for the first time what horrible humiliation and hurt I had inflicted upon you.
I still cannot believe that I did these things, but if you told Christine I did then I must have. I want you to know that they were done in drunkedness (sic) and not meanness or anger. It is beyond all my comprehension how I could be so stupidly drunk as to offer you ten dollars in recompense for a disastrous evening. It doesn't sound like me and I have no recollection of doing it but I knew that I must do something and I believe it was in my mind that you would be home alone and that I must be near you. All I remember and this part may be wrong, was Mrs. Ackhurst coming to the door and saying that I had better go home.
I do not remember anything else of the evening but the boys have told me that I arrived back at the hotel in a horrible state of mind and body with apparently the idea of drinking myself into oblivion. Which I did. They say they told me if I was going to join the party I had better get a girl and it was then that I phoned your place for Bernice (the girl on the Church St). Whether I actually ever phoned her or not I do not know but I ended up by going to sleep, or rather, passing out, and this spoiled their party as well as yours.
They say I was quite alright when I arrived at the hotel and I know I was. They had phoned and asked me to bring a case of beer over, which I did. I remember having two drinks of rye but I apparently had quite a few, straight and quick. I hadn't had a thing to eat all day, only some beer, and two glasses of the rye really hit me. Shag says that I was fine one moment and out on my gourd the next. I certainly must have been.
I can give you no excuse and I know that none would be acceptable. I know also that I should withdraw swiftly and quietly from your life; that I have done more than enough to you now. However, I cannot.
I will not believe that in the space of a few hours I have killed all feelings that you could have ever had for me. I'm wrong, I know, in hoping that I may see you again and enjoy your company again, but I do and very much. I seldom have very much regret for the things I do but I know that I have never had anything hit me harder than this has. I know also, that I have never pleaded to any girl before, but as I write this I know that is exactly what I'm doing.
If drinking has got me into such a state that I so deeply hurt one I like so much then it is time that I straighten myself out. If this debacle accomplished nothing else it has done that. If you could bring yourself to forgive me Helene, I promise you that you will never regret it. I shall phone you when I get out. Until then I remain,
Hopefully yours,
Wilf
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. – Henry David Thoreau
Stella and I hated those meubles. Not because they were ugly or uncomfortable, they weren’t, they were “ergonomic”, a not yet widely-known concept in 1993: from the Greek ergon (work or labour) and nomos (natural laws), it was coined by the Polish writer, scientist, naturalist and inventor Wojciech Jastrzębowski in 1857, but it did not become common parlance in other parts of the world until 1997, when his book was translated into several languages, including French and English.4 Nor because they were made of pinewood that you could scratch your name into with a fingernail. Nor because they were designed by Swedes. We loved Swedes. In 1991, and again in 1992, during Sweden’s worst economic period since the Second World War, Stella and I visited Sweden many times, staying with friends in Stockholm but also in small villages in the province of Skåne, where we participated in local hunting events organized by members of the frälse. Nor did we hate these monteringsfärdiga möblermade because they were manufactured overseas or in eastern Europe. We had nothing against the people living and working in these countries. We were very appreciative of skilled labour regardless of its origins and we were in no way opposed to globalization or the so-called revolt of the elites. What we hated about these things from IKEA back then, before the hum started, was that they were from IKEA, and we hated IKEA, and everything that IKEA made and sold and stood for, except their ORGELFIKÄR meatballs, which we ate at least once a week and which I still often use as bait.
This was before the outbreak of mad-cow disease and the horse-meat scandal.
IKEA-branded kitchen utensils, including the full range of bowls, pots and roasting pans, bore no ideological significance for us, at least on the surface. The same was true of their flatware and stemware. Only the bigger items, the ergonomic sofa, the unadorned table, the sensible chairs, were loathsome to us. Because of their size. Because they were big. Because they took up so much of the space in our apartment and in our lives, in our living space and in our mental space, and in our spiritual space. And space, then, in its broadest context, was at a premium, then as now. It was and is the key to everything, for it was and is where things and beings commune. This was central to Stella’s message back then, much more than time, or spacetime, or the time-like and the space-like, or rest, or simultaneity. Then as now. Besides, we didn’t just want things to support our eating, sleeping, sitting and storing. We wanted things to engage us and excite us, to please our eyes and minds, to soothe us, challenge us, push us forward, make us bigger, stir our hearts, fortify our souls. If the governments or the corporate powers of the world were keeping score, if they wanted or needed to recreate us in their image, so be it. If they wanted or needed to know what we were doing or not doing, what we liked and didn’t like, what we did for others and what we did for ourselves, we didn’t care. We weren’t scopophobic, we were citizens of the world, at home everywhere and nowhere, and we were in love, and we saw eye to eye. We needed no other validation, we were everything to each other. “I am your fella and you are my Stella.” I would whisper this in her ear just before she fell asleep, or as we were making love, or just before we made love, or just after. “My Stella. My best friend, my favourite beer.” I would say things like this to her all the time, not just in bed, I would whisper them in her ear while stroking her cheek or the base of her spine, and she would slap my hand away and throw back her head and let out a loud snort, and then cover her mouth with her hand. Not because she was embarrassed by the snort, the snort was adorable and she knew it, it was one of her atouts, it showed she lived life to the fullest, with unbridled gusto. No, Stella covered her mouth to hide her teeth. Teeth, in general, disturbed her. Crooked, yellowed, misshapen, missing, cracked, perfectly aligned and flawlessly white – all teeth, all human teeth, all animal teeth, the very idea of teeth. She would often look at people in horror, and only I would know why. “Hey Stella!” I would fake-shout, like a Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire with the sound down, covering my face with my hands, then pulling them away to reveal the most toothsome leer I could manage. “Stop it!” she would shout with a loud braying snort.
By eye to eye I also mean I shared her conviction in the inner light of Jesus Christ and the primacy of human agency, beliefs she had inherited from her parents, who were descended themselves from illuminated people, including Syncretists and Quakers. I also shared her belief in what she called transcendental morality, though in retrospect I don’t think I was ever too sure what that actually meant.5 We also believed in the inviolable sovereignty of Art, and what, at the time, she and her followers were calling the Four Dreams of America. But by eye to eye I also mean pupil to pupil. During our first years in Paris we were studying with the famous French writer, philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion at the Institut Catholique de Paris.6 We were very much taken by his lectures, which were based on the not-yet-published Étant donné: Essai d'une phénoménologie de la donation (1997).
From my lecture notes:
Even for a gaze aiming objectively, the pupil remains a living refutation of objectivity, an irremediable denial of the object; here for the first time, in the very midst of the visible, there is nothing to see, except an invisible and untargetable void... my gaze, for the first time, sees an invisible gaze that sees it.
That apartment, our second in Paris and our fourth together — we had lived in Vancouver before, and Madrid before that — was above a halal butcher and a West African dried goods store on rue Poulet, a market street in the Eighteenth Arrondissement named after Alphonse Poulet, who owned land in the area in the early 1900s. The name of the neighbourhood, the Goutte d’Or — “The Golden Drop” — came from the name of the small hamlet that had existed in the area at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The hamlet itself took its name from an inn called “La Goutte d'Or,” which in turn took its name from the golden colour of the white wine that the inn’s vines produced. At the 1889 Exposition Universelle de Paris, the World Fair celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution, it was voted the fourth best wine in the world, and was served in the second-floor restaurant in the Eiffel Tower, which had been built for the exhibition, and at the time was still called the “tour de 300 mètres”, even though it was already 312 metres high.
There were no vines in the Goutte d’Or in 1993. What inns there were flophouses filled with prostitutes, drug addicts, terrorists and illegal immigrants. Or so we were told by our neighbours across the hall, an ailing Alsatian-Portuguese couple in their seventies who had lived in the building since 1956.
Most of the inhabitants of the Goutte d’Or, at least the visible ones, the ones I would see on the street, at the stalls and in the food shops and hairdressing salons, were newer imports from the Maghreb, West Africa and the Caribbean. Many, according to the couple across the hall, were, like Stella and me and most of her followers, clandestins – illegal immigrants.
Very few people in the neighbourhood talked to me. Or even looked me in the eye. Not even the barmen and waiters at Le Papillon, the café on the corner that we frequented at least once a day, for coffee in the morning or apéros in the afternoon.
Not being looked at and not being seen are two different things: and both have been my lot — and perhaps my salvation — since childhood, and especially since my twenties, when issues of attraction and trust first began to take on more social thrust. I am “not much to look at”, as the saying goes, and I don’t look trustworthy. Many people have said this, including, Stella, on countless occasions. I rarely smile at people, and never at those I don’t know. I walk with my mouth partially open. I am frequently mistaken for a policeman. Customs officers, however, never give me a second glance, I could smuggle H-bombs across Europe and no one would notice. And yet, ironically, once people determine that I pose no danger, or hear me talk, or see that I am looking at them and listening to what they are saying, they will look me directly in the eyes and very intensely, with every ounce of their concentration, as if drawn by a force too strong to oppose. In group conversations, they address their words directly to me and to no one else. This can be unsettling.
But this never happened in the Goutte d’Or, where people’s reluctance to engage with me, to acknowledge my presence, was very pronounced; and this never changed, never waned; and as the stalls in the market and the shops and salons on the surrounding streets were almost always packed with loud, gregarious people vibrantly dressed in impressive combinations of colourful clothing, especially on weekends, all avoiding my gaze or diverting theirs, or looking at me with suspicion and distrust or contempt, I found living there additionally alienating. It might have had something to do with skin colour, but Stella’s experiences were similar. Complicating this further: on any given day, at least half the people in the Goutte d’Or were from somewhere else, other parts of the city or the suburbs or far out in the provinces. They came to our neighbourhood to get their hair cut or straightened or coloured, or their tresses extended or replaced, or to buy a week’s or even a month’s worth of rice, maize and manioc, or a brace of halal chickens, whole lambs and goats, or just their roasted legs or their heads, exotic spices and fruits, herbs, chillies, peppers, dried and fresh fish. This is where I first saw Scotch bonnets, tilapia and Nile perch. In front of our building West African women dressed in batik robes and high turbans sold skin-whitening creams, roasted animal heads and legs and giant African snails on makeshift tables. North African men stood in small groups at the street corners, talking and smoking, listening to sermons and debates on radios, or selling counterfeit watches, jewellery and Marlboros. When the police raided, which happened at least once a day — every morning, truckloads of CRS reservists in full riot gear parked at the Chateau Rouge metro station at the top of our street — a series of whistles and whoops would then cascade down the street and the women with the makeshift tables and the sellers and smokers with their transistor radios and fake Rolexes would scamper down the block and disappear up rue Stephenson, which was named after George Stephenson, the English engineer, the “Father of Railways,” as was my maternal grandfather, with whom I lived until dementia required his incarceration in Essondale Hospital, in Coquitlam, in 1980. He died in 1982, at the age 96.
This is also where I first saw marabout flyers.
They were handed out by well-dressed and charismatic young black men standing at the top of the stairs to the metro mouth, or next to the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. On them were printed extravagant claims (“A great medium with supernatural gifts, famous genius, international wizard”) and even more extravagant promises (“creating love where it doesn't exist”; “success in driving tests and all manner of exams”; “absolute sexual power”; “immediate wealth, luck or health”; “success without consequences”; and “protection against dangers, marriage and backache.”) Invariably, at the top of the list: “If your husband or wife has left you, come here, and he or she will run back to you like a dog after its master.” This was backed with 100% guarantee: the loved one would come back for forever and immediately, or in 24, 48 or 72 hours, depending on how much money you were willing to pay, as this would determine whether the marabout would use love spells, geomancy, rosary beads, cowrie shell throwing, gris-gris amulets, palm reading, dowsing, voodoo, or “formidable occult work through fasting, prayer, charity and the other pillars of the Islamic faith.”
The best results, however, demanded animal sacrifices.
The most privileged place with Allah is the mosque, while the most detestable is the market. – Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj
Animal sacrifice and the ritual slaughter of animals are not necessarily the same thing. People of faith don’t always eat what they sacrifice. Sometimes, for example, the sacrifice is a burnt offering. Both practices have complicated histories in France. So, too, does fortune-telling. Voyance was illegal in the country until 1994, when the nouveau code penal, as it was then called, replaced the one Napoleon enacted in 1810, and tacitly dropped voyance as a punishable offence.7
This was just after we moved into the apartment on rue Poulet.
The ritual sacrifice and slaughter of animals, however, has always been legal in France, subject to certain conditions determined by the state. A Muslim, for example, or anyone else for that matter, can buy a live animal from a farm for the Feast of the Sacrifice8 (or any other purpose, whether ceremonial or not), but the “uncontrolled slaughter” of it – not conducted in an authorized space by an authorized person – is not permissible. Killing animals meant for human consumption can only be conducted under controlled conditions, in licensed slaughterhouses, by certified individuals. Live sheep, for example, must be slaughtered by a “religious authority approved by the Veterinary Services Department,” and the slaughter must be carried out in the only place exclusively reserved for the death of that animal: a licensed abattoir. Chickens, too, can be killed, according to halal or kosher rules (they do not have to be stunned first,9 but can just have their necks quickly slit), but only in a licensed slaughterhouse, overseen, again, by an approved religious authority.
Slitting the animal’s throat outside of an approved slaughterhouse is punishable by six months in prison and a 15,000 euro fine. A fine of 750 euros can be incurred if precautions are not to taken to limit the animal’s pain and suffering, or if it is not properly immobilized “in an approved cradle” before killing, or if it is suspended while conscious, or not immobilized before bleeding. If an individual or a family or a group of friends want to do it themselves, as many do, as this is often felt to be more participatory and therefore more meaningful, it has to be done clandestinely, which can be a source of shame — no one wants to practice his or her or their religion in secret — and is also haram (Arabic for “forbidden”) by Islamic jurisprudence, because it contravenes the laws of a society.
You shouldn't hurt a beast: you either pet it or kill it. – Jacques Chirac
Skinning and butchering the carcass is onerous, as is disposing of the waste and the blood, but these are not criminal acts. Article 521-1 of the Penal Code, however, states that, “The fact, whether publicly or not, of inflicting serious abuse or of a sexual nature, or committing an act of cruelty to a domestic or tame animal, or one held in captivity, is punishable by two years' imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros.”
Animals, by French law, are considered sentient living beings, protected by laws, and subject to the regime of property. However, there are, of course, hierarchies, just as there are between humans, and between humans and the rest of existence, between all beings and all objects, including animals, whose hierarchical order is, in descending order, domestic, production (farmed for food or fibre) and wild. In principle, in France, according to the so-called new penal code, “stray animals of domestic species or animals living in the wild are not to be used in experimental procedures” but exemptions may be granted “exceptionally after a favourable opinion from the National Commission for Animal Experimentation” provided that certain conditions are met, including the existence of an “essential need to carry out this experimental procedure which concerns the health and welfare of animals of the same species or a serious threat to human or animal health or to the environment.” Killing an animal for divinatory purposes does not fall into any of these categories. People who practise voodoo rites, for example, in which “sacrifices of animals are carried out with bare hands or knives” and participants are “sprinkled with blood” can be prosecuted not just for “abuse of weakness of persons and psychological subjection”, but also for “acts of cruelty towards a domestic or tame animal or one held in captivity.” Such prosecution is not considered an infringement of religious freedom, as the code does not provide for an exception for “acts consisting in putting an animal to death in the religious context of a sacrifice to a deity.”10
The live chickens used by the marabouts were kept in nearby apartments, along with other objects said to have magical powers, including giant vats containing the blood of cows. This is what the Alsatian neighbour told me. Did I believe him? I don’t think so. He had ball-point pen tattoos on knuckles and on his neck, which he said he got in Algeria, during the war.
“I fought in the Battle of Algiers and the Bataille of the Frontiers,” he once told me. “I was a commissioned officer with the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment. My men enlisted under pseudonyms. They didn’t swear allegiance to France, but to the Foreign Legion itself. I know all about these people.”
When I pressed him on this he slammed the door.
I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Every Wednesday around five o’clock, just after afternoon prayer, an open-topped garbage truck would rumble down rue Poulet, blasting its air horn three times, and lurching to a stop under our windows. We were on the third floor. At the sound of the first blast an overpowering odour, immeasurably vile and abominable, would rise up towards us, and Stella and I would become frantic, and Stella would curse me, and I would curse myself, for having once again not remembered to be somewhere else at five o’clock on Wednesday. For this was the moment of the meat truck, and the shofar-like horn blasts announcing its arrival called out a dozen men in blood-stained white smocks, most of them fresh from prayer, carrying bins and bags filled with rotting meat and bones. The stench, more foul than the devil himself, would linger for an hour.
Across the landing was the white couple, the very large Alsatian, long since dead, and his even larger wife, whose parents were Portuguese and who is also no doubt dead, and already at that time severely hardened, as was her florid-faced husband, by arterial calcification but even more so by their embittered opinions and views about the déspiritualisation” of the French and their “remplacement” by nationless immigrants with higher birth rates but otherwise no individual characteristics, not just without identity papers but with no identity whatsoever, and by le choc — the clash — of civilisations that they saw each day out their window, down at the level of the Wednesday meat truck, and on their television set, which was always on, and always loud.
“You, you’re ok,” the Alsatian said to me once, after a lengthy argument at the door. I had told him that we were moving out and his tone softened. “You make too much noise, all this screaming and fighting and crying at all hours, but you’re Christian and your fathers fought with us against the Nazis, so you’re ok. But all these blacks and Muslims? It’s hell.”
It wasn’t true. My father never fought in France against the Nazis. He didn’t cross the Atlantic during the war. His first trip to Europe was in 1985, during which he left 100 francs for me on the 177th stair of the staircase leading to the top of the north tower of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. He was 65 years old, my age now, and he would be dead in two years.
Stella never knew her father. From what her mother had told her, he was probably German or Austrian.
Did it matter? The couple thought better of us because they thought well of our fathers. I did not correct him.
“You come from good stock,” he said.
Perhaps I had told him about our fathers when I was drunk. Or maybe one of our friends had said something coming in or leaving one of our parties. Whatever the case, after this conversation, the next afternoon, I started attending the Mosque on rue Myrrha. It was a very welcoming place. It had a clean and well maintained bathroom, and it was guarded by an irreproachable gentleman named Mohamed. Prayer, there, however, at the time, was not oriented toward the qibla, it was done in a straight line, instead of slightly shifted to the right. Those who prayed inside, in the musalla, the prayer hall, unlike those who prayed outside, on the street, were pointing in the wrong direction. I mentioned this to Mohamed during my first week of devotions. He smiled and said, “This is not gymnastics, brother. Nor is it an exercise in cartography. Focus on the prayer, on the direction of your heart and soul, not the exact orientation of your head. Prostrate yourself to Allah.”
The BLÅVINGAD storage bag is a handy solution to keep on track of things. Printed with the coordinates of the Great Barrier Reef, it’s also a little reminder of the magnificent natural phenomena that are worth keeping safe. — IKEA catalogue
The earworm. Later, I would again resurface, and know precisely where and who I was, but not how I had got there, or what I was doing, or what I was supposed to be doing. And then I would remember and the scales would fall and everything would become clear for me again, just like everything suddenly becomes clear for goaltenders in the moment they decide which direction to throw their bodies to block penalty shots. Usually at this point I would turn onto my left side, towards my wife, Stella, who was still a great beauty, especially naked, and I would touch her foot with mine, and then pull my knees up close to my chest, and think — “fret” I suppose is closer to the truth — about the position of my neck and the curvature of my spine, and about where to put my hands, between my legs or under my cheek, or crossed across my chest, or wrapped, palms facing out, around my ribs and under my armpits, or with the left hand stretched up behind my head and the right under my cheek, or on my groin, or resting on the outside of my right thigh. And then I would wonder what time it was. I can still usually repress the urge to actually find out what time it is, which requires ascending to a higher level of awakenment, and pushing the button on the runner’s watch on my wrist that my wife, Stella, bought me for Christmas in 2015. The watch monitors my pulse and my various states of sleep (Deep, Light, REM, Awake) by means of spectroscopy and photoplethysmography and an algorithmic set of deep learning rules I am told were written by the US Department of Defense. Likewise, I will repress the urge to reach over in the dark for my iPhone, which is sitting on the pile of books next to my sleeping bag. It is an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and my watch is linked to it by means of UHF radio waves. Instead of looking at the watch, or my phone, I look at the moon through the blue FRAKTA tarp, and listen to the hum while lying on my back or on my side, slowly becoming more and more aware of the fullness of my bladder. New movements of thought, new lines of questioning: Is this what woke me, what keeps me awake, the state of my bladder? Or am I only conscious of its state of fullness because I am awake? If I were still asleep, would it feel full, would I need to pee? This is when I usually look at my watch and say, “two am?” or “four forty-nine?” with all the incredulity I can muster at those hours, and more than a little upset, and feeling like an animal stunned by a blow to the head. Before, when I still lived with and loved Stella, finally, usually, probably 95% of the time, I would give up and get up and go downstairs in the dark and sit on the toilet, first feeling to make sure that the seat was down, as my son would sometimes leave it up. Ascertaining this, or lowering the seat if not, I would pee, maybe fart, maybe wipe my ass, then drink some water directly from the tap, and go back up to bed.
“You OK?” my wife Stella, who by then would be half-awake, would ask.
“Yes.”
We wore wax earplugs, and Stella wore an eye mask. Sometimes she would reach over at this point and touch my cold foot with one of her nicely warm feet, and maybe then my back with her warm hand, or if it was winter and very cold, with her entire naked body, which she would press against me, which of course aroused me, but as she usually had something to do the next morning, I would usually move away from her, just slightly; and if she did not again move next to me, I would take this as a sign, or the lack of a sign, and sigh once or twice; and this is when she usually turned onto her back, with the covers just over her nose, concealing her mouth, which was distorted by her mouthguard; and very soon her breathing would change, and I could tell she was once again asleep.
The actual names of the IKEA products:
FALGAR (the floor lamp); STAKNA (bed); KANKO (couch); SNAGMA (kitchen chairs).
I add this here because I found a copy of a catalogue during my prowls along the Canal Saint-Denis, and not because it makes me think or makes me sad, or raises ghosts, but because it reminds me of my second daughter, who’s coming into this world caught us by surprise, and as no name for her was forthcoming, it was to this very catalogue that we turned, and found, in its now discoloured pages, ANRIK, or rather Anrik, which derives from a Swedish phrase meaning “rich in heritage,” and which, for the last twenty-five years, she has shared with a stainless-steel coffee pot.
On that day you shall be exposed to view — no secret of yours shall remain hidden. – The Quran
In late-June of 1996, a week or so before Stella and I moved out of the Goutte d’Or, 300 undocumented migrants — at the time they were still called clandestins — mostly Muslims from Mali, Senegal and Zaire, occupied Eglise Saint-Bernard, a Catholic church just a few blocks from our apartment. This was right around the time the first French reports of mad-cow disease started appearing in the newspapers.
Two months before, some of these same clandestins, whom the press were just then starting to refer to as “les sans papiers” — migrants without papers — had occupied Eglise Saint Ambroise, a Catholic church in the 11th Arrondissement. On the second day of that earlier occupation, the parish priest desacralized the church by removing its tabernacle, an ornate locked box containing the body and blood of Christ in its sacramental form. The following day, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris and a converted Jew, met with the occupiers, assuring them of his support and promising to talk to President Jacques Chirac’s Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, about their “distress”. The next day, the parish priest, by order of the prelate, gave the police the church keys. The occupiers were evacuated. A pregnant woman was pushed to the ground. A baby swaddled to its mother's back hit its head on a marble pillar. Forty-three people were arrested. A woman cried out: “Are we to stay here, on the ground? We can't live like this anymore!” The man next to her, hoarse with rage, shouted, “Our fathers, our grandfathers fought for you, for France, and look how you treat us! We are men, like you, like everyone else!”
They were moved into a gym, then an abandoned train depot, then to a theatre in Vincennes. Then to Eglise Saint-Bernard
We watched all this on the TV in Le Papillon. No one said a word.
If you do not believe, you will not understand. – Isaiah 7:9
Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger was the only Jewish convert to become a French bishop in modern France. He converted to Roman Catholicism during the German occupation, when he was 14. Two years later, during the round-ups of Parisian Jews, his mother was denounced by the family maid — who was dating a member of la Milice and wanted the apartment for herself — and arrested. She was held in the Velodrome d’Hiver sports arena along with 13,151 other Jews, and then deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.
After the war, Lustiger's father tried in vain to get Jean-Marie to renounce his conversion. With the help of the chief rabbi of Paris, he asked the Church to annul the baptism, on the grounds that he had converted for “empirical reasons,” which Jean-Marie adamantly denied. He studied Literature at the Sorbonne, and then joined the priesthood. His father severed ties with him.
In 1995, the year before the Saint-Bernard occupation, in between the first and second rounds of the French presidential elections, Cardinal Lustiger visited Israel and participated in a symposium at the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv on “The silence of God" – where was He while the Nazis killed millions?” During the visit Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi and a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, said Lustiger, though only a boy at the time, had “betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods. If we were to accept Lustiger as a model, not one Jew would be left in the world to say Kaddish.”
“It's the first time that I hear such a thing, that being baptized is worse than what Hitler did,” Cardinal Lustiger said in response. “To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers,” he said on Israel Television. “I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”
Cardinal Lustiger died in 2007. Before his funeral at the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame, his great-nephew, wearing a yarmulke, fulfilled the prelate’s wish by filling a cup placed on his coffin with dirt he had collected in the Holy Land, in Jericho and on the Mount of Olives.
Kaddish was said for the first time inside the Cathedral. The Cardinal was buried under the choir, in the vault of the archbishops of Paris. A plaque above, in the Cathedral nave, carries these words:
I was born Jewish. I was named after my paternal grandfather, Aron. I became a Christian through faith and baptism, but I remained a Jew as did the Apostles. My patron saints are Aron the High Priest, St. John the Apostle and St. Mary full of grace. Appointed 139th Archbishop of Paris by His Holiness Pope John Paul II, I was enthroned in this cathedral on 27 February 1981, and I have exercised my entire ministry here. Passers-by, please pray for me.
My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable – I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t. – Bertrand Russell
Like his predecessor, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, who had taken office a little over a year before the Saint Bernard occupation, frequently sought out the Cardinal’s counsel; and two months into his mandate, just after the Cardinal’s visit to Israel, he became the first French president to declare France’s “collective mistake” for the mass arrest and deportation to concentration camps of the Vel d’Hiv Jews.
Those responsible were 4,500 French policemen and gendarmes, under the authority of their leaders, who obeyed the demands of the Nazis… these dark hours will forever stain our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupier was supported by French people.
The parish priest at Saint-Bernard, Henri Coindé, with the support of the Cardinal11, said the occupiers could live in the church as long as they didn’t disrupt masses or weddings. Parishioners came and prayed with the occupiers, as did Stella and I and the rest of the flock. We gave them food, washed their clothes, and played with their children. “There were many small children,” said the priest, “and people saw what the Pasqua laws really meant, and what these people were experiencing.”
Alain Juppé refused to regularise the occupants, believing that, as the eyes of the world were upon them, this would encourage more illegal immigration. On August 23, 1996, at 7:30 a.m., following an emergency order issued by the then Minister of the Interior, Jean-Louis Debré, 525 gendarmes, 480 CRS and 500 police officers launched an assault. Neighbours around the church square banged their shutters loudly to warn the occupiers. The church bells rang out. Hundreds of supporters surrounded the church, arm in arm, forming a wall. Dozens more huddled in front of the gates, blocking entry. Those inside barricaded the doors with chairs, benches, mattresses and tables.
The gendarmes poured out of their trucks firing tear gas canisters. They shoved the crowd off the church square with their shields, beat those defending the gate to the ground with truncheons, then stepped over their bodies to reach the church’s five doors, which they smashed open with axes. Those inside were pulled out, often by the hair, and pushed into buses. The actress Emmanuel Beart, who was pregnant at the time, and had just finished shooting Brian De Palma’s Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise, and with whom Stella had been discussing Scientology and African animism just before the attack, was forcibly removed from the church. “What are they going to do with these children, what are they going to do with them?” she shouted at the gendarmes. The hunger strikers, on their 50th day of fasting, and the wounded were taken away in ambulances under armed guard.
In all, 220 people were arrested, including 210 illegal aliens (98 men, 54 women and 68 children).
Tens of thousands of Parisians, Stella and I among them, along with the other members of the flock, took to the streets in protest. Stella and her followers held aloft a giant banner “Des papiers pour tous les sans-papiers !”
The government announced that they would deport 50 of the occupiers, but dropped this figure to eight after being told by the Air France pilots' unions that the crews would refuse to board. Within a few weeks three-quarters of the occupiers were regularized. A year later, after the election victory of the Gauche Plurielle, a left-wing coalition led by the Socialist Party’s Lionel Jospin (who Chirac had defeated in the second round of the 1995 presidential election), more received their papers in an official ceremony that, according to a reporter, “looked very much like an induction into the Legion of Honour.” Today, most of the occupiers have received French citizenship.
He is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? – Ralph Waldo Emerson
In my beginning is my end; in my end is my beginning. Really? This seems patently false. It is now late summer, the birds have not left, the hum grows stronger. Have I been led astray. Am I descending into hell? Is this the end of the world or just the beginning? In June of that first year on rue Poulet, the street and the open-air market next to it, Marché Dejean, were visited by Juppé and Chirac. The following day, at a dinner-debate, Chirac gave his famous la bruit et l’odeur speech:
Our problem is not the foreigners, it's that there is an overdose. It may be true that there are no more foreigners than before the war, but they are not the same and that makes a difference. It is certain that having Spaniards, Poles and Portuguese working here poses fewer problems than having Muslims and Blacks. How do you expect the French worker – who lives in the Goutte-d'Or, where I was walking with Alain Juppé three or four days ago – who works with his wife and who, together, earns about 15,000 francs, to see a family with a father, three or four wives, and about 20 kids, on the landing next to his HLM, crammed together, and who earns 50,000 francs in social benefits, without, of course, working!
The room broke into loud applause.
Chirac: If you add to that the noise and the smell…
The room broke into raucous laughter.
Chirac:–well, the French worker on the landing, he goes crazy. He goes crazy. That's the way it is. And you have to understand that, if you were there, you would have the same reaction. And it's not racist to say that. We no longer have the means to honour family reunification, and we must finally open the great debate that is necessary in our country, which is a true moral debate, to know if it is natural that foreigners should benefit, in the same way as the French, from a national solidarity in which they do not participate since they do not pay taxes! Those who govern us must realize that there is an immigration problem, and that if it is not dealt with, and the socialists being what they are, they will only deal with it under the pressure of public opinion, things will get worse to the benefit of those who are the most extremist. Most of these people are hard-working, good people; we are glad to have them. If we didn't have the Kabyle grocer on the corner, open from 7 a.m. to midnight, how often would we have nothing to eat in the evening?
The Alsatian and his Portuguese-French wife supported Chirac and Juppé. They were not supporters of the Saint-Bernard migrants. They were racists, and nostalgists, and very frank about being entirely focussed on their own personal concerns, and they were dying.
“As are we all,” said Stella. “but some at a faster pace than others. Our neighbours are in a full sprint.”
“We’re in the departure lounge,” the Alsatian said. He had been a commercial pilot. He was connected to an oxygen tank. He and his obese wife wore slippers and housecoats at all hours of the day. I never saw them step beyond the threshold of their apartment.
The smell of their illness was worse than the smell wafting up from the open container on the back of the Wednesday meat truck.
All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. – Chief Seattle
Indigenous peoples have a very different concept of personal space. It is not something “taken up” by objects and framed by walls. Nor is it based on fixed ideas of fullness and emptiness. It is entirely about relationships and connections. And memories. And traditions. Learning this, in the winter of 1995, just before President Mitterrand died, was when the questioning started, when I began asking myself things like, for example, not just “Was I asleep?” or “Am I awake?” or “Where did I come from?” or Where am I going?” or “How long have I got?” but “Am I ever really conscious of myself?” and, in this case, answering, “Yes, I suppose that I am.” And it was through these early questionings that I began to see that I was also very different from other animals. Not for the usually stated reasons, not because I laugh or speak or smile or supposedly reason at a higher level of complexity, or am aware of my existence or because I wear clothes, or because of what I eat or where I urinate and defecate. And, certainly, not because of the so-called Four American Dreams, not because I come from the richest society on earth, where everyone, regardless of race, religion, colour, creed or sexual orientation, has access to the same things, the same objects and products, where the choice of these things is ever-expanding, where all these unexpected and new things ever-appearing are ever-broadening our experience, changing our skills, deepening our awareness, altering the way we engage with the world, the way we think, the way we behave. Do we still know what it means to be human? It is likely no coincidence that this was also the period of my life when I stopped saying “I write” and started saying “I am a writer,” and, less frequently, paraphrasing famous Greek philosopher and writer Aristotle, “I am the only living thing that writes.” For this was what came from this questioning, a certain expansive and, perhaps, delusional, sense of grandeur, and with this came more questioning: Shouldn’t my primary concern as a writer be, not to know and describe things outside myself — the world or its animals, its furniture and history — but to know and describe myself? That is, to know and describe what I am as a writer? Because I strongly believed that a writer must know and be able to explain her own being and doings, not just those existing and happening outside of herself. “Every secret of a writer's soul,” wrote the famous English writer Virginia Woolf, “every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” Writing that explains the cosmos, the animals in it or the ways of men and women that does not leave room for, or talk about, the writer as writer is woefully wanting because it cannot account for the possibility of its own existence. This is what I thought. That the world known and described by writing must be such that it supports writing, the way buttresses support a cathedral, or roots a tree, or a goaltender a football team. It is this, I thought, that makes the writer the most complete kind of human being.
Like Virginia Woolf, whose writing I admired immensely, I believed (and to some degree still believe), that these “moments of being” were at least “partly mystical”:
Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain… Then suddenly something springs.
There are things, these quiescent transitional states from whence things spring that cannot always be put into words. This is what is mystical. The Kwakwala had a word for this, kwikwaladlakw, which means “things that are hidden.” Traditionally, these were things with ceremonial function: masks, headdresses, whistles, drums, medicine sticks. Things with supernatural power. Things only taken out at certain times. Things not meant for everyone to see. Stella’s objets, for example. Were we meant to see these? Or these words. Were you meant to see this, read this? Was anyone?
The famous American writer Henry David Thoreau describes how the vitality of “village life” would languish and dwindle were it not for its surrounding, unknown, unexplored wilderness.
We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable (my italics), that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
The sacred Jewish writers, too, concealed messages, using codes, creating puzzles. The famous English writer Samuel Pepys used a secret key to write his private diaries, which he hid in his library, where it was not found until 170 years after his death. These are examples of secret languages, not private ones, for though the words and sentences in them refer to what can only be known by the person or persons using them, and though no one else can understand them, they can be learned, at which point they will serve, like all languages, a social function.
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. – Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest object on the planet. It is composed of and built by billions of tiny organisms too small for the human eye to see. The smallest resolvable objects, those visible to the naked eye, those that we can clearly read and identify, are either photon point-particles, which have no known external structure, or the shadows of protein structures or other cell-tissue debris, all of which are “projected” onto the retina within the eye's vitreous, or between the vitreous and retina. They appear as spots or broken cobweb threads that float across the eye, usually following the direction of the eye’s movement, and best seen when back-dropped by a monochromatic space. Often, gazing at the blue sky will bring them forth into the visible realm. I, like most people, can do this at will, I can conjure these up and see them whenever I want. The French call these mouches volantes (“flying flies”). In English, they are called floaters. They are not optical illusions. They are not static or white noise. They exist within the eye itself.
The famous American science-fiction writer and cult leader L. Ron Hubbard’s E-meter is an electrodermal activity (EDA) meter.12 EDA meters measure changes in electrical charges on the surface of the skin. It was invented in 1889, the same year that the Eiffel Tower was finished and equipped with a permanent radio transmitting station. The famous Swiss writer, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who used an EDA meter to evaluate emotional sensitivity on patients performing word association tasks, called it “a looking glass into the unconscious.”
Hubbard’s version is used to monitor response to questions like these:
Are you a pervert?
Are you guilty of any major crimes in this lifetime?
Have you ever bombed anything?
Have you ever murdered anyone?
Have you ever raped anyone?
Do you collect sexual objects?
Do you have a secret you are afraid I'll find out?
Do you hope you won't be found out?
Do you think there is anything wrong with having your privacy invaded?
What do you wish you hadn't done?
Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?
Have you ever smothered a baby?
Have you ever enslaved a population?
Have you ever destroyed a culture?
Have you ever torn out someone's tongue?
Have you ever zapped anyone?
Have you ever eaten a human body?
Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive?
In the science-fiction film Blade Runner (1982), by Ridley Scott, the protagonist, Rick Deckard, who may or may not be a “skin-job” — a bioengineered humanoid “replicant” — appears to fall in lust and then in love with Rachael, even though he learns, by means of the non-verbal responses she gives to a lengthy Voight-Kampff test, that Rachael is most definitely a replicant. The Voight-Kampff test “measures contractions of the iris muscle and the presence of invisible airborne particles emitted from the body” and can distinguish replicants from humans by their “empathic response” to questions and descriptive statements.
Rachael is, we later learn, an experimental Nexus-7 model implanted with memories originally belonging to the niece of Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the CEO of the bioengineering company that made her.
Before Deckard falls in love with the replicant Rachael, he kisses Rachael while she is playing the piano. Rachael is perturbed by this. Deckard tries to kiss Rachael again but she gets up and walks to the door. She tries to leave but Deckard blocks her exit and slams the door shut with his fist. He pushes her violently against a wall. Rachael trembles with fear. Deckard kisses her again. Deckard says to Rachael, “Say kiss me.” Rachael says, “I can't rely on my memory.” Again, Deckard says to Rachael, “Say kiss me.”
Rachael: Kiss me.
Deckard: I want you.
Rachael: I want you.
Deckard: Again.
Rachael: I want you. Put your hands on me.
Later, Roy, a Nexus-6 model, after saving Deckard’s life, during his death soliloquy, says “I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see.”13 Earlier, Deckard killed Roy’s friends. Earlier, still, while questioning a designer of replicant eyes, Roy says, “If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.”
Neither Deckard nor the niece nor the CEO submit to Voight-Kampff tests.
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. It is the only one visible from space. Have you seen it? I have not. Do I need to? No. Do you?
More human than human is our motto. – Eldon Tyrell
The first affect display inducer monitored by the Voight-Kampff is: “It’s your birthday, someone gives you a calfskin wallet.”
How would you respond? What would you feel? How do you feel? What do you think you feel? The Voight-Kampff monitors involuntary pupil fluctuation, capillary and iris dilation. Can you detect movements at those level, in your skin, in your blood, in your optic nerve?
Here’s another. You’re staying with your wife and your seven-month old son in a gîte on the grounds of a winery on the Côte d’Azur owned by Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. It is 1999. Your mother is still alive. Your father has been dead for several years. Your wife never met your father. The wine made on the property is not very good. A decade later the vines and the chai will be run by a Franco-Chilean couple who will produce better wines, or at least more appreciated wines.
An old man wearing a ROCKÅN bath robe and TÅSJÖN slippers enters the pool gate. He walks over to the closest MYSINGSÖ beach chair, strips off the ROCKÅN, revealing a very white body with a large paunch above a red maillot de bain from MONOPRIX. He sits in the MYSINGSÖ and farts loudly. You get out of the pool. The man farts again. You and your wife, who is cradling your son, exit the pool gate. The old man farts a third time.
Article 12 was rescinded on November 6, 2014.
The modern notion of a hall, by the way, was invented by the English architect John Thorpe in 1597. He was the first to replace the enfilade construction of multiple connected rooms, like what you walk through if you visit castles or palaces—Versailles, for example, which my wife and I visited more than a dozen times, or the Napoleon III apartments in the Musée du Louvre — with rooms along a hallway, each accessed by a separate door.
At the time, being from North America, I incorrectly identified the IVNAR’s buzz as being somewhere halfway between A♯ and B, when in fact, in Europe, the AC “mains hum” is 10 Hz higher, and the resulting tone is closer to G.
Rys ergonomji czyli nauki o pracy, opartej na prawdach poczerpniętych z Nauki Przyrody (The Outline of Ergonomics, i.e. Science of Work, Based on the Truths Taken from the Natural Science) (1857).
“Lord Palmerston, with characteristic levity had once said that only three men in Europe had ever understood transcendental morality and of these the Prince Consort was dead, a Swedish statesman (unnamed) was in an asylum, and he himself had forgotten it.” R. W. Seton-Watson Britain in Europe 1789–1914 (1937) ch. 11
“We live with love as if we knew what it was about. But as soon as we try to define it, or at least approach it with concepts, it draws away from us.” Jean-Luc Marion
In France, everything that is not prohibited by law is tolerated. Bigamy, for example, is explicitly prohibited in France by Article 147 of the Code Civil, which forbids the contraction of a second marriage before the dissolution of the first. But polygamous marriages, especially common among Malian immigrants, made prior to their arrival in France, were only effectively criminalized in 1993, when a new law banned second wives from getting visas. In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron’s government passed a bill denying immigrants French residency if they are in polygamous relationship. The law gives authorities the right to cancel future marriages if they are deemed forced.
Eid al Adha (“Feast of the Sacrifice”) commemorates Abraham’s killing of a sheep instead of his son Ismael. It also marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. It is estimated Muslims in France kill 125,000 sheep and 6,000 cattle for Eid each year. These are official numbers. The figures for uncontrolled slaughters, which are prohibited by law, are not known.
The law applicable to ritual slaughter in France is essentially based on the provisions of Article R. 214-70 of the Rural and Maritime Fishing Code according to which “the stunning of animals is mandatory before slaughter or killing.”
Animals, however, can be killed or wounded during bullfights and cockfights, “in those parts of the national territory where an uninterrupted local tradition can be invoked.”
According to the centre-right weekly magazine Le Point, in his diary, Father Coindé “recounted a thousand anecdotes of the occupation, the pressure from the police to change his mind, the birth of a baby in the church, and the reactions of his parishioners: some helped the families, others preferred to ‘slam the door’ on the church so as not to attend a mass in the presence of “ces sales nègres”. In the same book, he confided his comfort after a supportive phone call from Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, his archbishop, but also his disappointment another day at the ‘academic and conventional’ answer the prelate gave to a journalist.”
EDA is also known as skin conductance, galvanic skin response (GSR), electrodermal response (EDR), psychogalvanic reflex (PGR), skin conductance response (SCR), sympathetic skin response (SSR) and skin conductance level (SCL).
In the final version of, Roy says, “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”