Abbaye de la Lucerne

The new camera is shaping up fine, but I still have plenty of pictures from the Mont St Michel holiday in September I want to post, including these, from a trip that we made up to the Abbaye de la Lucerne (the link is to the Wiki page; they have their own site, to which there is a further link from there, but it's mainly in French, and perhaps still in its rather early stages).

The place is the perfect antidote to the drama and hectic business of the Mont. You reach it by driving up the Contentin peninsular, if you like on the coast road, so you can marvel at the Marvel across even greater, more luminous wastes of sand and water, then branch off inland, and find the abbey tucked away in a green and peaceful cleft in land.

You enter by a gatehouse, and buy your entry ticket from a gentle young man who has the air of a religious, though he may not be, in a little shop which also sells the kind of tasteful and wholesome souvenirs that religious foundations specialise in, and which I could be rather a sucker for: things made with honey and lavender, leather purses made to look like pilgrim scrips, pilgrim foot balm, books of mediaeval manuscripts and recipes...

The foundation is 12th century, and was the home of a community of Premonstratensian canons. Now the trouble with 'Premonstratensian' as a word is I can't help thinking it sounds like 'pre-menstrual tension', which led me to remark to Tom that that was probably why they had to get away from it all and go and live somewhere quiet and secluded, because no one else could stand to live with them. In fact, as it's a bit of a handful to type, I think I shall henceforward refer to them as the PMTs, and beg forgiveness from any of them who might be reading for my irreverence, because, upon enquiry, it seems to me they are, and perhaps were, an interesting and admirable group of people.

They were part of that movement towards austerity and purity of the 12th century, of which Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians, with whom the PMTs had strong links, are perhaps the better known exponents; one of those spasms of puritanism, of rejection of worldly vanity and decadence that have happened over and again through history. There's a strong case that we might be due for one now, or perhaps we are having it already, but like much else, it has gone global, is being enacted on a larger stage, is wider and more important, and maybe more frightening, in its scope and its implications... But such speculations may be facile and specious, a kind of pseudo-history, history's lesson being history has no lessons, and I am not a historian anyway.

Like most puritans, the reforming religious movements of this time, the Cistercians, and Bernard of Clairvaux in particular, were oppressive killjoys, attempting to crush the creative impulse in humanity, in favour of allowing only the contemplation of God's creation, denying anyone the fun of decoration, of playing with shape and colour, insisting on a dour self-mortification. If you like, and mostly I do. Or you could say it was a question of seeking to clean and simplify things, question our real needs, the nature of our aesthetic, rather than always to be wanting more and more stimulus, more artifice, more cleverness, to see the beauty in functional form, both man-made and natural, in what needs to be there without contrivance.

Bernard harried poor Peter Abelard and made him burn his books, just for his daring to keep on asking the wrong kind of questions; he preached the Second Crusade with all its bloodshed and terrible consequences. Dominic, who arguably started out as a PMT, practically in person tormented and burned and murdered the gentle and peaceable Cathars, simply for seeing things a different way, until the last of them jumped off a big high rock.

The reformers railed against the worldly and the powerful but were more than happy to grasp worldly power as soon as they got the chance. Don't they always?

Yet the Cistercian and PMT monasteries were, and still are, places of an imposing grace and peaceful presence, they pioneered good and wholesome methods of husbandry and ways of doing things, and the Dominican foundations sheltered the sublimities of Rhineland mysticism, of Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen, where men's and women's thoughts and visions reached to places rarely attained, way above and beyond religious dogma...

So where was I? La Lucerne. It was, as one might expect, suppressed in the French Revolution, plundered for stone and used for something degrading, I forget what. But a lot of it survived. The PMTs dwindled in number everywhere over the 19th century. Then they experienced a gradual resurgence; now there are many foundations worldwide, mostly male but with some female communities, working in some quite difficult places, in Africa and South America for example. They are not, and never were, actual monks, but another kind of beast: canons regular. One could doubtless make a bodily joke about that one too. As far as I can gather it means they are ordinary Catholic priests, except the women I suppose, I don't know what they are, living subject to a Rule, the Augustinian one in this case. The houses are autonomous, may give permission for their members to set up dependent houses, and though they all get together for a synod every year, there isn't any real central monitoring authority. Some of them are contemplative, but many are active in the world, and have ordinary day jobs, and just come home to their religious life. There are teachers, and doctors, there have been inventors and scientists and writers, one long-standing US congressman was also a PMT canon.

In the 1950s, a PMT canon, the Abbé Marcel Lelégard, took on the task of restoring the abbey. This work seemed to us to typify the kind of heroism that quite simply persists, that takes the long view and labours and works with love even when it can't, and won't live to, see an end. He's buried in the abbey church, and over his memorial stone, an odd touch, a suspended model boat. I don't know why, perhaps he made it, or it was someone else's tribute.

The ultimate wish for the abbey is that it will house a religious community once again, and the work goes on. There is an association of Friends of la Lucerne, and there are concerts and exhibitions held there.

It seems to me, as an outsider passing through, that what was good about the puritan desire to strip things back, the focus on simplicity and on creation, is being reworked here, and the picturesque ruination of the place feeds into this. So the architectural forms stand out clear and bold, and time and again arches and windows form frames for the natural world rather than presenting images and colours of their own.

The occasional piece of ornament or design, either a vestigial or modern, is isolated and achieves a gestalt weight and interest. Natural forms are favoured,

and there are many spirals.

The woody greenness is allowed to come close and colour the inward life of the building, and the only staining of the glass is a very subtle pale green which serves to enhance the leafy light as it passes through.

Streams and ponds are channelled through the site, reflections and ripples bringing it to life.

And then an odd thing: an exhibition of very nice, large blow-up, black-and-white photographs of aspects of the abbey itself, exhibited between the arches of the ruined aqueduct.

The through-the-looking-glass, post-modern irony of this confounded me. Following the sens de la visite, we had just seen these things ourselves. The aesthetic which governed the place, of the rejection of unnecessary artifice, was being turned upside down; its most functional elements were being made objects of such artifice. In one way they were encouraging me to look again, to wonder if I'd seen as well as I might have (or if my camera was good enough to create the same record), but that in turn then made me feel somewhat belittled...

I shrugged and moved on, back through the gatehouse. A mere half hour's drive from the heaving crowds on Mont St Michel, perhaps half a dozen more people were making their way in. We thanked the young man in the shop, and went on our way through the green and gold countryside of the Cotentin, our heads, and our memory cards, full of satisfying images.

Reader, I purchased it.

The folks at the camera shop assured me that it would probably cost as much to fix the old one as to buy this, and I believed them. Very willingly.

So here are the first efforts and impressions. Yes, it really is better, though whether that will show up in Blogger I don't know. It is light as a whipped soufflé, thanks to super-dooper new battery technology. It's remarkable how things move along in three years. It has a whole array of fancy settings, some of them really quite funny, like a special Baby one, where you can log the info like Baby's age etc, and you get a toned down flash and fluffed up skin tones, and then you get a Baby 2 setting in case you have another one, then just so the child-free dog-lovers like me don't feel left out there's a similar mode for pets! There's also a 'pinhole camera' effect which looks fun...

The first thing I was very anxious to get sorted out was to find the place in the menu to turn all the volumes down to zero, all those totally artificial shutter whirrs and zooming noises and bleeps and jingles. Why do they do that? One of the things I've always loved about taking digital pics was the silence, so no one knows if your taking one or not, and there is as little intrusion as possible.

It feels a little ponderous, the focus and the zoom. The buzzard a few photos down was one of a pair going over which should have been a gift with the extra zoom power, flying low with the sun under their wings, but by the time I fixed on one they's almost gone. But I guess I just need to get used to it. The 10 megapixels make for gigantic great files, so I must be really conscientious about backing up and throwing out.

So, just some things round and about:


Sumac,

rose,

nasty old maize plants, time they were gone,

field at the bottom of the garden,

said buzzard,

backlit decay in a hellebore leaf,

grass heads,

late peacock on late marigolds,

liquidamber, such a lovely name.

I thin that Lumix and I are going to have fun...

And also...

Joe's in a cave, writing terza rima, that's what he's been doing. Go look.

All behind like a cow's tail, and a quandary.

Tom remarked that Box Elder is looking very boring, with nothing new for the last eight days. I reminded him that we haven't had any internet for pretty well four of those. Our idyllic and reclusive mode de vie does have disadvantages, notably that your internet can go AWOL at the drop of a hat. If this happens midweek, as it did, it's not so bad, since the odd commercial interest like the suspended ceiling factory up the road whom I rang for confirmation that it wasn't just us, may protest about it, and there will be people employed to fix it.

If, however, it's over the weekend, as it was the second time, then it's just tough shit, and you have to wait till someone wanders in on Monday morning and notices that the little light that signifies the environs of our village is not on and sticks the relevant plug back in its socket. Or however it works. I am woefully ignorant of the workings of the internet beyond my immediate orbit. I'm quite cheerfully ignorant of them within my orbit come to that.

So now I am hopelessly behind with everything requiring me to be on-line, though I'm admittedly quite well up with things like organising pieces of work-related paper, brushing the dog etc.


Yet once I was once more enmeshed within the tissue of the web once more, I felt somehow paralysed,

and, rather than catching up with pleasant or useful matters such as your good selves' blogs, putting something on my own or studying the next module of my on-line business English teaching course, I frittered and wasted the afternoon hours I had available today in trying to find a means on their website to berate Orange for their lack of service and threaten to withdraw our custom from them - a futile endeavour since they make sure you can't complain by e-mail, and anyway, all the internet service providers available here are overpriced and rubbish, and as my good friend said, better the devil you know.

The other thing I've been wasting time on here is vacillating uselessly between Canon's website, various photography forums and camera-repair place websites, and other forums, reviews and Flickr pools dedicated to lauding and honouring the superior virtues of the Panasonic Lumix FZ28. Because, brothers and sisters, the camera has croaked. My first response to this was that I would do without it for a time, use the cheap compact occasionally, and virtuously edit, sort and maximise the potential of all the backlog of photos I have already, then either get it repaired or replace it. But, I decided, I would go to the camera shop and ask their advice. The camera shop wasn't open (it was Monday, which is the New Sunday here), but peering through the double metal grills and shutters over their windows (an oddity in a place where bank cashiers sit in cheerful open plan spaces behind nothing more than flimsy formica desks, no grills no glass, and people have vegetable patches full of sumptuous comestibles unfenced next to the road without fear of their being raided...) I saw the Panasonic. At a very good price, which so far I have not seen the equal of even on-line.

What to do? The Canon is probably reparable, which would cost rather less, though probably rather a lot compared to what it's worth, and things are tight and getting tighter, with the exchange rate and all. But it has had motor trouble (which this seems to be) before, when it was still under guarantee, is there any point in repairing what is clearly a fragility. I would have to send it off or take it the other side of Rennes to get it looked at, even before deciding whether it was worthwhile. It is a little over three years old, it is outmoded, it would be exciting and interesting to upgrade... but it is only a little over three years old, it's appalling that I should have to replace it!

Taking good photos is little to do with the equipment, as everyone tells me, but comes from within, I should not be beguiled... but it is clearly a superior beast, I know I would take better photos with it... I am being seduced into the evils of unnecessary consumerism, but for goodness sake, I consume so little, I never buy new clothes, I scarcely eat red meat, I don't even own an I-pod or any other MP3 player, I have no children ... I would grieve for the Canon, not just as a departed friend that's been through much with me, but also in that fashion I remember Dave writing a poem about once, as the only form of grief peculiar to the modern, consumer, throwaway and built-in-obsolescence world, the grief that comes from the sense of waste, of knowing that something has gone before it should have, it should have died hereafter...

If we went through Rennes, we would probably stop and have a Japanese or Indian meal which would be a treat, but would add to the expense...

Help me, sisters and brothers, what would you do?????

~~~

(The photos are nothing much to do with anything, just backlog. Tom says this agonising about the camera is pretty boring too, since it's already decided ...)

The dyke of the Duchess Anne, and a series of posts.

La digue de la Duchesse Anne, Duchess Anne's dyke, was the first, mediaeval, attempt to hold back the sea from the coastal marshes around Mt St Michel. After that for several centuries more embankments and drains and such like were constructed, notably by the Dutch, but it wasn't until the 19th century that the cultivable and pasture land that makes up the Bay was finally secure.

La digue is now a well-surfaced motor-vehicle-free footpath and bridle- and cycle way, and it goes on and on from the Mont westward for a good 20 km, past saltmarsh and sands and sheltering settlements like Cherrueix in its lee. It's a very Dutch-looking landscape, of dykes and polders, lines of poplars, low-built farms, windmills even, and in fact the best way to explore it would be Dutch style, which is to say, by bicycle. Walking is fine; the air's a tonic, the space is wide and open and the views are great,




the thorn trees and grasses string out in the wind,

but you can walk and walk and very little changes except that the Mont grows a tiny bit bigger if you're walking towards it.

Which was what we were doing. But then I saw them: fence posts.

I think fence posts may be becoming something of a hobby with me (and they do say it's a fine line between hobby and mental illness). These were some of the most hypnotising I've ever seen.

Made of chestnut, I should think, heavy-grained, substantial and imposing, so that the the weathering and silvering of the salt winds and spray made them into the most dramatic of sculptures,

like fetishes or totems,

infibulated with wire,

chained and bound

some dignified, but some also sinister, bonelike,

their knots and graining, sometime elegant and abstract, or forming a refuge for living creatures

looked like mouths, tongues, sockets, or other openings and appendages,

and the eroded holes bored for the wire like eyes, animated by the living green of the world behind.

Their regular intervals and repetitious patterning increase the typological quality of the posts, and the compulsion to stop and study each one, its similarities and differences. I become more and more convinced they are trying to tell me something. Something not altogether happy or benign.

Unfortunately, not everyone could share my fascination,

or wait around for it. I find myself running between posts to keep up.