“Art is not freedom from discipline, but Disciplined Freedom.” — Edward Catich
I must tell you something of the people I’m staying with. Nothing I write could possibly convey the pleasure I experienced in meeting them.
Delphine Decloedt and Didier Durassier live in a little bungalo in Saint Barthélemy, on the quiet lane that leads to l’étan (the pond) de Kergallic. The house, true to medieval tradition, combines the functions of home and atelier, and opens onto a delightfully anarchic garden. Their children are intelligent, polite (well, little Arthur can be stubborn, sometimes!) and talented. Didier is well known in Breton music circles as a performer on biniou, veuse and bombarde, as a member of the band Penn Kazh, and as Brittany’s most accomplished craftsman-sculptor of traditional instruments. Delphine is a painter and calligrapher (Grand prix du prestige Européen des Arts et Belles Lettres, Commandeur de l’ordre de l’Etoile de l’Europe). When, I stepped into the house, Mélissande was playing some Satie on the piano. She came across as quiet, but not timid. Liam already has the “cool” of French cinema idols. Arthur is a reincarnation of Christopher Robin.
In this charming setting, the family pursues numerous interests. They are science fiction fans, historical re-enactors, amateur astronomers, medievalists, nature lovers. They are not passive consumers. Part of their livings are made from organizing and managing participatory events that combine scholarship, Breton traditions, modern pop culture, and fun. They organize Quidditch tournaments!
The little house is stuffed with books, musical instruments, and artifacts. Over a late-night snack, Delphine brought out a series of little treasures for me to contemplate, culminating in a set of Byzantine earrings. We could not resist unscientific speculation — I was prepared to swear that the Empress Theodora tore them off in a rage at Belisarius. I was made a gift, to my astonishment, of an 1846 edition of Th. Hersart de La Villemarqué’s Barzaz-Breiz: chants populaires de la Bretagne, which I pored over in the warm sunlight of the garden. This book was instrumental in the nineteenth-century romantic revival of Breton language and music. I was pleased to see in the lyrics the assonance and consonance that give Breton songs their vigour, and allow them to appeal even to those who cannot understand the language. I also noticed that there were a large number of songs about the chouans, the Royalist rebels of Mayenne and Brittany during the Revolution, described by Balzac in Les Chouans.
The book also embodies an unexpected irony, for it indirectly helped the process that replaced Breton with French. This was certainly not the intention of the author, whose love of the Breton language was sincere. However, he was a priest. The drive for the retention of Breton in the nineteenth century came largely from priests and local aristocrats, a situation unlike that of other places where Celtic languages were retreating. In Brittany, the gentry and the clergy wished to see themselves well educated in French, while the peasantry remained Breton-speaking, and thus insulated from the two things they feared the most: democratic ideas and secular knowledge. The Breton peasantry were quite aware of this motive, and concluded, logically, that learning French was the key to upward mobility. By the early twentieth century, Breton peasants were hastening to learn French and discarding Breton as “la langue des curés” [the language of the priests]. Today, the situation is not at all like Wales, where Welsh is still spoken in the streets of a large region, and one can walk into a book shop full of Welsh books. Despite a strong revival of interest, and its use in popular song, Breton remains in quotidian use only among the very old.
I have encountered, in my brief visit, an unlikely high number of speakers of the language. M Gérard and Mme Mireille Le Gallo, with whom I stayed the first two nights, speak it — Gérard does so fluently. Mme Thérese Le Cornec, the oldest person I met, spoke no French until grade school. So I encountered far more of the language than a visitor to Brittany should normally expect. To my delight, I got to spend some time with Gilles Pistien, a genuine linguistic researcher, and we had a good discussion over the lexical database in his laptop. We discussed the geographical distribution of dialects, the possibility of underlying Gaulish elements, searched for the roots of Breton names in Canada, and so forth. It was one of many fine conversations I experienced — the house on rue de Kergallic seems to have a constant stream of visitors, each embued with some enthusiasm, and I had difficulty keeping track of who was who. Marc Heullant, with whom I had sparred in good-natured disagreement at the pub, showed up.
I spent my childhood in what you might call a “disfunctional” family. Much of my current presence of mind was shaped by the later experience of meeting and knowing a fine family very much like this one in Brittany. My long-time friends the Muhlbergers share almost exactly the same combination of interests as I found here in Saint-Barthélemy, and they too seem to have a wise approach to life. The children I met in this Breton family are not spoiled and bratty, as you often find in Canadian and American families that have artistic pretentions. They are confident, well-mannered, kind, gentle, thoughtful, and self-controlled. They display all the signs of being raised in an atmosphere of love and reason.
In North America, life has long been dominated by a bizarre dualism. Either one conforms to a rigid and puritanical orthodoxy, or one goes berserk with a kind of “freedom” that amounts to nothing but chaos and irresponsibility. You see this portrayed in classic American fiction. Huckleberry Finn must choose between being “civilized” (obedient, sexless, cheerlessly disciplined) and being free (ignorant, unwashed, savage, illiterate). Mark Twain spent his entire life brooding over this false dichotomy. When he visited France, where people seemed to drink, amuse themselves and “sin” to an extreme unimaginable to an American, and yet somehow managed to be modern, sophisticated and technologically advanced, he was thoroughly confused. Not surprisingly, the French never found Twain very funny. His humorous lectures went over well in England and Germany, but fell flat in France. No Frenchman ever thought that a glass of wine with your dinner would damn you to hell, and set you on the slippery slope to savagery, so jokes based on that assumption meant nothing to them.
The same dichotomy re-appeared in California during the 1960s. At that time, if you were young, you were supposed to choose between being a docile robot with a crewcut, or a hippy living in squalor and contracting hepatitis. Most young people muddled through somewhere in between, but they accepted the dichotomy as thoroughly as Twain did a century before.
This strange idea has shaped much of North American society, and still pervades it. You find it played out in a bizarre hatred, horror, and obsessive fascination with sex. There’s a reason why Nevada and Utah are next to each other. A signature American character is the corrupt and fanatical evangelical preacher who grows rich ranting about sin by day and spends it screwing whores by night. Underlying it is the belief that “freedom” is not a reasoned, productive attitude to life, but simply ruinous selfishness and irrationality. You see it in the American “libertarian” movement that conceives of “liberty” as carrying a gun, hating most everybody, abandoning normal human responsibilities to others, and behaving like an asshole. Hardly any different from the cynical old “hippies” I remember from the 1970s whom you wouldn’t trust with your back turned, or the “punks” who combined self-righteousness with doing nothing useful.
This brings me to the quotation I placed at the beginning of this entry. Delphine is a renowned calligrapher, and she mentioned that she had done work based on the form of Latin script found on Trajan’s Column. Now, I know only the basics of calligraphy, but a long time ago I worked as a Webb offset printer, in the days before computers entered the game, and type for the masters was set by a machine the size of a refrigerator that projected fonts through a system of lenses. I knew that Edward Catich, the designer of the typeface called Petrarch, had been the first person to seriously study the writing on Trajan’s column. Catich, like Delphine, was both a calligrapher and a musician. And after our conversation, I remembered that quotation of his, so appropriate to this household that had welcomed me, a total stranger, with such warm affection.
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