Floods, Phantoms and the Ontic Bulge.

During March the Dordogne rose until it was rolling 1,110 cubic metres of water a second past Le Port, the field flooded and finally water flowed through it and came up to the wall running in front of the terrace. Today it is running at a mere 84 cu m/sec. There are old flood marks on the walls of the house, the oldest dated 26 December 1846 which is about four feet above the present ground level. That line dated from the era before the dams were built far upstream which, we were told, would prevent flooding. In January 1994 an early melt of snow in the Auvergne, combined with heavy rain led to a miscalculation by the EDF, which manage the dams, at Bort les Orgues so that the lake risked topping the dam and necessitated an emergency release. This caused a crisis for all the dams downstream as their lakes could not hold the water either and serial releases ensued. At home for Christmas one dark night we were rung by our neighbours to be told that they had just heard from the Gendarmerie in Sarlat who had said that a wave of water "un vague d'eau" had been released by the dam at L'aigle and was rolling downstream towards us. In the moment following this alarming phone call there was a gut wrenching scream from above in one of the bedrooms. We discovered Jessie weeping in fear having just seen the emaciated head of an old women staring in through the window at her. This was especially alarming because the bedroom window was a good fifteen feet above ground level. Thouroughly on edge the children were evacuated in the car to high ground, an act which looked so like panic that we thought we should make our own enquiries of the Gendarmerie, these resulted in a downgrade of the "wave of water" to a mere rising waters with a risk of flooding. We brought down the children from the high ground and over the next day the waters slowly rose until they reached the second step in the front of the house and were within a couple of feet of entering the side house. The children took advantage of the opportunity to canoe in the garden and we watched the water passing by throgh the trees, a solid sheet between the cliff opposite and the house wall.* This situation lasted for ten days. During this time we visited the dams and saw the anxious EDF staff leaning over the dam wall measuring the water level of the lake on one side whilst on the other two huge tongues of water shot from floodgates just below the top of the dam, down then up a shute before plunging downward again into the roaring turmoil of mist in the gorge below. So dense was the fog produced by the falling water that clouds were forming on the wooded ridges above the dam and were drifting off on the wind.

I was reminded of Jessie's ghost because I saw one in Wales in February. I had been walking alone all day and had descended from the moor to a lake with a huge iron pipe emerging from it. Finding gates through the fences between the moor and the track by the pipe was difficult and I had to use my binoculars. Eventually I found myself in field with a few sheep and what looked like an old house platform or wall line which made a useful path through the boggy field. Looking in front I saw a figure standing looking at me about 150 yards away, behind a second line of fencing by a stream besides which grew a few willows. He was dressed in brown, standing still and looking towards me. I was approaching the figure but as I was planning to turn left away from the person, I prepared to greet them, but looking up there was no one. I waited for a moment then scanned the area with the binoculars. It became clear that there was no one there and that there never had been anyone there because, unless they had lain down in the wet grass, I would have seen them.

Before this incident I had had impressions in lonely place of figures standing looking at me. When in Oman I had taken a rather stressful boat trip with Jessie and Raphael just before Halcyon was born and Josephine was in England. In a remote and lonely, wide sandy bay surrounded by low hills I continually had the impression a man was standing watching from across the bay. Examination of the spot, again through binoculars, showed that my edge vision was interpreting a vertical cleft in the rock with strong shadows as a standing figure. In spite of knowing this the impression continued for the whole afternoon. Months later I was in the same bay at the same time of day but in much more relaxed mood. Then the cleft in the rock left no such impression with me.

There are two sorts of explanation, one is that the perceiver is reacting to spirits or impressions of past persons, so that my ghost in Wales was associated with some event that happened near the ancient house platforms and walls on which I had been walking. Of course as a modern man I should apply Occum's razor of parsimony and look to an explanation that does not involve the invocation of a spirit world of which there is no logical evidence. Instead I prefer an evolutionary explanation. For example when in a strange area men have tradtionally been most at risk fron encounters with other men. This has led to us men evolving interior mental structures which are very sensitive to being triggered by visual stimuli which could be men standing staring from a distance in a menacing manner. Furthermore anxiety would further sensitize such internal structures. Perhpas for that reason the same stimuli on the beach in Oman caused different responses according to how anxious I was. If it is true that the female of the human species is much more orientated towards social life rather than the agressive and defensive disposition of the male, then Jessie as a female would be predisposed to see faces and more intimate views of people. There is an interesting piece of research to be done examining the relationship between the age, sex and emotional state of individuals who report sightings of ghosts and the nature of those ghosts.

This week discussing the issue with Jessie, who is taking her degree finals which involve a heavy dose of philosphy, she pointed out that there were a whole mass of things that did not fit in with the rules, including scientific rules, by which we define the world - the ontic bulge - no less. She suggested that it is so important for the mind to make sense of the world that we may be pre disposed to freqeuntly see things that do not exist and provided we do not have to interact with them we would never know they did not exist, and furthermore it would not matter much. So that great human feeling of invulnerability would not be punctured. I have always held that it is a great wonder of human being that in spite of knowing relativly little of what is going on around us or of what exists around us we have this strong feeling of omnipotence and this will remain unpunctured provided that we only have to deal with the limited number of things that ensure our survival and continuation and can do so reasonably competently. Now Jessie is suggesting that on the other hand there are many things we may perceive which do not exist but this does not matter too much either.

* The excellent departmental website records the passage of 1,401 cubic meters per second on 7th January 1994 as the maximum for this flood. See:
http://www.dordogne.equipement.gouv.fr/crudor/suivi/mesuresStation.do?action=mesuresDuJourEtDeLaVeille&codeStation=CENA

Haiku XXII

No nightingale's song,

Instead a frog's chorus

Roisters all night long.



-

A Rest on the Journey between London and Le Port

There is always a carved stone guarding the entrance to the territory of spirits. *1 Here too was a carved stone laid across the entrance to a woodland track, an effective guardian using its tons of weight to ward off vehicles powered by the infernal combustion engine. Just beyond the stone amongst the trees and bushes were dispersed on either side of the track about fifty large white and purple orchids, some so tall as to reach half way up a man's thigh *2. At first the track was wide with tractor tracks but these ended abruptly as if the machine that made them had been disassembled and removed from the spot. The track ran downhill just inside a wood of trees that had in the past been coppiced, the trees stretched uphill to the left whilst to the right a lush pasture could be seen through the edge of the wood lying in the flat valley bottom, beyond the meadow a gallery of trees indicated a river bank. The wood was spacious having no cover of shrubs or bushes, instead there lay a dense carpet of white Ramsons in full flower giving the cool air a slight odour of garlic. These flowers bounded the track and stretched away up the hillside, a field of unbroken white. The track narrowed to become a footpath although there were no turnings off nor were there any footprints of any kind, animal or human upon the earth. After a few hundred yards a yellow figwort (*3) could be seen growing amongst the Ramsons, making up about a quarter of the flower bed furnishing the wood.

The path ran on for a kilometer with no significant branches; the hillside closed in and the bed of flowers gave way to dense undergrowth growing from a steep bank. Eventually there appeared on the right a wooden building, apparently a barn, in front of which quietly grazed white steers. The windows of the buildings were large, square and empty of frame or glazing, more medieval than contemporary rural France. The path ended at a crossroads of dirt tracks, one leading to a gated cave on the left, about 150 yards from the "barn". Expecting a farmyard I saw instead that the dirt track onto which I had emerged passed right through the middle of long side of the barn, indeed it took up the entire width of the barn which had no front or end walls. Close inspection revealed a sturdy structure some 25ft in height with a well made pitched roof, floor boards of thick worn oak planks and clinker built walls with with the plain cut windows I had seen before. The whole structure was suspended upon enormous oak beams secured onto four stone buttresses situated at each corner of the structure above a small river the turbid waters of which flowed almost imperceptibly beneath. The track passed through the bridge and emerged to curl up around the opposite hillside out of sight.

A notice in old enamel nailed high up on north wall of the bridge told its story - how, in the middle of the nineteenth century - Italian workmen had been making the tunnel for the nearby railway line then being built between Paris and Toulouse. Their camp had been on the other side of the river from the tunnel where they worked and once when the river was in flood nine of the men had had their lives cut short whilst trying to cross over. The response of the Italians had been to build this massive bridge to cross safely to their camp, gave them shelter to have their lunch on stormy days, but most of all to construct a memorial. This is a memorial by illiterate men to their dead workmates - not a memorial of words but of massive materials and the exercise of great skills of construction - a singularity.

I returned along the path which had a "private path" notice at this end. Private to whom was never revealed, this path which ran through a flower garden for over a kilometer from nowhere to nowhere, just to other tracks, ways and bridges, where those who used it left no prints to show who or what it was that savoured the beauty of this wooded place.


*1 Two recent films Miazaki's Spirited Away and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth have opening scenes where a child encounters stone carvings which mark the entering into a spirit world.

*2Probably Loose Flowered Orchid, Orchis laxiflora.

*3 Ramsons, Allium laxiflora.

*4 Probably Yellow Rattle Rhinanthus minor.

Haiku XXI In memoriam John Kearns.

Paddling my own canoe:

Peace pipes over the water

Bring John Kearns to mind.


John Kearns died circa 23rd March 2007: atheist, Stalinist, professional Irishman, he died at the heart of the establishment, his memorial service being celebrated this day at Fitzwilliam Coll. Cambridge.

Today, being banned from the service, I paddled for eight and a half hours from Souillac to Le Port. Just after lunctime I reached the cliffs just before the village of Grolejac and heard the gentle celtic pipes being played on the opposite bank, John loved the peace pipes as he called them and was always keen to distinguish them from the Scottish pipes, the war pipes. I hope the angels enjoy your company as much as we did... or will it be the devils keeping you company? Well the grand and petit bourgeoise seem to have survived you and are pretty well intact, so it'll probably be the angels...