German graves, French soil.
Above a precipice, staring at germany through the haze, a border collie befirends me wildly while her owner does an impression of a cow, illustrating her question. Descend through Orbey and alpine flowers, kill the heart of darkness and my staff – stabs me in the chin and splinters beneath my fall. In the night Pine Martins rush silently above me from branch to branch to branch, their frog like barks tracing their movements. In the morning they scamper in the light.
Interlude. (I killed a grasshopper by mistake*)
you realise you are as inconsequential as the last human, as important as the first. You realise there are so many people doing so many things, that everything comes to matter as much as everything else. Or as little.
Before I left I had a conversation with a man who said I had to be prepared for this journey to be completely inconsequential. For it not to matter at all, for it not to change anything, for it not to be noticed. And I think, and I have thought on this for all these days of farmland and villages, night and day, forest and gendarmarie, all the mornings I have woken having no idea where it is that I will sleep next. And it is a thing that makes me so sad I become happy again, when you have plumbed the depths of this thought, this possibility, when you have discovered that everything you thought mattered so much matters not at all you obtain a kind of peace usually only offered by the grave, or the open sky, the blue of distance and disappearance. The joy of presence, that the moment you are in is everything. A two bit bar with flies and the noise of French pop music. Everything. As consequential as inconsequence, as nameless as defined. As Rebecca says, so easy to recall, so impossiible to describe.
*The grasshopper to which this passage is dedicated died in the gap between the fly sheet of my tent and the inner bit as I rolled it up one morning,, the next night I lay there and stared at its buckled dried out corpse and wrote.
