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Luminous Debris – Reflecting on Vestige in Provence & Languedoc: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc - Hardcover
Synopsis
This text explores the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc, drawing on prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, focusing on a particular place or artifact for the relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival curiosities for Gustaf Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation on existence: artefacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons. As much travel writing as meditative discourse, this book is enhanced by a prose that tracks, questions, and reflects on the materials invoked. Sobin engages the reader with precise descriptions of those materials and the messages to be gleaned from their examination, be they existential, ethical, or political.
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About the Author
Gustaf Sobin's books include Voyaging Portraits (1988), Venus Blue: A Novel (1991), Breaths' Burials (1995), By the Bias of Sound (1996), and Towards the Blanched Alphabets (1998). A novel, The Fly-Truffler, set in Provence, is forthcoming this year.
From the Inside Flap
"A wonderful, addictive book. Gustaf Sobin's prose combines descriptive precision with evocative power, calling to mind the poetic-scholarly writing of Barthes or Bachelard. As he records and links the scattered fragments, some infinitesimal, of a regional past, Sobin offers wonder, regret, and often a sharp critique of contemporary society."--James Clifford, author ofRoutes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc
By Gustaf SobinUniversity of California Press
Copyright 2000 Gustaf SobinAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520217756
Terra Amata
The beach cobbles lie there in little unruly heaps. Indeed, nothing seems to indicate any inherent arrangement in the way the stones lean one against another, as if toppled, at odd, apparently haphazard angles. There's nothing whatsoever to tell us that they'd been deliberately laid into place, over four hundred thousand years earlier, by Paleolithic hunters in a pathetic attempt to shield their pit fires against the high prevailing wind overhead. Nothing indicates their veritable nature but the fact that the cobbles themselvesloosely arranged in vague crescents, in curves no more than ten centimeters high and fifty centimeters wideall face in a north-northwesterly direction. All happen to face, that is, the all-dominant, all-determinant air mass of the mistral.
We look on, amazed. Ours? we might ask ourselves. Really ours, these vestiges? The markno matter how makeshiftof some distant predecessor? Living as we do under one wind or another, but in the shelter of heated, heav-
A four-hundred-thousand-year-old windbreak.
Photo courtesy Henry de Lumley, Muse de Terra Amata, Nice.
ily insulated houses, we look on, amazed by the fat pebbles in this archeological resuscitation, struck by the enormity of so much scant evidence.
Discovered quite by chance in excavating the foundations for a high-rise apartment house in the suburbs of Nice, the site of Terra Amata has given us a brief but luminous glimpse into a thoroughly obscure period of prehistory.1 The ancient site lies underneath ten meters of rubble, marine deposit, and aeolian sedimentation. Despite everything we've learned about Terra Amata itselfit was occupied on a seasonal basis by itinerant bands of Acheulian hunters (usually in late spring or early summer, according to pollen analyses
of the subsoil)we're left with little material evidence regarding the hunters themselves. We have, of course, their artifacts. We even have an area that the archeologists have clearly identified as a worksite, within which the Acheulians would crack open the quartzite beach pebbles and create, with the constituent parts, their implements. But what of the hunters themselves? What of their size and physiognomy, not to mention their rites, their traditions, their Weltanschauung? Of these, nothing remains. Nothing but a small patch of barren earth at the very center of the worksite. There, surrounded by broken bits of beach pebble, in an area that the archeologists have described as "sterile," the tool makers must have squatted, chipping away at those round, ungainly volumes. Nowhere, in fact, is their presence at Terra Amata more apparent than in this manifest absence, this tight, earth-beaten patch of pure lacuna.
We're left, as ever, with residue, with the little that remains. In the Lower Paleolithic, this never constitutes more than a few scattered artifacts: traces of Homo faber 's attempt to survive an essentially hostile environment. So we return, over and over, to those piled cobbles, those pathetic little windbreaks, no wider than one's spread fingers and not much longer than a forearm. For these, unmistakably, were theirs. Cobble over cobble, these were what the hunters assembled for the sake of protecting the quick little scarves of their fires, the scavenged meats that they cooked, over four hundred thousand years ago, in the scooped hollow of the sand dunes. These were the tiny, fortuitous arrangements they made against the flat, lateral pour of that indomitable air current.
The mistral is still blowing. As we leave the museum in which the excavation has been meticulously preserved, we're struck by a blast of that blue air. Through the streets of Nice, the same wind blows unabated. We watch it catch, now, in the awnings of the outdoor cafes and billow through the taut canvas of the brightly striped beach cabanas. For us, of course, it's no longer an is-
sue. We've long since learned how to shelter ourselves against every natural element; even more, we've learned how to harness those very elements to serve our own, ever-expanding needs. The windafter how many hundreds of thousands of years?rarely affects our lives. Like one of our own mass-produced appliances, we too have grown "windproof."
What, though, about those fires, we might ask? Those fires within? The subtle little flames each of us covets, not in the scooped hollows of a beach, but in the chambers of the brain or spirit or wherever we'd locate that tiny, flickering, unsubstantial glimmer that we've equated with life itself? The glow, say, of an early intuition? Or the sputtering embers of some still resilient memory? Are these fires any less exposed now than they were then? Any less vulnerable? And those cobbles, our cobbles, what we've laid into place along the rim of our consciousness in an unending effort to protect that fire, that glow, those embers: are they, in effect, any less provisional?
The wind today is still blowing, both inside and out. And if, at Terra Amata, we've lingered so long over such seemingly inconsequential artifacts, it's only because we have recognizedin cobble after teetering cobblethe extreme fragility of our own existence, displayed in paradigm. Found, among so much brute material, metaphor befitting our own human condition.
Continues...
Excerpted from Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc by Gustaf Sobin Copyright 2000 by Gustaf Sobin. Excerpted by permission.
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