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Published: September 18th 2007
Now that I have realized that I am nothing more than a machine which transforms experience into memory--chewing the small bites of reality I take into digestible morcels and storing them hopelessly into continually dying cells, on bits of wood pulp, and in various plastics and metals as binary code -- I know for sure that I have forgotten where this paragraph was going.
...17 days were just spent at Les CLAJ. I forget what this stands for, but it is a collectively run, collectively owned organic farm, not 10 km from the Swiss border, where meat, milk, and cheese are produced and many kind people and animals reside. Now I'm in Geneva, awaiting my removal from the earth and inevitable return.
....All has changed again, especially the keyboard I currently type on, with the letters rearranged once again, Swiss-French style. The double espressos are now more expensive, the accent is different, and everything from the recent past has begun to blur...
...everything is beginning to move backwards just as the train I transferred to in Lausanne departed in reverse,
in the direction I had just come from, past the same people dining on the same terrace, past the same workers outside the same factories. The mountains arose and dissipated from opposite angles while I was brought back to where I began two months ago.
...it was a short ride from Rochejean in the Valée du Doubs into Switzerland, with old man Manu at the wheel going off on tangents, continuing my lessons in French curses and slang, as usual avoiding his almost perfect English, forcing me to bumble along in response. We were waved though at the border. Suddenly everything was cleaner, crisper, straighter, the roof tops more pointy, and the mountains bigger. Its never until you are gone, when its no longer real, that you comprehend all the things you did not do, what you had and what you didn't. It starts to come on the night before, imagining the goodbye that maybe you've been waiting for with curiosity. It blankets your dreams and steals their imagery. A form of death I suppose. For me it was the dinner the night before at the Petit Challet, an old inn on a cow
path into Switzerland. The cow bells rang outside, under the glowing Milky Way while I was rolling my squares of bread in a fondu of Comtè cheese and sipping Cote du Jura Chardonnay in a candle lit room at a long wooden table, surrounded by people who know me only by my smile, my attentive silence, and my limited ability of self expression in French. A 15 year old albino cat with a giant oblong head roamed around us. It was then that their smiles began to fade, their and my realities dissipating and being replaced, transforming into a haze, punctuated by moments of random brightness...
...chicken feathers blow in the wind. Blood spattered on a blue board, dripping from the neck of a hen in a red upturned cone into a yellow bucket. Two chickens dangle by one leg from a metal step ladder, half plucked, still warm. Another one shudders, its neck in the shocker. The others cry cocorico,
cock-a-doodle-death in the small cage resting on the tractor fork. Start at the ass they've told me, then the wings, the big feathers first, while they are still hot from being dipped in
the pot. Once naked, I bring the carcasses to the other people who disembowel them, restuff them with a few of the desired entrails, then tie and box them. Chicken à la mode...
...I awake in the basement. There is no light to invade my uninvadable darkness. It is 6AM. My tiny, pink, 7.50 Euro, one AA battery powered alarm clock grows louder. I rise and climb the stairs. The camionette is running, the other workers waiting. I tie my shoes. It's a short ride to the Batailleuse. I put on my boots, grab a stick, and head for the frost covered pastures on the south slope of the Jura mountains to retrieve the cows. "Allez, allez!" I stick with their native tongue, slap a few on the ass, and make the long walk with them back to the stall. A bit of rustling and shouting and stick swinging gets them into place, chained, ready to be sucked dry.
And so begins the process of making fine French cheese from French milk from French cows with French shit covered French utters, whose French open sores sometimes drip with French blood, sometimes next to
a fifth, French extra utter and sometimes even a dangling, meatball-looking, French tumor. And there's me in the middle of it all, an American, crouching between the beasts in French manure and French cow piss, in France, not far from Switzerland.
I release the plug. Thuck, thuck, thuck, and thuck go the milkers. Clean, squeeze, suck, grease; 4x4, cow x cow, until daylight has come and the cows have gone home. Into the trough goes the sloppy steaming mess they've left behind, scraped with a metal sheet on the end of a stick. I flip the switch and then round it goes, around the barn in what I have dubbed "le train de merde"(which raises few smiles from the other workers), and then into the pit, under ground, from where it is pushed by a giant piston, only to bubble up 50 meters behind the barn, in what I have also christened "La Fontaine de Merde"(less smiles). So it goes.
When this is done, someone else cleans the machine. I ask them what I can do. By the time I've already asked them to repeat what they've said, I understand. I drag the bucket of petit lait to
the pigs and pour it over their heads into their trough. Excitement and sucking sounds ensue.
....breakfast equals coffee in a bowl, baguettes, butter, jam, and honey, after which I head back to the farm to tend to the surviving chickens. I open their door, give them water and feed, lay down some straw, and pick their meat out of my teeth. Next come the rabbits. Give them grain, hay, and water. I quickly learned not to put fresh grass in all the cages when I saw Christine, one morning, carrying a black baby bunny, stiff like a small square of cardboard, over to the manure pile. As a result of my ignorance, it had been taken prematurely from the land of the living with not even a chance to become paté. Yum.
...the tangy must of goats and stale hay is in the air. Square eyes, sour milk, delicate cheese. White boots, spooning curd, washing the forms. The goats trap them selves in one by one running up the ramp. The milking is quick and easy. I pull the bar and the goats lift their heads, pull
again and they are locked out.
...pastis and cigarettes precede the big meal at 12:30. The conversation grows to fast for me to follow. I chew and swallow, pour another glass of wine, and await the cheese. A sieste is made or not, but either way my time is spent wisely, before returning to the farm at 4 to prepare for the evening milkings.
...consisting of left overs from lunch, the dinner is quiter, the conversation slower, and though I can follow, I am tired. I slide away and return to my room to digest the day in darkness as I drift away into dreams less foreign...
...,
steve
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Joe
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Poulet Du Kentucky
We all like fried Chicken Steve. For some reason, my comments arent showing up on your bloggo. I sent an email too about our little boy from Neptune. He has been home for about a month now.... Continue to put your prophetic "stick" in the spokes of earth's tire. Have you had any cigars???