Towering above this medieval French village is dun-coloured cliff of volcanic rock, dramatically floodlit at night, topped by two ancient lookout towers. A wide waterfall once flowed over this cliff and at night the floodlights pick out the grooves and caverns worn away over thousands of years. For the last couple of millennia these caverns have been the dwelling places of all sorts of refugees and paupers and one of the larger ones was turned into a hospice for old soldiers of Napoleon’s citizen army. The rock is too hard and impervious to allow for much modification of the cavern walls, but a rough stone wall with window and doorway built across a cavern opening affords a perfectly dry and secure dwelling place. I can vouch for this because since last Thursday I’ve been living and sleeping in one.
The bed is at the narrowing whitewashed point of the cave and lying there with the living rock hanging just above one’s head, it feels a bit like sleeping in a big cool vagina. A chimney in the tiny cave which is the kitchen has been in use for the last 1,500 years. In front of the hobbit-like door in the rock is a ledge about the size of a tennis court where it never rains and which has been made into a cactus garden. A circular metal table and four plastic chairs under a pollarded mulberry tree constitutes the living room. From my plastic seat under the mulberry tree I can see for 30 miles over the hills to the south, and for the last few nights, weirdly, and slightly ominously, the planet Mars has appeared low in the sky as a huge solitary red blob after about the third evening gin and tonic. And if I’m not mistaken, I will have a grandstand seat for Friday’s Blood Moon and total lunar eclipse.
Shelley von Strunckel has been warning me for months that this once in a century lunar eclipse in Aquarius will render null and void even the pitiful few certainties which I am currently entertaining about who I am and what I think I am playing at.
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