Heroes Not Zombies

As I walked into the Place de l’Hotel de Ville, in Aix-en-Provence, last night, I could hear somebody speaking very loudly. Well, these days, there are always people around you using mobile phones. Mobile phone users fall into one of two camps. There are those who try to speak very quietly, maybe even holding a hand over their mouth while they mumble and whisper into their phone, but there are others who are a bit like old-fashioned town criers yelling their opinions and news so that everyone in a 500 yard radius hears exactly what they have to say. These latter seem to outnumber the former. So when I heard the loud declamation I assumed it was somebody on their mobile phone and didn’t think any more about it till the square gradually cleared and the voice continued loudly. It seemed to be coming from near the great tree.

But it wasn’t someone on their phone and it wasn’t even one of the people strolling past the tree. In fact, pretty much everyone walked on and the loud voice from the tree continued. I noticed a bike resting against the trunk of the tree and up above I saw a man.

Yep, there was a man, sitting in the branches of a tree and reading. Loudly. My first thought was that he was declaiming poetry. French is such a beautiful language to my ear that the assumption I’m hearing poetry is an easy one. But as I listened I realised it wasn’t poetry. He was reading the book out loud and it was a textbook. My French isn’t good enough to but he used the word “technic” a lot, and other words from economics and politics were scattered through the sentences. What was he doing? Studying? When I was at University, one year, a fellow student walked back and forth across the grass outside my window, textbook in hand, reading it out loud as he got it into his brain. By exam time that one student had created a deep trench! Not just a path, but a trench! Was that was this guy was doing? Getting the facts of the textbook into his head? Or was he trying to change the world with words? There’s a man walks around the streets of Carcassonne singing a song of his own making. He has sheaves of handwritten paper in his hands and walks round and round the streets of the old town singing his words at the top of his voice. You can hear his words about the ‘Carcassonais’ and ‘Cathars’ and several entirely private fantasies about places and people echoing down the narrow streets. I’m never sure what he’s doing either. Everyone just ignores him. As if he’s doing nothing unusual. And the man in the tree was the same. Nobody stopped to listen. Nobody called up ‘hey, what are you doing up there?’ (nope, I didn’t either!) Was he marking his territory with his words? Was he casting spells to change his world?
Isn’t reality strange? You couldn’t make it up!