Heroes Not Zombies

I was in Bayonne recently, and stopped to read this plaque (I was going to say “notice” but it isn’t a notice, it’s words chiselled into stone so that they don’t fade. It’s a “plaque”)

I read it as – “Here was the tower where people deposited abandoned infants. It disappeared in 1867”.

OK, so I don’t know Bayonne, and I didn’t know the history behind these words, but they chilled me. I was already standing still because I’d stopped to read them, but I felt my breath stop, my heart quicken and some tears come to my eyes. Yes, real, physical changes in my body provoked by reading some words.

That kind of thing happens all the time, so why do we insist on talking about the body and the mind as if they are two separate, isolated, if related, parts of a person? Isn’t it obvious that we change as whole organisms? Without any duality of the so called physical and the so called invisible?

Immediately after reading it I looked at the bars on this little window and felt quite confused. Isn’t a “tour” a tower? So where was the tower? But that turned out to a be a misunderstanding on my part. There are many possible translations of the word “tour” from French into English. This plaque doesn’t refer to a tower at all. It refers to this actual window. It was a kind of hatch which the abandoned children were passed through. The “tour” here refers to a “tiroir tournant”, a kind of drawer which turned around. A baby, sometimes accompanied by a few words on a scrap of paper, was placed in the drawer, which was then turned around so that the baby was now on the inside. The inside was a hospital, Le Maison Dagourette, and this device in the wall was the same as one found in Florence, in the wall of the “Hospital of the Innocents”.

Isn’t this just so sad? And yet, in one way of thinking, there’s nothing sad here at all. What was sad is long since gone. So why did it “infect” me like this? Why did I experience a surge of sadness? I suppose it was the story in the form of these brief words, the physical reality of standing on the spot where the story came from, and my imagination……

So, there’s something else this little experience did for me. It reminded me how the past is always here, in the present. It doesn’t go away. We can be moved by it in the here and now.