For Sure

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by France Daigle


  461.61.4

  Social Sciences

  “Don’t know wot’s goin’ on, I’ve a cramp in me leg all day since dis mornin’.”

  “If it was yer heart it’d be in yer arm you’d be hurtin’. Unless you slept crooked on it or sometin’ of de sort. In dat case, you might be tinkin’ ’twas yer heart, but ’twould just be on account of you slept cramped. Like when you goes campin’. Don’ know ’bout you, but I wakes up wid a cramp somewhere’s every time I goes campin’. Camp cramp, me wife says. Well, I’ve gotta haul ass or I’ll be getting’ a call. You takes care o’ dat leg, now!”

  “Ya! An’ tanks fer all dat information (dat I didn’t really want).”

  “Anytime!”

  In the above tirade, the speaker switched back and forth between the English and French pronunciations of camp and cramp. One wonders why. Was it the pervasive influence of English? A degree of embarrassment at speaking French? Just for the sake of variety? Out of nonchalance? A kind of linguistic intuition? A form of complicity?

  462.35.10

  The Detail within the Detail

  Comte-Sponville does not claim to have produced an exhaustive and immutable list of the virtues, but he hopes to have included the essential values associated with 30 possible virtues. As for the order in which he presents them, the philosopher explains that it is based more on a combination of intuition and necessity than on a desire to establish a hierarchy.

  463.66.6

  The Virtues

  “Dad, is it true dat crows’ eggs are black?”

  “Der legs? Yes, sure.”

  “Not der legs, der eggs! Dat’s wot Chico told me . . .”

  “Well, could be. I never heard nuttin’ bout crows’ eggs. To tell you true, crows aren’t me all-time favourite bird. Matter o’ fact, dey scares me just a bit.”

  “On account of?”

  “Don’t know, do I. Hard to tink dey’s very nice wid dat croaky voice dey got. An’ dey’re big and black to boot. An’ here you are tellin’ me der eggs are black as well . . .”

  Étienne looked with renewed interest at the three crows gathered around a partially crushed cone of french fries in the parking lot of the A&W.

  “Dey don’t scare me . . .”

  “Well now, dat’s a good ting. ’Tis better if we’re not scared of de same tings. Dat way we can help each udder out.”

  “OK.”

  464.140.4

  Caraquet

  On his mother Anne-Marie Schweitzer’s side, Jean-Paul Sartre was the cousin once removed of Albert Schweitzer, theologian, philosopher, musician, musicologist, medical missionary (in Gabon), winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952, and the man who swallowed an oyster, giving half the bivalve shell to each of the two individuals who were arguing over the mollusc, each claiming he had found it. A bit of trivia we were told in school.

  465.65.2

  Boy Cousins, Girl Cousins

  “You won’t believe wot he showed me today . . .”

  Carmen had given up any doubts she might have harboured over what Terry told her about The Cripple.

  “A bucket full of screws is wot, every kind o’ screw!”

  !

  “I’m tellin’ you! A whole bucket full!”

  The idea that this was a pretty poor system of classification occurred fleetingly to Carmen, but she simply said:

  “Must be awful heavy.”

  Terry felt this was dwelling on a minor detail.

  “Only proves how complicated dey’ve made our lives wid all der different kinds of screws.”

  466.16.3

  The Cripple

  From a comparison of the titles listed in La Bibliothèque idéale and those in “La Bibliothèque idéale des sciences humaines,” we can identify a certain number of essential works for anyone seeking to augment his or her knowledge of the social sciences. A total of 58 titles are recommended by both reference works. For those seeking a shorter list, 14 titles not only appear in both publications, but are considered by La Bibliothèque idéale as one of the first books to read on the subject: in politics, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt; in history: The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England by Marc Bloch, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 by Georges Duby, and The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga; in sociology: Suicide by Émile Durkheim and The Civilizing Process by Norbert Élias; in psychoanalysis: The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud; in anthropology: The Golden Bough by James George Frazer, A World on the Wane and The Savage Mind by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis, and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead; and, finally, the essay The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille.

  467.61.5

  Social Sciences

  “Saint Theresa, she’s de one lyin’ down. She was sick a lot.”

  Indeed, Étienne had noticed a second woman dressed in white and carrying a bowl that resembled the one Carmen would take out when someone looked like they might vomit.

  “Did she have a bellyache, den?”

  “She coughed a lot and spit up blood.”

  Then Granny Thibodeau added, as though by virtue of this detail, the saint had managed to have her sickness pardoned:

  “But she loved roses.”

  Yes, Étienne had also noticed the beautiful purple roses in several of the stainglass windows. Granny Thibodeau concluded:

  “Dat’s de reason dey puts a wooden rosetta on all de benches.”

  Étienne had often let his fingers run along the edges of the rosettas without making the link between these and the roses in the windows.

  468.41.8

  Lives of the Saints

  “Eighth station: Jesus meets de women of Jerusalem in tears.

  Étienne thought that must be the name of those long dresses they were wearing.

  Agony = no end in sight. In Terry’s notebook.

  469.117.3

  Death

  “Mom, are you scared of crows, den?”

  Étienne and Carmen were gathering stones along the shore when a screeching crow alighted on the edge of the cliff.

  “No. I don’t much like ’em, but dey don’t frighten me.”

  “You don’t like de way dey croak?”

  “No, I don’t like wot dey eat.”

  Étienne was almost blown over:

  “You doesn’t like French fries, Mom?!”

  The question took Carmen by surprise, but rather than dwelling on it, she answered quickly, hoping to cut short the unpleasant image:

  “No, I don’t like dead animals on de side of de road.”

  After that, in Étienne’s eyes, crows took on a more human aspect, as meat and potato eaters.

  470.140.5

  Caraquet

  In his Glossaire acadien (Acadian Glossary), Pascal Poirier explains that it was graphists who preferred the word seau to siau (bucket). Many words ending in -eau were pronounced -iau in the sixteenth century. Rabelais was somewhere in between, with seillau. The Grand Robert dictionary has conserved seille and its derivatives seillée and seilleau, a seille being a wooden bucket with ears through which to pass a rope, similar to Évangéline’s bucket at the Acadian Memorial in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia.

  471.33.4

  Chiac Lesson

  Even as she waited on tables, Lisa-M. took the time to chat with friends.

  “Is dat Patrick over der wid Jeannine? I tot ee was seein’ someone else?”

  Chantal replied bluntly:

  “Dey must’ve changed ’is medication.”

  When Lisa-M. took this as a joke, Chantal insisted:

  “I’s serious, gi
rl. Ee was goin’ wid Jeannine last year, when dey put ’im on Zoloft. Well, after a while, the boy starts self-mutilatin’ — ee’s tearin’ at de skin under ’is feet ’til it bleeds. — yoye! gross! — so dey switches ’im onto Effexor. Two weeks after dat, ee breaks it off with Jeannine an’ starts goin’ wid Nadine. But seems Effexor wasn’t doin’ de trick, so dey puts ’im on Paxil. Two weeks after dat, ee breaks up wid Nadine an’ starts seein’ Charline, off an’ on like. But den, maybe two munts goes by an’ ee just about freaks out on de Paxil, so dey takes ’im back to de psychiatric ward where dey cleans out ’is system an puts ’im right back on Zoloft, only tree times de dose dis time. Ee told me, ’twas a lucky ting ee was sleepin’, on account of ee never would ’ave let dem. Well, turns out dat worked. So, ’ere ee is back wid Jeannine, wot makes sense.”

  “Poor boy!”

  “Poor girls!”

  “Poor doctors!”

  472.87.8

  The Body

  Compassion, the virtue most associated with Buddhism, comes in eighth place in Comte-Sponville’s scale.

  473.66.5

  The Virtues

  Terry was also granted a tour of his collection of watches frozen in time, with or without bracelets.

  “An’ where does ee get all dis stuff?”

  “Don’t know. Might be some folks finds ’em for ’im.”

  Carmen wasn’t sure what to think. Was the man a little bit nuts?

  “Naw, I don’t tink so.”

  “Might be, he’s just bored.”

  Terry didn’t think so.

  474.16.4

  The Cripple

  To the 14 works that turn out to be la crème de la crème of La Bibliothèque idéale and of the “Ideal Library of the Social Sciences” one can add 44 other highly regarded titles: The Opium of the Intellectuals and Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations by Raymond Aron; The Formation of the Scientific Mind by Gaston Bachelard; Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson; The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard; The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir; Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson; The Empty Fortress by Bruno Bettelheim; The Inheritors by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron; The Making of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown; The Normal and the Pathological by Georges Canguilhem; Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind by Jean-Pierre Changeux; Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres; La Peur en Occident (Fear in the West) by Jean Delumeau; The Flower of Chivalry by Georges Duby; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Emile Durkheim; Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage by Jeanne Favret-Saada; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century by Lucien Febvre; Against Method by Paul Feyerabend; The Order of Things and The History of Madness by Michel Foucault; The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erwing Goffman; The Hidden God by Lucien Goldmann; The Horse of Pride by Pierre-Jakez Hélias; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy by Edmund Husserl; Pragmatism by William James; The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by Lord John Maynard Keynes; From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe by Alexandre Koyré; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn; The Language of Psycho-Analysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis; Carnival in Romans by Émmanuel Le Roy Ladurie; Studies in Animal and Human Behavior by Konrad Lorenz; One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse; Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan; Chance and Necessity by Jacques Monod; La Science chinoise et l’Occident (1977 French edition of Science and Civilisation in China) by Joseph Needham; Vichy France by Robert O. Paxton; The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl R. Popper; A Theory of Justice by John Rawls; Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure; History of Economic Analysis by Joseph A. Schumpeter; The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler; La Droite révolutionnaire en France (1885–1914): les origines françaises du fascism (The Revolutionary Right in France (1885–1914): The French Origins of Fascism) by Zeev Sternhell; and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  475.61.6

  Social Sciences

  Around eleven o’clock, seeing that the celebration was far from waning, Josse phoned Carmen:

  “Wot’re are you at, girl?”

  “Not a whole lot. We’re watchin’ Sleepless in Seattle fer de tird time an’ eatin’ nachos. On account of?”

  “On account of I’s thinkin’ you wouldn’t want to miss out on de goings on over ’ere!”

  “Sounds like der’s a whole lot of folks, anyway!”

  “A whole lot?! We’s overflowin’ into de street! Dey’re celebratin’ Hektor Haché-Haché . . .”

  And with that Josse hung up, because her bar order was ready.

  476.18.5

  A Place for

  Everyone

  Among the scholars, are included the ethnologist, also versed in biology, anthropology and Daoism, Gregory Bateson (Naven, Steps to an Ecology of Mind) and Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa, Male and Female), who were in fact husband and wife. Their familial genograms indicate that they came from complementary situations: Margaret being the eldest of her siblings, and Gregory the youngest of his, which ought to indicate they would have a complementary relationship, one supporting the other. However, as it happens, quite the contrary was true: their conjugal life was rife with conflict and disillusion, mainly due to the difference in the way each of them tackled problems. Margaret, being the eldest of her siblings and having experienced early success, lacked neither the imagination nor the energy to overcome any problem; Gregory, on the other hand, tended to retreat when an effort was required to resolve a difficulty, seeking instead, an understanding.

  477.65.3

  Boy Cousins, Girl Cousins

  “Seems dat humans started sketchin’ animals on de walls of der caves even before dey decided dat, from now on, dis or dat drawing would mean dis or dat sound. Sound, pronunciation an’ de like, all dat came after.”

  “Not around dese parts it didn’t!”

  “Wot about de folks dat says, first you learns to talk, den to write? You only have to look at a baby, it’s pretty obvious.”

  . . .

  “So, de real question is dis: should we be talkin’ like we write, or writin’ like we talk?”

  “Here’s de problem: everybody knows how to talk, but not everybody can write.”

  “Right on!”

  “Well, folks doesn’t talk all dat well all de time, neither.”

  “Is dat right? An’ who, pray tell, decides dat?”

  “Ya! Wot’s dat supposed to mean?”

  . . .

  478.22.4

  Overheard Conversations

  “Hard to believe just twenty-six letters an’ a couple o’ accents can make such a terrible lot of trouble.”

  Leave Peace River to end one’s days in Rough Waters.

  479.117.12

  Death

  Le Grand Étienne and Ludmilla also joined in the celebration.

  “It reminds me of our first Christmas here. Do you remember?”

  Le Grand Étienne nodded, while everyone around the table made room for Zed, who had just arrived.

  “Who started all dis wrangle-gangle, den?”

  “It started hours ago!”

  “We’re celebrating Hektor Haché-Haché! He’s a hundred years old today!”

  Zed did not pursue the matter, turning instead to talk to Ludmilla.

  480.18.8

  A Place for Everyone

  Gregory Bateson was, actually, a pioneer of the genogram, a practice that reached its zenith during the 1970s, along with family therapies and the Palo Alto school, of which Bateson remains one of the best-known founders.

  481.58.6

  Extensions

  As a rule, folks kept quiet about the Babar’s smoking policy, not to mention the source of the Doucette
s that Jacky rolled, so as to keep this small commercial venture in the private sector and out of the hands of some anonymous corporation or the law.

  “Who is doing this?” an anglophone tourist wanted to know.

  His interlocutor lied:

  “Some girl down in Saint-Antouène, I doesn’t know her.”

  “It is a very fine idea!”

  482.18.3

  A Place for Everyone

  A genogram is a genealogical tree deployed over two or three generations that identifies biomedical, psychological, or social particularlities of an individual’s family. For example, Henry Fonda’s genogram reveals a reoccurrence of suicide and attempted suicide in his family. The word genogram does not appear in the 2002 edition of the Grand Robert dictionary. On the other hand, under the letter g, we do find the English words gadget, gag, gagman (from which is derived gaguesque), gay, gang, gangster (from which gangstérisme), gap, garden-party, gasoil (or gas-oil, from which gazole), gentleman, gentleman-farmer, gentleman’s agreement, géomarketing, G.I., GIFT (acronym of Gametes Intra-Fallopian Transfer), gimmick, gin-rummy, girl, glamour (from which glamoureux, glamoureuse), glass, globe-trotter, G.M.T. (acronym of Greenwich Mean — or Middle or Meridian — Time), goal, goal-average, golden, gold point, golf (and its derivatives bunker, fairway, green, rough, drive, putt and swing), gore, Gore-Tex, gospel, GPS (Global Positionning System), gramophone, Granny Smith, grapefruit, grill, grill-room, groggy, groom, groove, groupie, and guiderope.

 

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