September 14 2023
Dear All,
Thirty or more years ago, I walked out of Taroudant in Morocco, with a writer friend from Scotland, Andrew Greig, and our guide whose name was Ahmed and a mule with her mule-man, our tents and cooking utensils and clothes strapped on the back of the mule. We walked into the High Atlas, camped out at night and in the daytime walked through green valleys full of almond blossom and villages made of earth where the main street was a dirt track and no vehicle could possibly pass. We ate around a small fire, washed in rivers, came to places where horse and camel markets appeared on bare red plains, saw mountains tipped with snow.
This week I read the news of the earthquake, saw Taroudant on the disaster map, remembered how we had to pull our indigo scarves across our faces to protect ourselves from a sandstorm when we arrived, and how we set off, early that February morning.
It makes a difference to know a place, to have felt it with your feet, to have camped on its earth and stopped to rest in its villages. It makes it real. Abstract, distant disaster insults its victims by making them unimaginable. Where we have walked on this earth is real to us.
Dis-aster: a separation from the stars.
A German film, “Red Sky” (‘Roter Himmel’) I saw this week: a writer insists on ‘working’ on his novel (actually goofing off) while his friends mend the roof, cook food, fix a wrecked car; he ignores what is going on around him even as they suffer and die in a forest fire; only after all that can he write a successful book. There was something so repugnant about this that I was stopped in my tracks.
It was a portrait of total solipsism.
So, what do we writers do?
Here in Paris, during an unexpected heatwave – isn’t everything unexpected these days? – there is still peace in green parks, ancient trees, life going on: a Paris market, beehives that have been in the Jardins du Luxembourg for nearly 200 years. It’s loving what we have that matters for a start. Only then can we really work to save it - and after that, if we have to, mourn it as it deserves.
Affectionately, Ros
