{"id":24387,"date":"2021-03-11T21:33:33","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T02:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=24387"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:44","slug":"mon-evasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2021\/03\/mon-evasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Mon \u00c9vasion"},"content":{"rendered":"

(My Escape<\/em>)<\/h3>\n

Creativity — or in essence, artsy-thing-making — has served as my escape, mon \u00e9vasion<\/em>, during this pandemic, if not my lifetime.\u00a0 It is what I am compelled to do when I want to bend the rules, feel more alive, venture beyond the gray world of homo economicus<\/em>.\u00a0 I am fortunate at this point in my unknowable lifespan to be able to seek escape in my artwork, to explore, to slightly remold the clay of what it is to be at this nearly-cured stage of me.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

Samian<\/a>\"\"<\/a> (Samuel Tremblay) is a 37-year-old Algonquin-Quebecois rapper, whose songs mostly deal with the apartheid-like treatment of Canadian indigenous peoples.\u00a0\u00a0He told the Guardian<\/a>, “For a few years I flitted from town to town in Quebec province, working in restaurants on minimum wage because I had no education.\u00a0 I mined the pain from that hard part of my life for my songs.”\u00a0 One of those that he wrote in 2oo8 was “Mon \u00c9vasion<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

\n

mon \u00e9vasion !!<\/em>
\nma fa\u00e7on de prendre l’air<\/em>
\nma fa\u00e7on de m\u2019en sortir en essayant de l’\u00e9crire<\/em>
\nyo je veux partir….<\/em>
\nfaire sortir le m\u00e9chant<\/em>
\nje tourne pas ma langue sept fois<\/em>
\nmais je reste m\u00e9fiant!<\/em>
\nc’est juste de la po\u00e9sie!<\/em>
\nc’est plus qu\u2019une rime, c’est une \u00e9motion<\/em>
\nun mode d’expression, c’est une passion!<\/em>
\nj’ai pas choisi de faire du rap, c’est le rap qui m\u2019a choisi<\/em>
\nla vie c’est une chanson, pis c’est elle qui m\u2019a \u00e9crit!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In English, with license:<\/p>\n

\n

my escape !!<\/em>
\nmy way of getting some air<\/em>
\nmy way of trying to get it all down<\/em>
\nyo, I want to go….<\/em>
\nlet that bad guy out<\/em>
\nI don’t turn my tongue seven times<\/em>
\nbut I’m still suspicious!<\/em>
\nit’s just poetry!<\/em>
\nit’s more than a rhyme, it’s emotion,<\/em>
\na mode of expression, it’s a passion!<\/em>
\nI didn’t choose to do rap, it was rap that chose me<\/em>
\nlife is a song, and she’s the one who wrote me!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

My life has hardly been hard, and I haven’t had much to mine except everyday white angst. Nonetheless, with respect to the urgency and rewards of art, j’identifie<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

I had never heard what it means to “turn one’s tongue seven times” and so I looked it up.\u00a0 This aphorism, the origin of which may either be French<\/a>, Chinese<\/a>, or Yoruba<\/a>, advises that attempting this near-impossible act gives one’s brain sufficient time to control the tongue and avoid making some inopportune utterance.\u00a0 But I say, go ahead — turn it six times and take a chance that you may speak art.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

We just watched Camille Claudel<\/em>, a 1988 film about the French sculptor and lover-muse of Auguste Rodin.\u00a0 The film portrays Claudel (1864-1943) as a passionate and talented artist, fortunate to study under Rodin but ultimately falling victim to his artistic jealousies and sexual dominance.\u00a0 The film’s most powerful scene shows Claudel closely embracing, while desperately clawing, one of her works-in-progress then finally toppling the mound of clay to the floor.\u00a0 While this scene was undoubtedly meant to presage her descent into madness (Claudel spent her final decades, questionably, in a sanitarium), it also served to convey her deep and intimate struggle with her art.\u00a0\u00a0 Which begs: must all worthy artistic pursuits be so fraught?\u00a0 Must real<\/em> artists be so volatile?<\/p>\n

Claudel’s art was her \u00e9vasion<\/em> but also the entrance to her own labyrinthe,<\/em> her escape without escape.<\/p>\n

\"\"“Ce cordon de phrases est un fil d’Ariane parce que je suis dans un labyrinthe, parce que j’\u00e9cris pour m’y retrouver.”<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

“This string of words is Ariadne’s thread<\/a>, because I am in a labyrinth and I write to find my way around.” —\u00a0 Michel Butor<\/a>, French poet<\/p>\n

There is a Camille Claudel museum<\/a> an hour-or-so drive east of Paris.\u00a0 We hope to go there once we are confident enough to travel again, and when the people who live in the places we would like to visit are equally as confident.\u00a0 This trip may be a long way down the road.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

It has almost been a year to the day since we last dined in a restaurant or went to a movie.\u00a0 Our life since then has been a labyrinthic string of trips to the grocery store, the ABC store, the gas station (albeit far less often than before), the library (after a long shutdown) and my retina doctor — all overlaid with countless Netflix-soaked hours and interspersed with weekly family video chats.\u00a0 We have had exactly three in-person visits with our children and grandchildren in the past year.<\/p>\n

(My children cannot possibly appreciate the wonders and capabilities of 21st-century tech as I do.\u00a0 The internet, speedy chips and high-speed broadband have created so many more possibilities — for better and, vis-\u00e0-vis The Proud Boys, worse — than existed in my youth.\u00a0 Video calls were just a space-age dream in the 1960s.\u00a0 Reddit was what your mom told you to do when your room was a mess.)<\/p>\n

I have tried to turn this past year-of-seclusion into an opportunity of sorts, my chance to do artistic spring-cleaning, where I free myself to spend whatever time is needed to make something out of nothing — which is how I define art.<\/p>\n

As a result, I spent many months last year writing, orchestrating, polishing and mixing my song “Company Man<\/a>” for purposes that defy 21st-century logic.\u00a0 It didn’t get me a million followers (the currency of the internet) let alone a hundred, let alone one.\u00a0 Expanding my circle wasn’t the point.\u00a0 (In that, I seem to have succeeded.)<\/p>\n

And now I’m putting in nearly the same kind of time orchestrating one of my decades-old piano compositions.\u00a0 The process has been equal-parts fun, intellectual and compulsive; and sometimes it brings tears to my eyes, hearing virtual cellos and violins playing parts that I only imagined in my head sitting at the piano bench years ago.\u00a0 21st-century tech is pretty amazing when put to benign purposes.<\/p>\n

Composing and recording music has been mon \u00e9vasion <\/em>for most of the past year.\u00a0 It gives me the impression that I’m accomplishing something, even though most of humanity will never hear it or even know of it.\u00a0 My escape from the wave of sickness and stasis that has swept over us all.\u00a0 Mon \u00e9vasion… <\/em>before<\/span><\/span> la vaccination.<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

My second vaccination is, at last, today.\u00a0 An end to escaping, an embrace of embracing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(My Escape) Creativity — or in essence, artsy-thing-making — has served as my escape, mon \u00e9vasion, during this pandemic, if not my lifetime.\u00a0 It is what I am compelled to do when I want to bend the rules, feel more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24387"}],"version-history":[{"count":119,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25086,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24387\/revisions\/25086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}