24 oct

Driving around the Poitiers area today. I saw the famous portal of the Notre Dame in Poitiers itself but I knew there were other Romanesque churches. So started to walk and found, after about a half hour, and just hoping I was going in the right direction, the Rue Hilaire. Exactly the place where you would expect the Eglise Hilaire, or the hilarious church, to be.
And what a church it was. 12th century, and enormous. Why was it so large? To welcome the enormous amounts of pilgrims, hundreds everyday, that would pass on their way to Santiago, getting a little bit of blessing from the relics of St. Hilaire while stopping in Poitiers.
This made me think about communities. How unreliable were those pilgrims really. Of course, for a while, they seemed like a gift from heaven. That’s why they build these enormous churches in the first place, to accommodate these big groups of people everyday.
But things never stay the same. People started to have to worry about more serious things than life after death, life before death for example. Or people started to doubt the validity of all these relics that they had to admire. Or started to doubt the truthfulness of these rich pilgrim churches, or started to doubt the existence of God himself. We are jumping through centuries here.
But what also happened was that the sense of community changed. The pilgrim community, maybe the strongest community of the 12th century, disappeared very soon after. But then you have the village, or the family, or school or church, or whatever. Mankind needs communities, one would guess, and will come up with whatever is available.
Thinking about this, I find this the one thing that our generation gave up upon – the value of community. When I say our generation I basically mean, me and Julie and lots of other people our age we know. There are examples of friends and family who have been able to prevent this trap.
But basically we are a community-less generation.
Which is, whatever way you want to put it, a sad thing.
Oh yes there are social networks, which might be some kind of solution, if it is that , which I am not convinced about. But social networks are not physical, they float around, it is a bunch of hot air. I was realizing this today when I visited a Carolingian, predecessor to Romanesque, church. The church itself was closed, but at the cemetary, on this lovely day, in a small village, there were at least four people busy scrubbing and cleaning the graves of their loved ones. It dawned on me that all souls day is coming up. The day that people (catholics I suppose) pay a little bit of attention to dead friends and relatives. It is the day before (or after, I am struggling here) all saints day, when all those saints are being remembered.
But suddenly it grabbed me, that these people, cleaning together, having a few laughs and cries while being busy – I saw both in the five minutes I was there – are the real cement of society. Facebook might try it, but there is no profit in a cemetary, which makes it ultimately more reliable – there is a material life, in which facebook exists, and an immaterial one, of my cemetary community. the immaterial ones are more trusthworthy, I would guess, but it is another way of saying I do not really get Facebook.
And then I saw this picture on the grave, which made my heart melt. They are the cookiest things they put on graves here, but this guy was missed by his card playing buddies. To me that is superb. This is community nirvana. Only to be surpassed if there is a sign of a grave from someone’s petanque (jeux des boules – a sort of billiart (you ignorant americans) that one plays without a stick, but just by throwing nice clunky iron balls – mates. Which is the loveliest game ever. So friendly, so relaxed, so valuable and so uncompetitive in a way that this not the right moment to claim that I am still the world champion in this game – with my deceased father, which makes us invncible- so this will have to be adressed one other time.