Memories of Richard Trigaux: 2 Saint Dizier, 1953-1964

My parents

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

My father was born in Erloy (pronounced erlwa), a small village in Thiérache: See my grandparents' house at 49°54'47.90"N 3°40'49.40"E. At the time, this house went right up to the road, which was also narrower at that time, and still a dirt road. It was a shell which «shortened» the house, in 1940 or 1944. The unfortunate inhabitant of the affected part had no choice but to continue living in her half-demolished house, until her family found her a place in a hospice. At the time we went there, only mounds of bricks and beams remained, covered in nettles, and the entire space between my grandparents' property and the road was fallow, while the space between the house and the barn to the north was a garden. The road was later widened, between 1968 and 1999. Today the whole thing has been arranged as a secondary home, by one of my uncles who inherited the house alone. This was decided because of the help he offered my Grandmother in the last moments of her life. The other uncles and aunts did not contested this inheritance, considering it was deserved. My grandparents, Henri Trigaux, son of the «Père Rustique», and Marthe Chauderlier, were married in La Flamangrie, just before the border with Belgium. They were simple country people, not smart, not particularly good, but not particularly bad either. I remember that we liked them, and we called them «Pépère d'Erloy» and «Mémère d'Erloy», names which still today bring us back delicious childhood memories.

Like most country people at the time, my father grew up with the cows' asses as his only horizon, and the local school as his only education. It was the tribulations of the war which got him out of it, with an apprenticeship in radio and electricity. One of the rare stories that he told me from this time was that he had blown up a radio belonging to the occupants, by forgetting to connect the neutral wire. Which of course led him in prison, in Reims. There, things almost went very bad: the prison was bombed, to help the prisoners of war to escape. A bomb fell in the cell next to his, and went through all the floors, fortunately without exploding. Then there was silence, with no one coming to help the prisoners still locked in. My father and his cellmate then used the toilet bin to break down the door. There are few Internet references to this event, the only thing I found is that it was the prison on Boulevard Robespierre in Reims, bombed on May 30, 1944. Not to be confused with the bombing of the Amiens prison, which is much better known.

My mother Geneviève Gandoin was born in Reims, Boulevard Albert 1er. 49°16'01.05"N, 4°00'37.90"E. It was a solid stone pavilion, aligned with dozens of others, still in very good condition today (2016). I only remember one visit, and few details, only the bathtub in gray granite speckled with black.

This is where my mother experienced the exodus at the age of six, the forced march on an empty stomach in fear of nazi planes machine-gunning civilians, the piles of corpses, the return in cattle cars to an empty house where everything had been looted. Then the war, the poverty, the hunger, the denunciations, the fear, the cold, the bombings, exactly like the Syrian refugees today. I reported her story of the exodus on my site shedrupling.org: «Duty of memory», but we must add other terrible facts: a large piece of still-burning bomb landing a meter from her, or another time, stuck in front of her school, the door locked, while all the sirens blaring. Or again when a bomb blew up the water pipes, drowning a hundred children in the basement of their school, including several she knew. Can you imagine the effect of such things on a ten-year-old child?

In 1945, aged 11, she was part of the committee welcoming concentration camps survivors at the Reims train station. Needless to say, even today she is allergic to striped pajamas. But of course what shocked her the most (at the age of eleven) was the extreme meagerness of these unfortunate people. Some died while arriving, just happy to «have seen France again». She talked me so much about this that it was as if I had been there myself, and her story makes all the denials very pathetic.

The years 1945 and 1946 were no better: the danger, disorder and misery only gradually receded, and food rationing only stopped in 1949 (1953 in Great Britain, the year of my birth!!). Indeed, the country and the economy had to be rebuilt, in a post-Hiroshima world which would never be the same again. My mother remembers hearing the «atom bomb» announced on the radio, without knowing what it was, but with the feeling that something irremediable had been done, which would forever make the world a worse place. There are things like that, that we know even if we never heard them.

My maternal grandfather Henri Gandoin had become anti-militarist after being a slave solder in the war in Silesia (or Crimea, I heard both versions), in 1918 or 1920. Needless to say, he did not appreciated being immersed in that atmosphere again. He nevertheless joined the civil protection, and became chief of the block. It was while he was making sure that everybody was safe that a protective trench collapsed on him. He escaped with a leg wound, which ulcerated and never healed. Of course, he ruled his household of eight children with an iron fist, but my mother still speaks of him as an admirable man, whom I regret not having known, only having caught a glimpse once. He had the severe mustache that we often see on images of men before the war.

My mother never really liked her mother, born Marie-Louise Vignon, my grandmother therefore, because of her arbitrary authoritarianism. We did not liked her either, because she pampered me while hating my two other brothers (and being pampered in these conditions does not make us grateful). My mother never forgave her for taking her out of school, despite her burning desire for knowledge. And this, so that she could «help in the house», since that was «the place of the girls». In addition, she had divorced my grandfather, to get together with another ugly and unpleasant man, «Loulou», who walked past us without seeing us. This is the reason why I was never able to see my real maternal grandfather.

But the true motive for this divorce is that, during the war, my Grandfather had declined a well paid position as a foreman in the Panhard factory, so as not to work for the occupiers. A courageous choice, but that my grandmother disagreed with. This is how war reveals the value of some, and the lowness of others.

I also knew «Nini», my great-grandmother, my mother's maternal grandmother. A very lively figure typical of Reims, probably emancipated with the Belle Epoque, and who ran on champagne (one of the main industries of Reims: one of my uncles worked in the Pommery caves).

My father was more discreet about the war period. He too experienced the Exodus, like ten million other French people, which led him from Thiérache to Fougères, at the gates of Brittany, almost 500 km on foot. The Exodus was a major panic, which threw most of the French of the north onto the roads, in front of the ultra-fast advance of the nazi troops, and the incomprehensible collapse of the French society. But my father explained me another reason: they thought that the Uhlans (German soldiers) would exterminate them, as they did in 1914. We may probably find other rumors of this kind, that no government or media was there anymore to deny.

Another point to understand about the Exodus is that at the time very few people had cars. On the other hand, they still knew to walk: so it was on foot that people fled, taking only the bare necessities in bundles, or at best in strollers. Such a panic today would result in the roads being completely blocked, in a gigantic traffic jam.

My parents fared well, but not everyone was so lucky: the nazi pilots had fun strafing the lines of refugees, as my mother saw several times. This is how the petain regime had to deal with so many orphans, as explained in the film «Forbidden Games» (French: «Jeux Interdits»).

Fighting also took place in Erloy, and the house next to Pépère and Mémère's was hit by a shell, I do not know if it was in 1940 or 1944.

It was during the tribulations of the post-war period that my father joined the French Air Force, with training as an electrician. So he went in the communications service, with the rank of sergeant when he met my mother at a ball. «Do you dance, miss?» was his simple invitation, a phrase that we have often talked about since then, with humor. For my mother, this marriage was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get out of the narrow confines of her family. But her father, an anti-militarist, did not wanted to hear about a military son-in-law! So they lied to him, saying he was a military doctor.

However, my mother quickly understood that my father was selfish, sexist and contemptuous, and that she would never be happy with him. But she was already pregnant with me, so she could no longer refuse this marriage. A terrible trap had closed on her. As on so many other young married people, victims of false pretenses or blinded by their desire. I know something about it, having had exactly the same problem thirty years later. Plus my two brothers, also scammed by two bad women. Bad partners probably create more suffering that all the wars.

My father was transferred to Air Base 113 in Saint Dizier, as a sergeant in communications. The base had been completely devastated during the war, then taken over by the Americans, who had built elongated prefabricated buildings there, which I saw. Then they gave the base back to the French Air Force, which continued to fix it up. It seems that today these prefabricated buildings are still there (for the few we can see on the Internet), stretched out and low. I loved them, probably the army people too are attached to them, as a kind of style of the base.

We were given housing in time for my birth, at the Vertbois militaire, a neighborhood which was then under rapid construction to house all the army personnel and their families, plus the workers from the new mechanical factories (SIMA, farming tractors).

My genealogy

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

I am not fundamentally interested in this kind of thing, so that I only got information by chance, or by checking the indexing of my websites.

The surname of my maternal grandfather, and therefore of my mother, Gandoin, is little known, and of Belgian origin, she told me, perhaps a deformation of Gandois, from the city of Gand in Belgium.

The name of my paternal grandfather, Trigaux, which I inherited, is a Walloon name from Belgium, where we find doctors and academics of this name, and even several Trigaux streets. According to my mother, this name would mean «three guys». Some Trigaux also emigrated to the United States in the 1930s (I saw them on lists of migrants from that time). From there they prospered, producing a near namesake: R Trigaux (Roger Trigaux), a journalist in St Petersburg, Florida.

Another Roger Trigaux, one of my cousins, was one of the founding members of the rock band Univers Zero, before forming his own band «Present», playing a rock heavily tinged with zeuhl and various classical or folk influences, between Ashra Temple and Amon Düül.

Finally, one of my two brothers, Pascal Trigaux, became known as an advertising illustrator and comic strip author, notably in the defunct magazine «antirouille», more a very beautiful illustration of Perrault's tales.

But I never found any other Richard Trigaux, except one that I saw once but never found back: there supposedly was a Richard Trigaux painter at the court of Louis XIV. At least we have something in common, lol

My maternal grandmother, Marthe Chauderlier, was from Thiérache. A curious detail is that my grandfather Henri Trigaux was never French, but Belgian. Which makes me strictly speaking a second-generation immigrant. However, he was not Arab, so I was never criticized for this ancestry (almost never... there also are anti-Belgian racists!!!). But he was still a victim of racism! Indeed, his application for naturalization, to which he was entitled for having married a French woman, was never sent by the Erloy town hall. It was when they moved the town hall that they found the file, buried in a drawer. As if even being «only» Belgian does not protect us from idiots.

When I was a child, we still heard a few words from the old Champagne dialects. For example, one of my school friends liked «godins», very funny Picardy earthworms. My paternal grandfather also had a few, I remember the «rotond» (uncertain spelling), I suppose it was rounded gravel, which he used in his work as a road mender. The Reverso Dictionary gives «rotond», as a French adjective, to mean rounded. He also often said «ma'che» (walk) as we say «allez». From my maternal grandfather Henri Gandoin I get, via my mother, the ineffable «papinette à gogueneaux» (toilet brush). And yes, these words appear in dictionaries like the Universalis, and the spelling is correct (or the alternative goguenots). I even suspect that this Vaugelas dude brought his science into the matter, although he probably never used a papinette himself.

My earliest memories, 1956

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

The building where I was born, in September 1953, was a small 3-storey block, yellow in color with a flat roof, the «D1», probably built just after the war, or even before: 48°38'32.81"N, 4°58'07.82"E. The many chimneys had a curious shape of coil springs. There was no central heating, but coal stoves, and the floor was made of red brick tiles, like in the countryside. Fortunately the neighbors below, army officers, had money to heat their homes, and their heat rose to our place. Such an anti-ecological and uncomfortable style of construction explains why this building has since been destroyed, despite the central heating installed around 1960 (a project that had fascinated me, especially the work and welding of the iron pipes).

My birth almost never happened: at the time the fashion among doctors was that you should «let nature take its course», and it was only after 24 hours of suffering that they decided to give my mother quinine (since then she showed up at every other birth with a tube in her pocket). When I came out, my head was cyanotic, with three turns of umbilical cord around my neck. I do not know how long I stayed like that, and I consider myself lucky not to have had serious brain damage, or even to be alive at all. An unfortunate finger poke may have caused the problems I had with my right eye. In any case, I very much doubt that such an ordeal could have helped my intelligence, or any other faculty with which posterity would like to burden me. Perhaps I had an NDE that could have favored my free will, but I have no memory of this episode, and generally no memory of any previous life.

Like everyone, my oldest memories go back to about three years old. They are banal, and are only worth reporting for their value as a testimony about a now disappeared world.

At the time, 1956, in Saint Dizier le VertBois Militaire was in a construction frenzy, following the extension of the army air base, the BA113, and industries such as the SIMA (farming equipment). I remember that we had a garden, my father had taken me there once. But it was expropriated to build the Jean Moulin school, just in time to welcome us: 48°38'38.10"N, 4°58'14.52"E.

Having a car at the time was still a privilege. So my father had a bicycle, on which he sometimes took us. I was afraid of seeing the bicycle lean.

The Army was also organizing a bus service, of dark green busses with rounded shapes.

We also took the train, and I remember a trip to Reims, to see my Grandmother. Of course, over the years, this memory has been reduced to a few simple scenes, but it has remained very vivid and detailed, to the point of recognizing certain passages on Google Earth: the noises, the buildings along the track, the hole of the toilets which showed the tracks, and especially the steam locomotive, a frightening monster for a young child. The fact that this episode has remained so vivid may be related to my passion for trains (although I cannot say which one gave rise to the other). What is interesting is that, despite my three years, my memories show that I knew exactly what the train, the locomotive, the tracks, the journey, etc. were for. Which clearly shows that at three years old our conception of the world is already precise and complex: consciousness, intelligence and especially memory awake well before three years old. Even if we forget the events afterward.

I have two memories which precision is astonishing:

Once, around 1960 and a few, I noticed, in the connecting rod of a locomotive, an oscillating part in the shape of an elongated loop. 54 years later, in 2014, I identified this part as the expansion link, when I studied the Walshaerts valve gear to build my small steam locomotives in Inworldz.

Another time, in 1964, I was eleven years old, when we flew in a Caravelle to Béchar. The pilots invited us, the three kids, into the cockpit (at the time there were not yet all these idiocies of hijackings and terrorism, so on board things happened in a much more familial manner). The pilot made me turn a button, explaining that he would turn the plane. Which I was actually able to see, through the cockpit windows. Many years later, with the Internet, I was able to recognize this button on plans, as really the heading knob of the autopilot, and the place where it happened as a navigation checkpoint off the coast of Oran, where the plane had to change direction. This is how I flew De Gaulle's Caravelle at the age of 11, lol!

However, at three years old the awareness of the world is much more limited in its scope. During the train journey, I knew that there were other cities elsewhere, separated by countryside. But I had no geographical reference, north or south, nor a map with the layout of the cities. I realize in this regard that people who did not learned geography at school remain in this ignorance, this lack of appropriation of the world around them!! Fortunately, the VertBois had at the time an unintentional «Feng Shui» layout, which was giving a feeling or «north» matching the true north.

Another example of misunderstanding the world is quite terrifying. That day, my parents had bought shoes for one of my brothers. Unfortunately, they were pink, and in addition, they used a shoehorn to put them on my brother, who protested and cried. Not understanding what I was seeing, I thought they were using a blade to cut my brother's feet! And give them the characteristic shape of a sole with a heel. Of course such an operation would have had bloody results, but at three years old we do not know what the inside of the body is made of, hence the mistake. So I was not afraid of the injury, just that I did not wanted to have my feet like that! And I started to cry, one of those incomprehensible weeping sessions which exasperate adults so much. But the worst is that I did not found abnormal that adults treated my brother in this way!! Thus young children very quickly integrate submission to adults, and do not realize when their behavior is abnormal. This is often observed in cases of abuse. So here is the explanation.

The choice that memory makes of rememberings to keep or to reject is sometimes extremely curious. Thus I remember precisely, for each slang word, when I heard them for the first time (It was most often by my father, who had a rather expletive language). This is one of the rare examples that I see of a spiritual influence that could have touched me personally, and which draw my attention especially to these words. Indeed, for a young child, there is no indication that these words are special, since «slang» is a convention. In fact, not saying these words was the first rule of «morality» that I knowingly violated, because I found it was stupid to decree that certain words should not be said. But the matter is not so simple, and I went through several periods with or without swear words. Today I make the effort to avoid them, but it is difficult when it has become a habit of language. Hence the interest in refusing them as early as possible, in order to keep our freedom precisely.

Another example showing a possible spiritual influence is the precise memory of how I learned the swear word «meat». Yet no one at the time had told me that it was one! Nor even today, moreover, I had to find it all by myself. The story is well worth the time you spend reading it: since we did not had a car, and there were no shops yet in this new district, we depended on street vendors operating in vans. And it was the women who had to go, because the fathers were at work (a division of labor which not yet really disappeared). This situation was not without problems: when you heard the horn, you had to go quickly, or you would not have anything to eat. This often implied leaving the young children unsupervised. There were several serious accidents, with children screaming and squirting blood, after glass milk bottles broke, plus a little girl who was burned alive in her nylon dress (a completely new material at the time, the dangers of which were still unknown. Nylon burns form a network of linear scars between healthy areas. We used to see that back then, but not anymore today)

One of these traders was «the familistère», and I remember precisely the Citroen «tube», the one in «corrugated iron», marked «familistère» on the side, with the back door converted into a counter. It was only much later that I learned the political meaning of this name: the familistères were workers' cooperatives related to the phalanstères in Guise, created by the industrialist Godin (the stoves), in the style of Socialism and Fourierism in the 19th century. However, in 1956 the van operating familistères were just traders like any other, and the brand was shortly after bought by the Radar supermarkets: with the democratization of cars, traveling traders were no longer necessary. Then Radar, from regrouping to regrouping, ended up at Carrefour, which therefore inherited of the Socialist brand. But 10 a.m. remains in my memory as the hour of the horns, a joyful hour when we had to go shopping quickly.

Where we get to the bad words is that one day, while I was accompanying my mother behind one of these vans, the shopkeeper handed me, planted on a fork, something unpleasant-looking, so that I could taste it. Worried, I asked what it was: «meat», he answered in a stern tone and severe gaze. I clearly felt that there was something wrong with the meat. But especially I knew that, as a child, I «had» to deal with this thing. What is remarkable here is that this fact focused the attention of my memory, while I was totally ignorant of what meat was, and the atrocious price to pay for it. If it had been turnip or candy, memory would not have registered it (at the time it was common to offer candies to children, and it surely happened to me many times, without my memory registering it).

I do not know if I prepared for this incarnation in some spiritual world. But if that is the case, then it seems logical that I was warned of the problem of meat. But above all I would have been warned of the serious risk of refusing it: at the time I would probably have been placed in a psychiatric hospital. So, if there are spiritual influences, of the «memory of a past life» kind, or «our life program» kind, then they would manifest themselves between the ages of three and six, as the tradition claims, and then disappear. Well, I have hardly any other clues of this kind, perhaps I had only a simple episode of super-consciousness warning me of a hidden danger, like several others I have had since. In any case, I do not take responsibility for having eaten meat since, or even for having internalized this «necessity»: I only did so following these social pressures, which I got rid of as soon as I was able to regain control of my mind and life. And in any case I educated my children without meat. In 1988 it was possible, although still repressed.

The choice of retained memories undoubtedly has to do with their interest. The life of a young child is not exciting, with its trivial routines, in the small closed world of a family apartment, as open and interesting as a prison. Which probably explains why our memory does not retain it, but it retains any event that is even slightly salient. Thus, one day my father bought a carpet, and my two brothers and I had a fantastic game in the rolled carpet, which made a tunnel. This is how I remember details like the reddish concrete floor. Other salient elements allowed me to remember more everyday facts, like my mother putting ointment on her nipples, because my second brother, who was still suckling, hurt her. (and no, I was not «shocked» to see her breasts. Her «gougouttes», we used to say).

I also remember the time when my father, in one of his fits of educational concern, made me sit on the potty, begging me to poop. Of course it didn't work, because you cannot do that on command! But I was vexated, and as soon as he turned his back, I put the pot on the coal stove. This is how I remember the black stove, and how I discovered, astonished and vaguely frightened, that the plastic was melting. Fortunately my father had taken the thing with humor, and I remember his hilarious face waving at me through the hole in the pot. According to my mother, she was busy changing my first brother at the time, so that I could not have been more than two and a half years old at the time. So this would be my earliest memory, well before the usual three-year limit. And it already shows a complete vision of the world and a lot of knowledge forgotten and relearned later. For example, I knew that touching the stove hurt, and this was the reason why I had put the pot there.

All this explains why I remember so clearly the train journey, which for me was a fantastic break from the routine of suckling and pooping. So it is clear that babies need to be much more taken care of, well before the age of three, and given many more experiences.

One of the last memories of this time was the arrival of our car. My father had moved up the ranks, and he could now buy one. It was a Simca Aronde, with the stocky and rounded shapes of the time, dark green almost black, and whitewall tires (which my mother cursed, because she was the one who «had» to keep them clean). What made it unique was the presence of three circular hubcaps, red and silver, on the two front wings. These hubcaps are rare, the only image I have found is on the english wikipedia page. This car was going to change our lives considerably, since thanks to it we could go shopping in town, go out to the countryside, and also go on holiday several times a year, to my grandparents in Erloy, and «to the sea» during the summer holidays.

Then, as our family grew, we moved, still around 1956, to another nearby building. I remember several insignificant details of the move, such as the curved hose of the washing machine, and the rue Léon Blum which made a similar curve (at the time). There too, from the height of my three years, I knew the meaning of the moving, and all the associated details. But before I continue, I would like to mention another series of less flattering memories:

See this section, in the thread on wars ▶️

The aftermath of the Second World War

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

In 1956 and even up until 1960, traces of the war were still visible. Of course, the damaged public buildings had long since been demolished, but the private owners did not necessarily had the means to do so, or they were dead and no one took care of their ruins. One of the worst effects of war is the general chaos of society: reconstruction and reestablishment of economic circuits can take years. Thus in France, food restrictions lasted until 1949, and until the early 1960s, we could still see ruins or temporary constructions.

My most terrible memory is in Reims, Rue de Courcelles, in a courtyard where my grandmother lived, with her Loulou new husband who had stolen our real grandfather. There was still there, around 1956, a ruined house, a pile of blackened stones and charred beams. (This house was in this enclosure at 49°15'33.16"N, 4°1'6.99"E. The courtyard is immediately to the east, the entrance was on Rue de Courcelles). Of course, I was told that it was «the war», and I understood that something monstrous had happened just some years before I was born. I wondered if the inhabitants were in their house when it happened, because they would have been crushed and burned. In my two and a half years old child's mind the idea that war is a dark, horrible and abnormal thing took shape.

Later, during our car trips, we saw other clues, such as a large brick building with an entire section missing, showing walled connecting doors.

Another memory is a bridge in Vitry le François, 48°44'24"N, 4°35'31"E. I give an approximate location, because there are actually two bridges, one over the Marne and one over the canal. Today everything is clear and no trace remains, but several years after 1956, there was still a suspension bridge in white concrete, probably built before the war. But the deck had been demolished and replaced by a single temporary track, made of large wooden beams, which made a characteristic noise when we drove over it. For this reason we called it the «thunder bridge» and we applauded every time! Of course we did not knew what this bridge meant.

Decades later, you could still see old factories with windows painted blue. It is only recently that I learned why: it was a measure to protect cities from bombing (by preventing the lights from serving as a landmark at night).

We had also visited the Fort de la Pompelle, near Reims. At the time, it was still as it had been abandoned in 1918, a vague chalky mound devastated by four years of gunning, where only the tops of some vaults emerged here and there. I was horrified at the idea of soldiers buried alive under the shells, a sort of strange black curse. A feeling that we probably no longer have, today that the fort has been restored and the galleries cleared, glorifying war while avoiding to evoke the abominable suffering it entails. A curious detail is that I imagined these soldiers in faded blue uniforms, without knowing that this was actually the color at the time.

There also were «the Americans», who moved in convoys of military trucks, the famous Dodges of the Landing, which we see in the films, and which I therefore saw with my own eyes. These convoys were compact and difficult to overtake, but they went fast enough to make this unnecessary. They were distinguished by a whistling noise unique for the time, due to the presence of a turbo. This, and some other details, gave the Americans a slight «magical» sheen, and I remember that people spoke of the «Americans» a bit like a superior race, and especially a lot of gratitude. And in fact, without their help, we would have remained under the nazi rule. A worried gratitude however, as with an unpredictable big brother, who tends to pull the covers over himself without thinking of others. In fact, the presence of a foreign army on French soil was not without protests, and finally De Gaulle asked them to leave. (Well, I think that it was mainly the communist left which protested, at the time it was still very much subservient to the USSR, and we did not yet distrust the latter so much: it was still «the Allies» and not yet «the Cold War»).

I also clearly remember the dull gray aluminium one franc coins, stamped with the shameful Pétain francisque. I had even asked my mother what this francisque meant, but she had not given me any details: at the time, we did not talk to children about politics. These coins remained in circulation many years after the war, and even after the introduction of the Nouveau Franc in 1960, they remained for a while as one and two centime coins. The fact is that creating new coins is expensive, and the symbols s were not the priority in a country where everything had to be rebuilt.

This proximity to the war made me feel uneasy: if it had happened just before I was born, then it could happen again at any time. Things like the torture shows in the Roman arenas are far away, we can think that the world has evolved since then, and that this can no longer happen. But the war and nazism were much too close to reassure oneself in this way.

However, the fact that my father was a soldier also incited a certain attraction to the military, and I remember that I liked the rhythmic music of the parades. It must be said that it was the only music we heard in 1956, before we had a radio! At the time military parades were still common. Today they would be incongruous.

This is clearly an example of opinion neurosis, which proves that I was a child like any other, without special faculties. It was necessary in any case, because any difference would have brought me merciless repression. Which could not be completely avoided, as we shall see.

See this section, in the thread on wars ▶️

Saint Dizier, 1956 to 1964

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

During all this time, we lived in a larger white block, which we called le «bâtiment 1». It was at 48°38'32"N, 4°58'03"20E, but it is now destroyed. What is now rue Edgar Pisani was at the time an elevated bypass, to which we had no access. A wider bypass has since been built to the south of Saint Dizier, which allowed to transform ours into a street, to open up the Vert-bois from the city center. Our building was also destroyed, along with several others, to make the city more humane. At the time, there were small trees, lawns and a sandbox for children, to the north of our building.

It would be tedious to recount these eight years in detail, so I will stick to the points of interest.

Our new flat was more spacious, bright and pleasant, and I do not remember being cold there. Although we lacked real blankets, we used jackets, and later sleeping bags for camping. There was «la canadienne», trapper style, brown with pockets and a collar of false fur, and «the flannel», gray and soft.

Added to this was the radio, of course at the time a tubes radio. But it played music, and news. Today, we are so used to the radio that we do not realize what it represents. But at the time, it was a bigger change than today the arrival of the Internet: We heard the world! Well, never «the radio» was «our radio», it at once was the radio of the power. The Internet was able to belong to everybody for about ten years, until around 2010 when the indexing of my sites slipped behind that of the media.

I don't remember much about what I spent my time. People will tell me that I played, but for me it was serious and creative activities. So I was really annoyed when I was told that I would have to go to school. It interfered with my activities, my way of organizing my life. Well, I had to go, first to nursery school. I do not really remember what I did there, except that I actually liked it. Once there was a party where we dressed up as... a train. My relationships with the other students were probably good, in any case I have few memories. The only bad memory is one day when we were playing in the sand, and I was describing what I was building, one of my classmates started to contradict me, saying that I was doing something else. It was the very first time I had seen a sociopath, and I was more surprised than angry. But I have a clear memory of it. It is this experience, and the following ones, which allows me today to scientifically affirm that sociopaths appear at a very young age. Indeed, the fact that I had been a child allows me to understand what children feel, while «scientific studies» by people who never were children will always remain tainted by as gratuitous as stupid hypotheses, or by totally arbitrary ideological interpretations, often malicious. For example, a child who steps aside in front of a brutal classmate does not do so out of fascist admiration for domination-submission, he does it simply to avoid being hit. He has probably already internalized this pathological situation, and he does not realize that it is abnormal, as in the story above of my parents «cutting» my brother's feet. He accepts that he must obey sick brutes, exactly as he must obey his parents or teachers! Or he does not dare talk to adults, and especially not to those weird «scientists» who ask him strange questions, without ever listening to what he has to say. The rare times I was able to talk about these problems, people looked elsewhere. At best, I was told that I had to «make myself respected», but how could I do that in front of several people? Not to mention that I would be the one punished, as many cases prove.

The Jean Moulin Primary School (1960-1964)

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

This school was located at 48°38'38.10"N, 4°58'14.52"E. The coordinates point precisely to an annex room which served as a cinema, where a curious souvenir is located.

The main building is the bar a few meters further east, with the four stairwells. These buildings still exist in 2016, but they no longer serve as a school: they have been converted into a sort of adult education center. So that you will not find «Ecole Jean Moulin» on the Internet. This name «Jean Moulin» was very much in the spirit of the time, of the denunciation of all the horrors of nazism and the celebration of the heroes. We were even shown films at school, with a very attenuated image of the famous Auschwitz oven, which still gave me terrifying dreams for several nights. (Than, contrary to what some Holocaust deniers cretins claim, this image already existed in 1964).

The four years spent at the Jean Moulin school bring good and bad memories. Good ones, because I liked learning. Bad ones, because some teachers had the art of transforming the most interesting activities into unpleasant chores, or even into affairs of shame and guilt. There was one who was particularly gifted at that, whom I did not like, and he frankly hated me. There was another who was interesting, and I understood long after, from certain clues, that he was trained in the Freinet pedagogy. But probably at the time if he had mentioned it he would have been fired.

Learning abstract subjects is not easy for a child, accustomed to concrete stuff and images. If in addition we make of this a matter of shame and guilt, school failure is warranted. This is the reason why modern pedagogy is based on the senses (images, colors, sounds, objects, mechanics...), instead of abstractions. And especially on the social acceptance and self-confidence of the child, instead of shame or guilt, or more generally of the sadomasochistic model of submission to the socially superior master representing the system.

School, harassment and discrimination

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

The most striking memory however, is the one of discrimination: boys and girls were in separate classes and courses. Of course we thought that this state of affairs was «normal», like many other idiocies imposed by the adults. But it was definitively not innocent: there were often contemptuous comments about «girls», even «accusations of being a girl», cultivating «the shame of being a girl». The teachers themselves clearly implied that it was «a problem» to have relationships with girls (recalling that, at the time and at our age, sex was something totally unknown: if we went with the girls, outside of the school, it was only to be friends, or to play together). It is clear that these comments created sexism, and that they even were the one and only cause. This idea that women would be strange beings with incomprehensible reactions was at the origin of some of the difficulties I had in approaching women later. I imagine that the reverse is true for many women, feeling men as disturbing beings only concerned with doing things to them. Hence the «incomprehensible reactions».

These discrimination even ended up spreading in our games outside of school, since even outside of school boys and girls ended up no longer seeing each other, each rejecting the other into a strange and unknown world, whereas only two years earlier we were playing together in the same sandbox. Thus we internalized sexism. From there also come, very surely, the so-called natural differences between the sexes: boys interested in mechanics and fighting, and girls in cooking and sewing... How surprising, with the toys we were offered: war outfits for boys, play kitchens and «baigneurs» (baby dolls) for girls... and especially the comments and mockery nailing down all the «deviants».

So sexism is not natural, it is intentionally created from scratch by sick adults. And this is still happening today, for example in the supermarket, with the «girls» toy section all in pink, and the «boys» section full of monsters and horrible things. Or the ads on TV, with the woman who takes care of the housework and the man of the car.

The «virgin» state without sexism does exist, before school, and I even remember, before that, wondering why some people «do not have a willy», so how did they pee. They still had to do it though, and observation confirmed my theory: I remember one of my cousins who was still doing it in her diapers, her little mischievous smile accompanying the characteristic noise. This is how I did my first scientific reasoning at the age of four, lol

This is not the worst. Mockery and physical aggression, almost unknown in nursery class, became a major component of primary school. The first year (seven years old), it was still okay, although you already had to avoid «the elders», often brutal or arrogant. But from the age of eight, I was the regular target of mockery, especially by a group for whom it seemed to be the only activity. It was only a small group, but they did it at every recreation, and during the whole recreation I also suffered physical attacks. The first time it was a lone kid who tripped me, resulting in a split lip. The second time the «motive» was openly fascist: several guys cornered me and hit me to the eye, because I was wearing a shutter covering the other eyes. These two attacks could have had more serious consequences. I saw others, targeting other children. This mockery, and the constant risk of being jostled or hit, made it impossible to have a normal life in the playground. Personally, I stayed close to the teachers, where the fascists did not dared to attack me. But not too close, because then they would think I had a problem. That was something to be wary of too. I already knew that adults could also have strange or dangerous reactions.

The most serious assault I witnessed took place in front of the school: at the time there was a construction site rubble covered with bushes, with a path leading into it. Some kids had apparently lit a fire in there, my memory shows smoke and swirling grey flakes (most likely they had only lit a few pieces of paper, the ashes of which were flying. But at the time I did not recognize this detail). And the thugs were pushing another child towards the fire, who was struggling and holding on. An action which could have had consequences serious consequences, if his clothes had caught fire (the nylon!). My feeling at the time had been one of extreme gray strangeness, even more than fear: we lived in a world where very serious things could happen, that everyone apparently found normal and knowingly let happen: if these rascal had succeeded in burning their buddy, they would not be punished! In its intensity, it would almost be a war memory, if it was not for its brevity.

Thus, sociopathy, still rare at the age of six, affects the same proportion of people as in adults, starting from the age of eight or nine, and perhaps even more. This is an interesting observation, which specialists should not feign to ignore: something happens at this age, which favors or provokes their appearance (chapter V-13).

Because of course no one ever imagined that sociopathy would suddenly appear the day of being 18.

What is remarkable is that I never saw a single one of these aggressions punished. Not even an educational remark, nothing. Only the kid from the trip-up heard from me... through «the base», because his father was also a military. That it was the «military justice» which took care of a schoolyard affair always seemed surreal to me. But it was the only justice I ever saw in my entire childhood. And yet, his mother wanted to get revenge on me, telling me that «I shouldn't play here». I don't know what happened to that kid, but it is no surprise to see crooks if their parents deliberately encourage them in this way. His real name was Desboeux (Oxes, a French insult when applied to a person), and another gang called them... the Connards! (French strong slang insult) The later systematically infiltrated all the games in the neighborhood, to make them degenerate into fights.

Worse, the teachers themselves set a bad example. So I remember precisely, the first year, that two of my classmates had been «sent back to kindergarten». I do not know what happened, what administrative error or educational problem. But the least thing would have been to do it discreetly... instead, the teachers had made the announcement to everybody, under the covered playground, encouraging us to boo the two kids. How surprising then if mockery and stalking «appeared».

After a break in Béchar, we shall see later that this school harassment followed me all the way to Math Sup, in Pau in 1973. I was 20 years old. Later, it was other forms, sometimes very serious, like judicial harassment. I also had problems in «militant» circles, from which we would expect better, and even in spiritualist circles (where sociopaths eagerly pose themselves as gurus, contactees, etc. trapping beginners under angelic or high wisdom appearances).

On the other hand, contrary to some theories thich try to drown the fish, I have had relatively few problems in the «work milieu». Perhaps because sociopaths cannot adapt there, of provide enough results.

Erloy, our holiday village

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

We often went to Erloy, a small village in Thiérache, to my paternal grandparents: 49°54'47.90"N 3°40'49.40"E. My mother often regretted never going to her own mother's, but we kids much preferred the big house in the countryside to the gray courtyard of Reims, in the ugly old district of Rue de Courcelles.

Thierache is a humid and green country, undulating with small hills, full of black and white cows (at the time), nettles, geraniums, gray slates and reddish bricks with rounded edges (not industrial bricks therefore).

The house was very rustic: a single stove-cooker in pale yellow enamel and chromed metal, solid waxed dark wood beds, electricity in pre-war tar-board pipes, a clock which chimed the hours, and a wooden shed outside for the toilet. It was, however, merilly painted, clean and well kept. It would delight country lovers today! If you visit places like Oradour sur Glane, you might still be able to see «how it used to be». But in winter it was cold and damp, and taking a shower was an expedition: heating the water in a large tin in a room which served as a storeroom, with the dirty water flowing outside into a smelly ditch. Not to mention emptying the toilet bin...

The village could be approached via several localities which names still evoke the wonder of early childhood: Vervins, Étréaupont, Autreppes, Saint Algis. It was reached by a road which crossed the flood bed of the Oise river. I never saw it flooded, but today you can still see several bridges designed to allow water to pass under the road, when it does.

The sounds were of course the cows, the roosters, the nostalgic church bells, and the cheerful beep characteristic of the micheline railcars which passed to the south side of the valley. Today this railway has been sabotaged.

The smells were of course very «countryside»: the omnipresent manure and slurry. However, there was more to it, and I remember smelling the rain, or the night, which brought more discreet but very identifiable scents. Things that we no longer smell in the modern cities, with our sense of smell anesthetized by all the exhaust fumes. The main scents were geraniums, plums, or the characteristic acidic scent of redcurrant. The house and the barn also had their before the plastics smells: damp, straw, rabbit food, old wood, old attic, while the shower room smelled of jam and pies. There indeed was a «pantry» there (shelves covered with mosquito netting against flies, because there was no fridge yet) where there often were apple pies.

When we first went there, we could still hear the horse-drawn carts passing on the road, with the clipitipiclop of hooves and bells. We even made the trip once in a cart to a meadow, near the railway line. I mean to go there to work, not on an excursion. Then, practically from one year to the next, the horses were all replaced by tractors. Red-orange Massey-Fergusson.

Erloy was a radical change from the apartment: there was a courtyard, a garden, and above all the barn, a mysterious place full of nooks and crannies and Pépère's workshop, with the tools and the grindstone. In other words, it was heaven for three lively and active children. My father also enticed me in gardening, ploughing my little patch. I kept my love of gardening from it.

Later, as we grew older, we needed more space. We explored the village, which had a wonderful network of footpaths between the fields. I am not sure if this still exists today. It would be nice, though, to have networks of paths to walk in the countryside, without finding fences, private properties, herds (sometimes dangerous), or having to constantly be wary of cars on roads not intended for pedestrians.

Towards the end, however, as we became pre-teens, our interests broadened, and the old house ended up seeming boring to us. I remember wanting to make models... but no way to find a simple tube of Scotch glue! Not to mention balsa or other special items. I once made my first miniature solar system, with balls of clay painted with watercolors. I had put each planet and its moons in a separate little jar. But when we came back the next vacation, Mémère had mixed everything up in a single jar, ruining the whole thing. Maybe she thought they were marbles.

The most gruesome memory is of my grandmother bleeding rabbits: their unfortunate bodies were then spread out in an X, head down, across the dark barn door, the blood dripping into a plate on the floor. But we had internalized these things as «normal», because we «had» to eat a meat. Today in 2016 I suppose that no normal person would endure such a scene of horror.

We continued to go to Erloy until 1967, the end of our stay in Algeria. But Pépère died in 1966, and I then understood that a page of our life, our childhood, had been turned, and that it would never come back.

Pépère seemed predestined to die. I know, we all are, but by accident. But him often spoke of «going into the hole», as if it was his plan. From what I was told, towards the end he was nasty with the nurses at the hospital, because they bullied him «to live», as if this could have prevented the inevitable. So one day his children brought Pépère at home, where he was able to die peacefully, with his family. We learned the news while we were still on a stopover at the Marignane airport: I missed his final goodbye by only a few hours.

My father, who was so attached to his masochistic «social conventions», pestered me for several hours to go and see the body of Pépère on his deathbed. I refused, because I wanted to keep a beautiful image of him, not of a corpse. I did well, because, from what I was told, it was not a pretty sight. This cult of corpses always seemed unhealthy, disgusting and shocking to me. Yet I knew very well that what was there in that bed was no longer him, but something horrible which should not exist. So my sadness went to Pépère, or to the happiness he had brought us in his humble home. But not to the corpse.

Our last stay in Erloy was in 1967, on our final return from Algeria. But we had grown up, and the spirit was no longer there. In addition, there were other members of the family, who were making our presence difficult. Finally, Mémère joined Pépère a few months later. We no longer had any reason to go there.

I only came back to see this house once, in 1999, during the eclipse. There was no one there. Of course I recognized many things from my childhood... but the magic was no longer there at all. The only modern building, the town hall, had become covered in gray lichen. It is crazy how the futuristic style ages badly. Other houses I knew had simply disappeared, it is incredible to see how quickly a natural house dissolves without leaving any visible traces: 49°54'57.1";N 3°50'06.9"E.

And yes there really was a solid bricks house here, where lived a man called Paul, who was often visiting us, announcing his arrival with a cheerful laughter and a devastating cough. After his death, we went to his house to get saltpeter, who I knew this house while it was still here.

Today, Erloy remains one of those countless villages of boredom.

The outings, nature

Added in February 2025.

Another possibility offered by our car was outings in the surrounding countryside. Perhaps more than at Erloy, I discovered the beauty of the forest in spring, filled with birdsong. My memory show them more numerous and varied than today.

We sometimes drove at random through the Marne valley. Once we found a quarry with a large white cliff and caves, but I never found the place again.

One of our favorite places was the Lac du Der. Wikipedia says the lake was created «in the 1960s», but the place we were going to, 48°35'02.9" N 4°49'32.1"E, existed long before that: the dike was made of quarried stone, a technique from the early 20th century. Current images show that a concrete lining has since been added, which may give the impression that the dikes are more recent. Probably wikipedia refers to enlargements in the 60s or 70s, further west than the part we were visiting. «La brèche» 48°34'02.0"N 4°48'15.4"E could be where the old Der we knew was opened to the new. These remarks to show that wikipedia information can be false or distorted, even on benign subjects with no political stakes.

Another familiar spot was «la Houpette» 48°38'29.2“N 5°03'16.7"E, an aggregate dump, which we used as a sandbox. A little further north, around 48°38'31.9"N 5°03'16.3"E, there was a curious hollow, a few meters large but quite conical, which intrigued me. At the time, we thought it probably was a crater of the war, but I now think it was a small sinkhole. Indeed, not far from there, in Ancerville, on the same kind of terrain, we find the «grotte des Sarrasins» 48°37'43.4"N 5°02'06.8"E.

Vacations «by the sea»

(Permalink) Written in February 2025

Until the 1950s and 60s, modest people had no effective means of transportation. Their experience of the world was therefore very limited, and any deviation seemed extraordinary, as in the adventures of Mr Pickwick. This was the case for us until we bought a car. We then embarked on our first trip «to the sea», an exotic and extraordinary place for our council flat eyes. Imagine the first time a little piece of sea appeared from the car, the chorus of exclamations from three ecstatic kids. Fortunately, nobody saw us, but later when we were due to arrive in Béchar , we did it again in public, when we saw the first veiled Algerian woman. We heard laughing, ha ha ha!

Our first stay was in Brignogan, and we pitched our brand-new tent here 48°40'26.4"N 4°19'35.9"W. Today, this wild camping right next to the houses would be unthinkable, but at the time nobody said anything to us. To be honest, I cannot remember how we managed to get to the toilet, I can't even imagine we did in the rocks.

Apart from these contingencies, this stay multiplied our universe 100-fold: climbing through the rocks covered with life (when I went back to the area after the Amoco Cadiz, there was nothing left), swimming, sandcastles, and unfortunately fishing, which our father wanted to teach us. The surrounding area was dotted with houses, large granite boulders and even a menhir 48°40'13.17"N 4°20'6.75"W. Used to the bricks and tiles of Champagne, we were discovering the granit an shales of Britany.

For some reason, we never went back to Brignogan, which remained an emotional childhood memory. We tried many places on the south coast of Brittany, including Noirmoutiers with the Passage du Gois, where we were even treated with the spectacular sight of a car speeding in at high tide! Guess what, it went not far.

We also visited Bidard beach, a wild, undeveloped place at the time: freedom with a capital L! But it is impossible to recognize the exact spot today, it was destroyed, probably to make the Ibaritz golf course.

We finally found our paradise near Agay, 43°25'12.4"N 6°51'29.0"E, where we returned several times. We had everything we needed on site: camping, a beach, rocks and even snorkels. The rocks were teeming with life: sea urchins, anemones, fishes, octopuses... For kids used to living in council housing, these were unforgettable outings, and we continued to frequent Agay even during our stay in Algeria.

Brigitte Bardot's «La Madrague» was the song which marked our beach holidays, this is exactly how we felt, and it really captured the general mood of the time. But today, with pollution and systematic pillage, shellfish and crustaceans are no longer there.

Our longest stay by the sea, however, was in Hendaye. In theory, it was not a vacation, since we ran a grocery store in a campsite. But it was still «as if» we were on vacation! But it was a different epoch, we were now teenagers, and the music of that period was Santana III.

My Readings

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

Most likely, my readings during this period determined a lot my intellectual level and my future concerns.

Well, the very first readings were Sylvain and Sylvette, the first by Maurice Cuvillier (I remember this name). We liked these simple stories in nature, with a touch of morality while remaining pleasant to read. On Sundays we went to buy the latest albums at the open-air market of the Vert Bois in Saint Dizier. We also read Bibi Fricotin, les Pieds Nickelés, le Club des Cinq, and a comic strip now forgotten: Bicot (Originally Perry and Winnie in the United States. The French name had no known connotation when it was translated in 1924). I liked these stories of children who made a «club» of friends to have benign adventures in the neighborhood's wastelands. Sylvain and Sylvette, from their simple and rural world, also spoke a lot to children, much more than, for example, Tintin and his adult stories. Sylvain and Sylvette, Bibi Fricotin, Bicot or Enid Blyton «Club des Cinq» (the famous Fives) contributed a lot to my ideal of a group or community, well before the hippie years or 1968. Today the drawings of these stories are outdated, and they would benefit from being modernized. But not punkified, as for example with the new Spirou by Tome and Janry, which betray the spirit of Franquin. It is no longer our world, but the bizarro-mazo world of the media. So let's keep the freshness of the ideal.

There was also Tintin, of course. More adventurous, more for adults than Sylvain and Sylvette, a reference in comics and a certain contribution to French-speaking culture. But nevertheless less influence on our desires and ideals. Later, I learned that leftists hate Tintin, as they hate many things according to their incomprehensible binary codes. Well, Tintin was not always correct, if we read the original version of «The Shooting Star» published in 1942 with explicit anti-Semitism. But Hergé knew how to accept criticism, and later he even did anti-racist stuff, like in «The Castafiore Emerald» (although he never touched to Jews again). It is interesting to witness the positive evolution of a person. Even if Hergé's spiritual evolution was relatively modest, very feeeeew authors did better.

For cowboys, there was Chick Bill, with the sheriff Dog Bull, his sidekick Kid Ordinn and his Indian friend Petit Caniche. They announced Buddy Longway and Yakari 30 years in advance. Of course there were others, but with only fights, it was not interesting. Chick Bill at least offered an interesting framework, where the fights inserted themselves logically.

We sometimes read things like Mickey and Donald, when it came to us. But this world without life or vibration had no effect on us, and it did not arouse any desire or emulation. These stories were clearly not our world, not our dreams, not our school friends, while Bicot or Bibi Fricotin could have been our neighborhood buddies. In fact, we never bought anything from Disney. In any case, I did not like the irascible Donald and his sad smile (Even when they smile, Disney characters always keep the corners of their lips turned sadly downward: marvelous, yes, but only in dreams, tomorrow you go back to work). These books even seemed strange to me, with details like Donald's nephews always sleeping on their backs, with their arms over the covers. I thought that this must be uncomfortable, but I was a million miles from imagining the incredible sadomasochistic explanation for such a practice: monitoring if children masturbate! An activity yet light years away from the concerns of ten year old kids in 1963.

Masturbation monitoring is an activity which I was confronted to later, by comrades who, however, no one had asked anything. In the supposedly chaste Disney books (because they were for young children) this is not the only explicit reference to a morbid sexuality, especially the complicated relationships of Mickey and Donald with women (of course all presented as frivolous and inconstant), and especially the astonishing absence of the nephews' mother, an absence that many sociologists denounce as a dangerous anti-educational model. And then oh, I never tried to find out what my own kids did in their beds. We must not go too far, right?

You will also see a little further on how the subversive propaganda of the CIA also appeared in this literature. There is a simple test, which will make you feel the massive influence of these bizarre-reactionary readings: the incredible number of people who believe that we never see the Moon during the day, a belief they received from Disney books, the only ones capable of writing such idiotic stuff. The neurosis of opinion is so strong that it even not let them see the denial that Selene offers us every two weeks, right above their heads. Even when the truth is written in big letters in the sky, most do not see it! This is how reading Mickey-Mouse has become synonymous with reading imbecilities, a unique case in all of comics. We will find many other political prejudices or sexual stereotypes instilled in very young children by Disney, and which still condition their lives forty or sixty years later. They even desacralized the Jedi masters of Star Wars, making of them ordinary psychological beings.

There also was Selection from the Reader's Digest, which was for several years one of my sources of information on the world, and my first opening to politics. I especially appreciated that they denounced dictatorships. Then one day I ended up noticing that they only denounced communist dictatorships, while everyone knew very well that there were others (including one on our doorstep: no one could claim to be unaware that franco had not been elected). Of course I have since heard that Selection had a contract with the CIA to do this dirty work. An information most likely as suspect as the magazine itself. But Wikipedia France (2016) cites links with a former director of the CIA, Paul Henze, and a book by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman denouncing these shenanigans: «The Manufacturing of Consent. Media Propaganda in Democracy». Fortunately, at ten years old you don't smell the putrid odor of this stuff, but I still understood that some adults were dangerous perverts.

Let us clarify that at the time words like «communism» had no meaning for our age. My position on Selection was therefore based on their lack of objectivity, not on their orientation. In any case at the time we ate «Francorusse» desserts (a common brand at that time) and friendship between peoples attracted me much more than all these lies and hateful propaganda. That the Russians were under dictatorship, let us admit. But that did not prevent me from loving them. (Added in 2023: I realize that this anti-communist propaganda most likely contributed to my later leftist period, in a world where the American Cold War hawks appeared as the troublemakers. So it took me this leftist period to understand that the Soviets were actually much worse)

Apart from that, when they were not bashing the Russians, Selection provided tons of interesting articles on all sorts of subjects, like the first «electronic brains» (computers), a thing which by the time seemed as bizarre and impossible as the UFOs. It was also through Selection that I learned about NDEs, but much later in 1976.

But the magazine from which I learned the most was undoubtedly «Tout L'univers» (Toulune as we used to say), a wonderful weekly magazine with articles on all the subjects: history, world, geography, and especially science. It was with this magazine that I really began to know the world, the countries, the universe, and especially science and technology. So at eleven years old I knew the principle of nuclear fusion, the structure of atoms, the life cycle of stars, how a rocket and most machines worked, etc. I also knew about ancient civilizations before learning them in high school, and most of the countries in the world. Every week we had to buy Toulune, and I devoured it. My mother strongly encouraged me to read Tout l'Univers, and if there is one thing that has developed my intelligence and my understanding of the world, it is clearly this magazine. It is an important thing, which is missing today, and which should be redone (you can still buy the whole thing, modernized, at Hachette, but most of the articles are outdated): a general public magazine, which presents accurate, unbiased knowledge, without filthy-punkism, and in a way which is accessible to all. (Today we have Wikipedia, but it is far too biased and pedantic) (In more we are told that children must not go on the Internet...) (it would also be very useful if such a magazine dismantled conspiracy theories, but without falling into rationalism).

Of course we read a lot, but one book which especially touched me was «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling. During the year 1963-64, while our father already was in Algeria, my mother felt more free to take care of us, and she read us a passage of this book every evening. All three of us were enthralled about these adventures. If this book has often inspired people like the scouts or the animal protectors, I remember it above all as one of my first sensual emotions: the beauty of living naked in nature, a wide and free life, without petty laws or all that anti-vibration junk of the «modern world». Well, let us say, it was not the cruel «law of the jungle» which attracted me, and later I ended up opposing this kind of «laws» which justify the suffering of some by the interest of others.

But having a sensual emotion at 10 years old is not necessarily easy to manage (remembering that «sensual» is not «sex», to people whose brains are too small to function more than one neuron at a time. In 1963 nobody spoke of sex to children, and we even were unaware of the existence of this thing). I remember that certain music also aroused this emotion (like the bass line in «hot Sand» by Shocking Blue, but this dates 1969, I must have heard something like that earlier). Some beautiful dreams were also clearly of this order. But these were things I could not talk about, for lack of vocabulary. If I had tried, I would probably have been called crazy. Even today, words like «sensual» or «vibration» are still very strongly denigrated, and when it happens, almost everybody starts talking loudly to quickly dispel it. However, I consider that this area is one of the bases of spirituality, even more than morality: once our brain is destroyed, it is all what will remain in our consciousness. Indeed, the afterlife is most likely based on vibrations.

Added in November 2020

We can get an idea of the 1950s, with the magazines of the time, several of which still exist today, such as Paris Match, which remained shifted several decades backward in time, therefore in the 1950s, or the worse of all, Jour de France, which only came out in 1989, and vaporized under the shock. Dozens of pages to talk about nothing, strangers, shoes or cars, and especially not about significant things. At the time, it only had black and white photos, slightly blue (instead of sepia) to give a feeling of coldness. It was so boring to read that no one opened them, even after waiting two hours at a dentist («Jour de France» was distributed free of charge by Marcel Dassault, to brush his ego and the ones of his rich buddies). On the other hand, I devoured «La Vie du Rail», about trains and railways, a topic which is itself timeless. At the time it was in black and white and steam-powered, but the period articles could be republished today as they were, between one on the TGV and one on the Planetrans.

The Movies

(Permalink) Written in November 2018.

In the 1950s and 1960s, cinema was still a novelty. That is to say, we had an extremely limited choice of films. At school, it was only «gray films» (in black and white), and almost only Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, or Buster Keaton (whom I hated all, because they are horrible and dressed all in black). This is why I am allergic to black and white, and to this kind of grimacing films especially. Not funny at all, on the contrary, a dirty vibration of a bygone era.

The only one I tried to watch again, out of curiosity, was a Buster Keaton style, with a kind of magic missile which made a train fly over a ravine. I did not found it back since.

Another one started well, the life in a kind of boarding school in a big park, with teachers and children. It was rather pleasant, until a murder was committed... then it was no longer interesting at all.

I liked «If All the Guys in the World» (original French title: «Si tous les gars du monde»), because it showed people who were trying to break away from the ambient idiocy, against racism and against political divisions. But we were shown it all the time, and by the sixth time we ended up being as sick as the guys in the boat. (I looked for it on youtube, but it is forbidden here by its copyright, which is quite awkward for such a film)

Another curious film seen at school was a long color cartoon, in a kind of jungle inhabited with insects endowed with human psyches. I remember strange and disturbing scenes, but I never found the title of this film. Unlike the others, this film had been shown in a special, larger room, the secondary building west of the Jean Moulin school, 48°38'37.9"N 4°58'13.8"E, destroyed today.

The rare (or only) time we went to the cinema in town was to see Bambi, the one from 1942 of course. With all the messages of this film... One of the passages I liked was the one about the Dwarves working underground to create spring. But it seems to have been removed from more recent versions.

Well, there were other films at the time, but clearly heretical. If I had seen «forbidden planet» and its fantastic music, I would have taken off from Earth and never come back! I think I would have been very sensitive to this music, and the rare vibrant episodes on the radio moved me enormously, evoking other much more interesting worlds. This is what was missing the most at the time, and the reason why I would not like to go back there at all: vibrations, sensuality, lyricism, cosmic!

My first comic strip

(Permalink) Written in April 2017.

Yes, in Saint Dizier I drew a lot! My father brought back from the base rolls of paper for typewriters, and I drew, drew, drew, all these things that I saw in my imagination: when you are only ten years old you have no other way to influence the world around you.

It was at this time that I made my first comic strip «Pattoum the working ant». Unfortunately everything was thrown away during our moves, but I remember an episode where Pattoum works to dig the Channel Tunnel. More precisely, the team takes sonar readings to determine the depth at which to dig the tunnel. The whole thing had a moral tone very much of the time, although today it reminds me more of the Star Trek atmosphere.

This is how I began to actualize my many dreams... for want of being able to realize them concretely.

My eye problems

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

I began to understand that I had «something» to my eyes when school friends began to attack me: «You're squinting!» as if I were doing something wrong. (By the way, that they knew this word and not me, tells that adults had set them against me). It made me feel uncomfortable, that I was being accused of something whose meaning I didn't even know, so how could I be responsible for it. This is probably what the victims of the gulags must have felt, who had to answer for absurd or incomprehensible accusations.

In fact, the picture was not very pretty: myopia in both eyes, strabismus and amblyopia in the right eye. And to treat this, I had to go to Nancy for visits, and rehabilitation sessions. More of course the condemnation to wear glasses for my whole life.

The very first treatment was to wear a shutter. At first it was a disaster: I could barely see anything with my right eye. I don't know if this treatment improved the situation, probably yes, because I was less bothered at the end.

I looked on Wikipedia to see if this brutal treatment is still used. Apparently yes, and it does not seem that anyone has found anything better. But of course the French page and the English page diverge (dare I say they are cross-eyed), especially the French page was clearly written in 1950: you have to «force» the «lazy» eye to work. Still worse, the French page explains without blushing that the shutter «provokes» mockery... In my opinion, some good clouts to the apprentice sociopaths would be much more effective, and fines to Wikipedia for publishing such imbecilities.

The English page is more recent, and takes stock of current research: it seems that basically the two eyes each aim at a different point. Normally the point aimed at should be at the center of each eye, which is the responsibility of muscular control. But if this is not the case, then the two images are offset. The brain cannot then integrate two images that are too different (double vision) and it suppresses one, by inhibiting the corresponding visual areas (amblyopia). However, it is difficult to know what goes wrong first in this complex system looped back on itself. Hence the little medical progress for a condition which nevertheless affects several percent of the population.

The effect of amblyopia defies description: if you look at a scene with the amblyopic eye, the effect is similar to that of the beginning of fainting. If you try to read, the letters are clear, but without a defined shape, changing all the time. It is as if we were looking through bubbling water, except that we do not see this water. The interpretation in my theory of the logical self-generation of consciousness explains what we see: the neurons are inactive, or only intermittently. We would then expect to see small pieces of images separated by black, as in an incomplete puzzle. However, this is not the case: the area between the pieces of images simply does not produce a definite experience of consciousness, neither black nor otherwise. Hence the indeterminacy. Moreover, the inactive neurons are not necessarily «pixels»: they can be ones which identify the shapes. Thus a given group of neurons will sometimes see a curve, sometimes a line, and so on. The resulting sensation is that we cannot fix a detail, such as the shape of a letter, which seems to change continuously at random. We nevertheless retain the sensation of a clear line, but if we try to look at it, its shape escapes us. So we cannot recognize a letter.

A truly effective treatment would start before the age of five, which implies active screening, from the age of one, because at that age we are totally unaware of the problem. Personally, I still had not noticed anything abnormal at the age of six. Recent research confirms that, with some exceptions (blind from birth), this plasticity actually disappears around the age of seven. So it was already too late for me. And for everyone else following the same treatment.

So, a large part of the treatment I underwent consisted of several two-week courses in Nancy, where I was made to do «coordinator» sessions: a device with two eyepieces in which we saw a sort of small whirlwind on a bluish-gray background, like a TV screen. We had to «bring» this whirlwind to the center. The problem is that I saw this whirlwind wandering everywhere, without me will having any control over it... I tried to tell this, but they told me that I had to «concentrate»... without explaining what this means. Under these conditions, I spent all this time simply waiting for the sessions to end, and I very much fear that this treatment was altogether completely non-existent. Later, I was able to gain voluntary control of one of the muscles of the system, but this was not enough to restore a normal vision: as soon as you relax the effort, double vision returns.

Worse, these internships, several in a single year, had a negative impact on my academic level. It would have been much more interesting for everyone, and infinitely less expensive for the Social Security, to have one of these devices at home, and to use it less intensely, but every day for several years. I remember that, after this idea, my father improvised a system with tubes, but it was way too late.

Probably today virtual reality headsets would advantageously replace these treatments, by allowing the eyes to work without having to make an effort or to spend time on it, while playing or doing other activities. This could be effective even on babies, which would allow both diagnosis and treatment. For example, an artificial intelligence measures the position of the eyes in relation to the object shown, which allows it to detect the deviation causing the strabismus. Hence the possibility of a diagnosis even on uncooperative newborns. For the processing part, the AI could then manipulate the images in such a way as to provoke the right reflexes. For example by alternating the scene for each eye.

Wikipedia France does not mention any device of the kind that I have known. Wikipedia USA mentions several old treatments (the «rotational trainer» could be the one I was made to use). They also mention the lack of scientific evidence of the effectiveness of these treatments. Which seems to correspond to my experience (if I had been asked, it would have avoided costly «scientific studies»). In any case, it would have to be done before the age of five, or even one, and for that, find methods which are not based on concepts totally inaccessible to children of this age. Even at ten years old in 1961, «concentrating» was incomprehensible: Yoga, meditation and spirituality were still unknown. Even today in the 2010s we see comic book characters «concentrating» by making faces and sweating profusely, which is totally unrealistic.

For a seven to ten year old child, leaving his family is not very pleasant either. But it becomes frankly depressing when you find yourself in a gloomy old building stuck in the 19th century by a space-time fault, with the refectory in the cellars and dark brown Pétainist toilets. And on top of that, prey to the constant mockery of my classmates, and subject to the whims of sadistic or lax «educators». Worse, although we spent our days «in class», we did very little schoolwork, and no lessons. (I won't give the name of this center, because it still exists today, and it may have betteterd its mindset. At least I hope they have improved their methods and made their toilets presentable)

The main problem was of course the mockeries and other sociopathies, which came to monopolize our entire social life, forcing everyone to withdraw into a corner, or into their inner life (in imagination). For example, it was impossible to play with other children in the yard, or even to simply chat, without it automatically degenerating into bullying. And of course without ever a single educational intervention to stop this situation.

The most obvious problem was the first evening, in the dormitory: I changed into pajamas, as we used to do between brothers at home. My classmates would then start sniggering when they looked at me. It took me several days to realize what was exciting them: for a few seconds I was naked, and it was too much for their two little neurons to handle. Finally, when an «educator» saw the scene, It was me who was severely reprimanded! So, even if I did not directly experienced pedophilia, I can still be considered a victim of a sexual assault, which made my body an object of shame. I suffered others, in sports, where on the contrary it was «necessary» to undress in front of the others. Go figure!

These people had in fact a serious sexual problem: to go to the toilet, you had to ask their permission! The reactions were always bizarre and unpredictable: most often a furious no, as if you had committed a mistake. Otherwise, it was a condescending look and a bizarre question «is it for the small or the big commission?», emitting bad vibrations, as if it was something shameful. The first time, I wondered what this «commission» was, and I had to extrapolate. Fortunately right, because I don't know what they would have done. This constant attention to such trivial things, this power over our bodies, this constant reduction of our lives to just pee and poop, had something very humiliating. In fact, the humiliation of having to ask, the sadistic refusals, plus the horror of the Pétainist toilets, made that I had several «overflows». I tried to go to the dormitory toilets, more normal, but most often I was intercepted and turned away.

This paragraph added in 2025: Exactly the same pretext of excreting on oneself, after being banned from the toilets, was used as a sadomasochist storyline in the «judge rottenberg center», to severely torture children with electricity. Without going as far as physical torture, «my» center clearly tried to send me in psychiatry, to «treat» the «problems» that them alone were creating. These kinds of sadomasochistic practices are based on the 19th-century idea that children must «control themselves». The «modern» variant used at rotenberg is based on the pseudoscience called «behaviorism»: the punishment forces the «behavior» of «holding back». Of course, neither works: children still need to defecate…

This paragraph added in 2025: The scandal of trump's «Alligator Alcatraz» concentration camp brought back another memory: we too were made to take scalding showers. Usually, the «educators» would round up five or six children and take them to a dilapidated shower room with rusty pipes, where we had to wash ourselves with unbearably hot water. I do not know if it was a sadistic practice, or if these people really believed that such hot water could replace soap.

We can therefore understand why masochistic submission to the system is still so widespread today: the only way to make this slavery bearable is to love it.

Of course, I was the one accused of all these problems, according to the well-known principle that it is the woman who is responsible for the rape. But I was never asked what was wrong. On the contrary, I was made to meet a psychologist, who asked me to draw my house. Of course, nothing was explained to me, neither who this man was, nor especially what I was risking. But I was happy with him: finally somebody with whom one could speak normally, without sadism or superiority!

Only once: when the interview ended I did not see this person again. And of course they did not tell me anything, and I only found out years later, by asking my mother: this man would have considered me a kind of little genius, due to my technical knowledge and my inner life (all things that I consider normal, it is those who do not have them who are mentally backward). His conclusion however was strange: he accused my mother of being at the origin of «my problems». It was very much from that time, always the fault of women.

This is how I found myself, still without any explanation, in a dark room cluttered with large black devices: I had to lie down, and look at the ceiling at a large purple wheel with a spiral rotating slowly. I understood much later that this thing was supposed to «relax» me, to «solve my problems». But at the time, I wondered what that meant! But at least no one was making fun of me or scolded me during these sessions, so that I just let myself go to my favorite daydreams. Did this reduce the mockery of my comrades? Not at all. Did it clean the Pétainist toilets? No, not either. Did it prepare me for spirituality? Maybe. But the least we can do, when we force people to do exercises of this kind, is to explain what they are and what they are for. Let us remember that spirituality is based on our own self-care: forcing people into exercises is always ineffective, often dangerous. People become hostile, or worse, they misunderstand. If we made kids look at a purple spiral in a Buddhist center, we would be called a sect (yes, yes, things like that have happened) (Yes, yes, in France, of course. Where else could such idiotic accusations be made)

I keep bad memories of the nurses, who all seemed crazy and mean to me. There was one I called methylene, because her favorite sadistic amusement was to smear the children's throats with bitter methylene blue. One day I had formal proof of their perversity: two or three who were discussing made me look into a coordinator, through a sheet of plastic, asking me if the little whirlwind had changed direction. Thinking it was a medical test, I scrupulously answered what I saw: «yes». «Liar» was the immediate and scathing answer. Then they went back to their discussion, without paying any more attention to me. Another time I was punished for simply saying hello to my doctor!

This how I understood that many adults are not as adult as they pretend. Since then, I have also experienced being an adult (I have tried everything in my life, even that), I saw that the same people still try to maintain the same social age distance, by posing as superior, or by infantilizing us in one way or another. Not to mention what happens when they are in a position of power (social workers, magistrates, etc.) And these problems are far too widespread and majority to be the feat of only the sociopaths: it is a whole pervert system of narcissistic affirmation by putting others down.

One of the most bizarre experiences, however, was in a kind of dark and gray attic, where one of the people in charge of the dormitories took me once or twice. I do not remember why, and when you are a kid you are so used to being carried around like an object that you end up not trying to understand anything anymore. But in that attic there was a noise. Not very loud, but still clearly audible: crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch. When you are a kid, you feel much more intensely certain vibrations, especially mystery and fear. Especially in an isolated and dark place. Frightened, I asked what this noise was. The answer surprised me: «there is no noise». At the time I thought that this person was just another nutcase or liar, trying to bully me, so that I kept quiet, to avoid worse. I already knew that a majority of adults were crazy, and what followed only confirmed it: no noise, no UFOs, no gas chambers, no climate change, no covid19... All this by people who would call me «unrealistic»!!

But there is another explanation, not exclusive. I have seen since then on many occasions that people do not hear certain noises however clearly audible, or even words spoken out loud. Once, a girl suddenly backed up in her car, when I had just told her that my door was not closed. Result: the door ripped off. Luckily I am used to people not hearing me, so I had withdrawn my arm rather than trying to close the door, otherwise my arm would have been ripped off with it. As for the noise in the attic, I one day got the explanation: they were simply wood-eating insects, which live inside the planks. Nothing scary! I even once held a piece of wood fifty centimeters long, from which this noise clearly emanated! So it was not me who had hallucinations, but this person who lived entrenched in her imaginary world. But if I had insisted, I would have been the one sent to the psychiatrist. It was not far, as we saw.

Well, this center ended up not wanting me anymore, and the last internships were held in private homes. Of course, once free of all those idiots, I no longer had «my problems». But maybe all these people had a much more fundamental reason for refusing me: for the last internship we did not found a host at all, and it was my father who had to bring me to Nancy every day. Apparently a ten-year-old kid up to date with the scientific knowledge of his time makes those people uncomfortable. And it was really my mother's fault, since she bought us Tout l'Univers, ha ha ha!

Another point that everyone deliberately ignored is that, with a strabismus, you cannot catch a ball. However, they made me do sports where I had to catch one, and each time I received copious insults. Yet I never asked them to do these boring things.

This Nancy affair ended around the age of eleven, with a surgery. This surgery succeeded in reducing the strabismus (which remains visible, although lighter), but since then I have double vision (when I think about it). The situation has never changed since, neither for better nor for worse, because at ten years old the nerve circuits are completely frozen.

I had to wait until I was 65 years old for someone to ask me which of my eyes is the dominant eye! And not just anyone: a tulku! I wonder what the thousands others thought.

It should also be noted that I retain normal peripheral vision, including on the right side: amblyopia harms the center of the eye. I can still rely on the peripheral vision of my right eye to drive, and it even happens that when I am looking for an object, I spot it first with my right eye. It is even sometimes better, in peripheral vision.

The only curious thing is that at the very edge of my field of vision, at the top right, there is an area where sometimes totally unreal images form. Probably where the nurse's finger injured the retina, at birth. In certain disturbing circumstances, I have even seen characters, and even animated scenes, which of course disappear as soon as I try to look directly. This phenomenon is perhaps at the origin of certain myths, such as ghosts, visions, in frightening circumstances. Fortunately, when I asked my mother about it, she told me that these images are illusions, and the continuation showed that this is true. So it is only a meaningless curiosity.

Another curious detail is that I have often been authoritatively told that I see «flat», that I have no vision of relief. So I wondered for a long time what «normal» people see more than I do. Then I finally understood that this statement was a prejudice: I have a perfectly normal vision of relief (just less precise for distances, like with the ball). If you have good bilateral vision, you can realize this with a very simple experiment: cover one eye. The vision of relief is still there! Less precise, but sufficient. How does it work, then? Largely with shadows and perspective, and this is what allows to give the sensation of relief on a simple drawing, or to perceive the volume of a virtual world on a single screen. A little also with accommodation ion, and film authors know this well, who use it to draw attention to the different planes of a scene. But above all, a slight movement of the head, even unconscious, is enough to reestablish the two points of view theoretically necessary for the vision of relief. Try it, simply turning your head to examine a scene is enough. In fact, our vision of relief is so powerful that even by combining strabismus and amblyopia I have never managed to «see flat».

Drugs

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

At the time, tobacco and alcohol were the only drugs known or existing in the general public. We could not found anything else, and we even were unaware of their existence. On the other hand, tobacco and alcohol were so omnipresent and internalized that we saw them everywhere, and their consequences were considered «normal»: road accidents and «crimes of passion» were treated as fatalities: «it's not his fault, he was drunk». Today, it is rather considered an aggravating circumstance.

My mother did not smoke. She had a drink occasionally, but never to the point of being drunk.

At the time, my father smoked regularly. He also drank his glass of wine with each meal, although at the time I never saw him drunk either. Oddly enough, I have no memory of the discomfort caused by tobacco smoke in our house: apparently our sense of smell protects itself from permanent pollution by self-anesthetizing, as can also be observed with the intense smell of cities, which we quickly forget. This is most likely how tobacco supporters manage to tolerate their own foul smell, or the taste of tar in their mouths. I once kissed a woman who just smoked... it was as if I was passing after a tarring machine. I never did that again. This self-anesthetizing probably explains why I have no memories of smells in Saint Dizier, while I have many in Erloy: geraniums, attic, redcurrants, plums, rabbits food, rain, etc.

On the other hand, I have a very... vivid memory: my father burned us with his cigarettes. Put yourself in the shoes of a kid, completely absorbed in what he is doing... and suddenly the intolerable pain of fire. With, of course, screaming and crying. But no punishment, not even resentment, towards what we thought was an «accident». I since found four or five scars on my body from these events, clearly from the period, because they have stretched with growth.

At the time, no one would have imagined that my father did it on purpose. But I later understood that he had some degree of sociopathy, and I saw him several times do things with the sole aim of being unpleasant. But he was also very froussard, and an «accidental» burn could have been a way to indulge in a sadistic game without taking any risks. I hope that today any «accident» of this kind is severely punished as child abuse, even before trying to prove whether it was intentional. Just smoking around a kid is a mistreatment anyway.

Added in 2025: In fact, there is one particular smell which dominated my time in Saint Dizier: the one of the military uniforms my father wore when coming back from the base. Especially the midnight blue one of the Armée de l'Air winter uniforms. It was also present on the gendarmes' uniforms until the 1980s (poor cops, if they had known they could be tracked with their smell). I think this smell came from the felt-like fabric, either because it had a smell of its own, or because it was particularly capable of soaking up the ubiquitous smell of tobacco.

Some curious smells that I was alone to notice were, for example, the one of iron. Probably, as with copper, volatile odorous compounds are formed on contact with the skin. As for the smell of hot electronic tubes, it could come from organic residues on their surface. But for hot aluminum, I have no explanation. The smell of rain has also been explained in terms of aromatic emanations, but not the one announcing snow weather. The most curious of all, however, was the strong bad smell of distilled water sprayed into an airbrush.

See this section, in the thread on wars ▶️

The Algeria War, seen from France

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

I only became aware late that we were at war with Algeria. Strictly speaking, I do not remember when or how I found out. But at eleven years old (1964), when we went there, I knew that this war had ended just before. And I also knew that France was at fault, having learned at the Jean Moulin school that France had been right to chase away the invaders in 1944.

Yes, the classical trick of teaching children to do the good, while doing the evil. All you gain is a generation which does not trust the system, the generation of May 1968 and of communities.

The reason why my memory has not recorded a fact of this importance is probably because, at the time, young children were kept away from politics. The only access we had was «the news» on the radio, and generally speaking we children did not understand anything about it, or did not listen at all. «The news» was one of those scary things reserved for adults, like drugs (tobacco and alcohol at the time), or Mom and Dad when they were alone in their room, making it clear to us that going there at that time would entail serious punishment.

So I have no personal anecdote to tell about this war. It was later, through my mother, that I learned that on several occasions the Saint Dizier air base had been put on alert, and all the personnel confined for several days, including my father, in the great anguish of women. These things culminated in the sociopathic coup attempt by salan and his terrible OAS, where nearby all the troops were put on alert. I remember hearing these names on the radio, or seeing them written on the walls, without knowing what they meant. In fact, we came close to a return to fascism in those days. And the only ones who avoided this was the army, which refused to follow salan, despite the humiliation of the withdrawal from Algeria. And De Gaulle, who, on this occasion, had to risk his person, by going to talk to potentially hostile officers and soldiers, some of whom had just tried to assassinate him (Petit Clamar attack). In more he was easy to spot: his head was above all the others, in a sea of kepis.

I also learned later from my mother that one of my uncles was the only survivor of an ambush, several vertebrae broken by the explosion of a mine under the truck he was driving, his thirty buddies chopped up by machine guns. All of them «malgré nous», slave soldiers forcibly enlisted... knowingly sent to a dangerous zone so that the big bosses could pass safely one hour later. Take advantage of this little window opened on the real world... you won't find this kind of stuff on Wikipedia. (strictly speaking, this episode is quite well-known, I have seen it mentioned several times, but not the plot behind)

However, I knew Algeria through Tout L'univers, and things naturally fell into place in my head as soon as I was more informed about the current events: Algeria was clearly not France. However, it was only as an adult that I learned about all the torture and atrocities committed by both sides (right-wing sources reporting Algerian atrocities, and left-wing sources reporting French atrocities. «Left» meaning they deserve slaps on the left cheek, and «right» on the right cheek. Tie them two by two for the treatment, it will be faster).

What bothers me today is the complicit silence about these atrocities, war crimes and genocide (deporting villages to desert areas without resources is equivalent to a genocide). Thus, in France as in Algeria, our children in the street pass near murderers, torturers and rapists, who go unpunished. This cowardly consensus of not denouncing any of them, and the blocking of any publication and investigation for fifty years, is equivalent to being an accomplice, by all the cowards who know and who have kept silent during all this time.

Hence the interest of sites like WikiLeaks to denounce all these bastards. Unfortunately WikiLeaks veeeeeery quickly fell into the trap of power, using their information to weigh in on electoral campaigns (Denigration against Hilary Clinton, United States 2016. An imbecility which cost we know), often in total disregard for the anonymity of the victims. Thus the ordinary citizen, expelled, dispossessed, raped, mutilated, tortured, deported, pedophiled, still today has only his eyes to cry.

And hence also my assertion that the war never had a single political motivation: it is pure sadistic amusement, a sort of «vacation» that sociopaths grant themselves from time to time to escape the pressure of normal society. If this was not true, then no one would cover them once peace returned: all the guilty would be put in prison or in psychiatric hospital. If anyone thinks I am wrong, he just has to publish the lists.

See this section, in the thread on wars ▶️

The Christmases

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

In a stunning contrast to the previous sub-chapter, I remember very well the Christmases «at the base» as wonderful times. Indeed, the children of soldiers were invited to a meal at the petty officers' mess. I remember this place, all in length, with sorts of separations between the tables, a bit like a dining car on a train. (They were probably prefabricated, quickly built by the Americans, just after the war, which had left the base totally devastated. It seems that they are still there, but it is difficult to verify since Google Earth and others blur the images of the place.) Associated with them are precise memories, the smell of candles, the taste of Christmas cakes, the pleasant warmth and the golden light of the place. At home, it was the wonderful colors of the garlands and the scent of the fir tree (At the time, real fir trees, with an unforgettable smell). The music we heard at the time (and which for me remained associated with all these wonderful tastes and scents) was the inevitable «Petit Papa Noël» by Tino Rossi, and things like Louis Armstrong «What a wonderful world»

It really took a hell of a lot of «Christmas magic» to achieve such a result in the middle of a war, with fathers in charge of preparing planes and helicopters for combat! What allowed such a sleight of hand was that the children were not informed of what was happening, that they were not told about these things, or that they did not listen to this boring and anxiety-provoking «news».

Our mother never made us believe in Santa Claus. She said it was a story. The holiday was just as wonderful like that. I remember the humiliation of the kids, at school, when they were taught that Santa Claus did not exist, or that they were mocked for their belief. Some were crying, and many arrived at school completely unprepared for this revelation. Maybe their parents believed too!

For this reason, I never told such nonsense to my own children. Which never stopped us from celebrating, making a Christmas tree, and even a mini-nativity scene on our Buddhist altar. The magic of Christmas passes just as well without lies or hypocrisy.

On the contrary, a kid who is lied to, risks either internalizing the right to lie, or losing confidence in his parents or in society.

Added on January 1, 2022: I learned (from Wikipedia) that Tino Rossi's «Petit Papa Noël», written in 1946, fell «just in time» for the secularism policy decided by Minister Marcel-Edmond Naegelen: «no religious songs in public schools». Also, the Santa Claus narrative most likely arrived with the American troops at the same time, derived from Santa Claus and his reindeers, probably also to «secularize» this holiday. So, in 1960, Santa Claus was not a tradition at all: the parents who told these nonsense to their children had been instructed to do so by high-level politicians! What is extraordinary is that even so, they believed in it, and that they behaved as if Christmas had always been like that. Probably more than in politics, we see here at work the incredible force of submission to the established order, sadomasochistic submission in its purest form, even without constraint or stakes! The worst is that 70 years later we see exactly the same perverse process starting again with Haloween, an ancient Celtic festival of communion with the afterlife, transformed into a cult of horror.

This policy of secularization of Christian holidays is only a repetition of the policies of Christianization of «pagan» holidays: the solstice holidays becoming Saint John and Christmas, Yule (Haloween) becoming All Saints' Day, etc. In fact, Secularism (translate: materialistic capitalism) has redone exactly the same plan as the Church: the feast of the good news of the birth of the messenger Jesus transformed into a feast of egocentric enjoyment and irresponsible consumption, the feast of communion with the afterlife transformed into a macabre cult trivializing satanic representations in the hearts of young children, etc.

Return of karma, or how we do not build our spirituality on the ruin of the one of others. The Catholic Church must well know this lesson now.

Religion

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

I first heard about it from my friends in primary school, who talked about God or Jesus. So I must have been seven or eight years old. Curious, I asked my mother what that meant. Her answer was of decisive importance, although probably not what she expected: people who «believe» in God. For me, a born scientist, «to believe» was «to be wrong». We were already saying «to believe in Santa Claus»!! So I immediately rejected all religion, like another kind of Santa Claus for adults. In any case, this story of God who sees everything but whom we never see was not very convincing, and my classmates who «believed in God» irresistibly reminded me of those who still believed in Santa Claus (and who were the target of mockery for their belief)

(Curiously, what I found thanks to General Epistemology, chapter V-6, actually confirms this astonishing property of «God»: the Transcendence would in fact be the profound nature of consciousness, its «laws of physics» in a way. Thus «He» necessarily knows everything we think, without any need for telepathy, and regardless of the location. But also, we can receive objective information, identical for everyone, on the meaning of life, happiness, etc. So the Catholics are not so far from reality, it is just a shame that the bigots made of Him a sort of sadomasochistic bogeyman punishing us for absurd reasons).

However, unlike the Santa Claus stories, it was those who «believed» who ostracized the others. Including adults, because at the time it was still «frowned upon» not to go to catechism, take communion, etc. And the older we got, the worse these disorders got (unlike Santa Claus, who was no longer talked about after the age of seven or eight). It is interesting to note that it was the religious who attacked atheists and secularists, completely against Jesus' message of love. Which shows the extent to which religion in the 1950s and 60s had degenerated into a system of oppression (Still I only saw the end of it). This fundamentalist attitude explains very well the rejection of religion which was growing at the time, both among the people and by governments. In this respect, I was right in tune with the times. (Today, 2022, things are reversed: it is the fundamentalist atheist bigots who persecute religions. Are you following? No? Well, if you don't want to make a mistake, just apply the basic rule: never persecute anyone)

The maximum tension was at this center in Nancy, where I had to do rehabilitation courses for my eyes. There, no discussion: we went to the mass, period. Whatever our religion or lack of it. For these people everyone was Catholic, and it did not even occurred to them that we were not. Being forced to go to mass in this way greatly contributed to my disgust with all things religious, and it took me decades to accept the major official religions and be able to attend a mass (ecumenical, because I never formally became Catholic), and take the wafer, in 2016 (it was the ecumenical mass to honor Father Hamel, murdered by a madman). Being forced to attend a religious service when we are against, produces a trauma comparable to that of sexual abuse, with very similar consequences, even if the attack targets a different part of us. Which is easily explained, because both equally break our momentum in life.

However, I could not remain indifferent to the beauty of their chapel, nor especially to the message of Jesus, to his call to love each other, to live peacefully, etc. I remember in particular, in Nancy, having seen a comrade reading a superb comic strip recounting the life of Jesus. I asked if I could read it, and he answered: «no, because you don't believe». What an idiot, because he might have been able to convince me, with his book. On the contrary, I understood that religion, as it was at the time, was a vast hypocrisy, totally opposed to the founding message. I recognized, however, that it was built on a valid foundation: the example of Jesus, who seemed to me a logical, credible and necessary ideal. Which immediately distinguished me from political atheists (anarchists or Marxists) or hateful fundamentalist atheists like Charlie Hebdo and other niqab hunters. Cartesian doubt, then, but not miscreance.

So, around the age of nine, I adopted an attitude which I thought was original, but which was none other than Pascal's Wager: not to contravene the divine law, in case God really exists. However, Pascal's Wager, as explained for example on Wikipedia, seems rather opportunistic: to protect oneself, if case God exists, but without really adhering to His divine law. Not sure that God buy this trick! He asks that we commit ourselves, not just that we protect our butts. In addition, if He knows what we think, it is totally useless to try to play smart with Him. The attitude that I adopted was therefore more committed: to sincerely adhere to the divine law, and to make the effort to apply it in life, since in any case it is THE normal way to live, whether this law comes from God or not. Thus, God would understand that I had kept a place for Him in my heart, even if I had not trusted his masochistic, hypocritical or discriminatory «believers».

Attitude that I kept until about 1976, when I discovered the NDE, the first scientific proof that consciousness really survives death, thus justifying the entire spiritual domain. It was then no longer a bet, but a knowledge.

Spirituality

(We saw above my feeling about God and Jesus. Of course this is already part of spirituality, but this sub-chapter speaks of much more personal things)

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

Of course, an ordinary young child does not have any real spiritual activities, due to a lack of introspection capacity. However, we should not conclude that he is necessarily totally stupid in this area. Thus, if my first conscious spiritual activities began around 1969 (16 years old), I had experiences of this order much earlier. Without being able to talk about it, due to the lack of any common reference with anyone. Today I still do not understand why so many people remain stupid as dead stumps, while I already had visible buds at eight years old. As Einstein said, human stupidity is the most unfathomable mystery of the cosmos. And the only one for which even this great genius has not been able to provide any answers. So me...

We saw a bit before about swear words, that I remember for each of them the first time I heard them. This is already curious, because «slang» is a convention, and nothing tells to a young child that a word is slang, until he has been told. But we also saw that hearing for the first time the swear word «meat», I had the premonition that it was dangerous to refuse it. A premonition which actually saved me a lot of trouble, until I was free to eat normally.

My first spiritual «position» was the refusal of death. A very subversive position, in those 50s when everything seemed centered on the cult of death. That we would one day have to cease to be conscious seemed to me the supreme injustice, the absolute horror. And, in the desperate world of the 50s, NDEs were unknown, nor anything like that: science offered no solution, not even consolation, and I had to live for more than twenty years with this monster lurking in my consciousness, ready to poison me with sadness every time it was mentioned. Well, even with NDEs, there is still the physical fear of death and pain, but that is nothing compared to the metaphysical anguish of having to fall asleep forever.

As we have seen, I had also rejected religion as a «belief». So I could not delude myself that the Little Jesus would come and get me if I was good and worked hard at school (the kind of «spirituality» we were served at the time). Being materialistic is not a pleasant path, it is a path of suffering and darkness, which leads nowhere. Or worse, towards revolt and violence. Indeed our death is an infinite price, which then justifies any exaction to try to avoid it: revolt, violence, political extremism, vivisection, meat, rejection of society, etc.

Another much more unspeakable experience (for the time) was a feeling of extreme strangeness in noting that my body was made of ordinary matter, without any particular properties. I could have marveled at its complexity (That I knew from the age of 8-10, thanks to Tout L'univers), but it was strangeness that I felt. Aggravated by a certain horror: it is because of this incongruity that I could at any moment be sick, injured, infirm, tortured, dead.

I have had other experiences on the sensuality of the body, which I cannot repeat in detail. I liked the vision of a beautiful, bare-chested, white (but not pale, slightly golden) male body, and felt the desire to live in such a body. This is why I also liked the images of Jesus, who was often depicted in this way. Plus, he looked nice, at least not stuck and gray like most people at the time. Mowgli was to have the same effect on me later, hence again a strong impression.

I don't know if these sensations were spontaneous, or if I had already had the experience of living in a spiritual body. Indeed, I have absolutely no memory of before about three years old, and even less of previous lives. These clues are all what I have. But these beautiful bodies are exactly those that we are invited to meditate on in the Tantras, and we find very ancient representations of them, like in the Ajanta caves.

Sport

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

What more boring than sport, tiring and useless. We gesticulate without creating anything!

Some will think that I do not like sport because of my weak physical strength, which necessarily placed me in the last. Of course it is the opposite: if I was not strong, it is because, even before school, I invested myself in creative or artistic activities (drawing, models, crafts, train...) instead of the fighting games of other children in my age. But being graded on our body has something humiliating. It is as if the girls were graded on the size of their breasts...

Some will think that I did not liked sport because of laziness. Wrong: I always liked gardening, hiking, etc. I even did judo, in Béchar, at a time when I lived with normal people. But pushing the body too hard produces very unpleasant sensations: shortness of breath, toothache (due to the forced inhalation of cold air), extreme heaviness and pain throughout the body (lactic acid). I persist in believing that those who «love» sports do not feel their bodies, because the narcissistic competitive mind suppresses their sensations, a bit like smoked bees do not realize that their honey is being taken from them. This suppression is perfectly possible, and a common observation, in times of war. It has happened to me too. Unfortunately, in normal times, I feel painfully feel the tiredness, and it has been one of my main limitations in my life.

Another thing which had regularly bothered me is the ambiguous relationship between sports and homosexuality. Of course a ten-year-old child in the 1960s had no idea that such a thing could exist. However, it was there, creeping, unnamed but implied, suggested. I mention that I had already been the victim of sexual humiliation, around the age of seven or eight, in this center where I stayed for my eyes. Which had resulted in a certain embarrassment of being naked in front of other people (proof that this embarrassment, called «modesty» as if it was a quality, does not appear spontaneously, but that it indeed is the result from «repression by society»). But at school, on the contrary, we were sometimes forced to be nude. Go figure. So during swimming sessions, we had to get in pairs in the changing rooms. Between boys only, since the girls were in separate classes. If we wanted to encourage homosexuality, there was no better method. Well, between intelligent people, we don't look, or we turn our gaze away, if we are embarrassed. But once one of my classmates asked me to look at his sausage, insisting that it had something fantastic. In addition, from the image I have in my memory, it seems to me that he was erect. Apparently, for him, the incitement to homosexuality had led to the planned result. At ten years old!

It was not the only occasion when we had to ignore a modesty that was nevertheless heavily instilled in us. Thus during medical examinations we all had to show up in our underwear in the classroom, an feat which would earn us severe punishments in any other circumstance. Then we had to take turns having our balls groped by a nurse. Okay, I know, it was to check if they had gone down. Yes, okay, but why to check again every year? In case they went back up? I remember one time that the nurse had long sharp nails. No matter how much I said ouch, she continued to knead them without paying any attention. Since children are only furniture... Or showing up with long sharp nails knowing that she was going to grope a lot of balls, she must have been sadistic or misandric.

«Detail»: she did not disinfected her hands between two pairs. This is how bacterial flora generating bad odors are transmitted, as I was able to see later. Probably among ancient peoples, where such contacts were rare or forbidden, people did not have so much bad body odors.

Well, I had other opportunities to train to physical effort, and once an adult I was able to build my wall and to carry my cement bag (50 kilos). But I remained lacking endurance, needing several days to recover from a masonry day or a mountain outing. This lack of endurance points more to a physiological weakness than to a simple lack of muscular strength. A problem which has often bothered me in my life, see further on about the scouts of Saint Dizier.

But a doctor can hardly answer this kind of questions, which would require a very expensive physiological and genetic assessment. In fact I never received a clear answer, and the only effective advice was to take vitamins (everyone should test which brand suits him best, a process which can take years). And even then, it works only if I take azinc every day, which is three to five times more than recommended. On the other hand, the correlation is quite clear.

I could have simply inherited some bad gene. But another explanation is possible: there could be a sensitive period of growth of muscles, skeleton, or even general metabolism. Around three years old? Five years old? Not later, in any case, because then the children on television would all be weaklings. Our body could need to get moving around this age, to receive a signal to strengthen muscles, skeleton, metabolism. But at this age, I was already calmer and more creative, not interested in running after nothing. This could also be the only explanation for why girls are weaker than boys: at this age they are already confined to doll games. Anyway, even if I was able to increase the strength of my muscles later, it did not improve my bones: carrying bags of cement is probably what gave me vertebrae problems.

Added in 2023: There would be a problem of genes. Indeed, the symptoms above correspond to those of a disease: chronic fatigue. It is only very recently that this condition is recongnized as a disease (before, people were called lazy, and punished. But on the contrary, I am very active, and this condition impacts my own life first). It would be caused by a deficiency of a gene: the mitochondria breathe badly, hence a reduced availability of energy. And all the associated symptoms: difficulty concentrating, drowsiness and increased need for sleep, a week to recover from fatigue, discomfort during or after exercise, etc. I must have inherited a relatively discreet version of the disease, but sufficiently annoying to be the cause of all the difficulties I have encountered in life: physical weakness, failed studies, difficulty concentrating (which also affects my spiritual practice), effort being painful and discomfortable, and of course physical weakness and last in sports.

Fortunately, my experience of sports has not always been so unpleasant: in Béchar I had more interesting opportunities.

The Dream World

(Permalink) Written in March 2017

For an active kid who is already involved in many things, spending time with nothing to do in a bare tarmac yard, alone in the middle of a crowd which does not communicate, it is boring. This is what I had to do with with almost every recreation for four years.

But one day, I realized something that no one was talking about:

I could control the mental images which went through my head.

It is actually very easy. The only thing I did not understood was why nobody was talking about it. Sometimes I wondered if I was going crazy. Then I finally understood that what I was doing was perfectly normal, but as with many things, «society does not speak about it» therefore «it does not exist».

In reality, probably many do it, but without daring to talk about it, since officially «it doesn't exist». Or they see such images, but without controlling them. And especially without realizing the fantastic advantage of having our own cinema permanently in our head, under our total control, for free, and without any manipulator to impose its «content» on us. Even today (2017) I would still say that it is better than the Internet and virtual worlds. Indeed, it only takes a second to visualize a complex scene, which would take weeks of thankless work to realize in painting or in virtual. Do we really need a high tantric initiation by the Dalai Lama to begin to control our imagination?

How does it work? You don't know? Explain me instead how you do not succeed. It is so simple. Well, I try to explain, but I am afraid it is a matter of blockage rather than technique. Have you ever seen the Eiffel Tower? (or any other famous object). Just reading this sentence, a mental image of the Eiffel Tower, called a memory, appeared in your head. Well now, I tell you that someone painted it in pink. Seen the Eiffel Tower painted pink? It is funny like that, huh? Still, this mental image of the Eiffel Tower painted in pink is no longer a memory, but a new mental image, that you created from scratch, spontaneously, instantly, effortlessly, in all its complexity and details. Whereas even with Paint Shop Pro it would take day of work to simply tamper with the colors. You can try with other colors, other monuments, etc. It is no more complicated than that, to create mental images. Some call it daydreaming... but it is not a dream, because unlike night dreams, it's entirely under control.

Added in 2023: in fact, today, psychologists call this «directed mental imagery», and they propose it to cure neuroses, as I did myself in 1975.

Neurologically, it is very well explained: when recalling memories, the activity of neurons causes a mental image, a sound, etc. Then the same neurons can as well create an image invented from scratch, without further effort. It can even be so realistic that sometimes we physically feel the emotions. And it is entirely natural. It is not a mental illness. And, unlike drugs, it is entirely under control, entirely free, perfectly legal, and without any danger.

(You can even very simply do «hallucinations» worth the one in the Blueberry film «the secret experiment»: (epileptics abstain, danger) stand facing the sun, or a strong lamp, eyes closed. A red light filters through your eyelids. Now put your hand in front of your eyes, still closed. By contrast, the red background becomes a deep blue. Now quickly pass your hand in front of your eyes: the rapid alternation of red and blue produces very pretty, kaleidoscopic patterns, bright and colorful like stained glass.)

Of course, I used this faculty every time I had the opportunity in my life, every time I was bored for lack of concrete activity or contact with others... that is to say often. It has had a strong influence on my life:

- This fantastic imagination has produced all the interesting stories that I have invented. I even made a specialty of the «creation of worlds», entire solar systems, with their peoples, their civilizations, their philosophies, and all the special circumstances which made these people live as they do.

-This is the Dharsham Illam of the elves, in my stories of the Elves of Dauriath. However, among the elves, it is shared!

-It also helped a lot in the vision of a better world, at all levels: techniques, social life, beauty, vibrations, etc. It is indeed much easier to visualize good vibrations than to express them physically. Today (2017) we can combine the two, with the virtual worlds, albeit at the cost of a huge amount of work. But in 1964 no one would have imagined things like virtual worlds.

-It finally helped me to «survive» in many occasions, when I was immersed in a totally degenerate environment, surrounded by morons with ugly faces from mockery. That is to say during most of my schooling. (Sorry dudes, if ever you read me, did you ever imagined that I would be grateful?)

Of course, this faculty is not without some dangers, to which particularly vulnerable people can succumb:

-Taking refuge in the dream world, and disengaging from the physical world, from society.

-Thinking that our dream is a kind of extrasensory perception. Many sects play on this: «memories of past lives», «contact» with «angels» or «extraterrestrials», «channeling», «therapies», etc. Especially, real people almost never conform to our sexual fantasies about them: guaranteed disillusionment.

-Developing desires which are no longer in line with the real world: impossible sexual fantasies (chapter V-5), conspiracy theories (chapter VI-10), terrorism, etc. This is the direction in which movies and video games are pushing us, always faster to show us horror and violence than beauty and kindness.

- Above all, the risk of creating as violent as inappropriate feelings (anger, sadness, etc.) from totally imaginary or invented scenes. Or from imaginary interpretations of real scenes. Or from imputations of intent on people who simply do not think at us.

The scouts

(Permalink) Written in December 2016

My mother always encouraged us towards this kind of thing. So I tried the scouts in Saint Dizier. (probably at the time my brothers were still too young)

Their premises were in a long wooden prefabricated building (probably a school built in a hurry just after the war). I had been fascinated by their construction of a kayak. At the time, these boats were still made of wood, and of a complex construction, for lightness, with many ribs and spars, like an airplane. I dreamed of having one, and of roaming in the rivers of the Great North. But I knew that it would remain a dream: at the time, a wooden kayak was the price of a car, and we had nowhere to use it.

I only did one scout outing, near Joinville. I am not sure of the exact location, several correspond to my memory, or the villages have expanded since then. The most likely is Curel, north of Joinville. I have mixed memories of this event. The camping, the backpack, the meal in a «popote» taken out of the bag (hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, I remember this smell which remains associated with camping), sleeping in a rustic building in whitewashed bricks, smelling of century-old wood... The outing started with one morning of work, where we had to widen the ditch of a road. Apparently this outing was organized with the town hall. I appreciated making myself useful to adult things, while we children were far too often confined to «games» without substance or interest. Or to useless and boring «sport».

The afternoon was a big game. Not a free game, of course, but a race. I didn't realize it at the time, but racing, or combat simulations like soccer, are not just any «game», but a very special and very restricted choice, favoring competition against «the others». So I was passionate about building «tanks» (or rather a kind of sleds), but the race itself seemed uninteresting to me, even boring. Worse, at one point I felt too corseted by all this quasi-military organization, and I «escaped» to explore a bit the surrounding nature. Which, on my return, earned me reprimands, first by the team leader (a kid my age), who threatened nothing less than to tie me up. Then by a villager who, far from being offended by such a treatment, on the contrary added that «you have to obey.» And, when you are a child, you do not always know where the limit of adults' power over you is: I took these threats seriously.

This is how, at the time, we only moved away very, very gradually from the state of mind of the pétain era.

However, what made me decide not to continue was that it took me almost a week to recover from the fatigue of this crazy day of digging and running. Which goes back to my basic physical weakness, which so often hindered me in my life. See the section on sports.

Milk intolerance

(Permalink) Written in October 2016.

It is fashionable today to claim to be gluten intolerant, even if all scientific analyses reduce this intolerance to pure auto-suggestion. On the other hand, milk intolerance, more precisely lactose intolerance, is well documented scientifically, its gene and its expressed enzyme are well known, and it affects a majority of people over the age of five. But we do not hear about this one, because it calls into question the religion of sacred meat and holy dairy products. Thus we continue to find milk and lactose in a whole bunch of products, sometimes unexpected, and even in organic products. Thus I noted digestive discomfort (nausea, loss of appetite, fatigue) with certain cakes, chocolates, etc. before realizing that they contain lactose, in unspecified doses. Hence the strong expressions I use, such as «sadomasochism», for such practices, which cause totally unnecessary suffering, as if that were precisely their goal.

So imagine in 1960, and even until around 1973, anyone who said they were intolerant to milk would have ended up in an asylum. Thus, everywhere, at home, in boarding schools, in summer camps, there was the sacrosanct bowl of milk for breakfast (with chocolate or coffee, to get rid of the sickening taste of pure milk. But even these ingredients had an ideological connotation: chocolate was «infantile», and coffee «adult», and we «had» to like one or the other according to our age. So we never had a choice).

Like any child, I ate what I was given, while our sense of taste adapts to the usual foods. So, we end up finding anything «good», as observed among people who eat rotten fish or worms. The intolerance then manifested itself in a devious way: violent nausea when seeing milk. For years I suffered from this without understanding, and without being able to talk about it: I was told that it was psychological, and I quickly understood that it was better to keep quiet or risk serious problems.

Worse still, the disgust for milk extended to other foods which looked similar but were harmless: certain tofus, soy milk, porridge, certain proteins, etc. Fortunately, nothing happens on the digestive level, but this disgust has sometimes created embarrassing situations. I probably wouldn't be able to eat with nomadic herders.

Yet lactose intolerance has nothing psychological at all. It occurs when a digestive enzyme present in the child disappears after weaning. Indeed, we are no longer supposed to eat milk at this time. Some nomadic herding peoples were able to adapt to a dairy diet by preserving the enzyme, or by fermenting the milk in one way or another (cheese, yogurt). This is a case of genetic adaptation according to race.

The religions of milk and meat are survivals of a prehistoric animist belief, which claimed that we would assimilate the qualities of a victim by eating it. Thus, according to meat eaters, eating beef would make us «strong», while milk would be a kind of elixir which would magically make children grow. These beliefs have been rationalized by biased pseudoscientific discourses, under the influence of the lobby of doliculturists (subsidized producers of animal suffering and slurry, who round off their revenues by selling the by-products: meat and milk). What true dietary science says is that meat or milk are not essential at all, since the nutrients they provide can be easily obtained in a non-violent way. And without intolerance. We even learn that in high school, in natural science class. But who remembers, lol

Of course, as soon as I was able to be independent (1973), I stopped this nauseating bowl of milk, for healthier breakfasts: wholemeal bread, muesli (without crushed wheat, which bran irritates the intestine, I checked that too). However, until 2016 I was never really able to stop eating cheese, despite several attempts to put something else on my bread. Ideally, we should have vegetable pâtés, rich in proteins, vegetables and other varied nutrients. But this takes time to prepare, or is sold far too expensively in organic stores. The few which are still there (Tartex) are far too fatty and far too rich in starch, and their price reserves them for the upper social classes. (Added 2025: we start to find interesting products, but still rare). So of course this business is not «taking off», and organic stores are not helping, them who have evacuated all together science, dietetics, social issues and non-violence. (2022: We have finally arrived at organic products at a normal price, for basic foodstuffs. But we still find far too many hocus-pocus powders and luxury products in organic stores)

On the other hand, butter has a very interesting plant-based alternative: Omega 3 from the Saint Hubert brand, which imitates butter very well (it even goes rancid in the same way), but with a finer vibration. In addition, it provides all the essential fatty acids of the nervous system, with fewer calories.

Added in November 2018: I was finally able to completely stop eating cheese, with vitamin B12 and omega, precisely. These resources cut the hunger for cheese, without having to make an effort and without feeling frustration. My doctor wanted to check the effects of this diet: my blood tests are perfectly normal. He even had to reduce the dose of B12, lol

Science, technology

(Permalink) Written in November 2018.

You might think that it was my reading of Tout l'Univers and Science&vie which opened me up to science. I don't think so: I was simply fascinated by these readings, which I devoured and assimilated with a surprising ease. Besides that, Mickey Donald seemed to me as poor and boring as a tennis match.

In addition, we saw on several occasions that I had a scientific mind from birth. Example: I once wondered why we feel hot in a sweater, when there is no flame or heat source. I put my ten-year-old understanding into action, and concluded that heat was a kind of fluid, which the sweater retains.

In addition, my drawings and tinkering opened me up to technical things. My father also helped me with this, by explaining things to me, and by bringing back «devices» from the base. Basically, they were scraps, but interesting: airplane parts, showing exquisite mechanisms or electrical circuits. For example, I had fun following the milling traces to understand how these parts had been cut. Even today, the simple smell of solder flux arouses the desire for electronics!

So everything was preparing me for scientific studies, and a scientific career. But at the time it was still far away. I just dreamed of becoming an engineer or a scientist: those who know how to do things.

I remember once at school, when the teacher asked what we would like to do, having loudly answered «science»!

The education by my parents.

Added February 2025.

There are some things which importance we do not always realize, so much they seem given. Hence the delay in writing this sub-section. But the education I received from my parents often stands out from the rest.

In the secular France of the 1950s and 60s, we were not necessarily Catholics anymore, but we still honored moral principles of this order, including in moral lessons at school: probity, honesty, and other indispensable foundations of life in society. I think these lessons contributed a great deal to making me the reliable and positive person I am today. And that was with the society of the time, not against it. Today, I had to discard several illusions in these simplistic rules, but the essentials are still here. I explain all this in the part on ethics in «General Epistemology».

So I passed on these basics to my own children. However, in the 1990s, it was the atheistic society which had become anti-moral: today, hateful, pedoclasts, marxists or grotty-punk «educators», explain to children that they must not be moral, or that they must change sex. No wonder if there are problems. What is extraordinary is that there are actually fewer: society is evolving, despite all the enemies of Humanity pulling backward and braking with their four legs.

My parents came from modest backgrounds: farmers, workers. Milieus where you only get what you earn from your work, or what you make with your hands. There is no room for the lazy or the clumsy.

So, from that time at Saint Dizier, and later in the Boniort, my father taught me the basics of manual labor. By the age of ten, I could spade, hammer a nail and saw a plank straight. My mother taught me the basics of cooking and sewing: by the age of ten, I could boil an egg, sew on a button, or dress a small wound.

It must be said that my father was a good handyman, we owed him most of our furniture, of professional quality. Later in the Boniort, he directed the building of a kitchen and a bathroom. My mother made a good share of our clothes, and she took her place in the masonry works orchestrated by my father. She also meticulously kept our accounts and paperwork, and later her own, until she was 89.

I think this mastery of the physical world has a lot to do with my success, including in the spiritual realm. And that I essentially have my parents to thank for it. And my school teachers. For instance in the UIT I learned welding and metal machining.

All this seems natural to me. However, I often came up against complete klutzes, especially in milieus pretending to build a better society: leftist, ecologist or spiritualist circles. The worst thing is that these people, far from having the humility to learn, resent the knowledgeable people, or they question the need to work properly. I have seen some unbelievable things, like those cretins who made French fries with virgin olive oil, or an authoritarian incompetent who called me a German engineer, ecology activists unable to pitch a tent correctly, and even a serious case of shoddy workmanship: a slab made of stale cement, with even lime!

So we understand that, more than ever, if we want a better society, we have to be better ourselves, and have the right ethics to start with. But we also need to be competent to hold a place or a role in it, even if «only» a technical one. Otherwise, the pretenses for a better society only are bigotry, were we request from others what we are unable to do ourselves.

Virgo Jet (M87).

(Permalink) Written in November 2018.

One of my most intriguing memories was an image of the galaxy M87, nicknamed at the time «Virgo Jet», because of a luminous jet which emanates from its heart. At the time (1963), astronomers had just realized that M87 was a galaxy, formed of trillions of stars. But then how could stars create a tongue of fire thousands of light years long? What monstrous object was hiding in its heart? This simple white point remained unresolved on all the images, and all my requests for explanations came back to me with «there is no problem». Obviously this fantastic observation did not arouse any echo in all these zombies, withdrawn into their navel to the point of reaching occlusion with the world, a psychological black hole from which nothing ever comes out. I quite suspected that at some point the stars would get so close together that they would collide and come together into «something» very big, but I was always told that «stars never collide.» So I quickly gave up asking questions, and I lived for several decades alone with this fantastic mystery.

I followed the progress of astronomy: first the quasars, even more monstrous, then, little by little, the idea of a black hole with its accretion jets. Today we know that there is a black hole nestling at the center of this galaxy, and it could be the second to actually be photographed, finally satisfying my burning childhood curiosity. But who in the 1960s could have imagined such a monster folding space itself?

Added May 2019: It's done! After 57 years of waiting, I finally see this thing. This sketchy, blurry image did not caused so much emotion, so abstract it looks. Then one day I meditated on it, and felt what it really represents: a tragic departure for an irreversible infinity, the opening of an endless tunnel, a trap where even time and physical reality cease to exist. Someone caught in it will accelerate indefinitely towards nowhere. The impression is of a kind of strange and fatal magic, very different from the terrible brutality of the object. A sensation quite well rendered by the music of Solar Fields: «Staring into the nothingness»: it is exactly what the scientists of the Event Horizon Telescope did.

Added May 2022: In fact, the concept of black hole was already known in 1960, at least theoretically. The astronomer Harlow Shapley had already noted an abnormal concentration of stars at the center of our own galaxy as early as 1918. The Sagittarius* radio source was known in 1960. Why then had no one made the connection with black holes? It seems that it is essentially denial or reality, the same denial which is today ruining our planet with climate change, or ruining our civilization with the denial of NDEs.

Yet what is so subversive or heretical about black holes? Probably the «end of the world» aspect: the very existence of space and time is threatened. An unbearable thing for materialists, for whom matter is God: it must therefore not die! This denial still exists today, no longer of the black holes themselves, but of the annihilation they produce. Indeed, many very competent scientists still try to save the absorbed matter by claiming that «information cannot disappear». Yet it surely can, for instance make a sculpture out of salt. Then dissolve this salt in water, and arrange to draw a single large crystal from this same salt: the information on the sculpture has disappeared twice, once in the disorder of the water, and a second time in the rigorous quantum order of the crystal. To remake the sculpture, you will indeed need to bring information. Or to go back in time. The Poincaré Return just does not work in physics, because of the nondeterministic quantum interactions. Even admitting we have a temporal mirror of an infinite accuracy, perfectly rewinding each particle’s path to its original position, there is simply no way that those quantum interactions happen again just in the same way they did.

If we meditates on images of black holes, we expects a sensation of violence. In fact, the effect is very different: a kind of horror of annihilation. The gaping maw of the horizon is like a tunnel, where one is sucked into nowhere. Like a magician who would be able to make us disappear in his trunk. The music «staring into nothingness» by Solar Fields produces exactly this feeling: the black hole is an existential fault of the physical universe itself, pointing at our essential vulnerability in this world. Even space and time are impermanent...

Nature before and after the destruction

(Permalink) Written in 2016.

The most accurate description which can be made of the 1950s is «before the plastic». Plastic, and modern paints on the same basis, allow for bright colors which are not found in nature (except flowers of course). Thus any plastic object attracts the eye's attention, and clashes with natural landscapes.

Before plastic (and more generally before chemistry), people had to manage to make everything with natural materials: wood, stone, fabrics, metal, etc. Only flowers stood out, but in a good way. Modern materials are what so easily give this flashy look to any recent human installation, compared to wilder or older installations.

Also, old materials took on patina, lichens, etc. which harmonize with them. Plastic and paint have clear and colorful shapes: dust or lichen then necessarily appear as dirt. This is especially visible in Brittany, where traditional houses are made of rounded granite and light gray slate, both covered in lichens which give them a warm yellowish shade, fitting well into the landscapes with rocks of the same color. But modern «Breton» housing estates have completely broken this, with black slates and white walls, which unbearable coldness is further accentuated by the purely square lines. And the slightest lichen then appears as an intolerable stain, which must be immediately scraped off.

Thus the world before modern materials could certainly be dirty, but it remained in harmony with nature, a part of it. Thus my grandparents' house in Erloy did not yet contained modern materials. Even the electrical installations were made of those tin tubes which were the norm before the war (and recognizable by the smell of the tarred cardboard which served as insulation). The walls were of pre-industrial bricks with rounded edges, the joints of mortar, and the roofs of gray-blue slate, all materials that patina and age enrich.

On artificial materials, on the contrary, the patina appears as a stain, which must be constantly cleaned, scraped, torn off.

Thus the bitumen of the roads, the power lines, the paints and the plastics, have profoundly changed the appearance of the world, and even its vibration. Today, in the «developed» countries, we cannot go anywhere without seeing power lines, roads, plastic bowls, shoebox houses painted in plain white, as simple as in a bad virtual world.

Added in 2022: Even discrimination against the Rohingya is accompanied by the destruction of their landscapes, clearly visible on Google Earth: straw houses with pointed roofs, in clumps of trees sown in the rice fields, formed an idyllic landscape, little by little destroyed and replaced by housing estates of white concrete squares, without any trees left. Destroying such a beautiful landscape is still more serious than murdering its inhabitants.

The changes in noise are even more radical: before modernity, the only artificial sounds were church bells, or the bells of carriages. Even musical instruments were made of natural materials, at best metal. But since then, the modern world has become a cacophony, and you cannot go anywhere without hearing cars, planes, lawnmowers, sound systems, televisions, rap, and gaudy supermarket music... So in Erloy I witnessed the replacement, almost from one year to the next, of the horse’s bells by tractors.

A specific memory will make you understand it. Given my scientific knowledge, when it happened, it must have been between 1962 and 1964. I heard a noise (that no one else heard, as usual, but this is not the point). A sort of hissing sound, in the evening, which seemed to come from the setting sun, from the balcony of our bâtiment 1. I already knew that the sun is a terrible nuclear cauldron, and therefore that it must make a gigantic racket. But I also knew that this noise absolutely could not reach us, because of the vacuum of space. Then I finally understood: this noise was not coming from the sun, but simply from the cars in the city center, which were in the same direction. The interesting point here is that this noise surprised me, that I had never noticed it before, even though we had lived here since 1956. So this noise did indeed appeared at that time, due to the increasing number of cars. It was also at that time that babies began to breathe tetraethyl lead, leading to the revival of fascism in the 2000s. My mother tells me a similar memory: when, in 1940, the cathedral of Reims sounded the bell (to signal the entry of the sociopaths into France), she found that this sound resonated strangely. And yes, the world before cars was silent! (or at least much less noisy). While today our cities are a continual cacophony! Which we do not notice, because we have internalized this permanent din, which sneakily insinuates itself even into our rooms: cars, sirens, televisions, VMC, etc. And if today the big Bell of Reims sounded to warn of climate change, no one would notice it. Even in nature, it is difficult to protect oneself from cars or planes. The worst thing is that people internalize this background noise: on YouTube you can find «recordings of birdsong» with... car noises! As incredible as it may seem, people actually seem to self-censor these parasitic noises, to the point of not noticing them even in a recording where they jump out at you. Not one recording out of 20 was usable for my virtual activities!

Silence, that is to say the ability to think about what we want, is one of the most precious things that modernity has stolen from us.

So we understand why today I advocate things like the 5-stroke engine, headphones, or filling tires with foam: it is not just about saving the climate, it is about something even more important: saving the very meaning of our existence in this world, by preserving our fundamental freedom to THINK and FEEL something other than engines or discordant music.

But another equally serious change has also occurred: insecticides and pesticides have greatly reduced the number of insects and birds. Not to mention the murderous madness of shaving and cutting everything, meadows, hedges, roadsides, I have even seen pruned trees in the wild! In the 1950s and 60s, when walking in nature we saw many more birds, butterflies, flowers, bumblebees, midges, frogs, etc. Today, they have not disappeared. Not yet. But there is much less life, much less varied, and we can cross entire forests without hearing a single bird or a single buzz. Comparing the memory of that time and the present makes the difference very visible.

You may say, comparing the present with 60 years old memories may not be safe. But this contrast is blatant when we arrive in a country which is not yet destroyed, like when I went to Bhutan in 1994. The first thing I saw when I landed at Paro airport was... dragonflies. And not one, several, and big ones. Unthinkable in an airport like Roissy. The countryside of Bhutan still showed a world where almost everything is made of wood and other natural materials.

Well, this is not a trial of modern techniques, which also offer fantastic opportunities: travel, Internet, synthetic music, virtual worlds, houses and high vibration constructions... The world of the 50s was also a gray world, sad like their music, cold, dirty, and above all incredibly limited: one could not see further than the next wall or the headlines of the newspapers. we much more often found horrible shacks made of blackish wood than shoebox villas, in addition populated by rude backward people welcoming strangers with rifles in their hands. So let us not idealize, but let us know what has been lost, before making plans.

Interiors and daily life in the first half of the 20^th Century

(Permalink) Written in September 2020.

Of course, I did not directly know this era, yet in the 1950s, and even later, many remnants of it could still be found. The most typical one was in Erloy, where I had visited (with my parents) a friend of Mémère.

The interior of Pépère and Mémère was rather simple. The floor was entirely made of square brick tiles, of a muted red. When I first knew it, their children had already repainted the living room with good paints, in broken yellow and broken burgundy (blended with a bit of brown). No overly bright colors in that time! Except once, when Pépère had repainted a ceiling with triangles of vivid colors. A small naïve masterpiece, of which he was very proud, yet his children deemed it a whim. They covered it in white after his death, which I found most regrettable.

Their bedroom was likewise simple, the walls of light ochre, the ceiling of beams, furnished with a large bed, a hefty chiming clock, a wardrobe, and a carpet. Both the ceilings and the furniture were of heavy, dark brown, well-squared wood, adorned with moldings and volutes—a certain refinement, compared to raw beams. The back room, wherein we slept, was furnished with simpler beds, devoid of carvings, yet still of solid wood waxed dark brown. Certainly people did not moved often in those times, and such a bed could easily last centuries. Modern furniture, simple, light, which can be disassembled, is nevertheless far more practical.

I long had a recurring dream about those beds: the space between the bed and the floor was only some centimeters. Yet, peering under, I saw a space vast as an underground hangar, with, at the far end, entirely blue butane flames. I never discerned the meaning of that dream, nor even whether there was one.

The other apartment I visited in that time in Erloy was entirely different, in a house near the church. Actually, I saw only the common room, predominantly pale blue, adorned with numerous curtains and draperies embellished with lace and floral prints, one of which marked an alcove (perhaps their bed, though I recall not, it was sixty years ago, lol). Unlike Pépère's house, dominated by a man, here dwelt only women, explaining the starkly different style. That predominance of blue endures still today in country markets, where we still find floral-printed blue dresses «for old women». Yet in the countryside of 1950, everybody was old and dressed like that.

In those times, most men wore gray or gray-brown, or the workman's blue of laborers and farmers. Women wore more colors, though often muted. Despite that fine dyes were already available. The choice of grim or sullied hues was therefore purely out of sadomasochism.

A room now seldom found in today houses was the laundry room. It was a large room, of sufficient importance, one of the five in the house of Erloy. It served a variety of purposes. One was washing oneself, and our laundry. To that end, one could heat wash-boilers. This last utensil, a truncated cone of galvanized metal, was for boiling laundry, and for that purpose, it bore in the center the «champignon», a vertical pipe ending in a flat head. We would boil the laundry in, and the boiling would produce a rhythmic jet, issuing from the flat head and sprinkling the clothes. This movement of water ensured the washing. All of this worked, but was less practical and rather dangerous, so that we understand how fast washing machines spread.

The laundry room also served to store many daily-use items (junk being rather in the barns). One of the largest pieces of furniture there was the pantry, now wholly supplanted by the fridge. Indeed, for lack of refrigeration, perishable foods were not preserved as today: they had to be eaten the very day, at most the next day. And to start with, one should not produce any excess! The pantry, however, allowed some foods to be kept longer, such as pies. So that that room was always smelling of apple pie! The pantry was made of a wooden frame, with its panels and door in mosquito netting. This protected the food from flies. Imagine a fly going from the toiled pit to the pie… Even with the lesser hygiene standards of the time, people had observed that rot and illness started from such contacts. Not to mention maggots, which were no more welcome then than now.

Another, smaller piece of furniture was the bread hutch. It was a vertical tube, of wood or wicker, with a fabric-lined interior, where loaves were stored upright. Its function was to prevent the bread from drying. The loaves already bore the form of baguettes, yet thicker, and the hutch allowed one to stock up only once per week, countryside obliging. In certain rural areas, the hutch was placed at the farm path’s entrance, where the baker would deposit the day’s bread. Today, with wholemeal bread, desiccation is less a concern, yet the less frequent supply still compels us to store it several days. To that end, I use plastic bags, and the freezer.

Ln the 1950-60 years, in the public housing in Saint Dizier, we still had a «séchoir» (drying room), an unheated room where we dried our laundry, but also stored utensils and food, especially leftovers. It was not until 1964 in Béchar that we got our first fridge, to protect our food from the heat of the Sahara. After that, we got used to it, and we always have had a fridge. The laundry room lost its functions of washing or food storage, becoming a simple storage room, when there was one.

It is very rare today to see period-accurate reconstructions in films, they depict either the homes of the rich, or crude shacks of rough-hewn materials. The sole example which comes to my mind is the film «Days of Glory» (French: «Indigènes»), (a most realistic film which likewise recalls other «forgotten» memories), where effort was made to employ the styles and materials of the time, notably in the bedroom and the reconstruction of the Alsatian village.

Of course, in that era, styles and ideas differed from those of today. For instance, massive furniture and dark carved woodwork are now unheard of, and objects such as clocks are far smaller. Heating hath rendered windows larger and clothing lighter, while paints and plastic have introduced pleasant colors, and electric lighting now joyfully illuminates all this.

Electricity appeared only gradually during the first half of the 20th century, mainly for lighting. Installations were added atop the existing structures, in the form of visible tubes (Embedding was practiced only in new houses). These tubes were thin (some 15mm) and fashioned of thin tinplate, with elbows and tees of stamped sheet metal, all fastened by brackets and screws. An internal insulation of tarred cardboard produced a distinct odor when working those tubes, which could also be bent in the manner of stove pipes, easily with a small hand tool. I would not be surprised if these tubes return, as they are far more ecological and durable than flammable, toxic PVC, and they further provide shielding and grounding.

As for the wires, they were insulated with a layer of gutta-percha, of rubbery scent, sheathed in a vaguely tinted braid, for wire recognition. Connections were made through splices—these are now forbidden, as prone to heating. Yet I recall seeing some in 1963, at an exhibition at the vocational school in Saint-Dizier. Aluminum wires existed solely during the war, and were abandoned for their unreliable contacts.

In 1950, tungsten lamps were yet a relative novelty. The electric revolution was made with osmium or tantalum filaments, yielding a warmer light. More yellow, have I heard about tantalum. The latter required longer filaments, hence larger bulbs, where the filament traced long zigzags. This yellow light remains tied to the music of the era, ancestor of jazz, or to the image of a well-heated bourgeois club with varnished wainscoting, populated with mustachioed Clark Gables in black suits, where one plays the piano or the Hammond organ.

Tungsten only became widely used after long research which allowed to draw this incredibly tough metal into wires, using some counterintuitive treatments which I no longer remember. In the end, engineers proved to be tougher than the metal itself.

The early days of electric lighting were inseparable from the rise of vacuum tubes, with brands like Sylvania, Tungsram (Tungsten), and Osram (Osmium) producing both tubes and lamps. At the time, vacuum tubes were still bulky, with a «head», «shoulders», a Bakelite base, and sometimes a small top cap for the anode. Miniature cylindrical tubes with a 19mm diameter only became widespread in the 1960s, as descendants of the military tubes developed during the war, particularly for American portable radios. For a long time I kept a 1930s «Memento Tungsram», inherited from my father, not for nostalgia but for the incredible number of practical formulas it contained. This contrasts sharply with today's manuals, which are often limited to abstract concepts.

Paints were also evolving, with the arrival of practical, beautiful, durable, and high-quality paints. The first well-known brand was Ripolin, giving rise to the verb «ripoliner», to paint in bright, even garish colors, replacing the previously common pastel, ochre or faded shades. For example, bars often had walls yellowed by nicotine. Before modern paints, there was the «blanc Fillion», a gelatin-based substance which left a white powdery residue on the fingers when touched. Many interiors were painted this way, sometimes with added dyes which still resulted in rather nice pastel tones: orange, green, violet. I saw these paints still in use in Algeria in 1964 and even in Mont-de-Marsan in 1970. Their only advantage was that they were «washable»: a simple sponge wipe would remove them! But since then, truly washable and durable modern paints have appeared. The trend for awful colors mixed with black or gray only emerged with the punk wave of the 1980s. In 1950, such things would have landed you in an asylum.

Although Jules Verne despised them (as seen in «The Begum’s Fortune»), wallpaper was an essential part of many interiors, often dominated by blue, like the apartment I mentioned earlier in Erloy. Wallpapers back then were much more ornate than today, but they followed a highly stereotyped aesthetic: complex floral patterns or repetitive pastoral scenes on a solid light background, using clear, outlined designs with pastel-colored fills, barely muted, without gradients. While the choice of motifs was cultural, the style was dictated by the printing method, which lacked halftones, but used a dozen different ink colors—light ones for the fills, dark ones for the outlines. Additional accessories included borders, ribbons of paper about 4 cm wide, adorned with friezes or Greek patterns. These were used to finish the top of the wallpaper evenly, as about 20 cm were left before reaching the ceiling, which was painted in the same color. And most importantly, it was real paper—no PVC or endocrine-disrupting plastics. However, it did not withstand humidity well, but people knew this and avoided using it in damp places. I once wallpapered a room in this way. It takes effort, but aligning these large sheets correctly is not as difficult as one might think.

Toilets were a persistent problem, and people disliked their odor as much back then as they do today. Porcelain siphon toilets only appeared in the 19th century and only became widespread in the 20th. Everything else reeked—from ancient Rome to Hugo's Paris—and entering a collective building almost always meant encountering «the mephitic smell of the pipes» («Captain Fracasse», Théophile Gautier). Even in 1978, in an old building in Toulouse! It is easy to understand why, whenever possible, toilets were placed outside, or at least in the courtyard. Hence, the nearly universal presence of wooden outhouses outside rural homes, or multiple stalls in school courtyards. In cities, toilets were located in stairwells, greeting visitors with their scent, though at least this kept the smell out of the apartments. Today, such arrangements are considered backward or barbaric, but at the time, they were the pinnacle of hygiene. Even Versailles, often criticized for «not having toilets», would have reeked like a pigsty if it had. People simply used chamber pots.

But what about going out at night or in winter? How did people manage? They used a «chamber pot». I don’t know how the ones in Versailles were like—probably beautifully decorated porcelain, with valets to empty them every morning or even multiple times a day. But in 1950, every countryside home still had several of these cylindrical pots (with a wide rounded rim for comfortable seating), usually made of pastel-colored enamel-coated metal, often adorned with floral patterns or stylized figures, with a matching lid and a galvanized iron handle with a wooden grip. This object only disappeared with the installation of sewer-connected porcelain toilets. It allowed people to relieve themselves at night or in bad weather, without having to go outside. And of course, one of the first tasks in the morning was to empty and rinse it, otherwise, the smell would quickly become unbearable, as I saw in the Faitg, where visitors refused to empty theirs in the name of freedom!

Polyethylene and PVC pipes came into widespread use only in the 1970s. Copper pipes have only been in use since the 20th century. Why copper, an expensive material? Because of its malleability: it is easy to bend a copper pipe. Before, they were made of iron, cast iron or toxic lead. Before... there were none. PVC also replaced zinc gutters, and their «culottes» connecting descending pipes. These things were so durable that many can still be seen in older neighborhoods.

But the king of rainwater and sewage materials was undoubtedly ceramics. So in Erloy there were plenty of brick pipes, which my grandfather called «drains». They came in lengths of around 50cms, with a larger end to fit the next one in, and even elbows and T-fittings. There were some small ones, a few centimeters in diameter, used for fountains and drinking water. The inside was varnished for watertightness. It was a cute and really great system, durable and eco-friendly, easy to make locally, and becoming part of the ground after use, unlike PVC which becomes garbage. Today, I would love to see a clay 3D printer to make these things again, ha ha!

One major factor conditioning both furniture and clothing was the cold. At the time, houses were cold, dark, and damp due to the lack of effective heating, which only became widespread in the 1950s and 1960s. The characteristic old house smell was inevitable. A well-preserved example of such a house from that era can be seen in Buffon’s home near Montbard.

Every house built before the 20th century had fireplaces with open hearths. A distinctive feature of old Haussmann Parisian houses was their large chimneys on rooftops, with a flue for each apartment. However, open hearths were inefficient, consuming vast amounts of wood while leaving many cold spots. Air had to enter from outside for the draft, automatically creating cold zones near doors and windows, not to mention the winter wind rushing down the chimney! By the 1950s, all old urban dwellings had sealed off their hearths, leaving only a small hole for a stove pipe, and new homes were no longer built with open fireplaces.

The history of stoves is tied to the 19th-century socialism: one of the first major brands was Godin (which still exists today), which housed its workers in the phallansteries housing complex in Guise (which still exist)

The coal stove provided the first truly effective heating, though theoretically, one was needed per room. We had at least two in Saint-Dizier in the 1950s, and I still saw them in public housing in the Empalot district of Toulouse in... 1978! They required a coal cellar, which explains the small basement openings still found in many old townhouses—used to dump coal deliveries directly into storage. The process was dusty, and coal had to be fetched daily from the cellar (using a bucket and coal scoop). There were also numerous accidents: carbon monoxide poisoning, chimney fires, or even outright explosions of oil stoves! I personally knew of two houses completely burned down this way, and my apartment in Toulouse came close.

At Erloy, Pépère and Mémère only had a wood-burning kitchen stove in the main living area. It provided heating but also served for cooking. The top surface was flat with removable circular plates of varying diameters, allowing a pot to sit directly on the heat by adjusting how many plates were removed. It also featured an oven and a compartment for heating bricks to warm the beds. It was quite a sophisticated appliance, enameled in a muted yellow with floral patterns and polished metal details.

And what about the bedrooms?

Well, most of the time, bedrooms were most often not heated.

People coped with this by using thick mattresses and enormous eiderdowns. These were stuffed with feathers and had to be fluffed up regularly to prevent them from settling. If they were not thick enough, the feathers would slip to the sides of the body, leaving the top exposed to the cold. Only goose feather was suitable, as it fluffed up, or even better, eider. For this reason, beds also had raised edges, to prevent the eiderdown from slipping off. We once even saw box beds in Brittany («Lits clos») fully enclosed sleeping compartments, made of massive dark brown wood, with an ornately carved window for ventilation, reminiscent of a confessional.

The eiderdown was enough to keep warm even in an ice-cold room. But there were still drawbacks and precautions to consider.

Indeed, if the whole body was insulated against the extreme cold, the only remaining heat loss was… through the head. Hence customs like the nightcap, which no longer makes sense in today’s well-heated world. But sleeping bags still have hoods for the same reason.

The nightshirt, along with slippers or a rug, allowed people to get out of bed at night, say, for the chamber pot, without their bare skin being exposed to the freezing air. I believe pajamas are a more recent invention, 1870, according to Wikipedia. I suspect a touch of puritanism in their history, as they’re actually quite uncomfortable, the shirt getting twisted around the body during sleep. But the fact remains that before modern heating, stepping out of bed naked on a freezing night was an ordeal. Only modern heating has granted us the freedom to sleep naked, as most people do today. Nowadays, quilts are far less demanding and bulky, while still allowing for a slightly cool sleeping environment (which is healthier) without requiring daily fluffing like eiderdowns. And they are… vegan!

Once warm in bed, getting up was not much of a problem, thanks to a slight body hyperthermia. The most critical moment was actually getting into an ice-cold bed at night. There were hot water bottles, and even heated bricks, I remember at Erloy, the stove had a special compartment for warming bricks. There were accidents with overly hot bricks: asphyxiation, even fires. Hence the preference for hot water bottles, once modern materials made them possible. Even today, when public housing heating follows bureaucratic whims rather than the rules of weather, I use plastic bottles. One or two are enough to warm the bed, or even to keep it warm through the night.

Thus, the winter bedroom had a distinctive smell: damp house, laundry, old wood, feathers. Modern bedrooms have far fewer and entirely different scents.

But the strangest device I ever saw was the «moine»(«monk»), back in the 1970s, in an old house in Ariège. It was called that way because it went into the bed, but you could not make love with it. Imagine four curved wooden slats, like a sled with two runners on top and two on the bottom. Between them, a small enclosed metal brazier! This peculiar contraption, a testament to the ingenuity of our ancestors, was slid into the bed and, with a back-and-forth motion, could heat it entirely. You probably won’t believe that such a thing ever existed, but here is a photo. Though in this one, a bowl of hot water is used instead of a brazier. An unrealistic substitution, since the bowl would spill the moment you tried to move it. Note instead the iron sheet at the top, to prevent direct heat or flames to reach the upper sheets.

Wikipedia shows another similar tool: the «bassinoire» (bed warmer), a small brazier mounted on a long handle (in my memory, it was rather a container of hot water instead of a brazier, with a tiny lid to prevent spills). This is where the French expression «bassiner» (warming the bed) comes from, moving this tool across the sheets to heat them evenly. And later, the phrase «nous bassiner», meaning to be boring, an allusion to the repetitive motion. Today, monks and bed warmers have been replaced by hot water bottles, made possible by modern materials like rubber and then plastic. Personally, I use a mineral water bottle filled with hot tap water. Simple, easy to make, and easy to use.

Because well, one thing did not changed: heating is expensive. In the 2000 years, even in rich countries few unemployed or retired people can heat their homes at a really comfortable temperature.

All this required quite a few rituals and preparations just to eat and sleep, leading to a rather rigid household routine: everyone had to eat and go to bed at the same time. And it reinforced the irreplaceable role of the evening gathering around the fire—the only pleasant spot in a dark and freezing house. Since winter nights were long, people brought knitting, handiwork, storytelling, and more.

Things are obviously different today: everyone warm in their rooms or in front of their screens, grabbing a tofinelle from the fridge, peeling open a can, or reheating a pizza in the microwave. And only talking through virtual means... I can just imagine a brother and a sister who hate each other but who unknowingly live out a romance through their online avatars, haha!

Another consequence of the lack of heating was its impact on health. Living and sleeping in cold, damp houses led to various ailments among our ancestors: rheumatism, lumbago, and more. This is where those strange weather forecasts about «aches and pains» come from. However, I never managed to experience these supposed «allergies» they warn us about. After all, if I like flowers, why would they harm me? In fact, I never had trouble with pollen.

The Grey World of the 50s

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

The world of the 1950s was a cold, gray and sad world. Not overtly sad, as if for example we had lost a loved one: subtly sad about something that we will never have, but without knowing what. This is exactly what I felt at the time, about something essential that was missing for our happiness, without having even an idea of what.

In the 50s, there were no computers, no internet, no virtual worlds. And therefore, no Elves, no wonderful worlds (There were Disney movies, but they clearly claimed to be «dreams», leading to no project, or even to no hope). No folk music, no New Age, no Hippies. No aliens, no planets (the only ones we knew were just dots in telescopes), not even UFOs (not yet in France). No quasars, no pulsars, no black holes (We were just realizing the existence of galaxies, the Big Bang and Relativity). No ecology either, no communities in flowery valleys. No Lamas, no mysterious gurus, not even world music.

Of course we had no idea about all these things, so we could not consciously desire them. But we actually felt the same as if we were deprived of them after having known them! Imagine a world where boys and girls were separated at birth, and would never meet afterward, even unaware of each other's existence. Of course they would have no visible causes for sadness, and they could happily go about their business. But they would still be sad about something missing, without knowing what, or even being able to imagine it. Add to thisgray streets, people all dressed in gray and with sullen faces, arrogant and bad «educators», the radio playing gloomy music all day long: that was the 1950s. And yet, it was an optimistic period, of reconstruction, of novelty: I dare not imagine the 1940s. Maybe people were less unhappy there, from at least knowing why they were.

I remember a dream which had marked me at the time: I had lost my family, and I was walking alone in a street, in a dark twilight, in slippers, in the rain, stepping on flattened horse droppings (you could still see them at the time, but cars drove over them, reducing them to a simple carpet of dirty straw), with nowhere to go and no one to take care of me. Of course I was sad, but it was more fundamental than simply losing my family: there was no alternative. In a normal world, if a child loses his parents, he is quickly offered another home. In the world of the 50s, the family was the only happy place, and if you lose it you were doomed. If you do not believe me, watch the film «Forbidden Games» (French «Jeux Interdits»), the horrible way orphans were treated. Well, this film was set under pétain. But in 1950, this dark atmosphere had not yet really dissipated, and we were still seeing the terrible blue or pink Vichy aprons... and everything that went with them. I even still met victims of orphanages... in 1976! So children were still incarcerated there in 1960. Some will reassure themselves by thinking that these orphanages are not «death camps». But they are still «brain destruction camps», where children are deliberately left without love or education, in order to make of them idiots and misfits. Just for all these pseudo-democrats and pseudo-humanists to give themselves a good conscience by avoiding physical pain...

In contrast, I remember being fascinated by yarn color charts (my mother's sewing books), or by paint stores, both offering magnificent rainbows of all possible colors. Even the muted colors of some yarns became alive, aligned in colorful harmonies or contrasts. So I felt their vibrations intensely, and spent time enjoying them. But it was something that was totally impossible to talk about with anyone.

The world of the 50s was also an ecologist's nightmare. For example, it was common to see factory smoke: from our accommodation in Saint Dizier we saw several thick black smokes coming out of small factories every day. It was considered «normal», whereas today it would be a scandal.

The same goes for steam trains, which, depending on the season, produced abundant white vapors, or black smoke. I saw one again in Lavaur in the 2000s, which flooded the city with a black plume that we imagines to be very dirty. And it was indeed very dirty!!

Similarly, those years were the seat of strange beliefs: that the smoke «dissipated», that is to say ceased to exist. The same goes for an object buried or thrown into the water: it was «disappeared», or «lost», ceasing to exist. Which was very convenient for getting rid of any chemical poison or nuclear waste...

I also remember my father explaining me how a mine works. When I asked him what happens when there is no more coal, he answered «there always is». As a child, this had intrigued me. Although I thought that there were things that I did not yet understand, the matter seemed illogical to me. Well, since then, I have seen most of the coal and uranium mines exhausted and closed. So I can say that this kind of reasoning is self-deception, even psychiatry. But in the 50s, it was considered «normal», and it was to affirm that the mines would one day be exhausted that would have gotten us locked up. It was not just a hazing system: until the 1970s and 1980s, all economic projections were based on inexhaustible coal. Then when this toy broke, it was replaced by inexhaustible nuclear power, inexhaustible oil, etc. The worse is that, today, if we we propose truly inexhaustible ecological energies, the same people say that they do not exist! This attitude therefore indicates that these people know the reality, but that they take the opposite view to distinguish themselves. And when everyone distinguishes themselves together in the same way, this is how... social norms appear.

If you want to get an idea of what the 1950s were like, think of all the things which were forbidden: atheism, all religions except Catholicism, guitars, long hair (You might think that this prejudice was invented against Hippies. But it existed before, also applied to women!!), not wearing a hat, homosexuality, contraception (yes, there even was a legal forbidding on this!!), science, politics, divorce, colored clothing, being a victim of a pedophile, etc. Other things simply did not existed: ecology, vibrations, spirituality, organic food, UFOs, elves, Relativity, computers, Internet, virtual worlds, pulsars, black holes, exoplanets, SETI, etc. So we are really very close to the comparison above, of boys and girls separated at birth. And painfully feeling the absence, without having the right to talk about it.

A more subtle characteristic of this time is that things were presented as static, eternal. Thus, the stories of Santa Claus had only existed for a few years, as a cultural borrowing from the Americans, or imposed by the government in 1946 to «secularize» the feast of Jesus. But people spoke as if it had always been like that!! I do not remember at any time hearing that it was a novelty. The same psychological manipulation has been reproduced since with Halloween, but this time with debates and oppositions to this «celebration» which normalizes horror and visions of evil.

Today, it is the opposite: one fashion chases the other. It is ultimately a more effective way than censorship, to neutralize real novelties, by presenting them as fashions, then introducing opposing false fashions. This was the case with the punk fashion, which was presented to us as the new ideal of the youth, while it always remained very much a minority. But it effectively censored New Age, the real popular music at the time.

My first experiences of beauty

(Permalink) Written in February 2025

The 1950s and beauty were somewhat antithetical. Just look at the gray, gloomy downtowns from that era. In fact, people did talk about beauty, but their «tastes» reflected the times: gray, muted, cold...

But there already were some beautiful things. I remember, for example, that Doctor Thomas's waiting room in Nancy had stained glass windows. They were not great works of art, but the light coming through the colored glass created some very pretty effects, a refreshing and soothing vibe. It was one of my few aesthetic experiments of the time, and it seemed so alien to this world that I did not paid much attention at the time. However, the memory remained, attesting of its importance, whereas I have no recollection of thousands of so-called artistic things at the time.

Yet beauty, especially pure colors and well-formed bodies, is one of the basic ingredients of a better life and spirituality. It is not at random if the Tantras speak us about wonderful bodies, or even things like the «rainbow body».

Music from the 50s and 60s

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

We can say that the music we hear at a given time defines the atmosphere of that time. Or even the atmosphere imposed by that epoch. Hence this sub-chapter, which will come back roughly for each chapter.

Before 1956, we did not have a radio, and the only music we heard was military parades, or sometimes festivals. Music was therefore a rarity, which came on us without any control. Suffice to say that we still lived in a world without vibration, such as the peasants of the Middle Ages experienced.

Between 1956 and 1964, we had little choice: the radio was our only source of culture and information. And, unsurprisingly, the different stations were already all the same, with all the same speaker (The same voice. And it's still like that in 2017... How far can we push social conformity?). Well, there were also feasts, while the supermarkets, which were just appearing, were already setting up their ideological formatting instruments, including their very special music.

Well, basically we heard:

-The fish sellers. I call this way singers with a mocking and vulgar voice, who were apparently the «popular» music of the 1930s. (There was nothing really popular about it: they were imposed social norms, without any choice). We could still hear them in the 50s. The best in this style that I remember is the unforgettable «Petit papa Noël» by Tino Rossi, or Edith Piaf, «Mylord», two singers who had their success during the war, or even before. But they remained the only models until the early 1960s!

-The accordion. I have nothing specifically against this instrument, but when for a century it is the ONLY instrument authorized for dancing, we quickly becomes allergic. In addition, all the filthy stereotypes of the time are associated with it: toad berets, idiotic and reactionary uncles, vulgar dances, clothes where the slightest fold is imposed under penalty of punishment, etc. And on the radio: beudeut beudeut beudeut, beudeut beudeut beudeut all day long. Even today in 2019, as soon as a party claims to be rustic or «for old people», the accordion is still imposed on us. Are accordions time machines? I doubt it. But I can see the burden of backward-looking and reactionary ideology attached to this unfortunate instrument.

-The sad violins. Here again I have nothing against this fantastic instrument, and I humbly kneel before anyone who knows how to play it. But at the time, the violin was only used to express sadness. Sad violins, if I had to sum up the atmosphere of the 50s in two words, these would be it. Their music perfectly expressed the insidious and omnipresent sadness of an ugly, gray world, without a goal, without an ideal, with no other joy than getting drunk. But for me who was discovering the existence of death, there was a very specific cause: every time the radio played its sad violins, it made me think of death, the sadness of never again being conscious, and the horror of what it does to our body. How could I forget? I thought about it often, but we were not allowed to talk about it. What was the point, anyway, no one tried to console us, we were told that it was «normal», as if these people hated life so much that they were happy to disappear one day. The world of the 50s was a sad, aimless street, surrounded by gray houses of reactionary uncles, with at the end, at an imprecise distance, the cemetery. A place which had a central place in the village at the time, whereas today we rather try to forget it.

-The pouapouaks. Well, let us translate right away: American jazz. Following the Liberation, there was a naive admiration for everything which came from the United States. Unfortunately, the jazz of the time is not the best they produced: dissonances, horrible sounds, cancoignous voices, etc. What shocked me the most at the time was the muted trumpet: this pitiful sound awakened in my child's mind the image of a kind of Gollum with big round ears full of green hair. It makes you laugh, but imagine an eight-year-old kid for whom this kind of stuff is the social norm, with no way to escape or to find better. Well, rest assured, it was still much less ugly than rap. Let us clarify: the fact that these singers were black does not justify the fact that they all had horrible voices. Since then, we have had many black singers who had fantastic voices, for example the inevitable Bob Marley, or the very African Oryema and his unforgettable «Land of Anaka». By the time, Count Basie already had a soft and pleasant voice. We even understand the lyrics! But at the time, it seems that the voices were selected to give a negative idea of black people. Well, for Louis Armstrong, I understand, and today I love his «wonderful world», probably the best in the style, and one of my best retrospective memories, also very representative of what we heard at the time at parties or official events. Today it still reminds me of the smell of Christmas logs... but received without explanation at eight years old, it had a frightening voice of a bogeyman!

-Underwear music. In my mind, this is how I called the supermarket music, which appeared at the time. The associated memory is that of boring clothes shopping sessions, where you had get in your underwear (in the changing rooms) and be scolded because the clothes did not fit. Despite a clear shift towards squeaky and dissonant voices, supermarket music has hardly changed since then: no vibration, no feelings other than a sticky mush, between artificial bliss and insidious sadness. Plus a blatant gap between the displayed beauty of the products, and what we really do with them, underwear for example. Today I think that the goal of this useless music is to produce a kind of sentimental anesthesia, by saturating our system with contradictory stimulations, which makes it painless to have to pay to buy. (One day in a supermarket I answered a satisfaction survey, to see: there were no questions about the music. Approaching the subject, I was told that the music was decided by a national authority, and that the stores had no say in the matter. Which tends to confirm that this music is part of a plan of psychological manipulation).

A fundamental difference is that, at the time, we had no choice of music to listen to: the radio chose it for us, and even those wealthy enough to buy records had only a very limited choice in the stores, in the same styles. While today, simply going on the Internet allows you to listen to almost any music in the world, and even in time. Thus, you can discover music and films from Africa, China, the Elves, space (space ambient), and even explore... the 50s, lol, which I have never known as well as now.

Above all, electronic synthesizers have since introduced a fantastic break: their dematerialized sounds allow to render the highest cosmic vibrations. While with classical instruments, such as the violin or the symphony orchestra, you hear metal, wood and wind, all materials of nature. This is why they are unbeatable for rendering the vibrations of nature (Debussy, «Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune», or «Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun»), whether immediate (folk music) or magical (elven music). In the early 60s, synthetic sounds (still very primitive) were used for science fiction or horror, where they gave a feeling of strangeness. It was not until the 1970s that artists really began to explore their potential to elevate consciousness.

Around 1960, however, some new things started to appear. While the 1950s ended on a high note with things like the Dave Brubeck quartet's «Take Five», the radio began to play more diverse, and especially more colorful things like the future «showbiz stars» of the 1970s. Among the best memories of these transitional years are Petula Clark's moving «Chariots» (an ode to migrants, which would be good to bring back today. I like to think that the lyrics intended by the author were «The Earth will have no borders») or Miriam Makeba's «Pata Pata», or even Gilberto and Stan Getz's «The Girl from Ipanema» (the Frank Sinatra version is in tearful black and white, 1950s style, since he always sang like that). This style gradually changed, towards «pop music», like the theme song for the show «Salut les copains» (saxophone rhythm). The main break in fact was to present young artists, instead of the stuffed mummies of the pre-war singers. New instruments were added, such as the saxophone and the guitar, which at the time caused a «scandal». If you understand how a musical instrument can be «scandalous», then you will understand the essence of the 50s.

(Well, those idiocies can go very far: Cromwell had forbidden harps, under penalty of death! So, I imagine today this cretin rotting alive in his hell of liquid manure and sanies, while hearing the harps from the paradise, and painfully regretting all the happiness he had destroyed.)

Finally, you should know that my mother always loved Africa. Of course, at the time we only had a caricatured vision of Africa and blacks, like «y'a bon Banania». But my mother had bought a small plaster statue that she liked very much, which we called «la négresse» (a word without racist connotations for us at that time). It represented an African woman in a loincloth, sitting, arranging a sort of turban, painted in complete shiny black, with only the bright yellow loincloth and turban. For a long time I imagined Black Africa in this way, a world of mysterious bamboos and brightly colored clothes with black leaf patterns, accompanied by music like take five or Pata Pata. Knowing it better today, I think I was not so far from the African soul.

Music before the 1950s: classical, Romanticism

(Permalink) Written in December 2020

We saw in the previous subchapter that, in the 1950s, the «popular» music (understand: social norm imposed by the media) was often vulgar and ugly. And apparently, the closer we got to the 1940s, or even the 1930s, the worse it got. Before, there were no recordings.

As for classical music, the «great music» as they said at the time, the little we were allowed to hear was a gray mush, always off-putting, often sad. Attending a concert was a high point of masochistic social selection, enduring two hours of massive boredom while respecting fussy standards about our position, our clothes, our hair, etc. (Fortunately today the classical concert is more relaxed, and especially more varied, with many little-known authors from the beginning of the 20th century)

However, throughout my life, I have never stopped discovering wonders in classical music, which were kept hidden from us, or which were mistreated to remove the vibration. We even find music in color, although attenuated towards then browns, as in classical paintings (before impressionism).

In fact, classical music was at the forefront of the evolution of art in its time, just as New Age was in the 1980s. However, unlike the latter, classical music was allowed into the big league, while New Age was savagely scotomized in a ghetto of cassette copiers.

In fact, classical music is not at all a homogeneous whole: there are periods, and countries. I am not going to give a complete history of it, nor an exhaustive presentation, but basically the Second World War put an end to one of its most beautiful, fertile and creative periods: Romanticism. A period which itself unfolded a complex evolution over more than a century. And today we still create classical music of excellent quality, even if this time the media censors it. Well, they couldn't censor the music of the Lord of the Rings, lol! I think that Wagner himself would not disown this music, which owes a lot to him anyway. The most typical example is the «Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun», by Claude Debussy, composed between 1892 and 1894. That is only 60 years before I was born, just the generation before. From the first notes of the flute, we enter a magical world of untouched nature... the arrival of the harp adds golden rays of sunlight under the woods, and the violins the sky, confirming this intense vibration, often rendered in illustrations by impressionistic images of colorful nature.

There are many other examples, from the Russian Group of Five to Wagner, and many others from the 1900s-1940s, which remained under the bushels of censorship. One of the last of this period was Khachaturian, who wrote Gayaneh in 1942. Thus even in the midst of war, the Soviets understood the primordial role of music in the unity and spirit of a country. From Gayaneh comes the well-known Dance of the Sabers, which was often heard in the 1950s. But this work, and probably his others, contains many other intensely vibrating passages. From the little I have heard, there are many works from the 1900s-1940s which deserve to be better known. This style is at the origin of the music of many films from the 1950s to 1960s, including the «peplum» style (films set in Antiquity, like «Ben Hur» or «The Ten Commandments»). Even the beginnings of science fiction were affected, like «2001: A Space Odyssey», which uses music from this period.

Thus, true artists do not care much about periods and conventions, using the instruments and styles which appeal to them. Classical music has therefore not disappeared, and we still create excellent works today. For example, I often listen Jean Michel Jarre's «Equinoxe 4» classical version, as evocative as the original synth version. But academic presentations of classical always start with the most boring, lol

My taste for music was kindled by music classes in high school, and my first records were Bach, the «Symphonie Fantastique», «Une nuit sur le mont Chauve», the Group of Five, etc. However, soon after I discovered things like Pink Floyd, much more colorful, and I stopped buying classical music. But listening to the same style all the time quickly becomes tedious, so today when I put Youtube as background music, I sometimes explore the heritage of our past, including Romanticism.

One thing that many people do not understand is the boring squeaks of opera singers. The reason given is that these people have to sing very loudly, say to scream. However, it seems that there is a selection of voices without timbre, which removes all the vibration. The introduction of microphones has allowed to recover natural timbres, but there is still the «vibrational repression» of beautiful voices with warm timbres. So that makes two problems to solve for operas sung on stage, without microphones.

Well, people are very good at it, as long as they don't do «opera». Think of the intense presence of Tarja Turunen in the group «Nightwish», or the fantastic elfin voice in «Sol» by «Static Movement». A musical comedy like «Hair», although technically an opera, shows warm and well-asserted voices, serving a positive social ideal. And apparently without microphones, if we are to believe the period film. We imagine that traveling theater troupes like those of Molières also had warm voices, playing in small venues in immediate contact with the audience. It is this social and political tradition that «Hair» continued, and it is a shame that we do not hear more of it today.

The rejection of society

Written before 2020 (exact date lost, more likely 2018)

I am not «special», and I imagine that in most children, like me, all this ugliness and bullying ends up building a distrust of adults. Diffuse, because before adolescence we are so dependent that we do not dare to openly consider the conflict, which remains in the background, like a resentment, whether against the perpetrators of gratuitous bullying, or against the «educators» who try by blackmail or by fear to push us in this or that ideological direction. This is not a gratuitous suspicion: many of the adults I have known would have merrily made me sing «Maréchal nous voilà», only a few years earlier.

One notion, however, which totally escapes us is that these sociopathies are the work of only a minority of sick people. But the silence of the majority, especially in the face of bullying, normalizes these things, and gives them a universal dimension, which children then feels as the «social norm»!

It is this lack of trust in adults which produces the revolt against society, so common among adolescents and young adults. There therefore is no inevitability here, no «adolescent disease» or «rebellious youth» or «lack of understanding between generations». These theories are only hypocritical lies, inventions intended to hide the revolt of the still young souls, before they are completely extinguished by submission to an abnormal society. A striking illustration of this is the painting «Volga haulers» by Ilya Repin, which depicts the resignation of the old to suffering and ugliness. And in the middle, the revolt of the only young person, when he sees what he will become. I was that young person!!

But even without revolt, the fact remains that society is perceived as superior to the individual, a force which is therefore better not to challenge. And if by chance a person in such a state of mind notices a fact which contradicts the dominant ideology, then they will think that it is them who are mistaken, or that this fact is a lie!

In my case, during my early adulthood, this revolt followed my benevolent but atheist spiritual orientation towards the extreme left and anarchism, until I realized that these people are in fact as bad as the extreme right that they claim to fight. So we can imagine that this diffuse resentment against society will push people in various negative directions, according to their affinities: protest, delinquency, leftism, fascism, drugs, religious extremism, nihilism...

Especially, young Arabs or Blacks are more severely affected by the resignation of the adults around them. Indeed, in the Middle East or Africa, the whole society participates in the education of children, while in Europe or America any interference of this type is frowned upon, and can even lead to a lawsuit. Young Arabs will therefore have to seek the limits much too far, faced with resigned adults who abandon their responsibilities. This simple fact is enough to explain the higher delinquency rates among the children of immigrants. But this is not a consequence of their race: if we inverted the situation, it would be the Whites who would become delinquents. Scientific research has even been done, and it confirms this scenario.

Of course, extremist or terrorist organizations recruit easily in these conditions. But they are not the primary cause, only an opportunistic infection which develops on an already deeply sick terrain.

This diffuse resentment towards society does not necessarily translate into adherence to this or that current which claims to reform it. This can lead to a more subtle revolt: the refusal of the rules of morality, or the lack of trust in the elites («all rotten»), leading to attitudes such as excessive capitalism, cynicism and swindling, everyone for himself, populism, conspiracy theories, etc.

«The Vert-Bois, delinquent district»

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

Today, 2016, the military Vert-Bois of Saint Dizier is known as a «cité sensible», a highly euphemistic expression to designate a ZADA («Zone A Délinquance Autorisée», that is Authorized Delinquency Zone), a lawless area, abandoned by the public authorities, governed by fascist, racist and sexist gangs, who can burn cars with impunity, scribble on walls, traffic drugs, commit assaults, «hold the walls» (stay idle for long hours leaning in the entrances, to the point of leaving each one his halo of filth, yes yes I have seen this) and recently provide members to groups of exotic morons like the DAESH.

However, when we lived in the Vert-bois (therefore until 1964,), it was a quiet neighborhood, where our parents let us walk, sometimes far (by bike) without supervision or special warnings. I have no memory of places not to frequent, nor of groups or gangs which would have made their law in place of the police. Drugs, rape, racketeering, trafficking, were things we had no idea about. Not to mention tags and car fires, which simply did not exist. And even the police, we never saw them there: there was simply no need for them, in a world of responsible adults.

«However», in 1964 in the Vert-Bois there were already immigrants, from Indochina, Madagascar, and even a massive arrival of Harkis from Algeria, evacuated in 1962. My mother often spoke to me about one of her Algerian friends, who, I remember very well, taught her how to make couscous, in 1963-64, so (This is how she inherited the gift «only Arabs make couscous well»!). My mother also told me that I had made a friend called Leila, and that I liked this original name. But I do not remember this Leila. These presences posed absolutely no kind of problem, nor did they even arouse the notion that these people would be «different». At most we looked at «the Chinese» with curiosity, because of their supposed exoticism. But no one had any idea of treating these people differently. Indeed, to have racism, it is not enough that there are races: there must be racists. On the other hand, if there are racists but no races, then there is still racism, against blondes, left-handers, Parisians, Belgians, people who wear glasses, women drivers, long noses, or whatever.

«Some» analysis associates the problems of the districts with «the immigrants», another hypocritically euphemistic expression to designate the Arabs. In the case of the Vert-bois, the Arabs therefore (sorry, but having a clear conscience about racism, I do not need euphemisms to buy myself the said good conscience with a special convoluted language) constituted one of the most important groupings in France since 1966 (especially Harkis evacuated from Algeria). But the Vert-Bois only began to become a «delinquent district» twenty years later, in the 1980s, that is to say with the reactionary filthy-punk movements. Similar reasoning seems valid for most of the «sensitive cities» in France: fascist gangs only appeared after 1980, following the filthy punkism and the rejection of the positive ideals of the 1960s and 1970s. Personally, I only began to see the hideous bald spots (shaved temples) and the deleterious vibrations of drug trafficking gangs around 1985. So that the relationship is clearly with ideology, not with race.

That fascist gangs recruit in part young Arabs is therefore not the result of race, but of the usual ghetto effect, among culturally and economically disadvantaged immigrants, and in addition deprived of their traditional educational references: in any Middle Eastern country, the gangs' actions would send them directly to prison, and many people who have been to places like Tehran or Riyadh speak of them as places where one is safe on the street. In Béchar, Algeria, our parents let us go out, and I never felt in danger, despite the resentment we would expect from the very recent war. Same in Kathmandu, I did not feel in danger, except for the far-right Maoist gangs which patrolled the streets in certain places. Not to mention Thimpu, where in 1994 delinquency was unknown, and marijuana grew naturally by the ton in public gardens without anyone touching it.

The system of cities itself has also often been accused of being «concentrationary». In the 1970s France there even was a word: «Sarcellisme», named after a city called Sarcelles. And yet, it was more about a malaise than a deliberate fascist ideology like the current gangs. This analysis is more relevant, but in the case of the Vert-bois it is important to know that from the beginning it was much more human than the gray and narrow city of Sarcelles: more spaced out buildings, numerous trees, green spaces, market, sports and cultural venues, churches, scouts, bordered by a forest, etc. In addition, it has been in constant improvement: if the construction peaked around 1970, a significant percentage of the «bars» have been destroyed since, especially where they were too close together. So, here too, the date of 1980 does not refer to a particular characteristic of the Vert-bois, nor of its inhabitants, but rather to the arrival of the filthy-punk ideologies which are still today the ideological basis of the fascist city gangs.

Added in August 2025: It was recently pointed out (source lost, sorry) that in France, the problem of city gangs had already arisen in the 19th century. However, it did not involved «Arabs», but rather «native» French people whose parents had migrated in town during the rural exodus. This tends to show that city gangs have nothing to do with race, but rather with certain young people who refuse to accept a world which is new to them.

Memories of Richard Trigaux:Saint Dizier, the years 1950

My parents

My genealogy

My earliest memories, 1956

The aftermath of the Second World War

Saint Dizier, 1956 to 1964

The Jean Moulin Primary School (1960-1964)

School, harassment and discrimination

Erloy, our holiday village

The outings, nature

Vacations «by the sea»

My Readings

The Movies

My first comic strip

My eye problems

Drugs

The Algeria War, seen from France

The Christmases

Religion

Spirituality

Sport

The Dream World

The scouts

Milk intolerance

Science, technology

The education by my parents.

Virgo Jet (M87).

Nature before and after the destruction

Interiors and daily life in the first half of the 20th Century

The Grey World of the 50s

My first experiences of beauty

Music from the 50s and 60s

Music before the 1950s: classical, Romanticism

The rejection of society

«The Vert-Bois, delinquent district»

Memories of Richard Trigaux:
Saint Dizier, the years 1950

Interiors and daily life in the first half of the 20^th Century