A translation by Randolph Burks of Coup de vent plein nord, from Nouvelles du monde [Short Stories from the World], by Michel Serres (pp. 31-38).

Gale from Due North

The real Brittany reveals itself during the winter. Walking around Belle-Ile during the end of December, following the cross-shaped Crozon peninsula's dizzying cliffs or Finistère-Nord's rias, with one's back to breeze or facing the gusts, through flashes of sun and sudden lulls, immerses one in the bittersweet beginnings of the world. Through the perennial washing caused by the interfacial love that the sea makes to the rock and sand, the strand uncovers emergence and engulfs the death of the living.

On a beautiful morning at the very beginning of January I had just returned from Le Palais to Quiberon by one of the dawn boats – the real Brittany reveals itself from the water, – when while walking I chanced upon the peninsula's tiny airport. I ordered some buttered bread and coffee at the bar,where, at a table cluttered with bottles of beer, four old vets with caps tilted on the backs of their heads and cigarette butts perched on their ears were playing cards while waiting for the fog to lift. From the salty words coming out of their mouths, I understood that they were former French Navy. “Long live the navy, sir,” I said as I approached, and I rattled off the names of my former vessels as well as two or three service records. After a few slaps on the back, the gentlemen had me sit amid the nautical fraternity. I bought drinks all around before diving head first into the conversation centering, as of old, recently and tomorrow, on our mother, the sea.

Such a convivial invitation isn't paid for merely in bottles of beer but also in witticisms and stories. Unlike me, all these strapping men came from the Naval Air Forces and told stories of master strokes inwhich waves and gusts, seacraft and aircraft, torn parachutes and ends of landing decks were involved. My turn comes. I ask them to forgive me for leaving aircraft carriers but, out of courtesy, I will have to move away from surface ships to lighter wings.

– Go on, son. We're listening.So I adopt a high tone, as must be done in front of such an audience.

“I no longer know what circumstance had deposited me in the airport, as small as this one, of a city right in the middle of Montana on an ominous November morning with the obligation to depart again due south; the famous big sky was displaying a more than foul mood. It is said thereabouts that only a handful of barbed wire fences, put up here and there to guard the heifers, protect the yards and houses from the icy tornados streaming down from the North Pole. In spite of the gale warning, the pilot, grinning and daredevilish, has the five or six of us board a battered old crate the size of a car from the 1950s, chewing gum and rolling his shoulders like a cowboy from that still close era, from which the industrialists drew so many films and which, precisely there and in truth, only lasted six months amid the despair and the alcohol. He shouts in the hangar that we're going to have some good fun. Takeoff into the tempest, turn and course is set toward Wyoming.”

“A hundred meters up, everyone understands what kind of leisure activity we'll be indulging in. All the rage and turbulence to be found in the squalls of the Canadian Shield were given us by the wind, a tailwind, from the outset. The plane slips, dives, pitches, falls in the air pockets; we're shaken in the cabin by the tornado like six dice in a cup. Are we going to roll on the ground? Who will win the jackpot?”

“She's twenty-five, I am fifty. Strapped in with the seat belt, we sit opposite each other, knees againstknees, as though alone in the world, in the uproar of the fearsome elements. In a blue suit, her hair pulled back in a neat bun, she resembles a flight attendant. Worried, her mouth silently cries words the motor, irregular in the booming gusts, doesn't allow me to hear, and her hearing seems to grasp perfectly what, enclosed in a fearful mutism, I don't answer her. I think I perceive a Midwest accent, admire the round and strong Spanish chin but don't understand the forehead: Basque, yes, perhaps Basque. I am fifty, she's twenty-five.”

“Being tossed about in this shaken dice cup, who knows why, causes me to think of the origin of the word “die”, which as you know comes from the verb “to give”; the commotion of the air, those suddenly close snowy mountains through the window and this die shaken horribly about with me, in front of me, are given to me today, like a kind of grace. This entirely gratuitous idea pleases me; I have to, a bit foolishly, laugh to the high heavens, as they say.”

Drawing on their pipes, my vets protest that I know nothing about it, since drinks, never free, alas, much less given, are played for in 421 with a cup [cornet], of course, and three properly shaken dice. But they have seen enough to grant that a fuselage might resemble a horn [corne] of plenty from which their endless stories come.

“So, yes, grace comes. She thought I was smiling at her, and she smiles back. The determined chin disappears, melting in the charm of the crease beneath the worried gleam in her eyes. Hail given thing, full of grace, marvelous little die rolling in the atmospheric destiny. While thinking this, I bless her with my eyes, which I feel are becoming gentle. So, facing me, a heavenly gaze pierces, which causes me to lower my eyelids. A passing emotion.”

– At your age, have you no shame?, the naval air choir exclaims, with a sense of propriety.“At the inside bend of my elbow, nervously braced on the armrest, the window fills with flying flakes

and thick foul clouds, in which a red canyon, narrow and sinuous, gets swallowed up; we evade, directly in front of us, two rock upthrusts; a disquieting summit passes beneath the belly: spins, snap rolls, chandelles, flares, how then do you categorize your acrobatic disorders?”

“I smile, again, at the die of the given to chance, which immediately smiles back. In general, even when quite tossed about, the plane remains in a large cube of volume, stable whatever the height, widthor length of the jolting about might be, as if the whirlwind, even when wild, were residing in it. I am resting in this space in which we are dancing like the little cubes in the cup; thanks [grâce] to this quiet background zone a kind of calm returns to my lips despite the danger. She senses that I have a secret, entrusts herself to that discovery and silently tells me that, even if she doesn't know the mystery, she's no longer afraid; I laugh about this secret; she smiles to seal its contract; her eyes become gentle as well.”

“I think she is clinging to my gaze the way one clutches on to a life preserver when one is sinking. And again speaks to me voicelessly and without my being able to hear beneath the thunder of the motors and the bass noises from the gusts. Her smile imitates mine, mine imitates her smile, both changing, tense, worried, put at ease, with the plane's jolts and torsions. And suddenly, I see in her eyes that she has understood that if she's able attach herself to my gaze so strongly it's because my gaze clings to hers the way one clutches on to a life preserver when one is sinking, because I tell her voicelessly what she hears beneath the noise of the squall, because serenity comes to me from the charm she offers me. She discovers too that my secret consists in the fact that I discover her. So, my airship is moored to two anchors, the strongest of which is hooked on to her serene beauty. Suddenly fixed fast and as though stable, the transparent bar carrying our exchanges crosses the cockpit rolling in

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the commotion and helps to rescue us all the more because with each back and forth of the propitious signs from our mouths and from our eyes it strengthens and begins to support with its powerful axis theentire cabin, which suddenly dances more and more regularly and in rhythms that are all the more refined because its jolts multiply our laughter and our silent voices which make the waltz harmonious and this axis enduring. The random shocks produce, across us, this anchoring that saves us from the random shocks. The anxiety of lost reference, the randomness of the turbulence, the noise of the nets ofwind on the twisting cabin transform into the pleasure given by a dance synchronized to this fugue for two voices.”

Modulated whistles from the entire choir to hail the emergence of this harmony.“No doubt, gentlemen, you have all done some aerobatics; for myself, never, and for the young

madam, even less; so you know, we were ignorant of it. So what follows and what I tell and mutter about her from memory doesn't apply to you: when, beneath the random strikes of the flows, the vertical and the horizon, therefore all ordinary reference, are lost, when, due to a chaotic chain of crossfades, the plain moth-eaten with lakes moves to the ceiling and the volume of the sky to beneath the seat, when the forest forms the wall and the side of the mountain the floor, amid a sowing of hailstones and rent mists, one makes love to the world the way one rolls united with a woman in a boundless bed. Before such an experience, we are ignorant of all things, separated from them. We enter into them just as much as they enter into us. In the Bible, this is called knowing.”

Respectful of religion, the friends bow their heads.“Or, pregnant with us, the Earth is dancing wildly, and we're rolling together in its uterus as though

set head to foot from each other. Everything is turning as when you're drunk, and our body accepts that the real world is finally being given, here, furious, random, and in rotation as it should be. We race like a gust of wind, roll like a planet, fall like rain and snow and fly like them, vibrate like thunder, soar, glide and fluctuate like clouds, break or crack like ice, we twist over ourselves like the branches of trees or the wings of a gull, undulate like the edges of a standard, feather or skin...”

“Really thrown into the world, right into the middle of its forces and beneath them, truly become its subjects, we become involuted into the things instead of merely seeing them. Better than perception: acception.”

With approving gestures, the aviators show that they know that the world's fluxing flows are only perceived when the body dances wildly with them.

“I no longer know whether – I'm speaking figuratively –, in making love, the beautiful piquant brunette and myself are making the things of the world enter into the tremendously scattered dance of our common joy, or whether, in making love to the things of the world dancing wildly around us, between us, with us, for us, through us and in us, a goddess rises before me amid the elementary fury. The world exists through her who exists through the things. For that forehead above her radiant eyes, I recognize it now: not Basque, rather purely Inca, pre-Columbian, prior to white culture. Shaken, as though centrifuged, a face – strange, tragic, austere, mysterious, enigmatic, yes, divine – separates off from its Spanish mixture. This woman rises to such an altitude, in such harrowing conditions, that she revives the practices of her people by accepting human sacrifice at the top of a sacred mountain, whose summit halos her face with a luminous light. I am witnessing sacrifice or contributing to apotheosis. Her suddenly dark expression and the arc of her deliberately tense gaze give me to understand that she understands the same thing from me and becomes the priestess presiding over the same office, reversed. Who then have I become for her and amid the objects?”

“In the closest proximity to such a strange death, by dispersion of body parts, have I ever perceived, known or loved so much the world and a woman who loved me and knew me just as much as she knewthe things of the world?”

Then, it seemed to me that the aviators knew.

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“Forty-two minutes later, we came out of it in northern Wyoming, not far from Yellowstone Park. During landing, we even saw, amid the breaks in the green-black forest and the extravagant calm of the lakes, Old Faithful, a geyser whose high plume seemed to hail, in spurting and fuming, our return among the living. Frightened by the noise from the motors, herds of bison and elk fled before us, fanning out in every direction, while the landscape displayed before our eyes the immense tranquility which paradise must have enjoyed from the silence and background noise preceding human language.”

“We disembarked, exhausted, ground up by the tempest and the unpredictable movements of the tabernacle. She got out before me. Her blue suit shined with white above the fresh snow, and her face radiated, as though illuminated by an innocent halo, while the voluminous growth of a joy beat beneathmy ribs, a joy so magnificent, exultant and jubilant that my thorax still bears the scars from it. Why didn't I pitch a tent to live there during those forty-two minutes out of thirty-five million?”

“Then, emerging from the back of the plane, a sudden shadow passes me, and the Inca goddess leaves arm in arm with her equivalent young man straight toward the valley, while I turn around towardthe horizon barred by the mountains. Even though, alit, I'm standing upright and calm, what fragment of that barbed wire carried away from the prairie by the tempest pierces me and now rends my heart?”

“Hey, admiral,” my neighbor tosses out laughing, after shaking himself, blowing his nose, taking a pull on his pipe and emptying his can, “it looks like the fog is breaking up; why don't we go and have a look at the sea?”

That morning I stayed a good three-quarters of an hour in the air in the company of this former warrant officer, whose widowerhood was only slightly consoled by airport's machinery, just the time to pass over one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world: the port of Lorient and the islands, from the austere Groix to the glory of Houat, the lace marquetry of the Gulf and the Carnac alignments, which are never seen from the ground and whose holy immensity, seen from a plane, astonishes.

The real Brittany reveals itself from above.

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