Low-grade paradise con

The mantra uttered every time you hear about the Seychelles is paradise.

Indeed, one of the great achievements of this mafia enclave has been to reduce all information broadcast to the outside world to one word: paradise.

The few who dare oppose the local chieftains include some real decent, committed highly principled people, who have plenty of reason to fear for their lives, and yet, who politely, calmly denounce the treachery the clique of robber barons engage in from their safe haven.

Imagine if you can the only country on planet earth, with the possible exception of North Korea, who has chosen to model it's food production on East Germany circa 1966. Imagine a president awash in rumours that none dare pronounce, the worst of which lays the blame for the murder of his own son right at his doorstep. Imagine, in the middle of paradise, a Dr Goldfinger, a slippery figure as only the tropics can produce, who still runs the joint from the shadows, and has managed to keep a lid on his operation since the day of the country's so-called independence. The genius of this man, Albert René by name, is to have kidnapped a country, to declare a Marxist uprising where none was wanted, and to run an entire country like a mafia enterprise. In the Seychelles, three Presidents are on full salary - the current henchman, ahem, honourable president Michel, the President for life in the shadows René, and the founding father playboy president, James Mancham, who brought the James Bond girls and soft porn star Emmanuel to paradise.

The star of Emmanuel lives just down the road here in Amsterdam, in a two room flat, where she lives off the monthly dole cheque issued by the Dutch government. So much for paradise.

Four hours by plane from the east coast of Africa is a long way to swim, so when you're stuck in these speckled micro stretches of territory, and the powers that run what is loosely termed a government decide you're not toeing the line, and not being loyal to the island...well, Zimbabwe isn't the only place where opposition leaders get their faces smashed in for daring to lead peaceful public assemblies. Just ask Wavel Ramkalawan, leader of the opposition who got his ass kicked a couple of months ago for daring to speak in public. And, it works, everybody's a little more careful since the opposition leader and the editor of the opposition newspaper had their heads kicked in. But, don't blame the natives for giving in, they're outnumbered, they're isolated, and the world at large is too busy scuba diving to notice that they're suffocating under the weight of the mafia crooks who have been pillaging their islands for thirty years running now. And, calling it a revolution.

There is a dark side to this country all right - nothing special beside the perfidy on the African continent, but still worth noting, for the marxist anti-colonialist hubris served up by the cultural ministry, for the Stalinist thugs, for the shameless buying of votes and bribery, for the shambles of a justice system, used principally to serve the political ends of the government.

When there's only 85,000 souls in paradise (that's 55,000 less than the Jehovah's promised), you get to meet all the players - especially when you've told them you're going to write a book on them. That gets their attention!

The Waste Land

Paris is diabolical - sucking all your money and dreams away and distancing you from the essence of life. And, the masochist who chooses Paris as his drug of predilection returns for more without fail, despite, the cost, despite the roteness to it all. Paris is the cemetery of Western civilization, the place dead souls gravitate to, in an obsessive quest for meaning, where there is nothing but concrete, cafés and artefacts. Don’t go anywhere near the place if your delusions are fragile. As a matter of fact, don't go near the place, period. Either plunge into complete denial or go into social work. When I walked out of the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, and shuffled down the Quai towards the pont de la passerelle, I felt like part of the great, lifeless museum – grey, petrified, a relic of another age.

I recalled a day, thirty years previous, when I had experienced a similar feeling. I’d run out of money days previous, and had been living off tea, Drum tobacco, and a bag of onions, tomato paste and baguette. And, as I recalled that sunny afternoon, and being skinny as a rake handle, moving down the Quai des Orfebvres, the realization came to me that I was never happier than when life taught me I was anonymous, and that my periodic fancies of myself as a moral man were nothing but pure fantasy.

So, here I am, thirty years later, waiting for an appointment with Caracalla, in Le Rouquet, mulling over all this, and telling it more or less to a man who has joined me from the neighbouring table without being invited, and to whom I was now exposing my theory of the useless white man and the city of light.

“You are dismissive of your life, but I suspect there is something of interest underlying all of this. And, it’s not just a woman, it’s something more. Of course there’s a woman involved, this is Paris, there’s no getting around that.”

“Not really unusual though, is it? We’re like a generation who can’t be lost, because we never got found in the first place.”

“It’s the doggedness of your pursuit that impresses me. You say you’ve lost your parents, your first two wives, three children, your friends, your business. Yet time and again, something pushes you back here. What is it? Does it give you anything in return, this Paris you claim to love?”

He was looking at me funny, mister American, he seemed to sympathize, but with what, who knows?

“Sure, it removes me from other things, other people, temporarily.”

“What about peace of mind?”

“C’mon, be realistic.”

He laughed.

“It’s identical for me. Actually, it’s a real struggle when I’m here. It wasn’t in the beginning, when I was young, but now, it only underlines the futility of things. And, yet I have to return. And, what’s funny is that my French is actually deteriorating, I’ve trouble expressing myself. What do you expect, I live in Toledo. Most of the people I knew before have died, or gone insane, or I’d not be caught dead with them. Christ, they might come and visit me, know what I mean? Would you mind terribly if I joined you for a drink or ten?”

I glanced at my watch.

“I’m not sure, I’ve only about two more days to drink, but…of course, by all means, mister beans.”

“So, is it true, are you really a writer?”

He laughed again.

“Well, I’m sorry to put it like that, but, why shouldn’t I? I don’t know you, but, then again, maybe it’s better, maybe it’s better. if I’d heard of you, I’d not have approached you. Celebrities make me shy. Would you mind if I confided something in you.”

“Sure, no problem, if you can do it in less than ten minutes.”

“Well, I come here three times per year. As far as family and friends are concerned, it is to write the great Parisian novel, the dream of a lifetime. But, actually, I haven’t written a word in the last fifteen years. The entire project has defeated me. You see, my entire life had been devoted to Paris, which I saw as a window into my soul, and the oracle of beauty itself.”

We were a legion of carbon copies, men of better than average potential, but not a hell of a lot more, who turned our backs on convenient materialist lives to chase something we’d never really sat down and defined, but for lack of a better word, we called it beauty. And, no word was sneered at with more disdain than beauty. If you were an artist – but the road this perfect stranger and myself traveled wasn’t artistic – then it was better in the dying years of the old millennium, and the early ones of the new, to stretch pig bladders over Styrofoam cups, and cover it all in shite, than to even mention the word beauty. We spoke the same language, and intuitively recognized each other within minutes of beginning a conversation. Nothing measured up to the illusion we pursued. Occasionally, a whore, or an all night drunk on champagne in an underground bar on de la Huchette, or rue des Lombards, might give you a sliver of it, but, for the most part, the trip into the city was a solitary drift from café to café, waiting for time to do its inevitable work.

It occurred to me that I’d spent almost all my time here in a dream state. Years, accumulated like scrap metal, a pile of debris, without record, without shared experience, without any record of having done anything useful. Paris was nothing if not insanity. If you looked at it through jaded eyeglasses, Christ, you were throwing your life away for pommes à l’huile and côte du rhone. It made even less sense when you could probably buy better truffles and foie gras at the mondo shops in Vancouver than in Paris.

“fuck it, I’m thinking of cancelling my meeting.”

“Oh, splendid! Well, actually, don’t do it on behalf of me, we could always take a rain cheque.”

“Well, let’s have another drink and mull it over. I mean a real one – let’s order up a bottle of plonk, and consider what dreamy idiots we’ve been.”

“Done! Waiter, bottle of Sancerre, de suite! Hell, bring a couple of cigars.”

“You know the Closerie de Lilas still has cigarette girls on Friday nights? Can you understand the attraction.”

“Perfectly.”

“Christ, I don’t know what it is about a girl in a cupcake hat and a pleated miniskirt. Sure beats the hell out of the Louvre, doesn’t it?”

“I was never big on the Louvre. I get tired just looking at it from my hotel room.”

“What, don’t tell me you’re in the Quai Voltaire?”

By any account, the man I was looking at was a complete absurdity for the Parisians. An American at seventy-five yards, well into middle age, wearing a chequered tweed jacket, his features weren’t exactly chiseled. More like putty, or unleavened bread.

But, for all his funny appearance, he was triggering memories of past years, and the fucking poltroons who were once my only company outside of punters. Ah, yes, that's why I came. I came to kill off my immortal soul, or to find it, or to discard it, or to rule it out as a factor.

Gallows Humour

Execution Dock at Wapping

One of Saddam's deputies will be getting the big rope burn on Tuesday. Ouch! As Monty Python would say, always look at the bright side of life. Better the hempen collar than the iron Maiden of Nuremberg. In Rwanda, on one of the bad days, while a Catholic priest was supervising the steamrolling of his own church with no little delectation, any parishioners not caught up in the demolition were bribing hutus to shoot them so they wouldn't be hacked to death, piece by piece, by machete-wielding Interahamwe. What can I say? It's just great to be alive, there's no getting around it. Grains of sand leaking out of the hourglass - I'll take that anyday over madame guillotine or a Hutu with a historical chip on his shoulder. Why weep over some Sunni henchman because his criminal overlord wasn't there to cover his ass. It's great to be alive, I'm ecstatic about it, and damned if I'll lose any sleep over Mesopotamia. They had their time, let me have mine.

Imagine what the French must feel like. A nation of regicides. How can you beat that? Everytime a Frenchy gets in a fight with some snooty landlord, or oppressive boss, he can always say, "listen, we settled your file in the Terror, don't think we won't start again." And they all mean it. Down and out in Gaul. You can have your cake, you can even eat it, but you could be going for a stroll in an oxcart in front of a jeering crowd with empty bellies if you're not careful. Ditto for the priesters. Sure, there's still légitimistes around, still a few priests and cardinals lurking on the liturgical feast days, and of course, you can always catch an imam down at the building permits office, lobbying for an extra turret for his mosque. But in Lutetia, the clerical caste are a little more careful about taking on the republicans. There's that lingering doubt that another Fouché is out there, another Robespierre, another Marat, just waiting for a pretext. That blade falling from the sky, and a few whiffs of grapeshot, people don't forget it overnight.

Birds flying high, You know how I feel

Sun in the sky You know how I feel

Breeze driftin' on by,You know how I feel

That's right, baby, It's a new dawn. It's a new day. It's a new life. Yee-ha! And maybe the Iraqis are depressed, maybe Mugabe's thugs are punching out old ladies at the airport, but I'm not losing any sleep over it. Maybe that weightlifter does regret pushing over the statue of Saddam Hussein. I don't see the connection. Sure, I have political opinions, who doesn't? But, you gotta watch your step these days, and you got to feel gratitude, if you can live as a free man, and not have to pay any hommage to any of these sons of bitches. You want a clean read, find out what they were doing in their formative years age 15-20, and if they're saving the world when they should be looking for work, they're the dangerous ones. Anybody says, I have the solution to the world's problems, ask him or her how old they are. If they're between 15 and 25, shoot 'em dead and save us all a big headache later on. If they're older, shoot em anyways.

And, if you have a gallows ready, put some Rashaan Roland Kirk on your cd player, and throw the noose over the potence. Vive la France!

Scaling les Dentelles de Montmirail

This is les Dentelles de Montmirail. Seen from our own rock la roque alric, where Lovejoy and I had been staring at the rising peaks, moving into our seventh bottle of wine. Lovejoy had been falsely slagged by his wife in a national magazine, she blamed him for turning her into a dyke, so he and I mulled over that one while pouring Gigondas down our throats, and arguing which is the best of the four major "caminos" or paths to Santiago de la Compostella, from Puy, Vezelay, Arles, or Paris.


The Sarasins had a weak spot for the Dentelles whenever they were conducting raids into infidel territory. After you climb up the sheer chalky cliffs, your main challenge is not to fall off the top. It's like playing rooftop tennis in Dubai, make sure the soles of your shoes grip well.


I haven't seen Lovejoy since that al l nighter, but I heard his ex-wife did a major recant on a morning talk show somewhere around the time we were communing with the mistral gods, claimed she was a victim of a femme fatale who was secretly recruiting women for a terrorist sisterhood, then made a public plea for the return of her once maligned ex-spouse.


That morning, I climbed the Dentelles again, and stayed there for a week alone, pondering the route to Santiago. Only 48 hours previous, I'd been planning to leave after a year's prep. But, that Gigondas wine, it moves you to flush out the useless details, and to get on with things.

There were a few people on my list that I had to get around to outdoing, or out absurding, or outdrinking, or outwriting, and at the top of the class, was the chief clown himself, Franck Rabelais, of the Rabelais, rabble rousers chapter.

Franck was convinced he was the funniest man alive, and there were a whole lot of priests who agreed with him. They were dying to ask the man a few questions. Dr Franck had gone incommunicado, that was my aim, to be issuing missives from unknown locations.

If you plan on getting listed on the most elite short list of literature - the Index librorum prohibitorumon put out by the Vatican, best to log some life history so you know what you're talking about when you finally decide to compile your "horribles et espouvantables Faicts et Prouesses du très renomméde Pantagruel, roy des Dipsodes, fils du grant Gargantua"

Chambre 32 bis, Hôtel du Quai Voltaire

This is the third floor hallway of the Hotel du Quai Voltaire. The first door on the right – number 32 Bis - is the room Oscar Wilde stayed in shortly before his premature death. I have been transferred to this room, thanks to the grudging concession of Bernard, a withered branch with no eyebrows, and jerzy kozinski electro-frazzled hair. Bernard is low potentate of the Quai Voltaire reception desk. Bernard decides who of the unnerved Americans will be allowed to sleep in his three star blighted hovel. In other words, Bernard & I get along all right – which doesn’t stop his conoid eyes, and his pellet teeth from flashing hatred every time he looks my way, or prevent him from trying to shop a closet with the number 33 on it as Wilde’s.

One of Paris’ big selling points is the “I slept in Napoleon’s tomb” experience, the idea being if you sleep in the same moth-eaten mattress as the Corsican dictator, or in my case, as some dissolute Irish scribe, some of the genius will rub off on you.

The worst of it is that it’s true. The catch is you can’t pick it up over the weekend. You have to be prepared to junk everything that was given to you by the gods in exchange for a very unlikely bet that at an unspecified date in the future, you might achieve glory. So, before you embark on this particular tangent, you had best:

a) be damned sure of your genius; and
b) be prepared to fuck up your life anyways.



This is a picture of another genius, Mister Antonin Artaud. If this picture doesn’t convince you the man’s insane, consider this statement in his study of Van Gogh, written from the Rodez asylum:

“I see coming towards me, as I write these lines, the bloody red face of the painter, in a mural of disemboweled sunflowers.”

I didn’t know flowers had bowels. Van Gogh seems to attract self-appointed geniuses, illustres inconnus, like shit attracts flies.


Something about Van Gogh invites sympathy, but he at least managed to escape to France, unlike his poor descendant, Theo, who was decapitated just down the street from our place in the Vondel park for the sharia offence of tattooing a wide-eyed nubian with koranic calligraphy.

On the famous twice removed chart, my Dutch teacher, Lucia is a close friend of Theo Van Gogh’s.




As for Van Gogh, the original, whatever his manic predisposition, he is a vastly sympathetic character, who was dead serious about his art, and suffered as much from the bite of the Provence mistral driven sun and poverty as any inate mental condition. But, this is Artaud’s first volley into the crowd, page one of the book, Van Gogh, le suicide de la société.

“Van Gogh’s mental health is demonstrated by the fact that throughout his life, he only cooked one of his hands, and only cut off one of his ears, in a world where every day, cooked vagina in green sauce is served up…”

Artaud would have a field day today. I think he’d move to England and be a visual artist. He’d be recognized as a genius. A no-brainer.

Delaunay's Eiffel Tower & the nature of Paris

Delaunay's Eiffel Tower
When you first arrive in Paris, the buildings ondulate, like swaying hips, drawing you closer towards a vortex. Paris is first and foremost botanical - a carnivorous Venus Flytrap - my understanding of the city of light began the day I first read about Dionaea muscipula:

"The leaves of Venus' Flytrap open wide and on them are short, stiff hairs called trigger or sensitive hairs. When anything touches these hairs enough to bend them, the two lobes of the leaves snap shut trapping whatever is inside. The trap will shut in less than a second. The trap doesn't close all of the way at first. It is thought that it stays open for a few seconds in order to allow very small insects to escape because they wouldn't provide enough food. If the object isn't food, e.g., a stone, or a nut, the trap will reopen in about twelve hours and 'spit' it out."

Reading these lines was a form of satori awakening, and I knew with absolute certainty that I was an errant dung beetle dissolving in the venomous fluids of Paris.

“The trap constricts tightly around the insect and secretes digestive juices, much like those in your stomach. It dissolves the soft, inner parts of the insect, but not the tough, outer part called the exoskeleton. At the end of the digestive process, which takes from five to twelve days, the trap reabsorbs the digestive fluid and then reopens. The leftover parts of the insect, the exoskeleton, blow away in the wind or are washed away by rain. The time it takes for the trap to reopen depends on the size of the insect, temperature, the age of the trap, and the number of times it has gone through this process.”

The lobe of this seductive predator manufactures digestive juices and an antiseptic juice. This keeps the victim from decaying over the few days it is inside the trap and purifies prey that it captures.

Rémy de Gourmont
Rémy de Gourmont, scholar of the bizarre and the obscure, eventually stopped writing on people, and devoted his efforts to treatises such as La Physique de l'Amour, which examined copulation, dismorphism and deviant behaviour in the animal and insect world, while a form of lupus was preventing him from showing an increasingly patchy complexion in public, and eventually left him trapped inside his flat on rue des Saints-Pères. See page 73 titled - Chimeras: the elimination of the male and human parthenogenesis."

The inside cover of la Physique de l'Amour shows a male Boreal toad mounting a female from behind, and in the words of de Gourmont, "pressing her like a lemon", while he "devotedly" fertilizes a "rosary" of eggs which trail behind the female. This graphic representation has to be one of the most flagrant cases of misrepresentation of a book's contents, as the book could quite easily have been titled "In defence of hermaphroditism", as de Gourmont ruthlessly views all human, animal and insect impulses with physiological egalitarianism.

De Gourmont's lifelong investigation into aberrant sexual behaviour eventually brought him to the following conclusion:

"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity"

Leper Tango

I've renamed my novel "Leper Tango". That's the dance that is being played daily in the second arrondissement, perched as it is above the old Cimetière des Innocents, which I'll show in a moment. Paris is an invitation, a promise which will never be delivered upon, but it is made with such brazen disregard for your credulity, that you buy into it, caring little whether it is true or not. The whole point is to take the bait, to believe, and being suckered, as men have been suckered for three millenia, is to form part of a wanton underclass with its own form of privileges. It's like signing up for the Iraqi police force, or betting that maybe, just this once, an inside straight will come through.

I'll be returning tomorrow to the scene of the crime, the Graveyard of the Innocents, where I'll be lurking, trying to decode the puzzle of the main character to my current manuscript. And, with Paris, there are only two choices. You're either done with the place, and you never return, or you drag yourself back on any pretext, and wonder how you managed to con yourself into believing it would be any different.

Left: a lithograph of the old cemetery, circa 1756.

During the plague of 1348, 500 bodies per day were buried in les innocents. In the plague of 1451, 50,000 more were inhumated. An old Paris legend had it that the soil was so infect that a body disintegrated within 9 days, which had everybody signing up for burial.

One fine day in 1757 or so, the south wall caved in, and a few dozen people were asphyxiated. So, the decision was finally taken to exhumate the entire cemetery, and 2 million bodies were taken out. The French have no qualms about exhumating bodies. Since Professor Guillotine, and the Reign of Terror, the attitude to meat, human or otherwise, has been most casual. Not even mad cow's disease can shake the French. It's the spirit of Les Innocents. Everyone being equal before death, there is a gallows humour which pervades the entire quarter, and it is considered very bad form to complain about meat, the very raison d'être of les Halles. Les Halles remains carniverous to this day, and the streets still stink of the slaughterhouse. On a good evening, you can see chic 16th arrondissement students, drinking champagne with butchers and slaughterhouse men, still wearing their blood-soaked aprons after a night's carnage.

Mafia Virgins & the Call of Chartres

It’s 1:30 am in the Hôtel des Alliés, rue Berthollet, Paris. 5th Arrondissement, a block down from the Place de la Contrescarpe. Cecille has just left the room, forever, she says. Tant pis. I’m wearing black pants, suspenders, white shirt, smoking a Danneman cigar, drinking the remainder of the Veuve Cliquot, then reaching for the last couple of Kronenbourg 1664s. I let my feet dangle outside the window, watch the traffic below. I'm where I want to be, in the middle of a post-coital, champagne-induced fog, within spitting distance of caverns and grottos, and subterranean haunts that I'll never reveal to anyone as long as I live.


Gerry has been sending me telegrams, letters, phone messages. Go back, he says, return to the scene of the mafia virgins you whoring debauchee, that’s what you went there for, don’t let the whore grab you, it’s the dark Madonna you want. Leave me alone, Gerry, a pox on your pilgrimages. Every time I go off on your pilgrimages, I end up in a fistfight.


On the other side of Berthollet, an old man is looking out on the passersby, smoking a cigarette. I’m flipping through a street map in my plan de Paris. Just up the street is boulevard Port royal and the Académie de la Bière. If I follow that West, I’ll hit the Closerie des Lilas, where it turns into boulevard Montparnasse. From there, rue Vaugirard and the Porte de Versailles. But, luckily, in between is Le Select, La Rotonde, Le Dôme and a hundred other unnamed pockets of booze and derivative souls. I’ll never make it, but my conscience will be clear. I’ll be swept up by the street cleaners somewhere around rue Vavin or the Villa Seurat. Gerry can be appeased, and I'll return to the hotel for a quiet meal, and safe, miles away from those poxy religious freaks.

1:30 in the morning, and I’m thinking, early yet, Paris is awakening. I head for the stairwell, leave everything behind , and take a stroll towards the Closerie, just a little nightcap, then back home for shuteye. Inside, there’s Samy the bartender, and the drinks are unholy expensive, so after a six euro beer, and a bowl of salted peanuts, time to move on. Another couple of hundred yards, and Le Select rises out of the asphalt like a gallic Las Vegas. Bunch of thieves these Montparnasse bartenders, sure, give me another bottle of that Gewurtztraminer and some oysters, what the hell. An oafish man with a head like a coquille is telling me about a place called Compostella, and I’ve never heard of it, but he says, don’t even call yourself a pilgrim. Who said I’m a pilgrim, I never said I’m a pilgrim? I’m eating oysters. We’re all pilgrims, mate.

And, then, it’s four am, and I’m stumbling up a road past the Parc des Expositions, thinking of the Douanier, Rousseau the Customs man, painting jungles while he calculated excise taxes. And, a couple hundred metres further, and two chavs waiting for an idiot just like me, waiting in their suburban discontent, up the hill in Issy-les-Moulineaux, and I might have been wearing dress pants, but I love a rumble, especially when the opposition takes me as a pushover.

I’m walking down both sides of the street at once, I’m a sot from the New World, take me into the Meudon forest. I've got a pretty good idea that with this attitude problem of mine, that this might be the night I've been gunning for, when I can finally really get the crap kicked out of me.

I didn't care much about mohawk rasta man and his sidekick with a face like a tomato can calling me a fag, or as he put it a baltringue. I'm of the Bukowski school - nothing against two men sleeping together as long as I'm not one of them. It was what he said just before.

"Why don't you just go back where you came from. This is chez nous, our neighbourhood."

"Well, actually, this is Céline's neck of the woods."


"What Céline Dion? Cette teupu?"

That earned him a snort from tomato can.

"No, Louis Ferdinand."

"Yea, well I say he doesn't own it."

"Tell that to Racine."

That's when he said he figured I was some kind of a putain de baltringue, which is a fag in chav-speak. Which meant it was time to use Gerry's rule number one for writing: show don't tell. When you want to take out somebody, it's like a law of physics. The maximum violence within the shortest possible time frame. I never aim for the face, that's for the movies, just ask mohawk man how it felt to have his oesaphagus crushed, with a follow up head ram straight out of Swansea.



Tomato can face turned on his heel and ran, pretty well in the direction of Céline's house. Maybe he was related. There were some fires going in the distance, and some dogs barking, and some shadows dancing in the moonlight... you could see the vagabonds were really taking control again. You wouldn't be surprised to see Villon come through and say hello. I pushed my hiking boot into Mohawk's throat. He looked way better to me on the ground.


"Louis Ferdinand's coming back my friend, he's coming back with his dogs. He'll be looking for you..."

Dawn was breaking; it was time to move out of the forest, and onwards to Versailles for breakfast. I was getting thirsty, and needed to get cleaned up.

The Mafia Virgin

I threw out my boots yesterday, dragged them out of the shed, tossed them into the bin, watched a couple of stoned out garbage men from Amstelveen municipality fire them into the shredder, and then they were gone, recycled somewhere into the great stockpile of renewable energies. Those shoes went from Paris to Chartres three times and took me 800 km from St Jean Pied de Port to Santiago. The hard toe served me well on my last foray to Chartres, when two sauvageons emerged from the Meudon forest at four in the morning, who had never heard of Charles Péguy, or Villon or Céline, who lurked up in that same forest with a couple of mean dogs to keep the world at bay. Like in every other profession in France, the chavs in France wear a uniform. This one had a Mohawk haircut, and at the nape, three tresses of rasta beads, and his face had the hard tanned leather texture of someone who slept outside. He looked hard enough, and my lucky day, no dog, he had no knife, just a small chain he was swinging a little too casually.

“What, you some kind of a pédé?”

Sure, I responded, and that got him close enough to put the boots to him, pilgrimage or not, he went down.

By the next day, I was already out on the plains of the Beauce, one foot in front of the other, seventeen hours through the Meudon forest, past Versailles, and well into the Vallée de la Chevreuse. But, when the legs hurt like that, and a burning wind is cutting your face, all the useless thoughts, about reputation and the job you quit, and where’s the money….it’s still there, you’re still caught up in it for the time being, but it's losing its grip on you.

Anybody can get fired, all you have to do is show up at your job for a while, don’t worry about it, people will get sick of your attitude, or your expectations, or even your ability or your youth or your good looks, or none of the above. But, to walk away from it, it’s like sitting in the stands at the horse track, and not placing any bets, then walking away, no richer, but no poorer, but knowing you belong to nobody.

Anybody figured out how rich it feels to say no? You can be a millionaire and still a slave in today’s world. But, you can also be the happiest man alive if you refuse everything that comes your way that goes under the label of “career advancement” and hit the open road. If that road takes you to Chartres, don't ever make the mistake of thinking it's a Christian site. It's pre-Christian, hellenic, pagan.

The Chartres labryinth.

Tell you what you think about during these walks, you think about your feet. Pilgrims don’t believe in listening about God, they’re putting God to the test, not the reverse.

So, when your friends have deserted you, and your dreams have been shattered, step out onto the Beauce plain, where the wind is hard, and at least nobody’s pretending to care about you, and remember Jacob Boehme’s words, that a man who is ruined before his time is a lucky man indeed, and if you make it through a couple more days of that, you’ll arrive at the labyrinth, and see the mafia virgin.

Notre Dame de sous-Terre, our Lady of the Underworld, one of the dark madonnas, or mafia virgins, one of the few that escaped the puritanical wrath of the French revolution.

These dark madonnas are hidden away in crypts, partly to protect them, partly because they are occult, and evoke sorcery and the black arts.