The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux

1. Ascent

The least shift in syntax, tense-perception, would reset the heavens. —Gustaf Sobin, “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables” Roussillon, Friday 17 November 1999, 4:20 P.M. The only white in the landscape is the peak of Mont Ventoux, the appropriately named Col des Tempêtes [Peak of Storms], rising 1912 meters above the plains of the Vaucluse. Whatever the season, this mountain appears snow covered, hardly what one expects to see in Provence. (The peak is, in fact, covered with snow for about half of each year; for the other half, the limestone scree that blankets the peak above the timberline looks, at a distance, like a snowcap.) Seen from the village of Roussillon, it organizes the picturesqueness of the place by providing an inexorable and singular focal point, and it is rare that it doesn’t, in our epoch of infinite photographic representation, solicit at least a casual snapshot. I stroll to the car to get the camera, return, and take one picture, adding to an infinite number of quickly forgotten photographs taken around the globe. Roussillon, Friday 17 November 1999, 4:25 P.M. The white peak disappears , first as approaching clouds mask the sun and throw a vast 1 I Ascent shadow on the mountain, and then as the upper limits of the Ventoux are almost immediately obscured by a cloud bank, such that mountain and sky merge. It is almost as if the mountain didn’t wish to be photographed, resisted representation, wanted to withdraw. Unlike Mount Fuji—everpresent in Japanese culture, even when invisible; of inexhaustible beauty and confounding grace; that absolute object which is the pure and exceedingly complex symbol according to which every other symbol, every other image in Japan, is oriented— Mont Ventoux appears as an empty sign. Empty in its difference from the rest of the landscape: a vast, strange natural monument to something unstated or unknown, its peak a beacon without a message (sign as analogue, unity in a continuum, object in a system, relative difference). Empty due to its sudden and frequent disappearances (sign as digital, unqualified alternation, on/off, one/zero, visible/invisible .) An object needs to disappear in order to become a symbol; yet it is as if the absence of the Ventoux somehow signals its presence— paradoxically, an inexpressible plenitude and an unimaginable emptiness —and nothing more. Mute semaphore, not living metaphor. Mont Ventoux appears as a pure, active principle, a secretive manifestation of natura naturans. 鵹鵺 What follows is an account not, as would be the case in fairytales or myths, about what the mountain says, but about its inscrutable silence. 2 The Wind and the Source 3 FIGURE 1. Mont Ventoux seen from the Toulourène Valley. 鵹鵺 e came across an elderly shepherd on a slope of the mountain who made every effort with many words to keep us from continuing our climb, saying that fifty years earlier, driven by a like youthful motivation, he had climbed to the very top and had brought back from there nothing but repentance, weariness, and his body and clothing torn by stones and bushes, and that no one had been known before or since to dare undertake a similar climb.”1 So wrote Francesco Petrarch on the evening of 26 April 1336 to his confessor , Dionigio da Borgo San Sepulcro, priest in the Augustinian Order and Professor of Sacred Scripture. Petrarch wrote from the town of Malaucène at the foot of Mont Ventoux—the highest point in Provence, visible from nearly everywhere in the region, seemingly the prototype of the sacred mountain. The words, prophetic and disapprobative , of this unidentified shepherd constitute the earliest extant record of Mont Ventoux: a negative depiction of the mountain , suggesting desolation, emptiness, danger.2 We neither know the shepherd’s name nor celebrate his exploit, but his warning should not be forgotten, since in a strange way it informs the future history of the mountain. One might well imagine that Mont Ventoux would have offered an ideal site for a hermitage devoted to ascetic meditation, even mortification . But Petrarch would make of it something quite different. Having disregarded the shepherd’s warnings, Petrarch—his “delicate mind, seeking honorable delight”—along with his brother and their servants, made the ascent of the “Windy Mountain.” Visible from every direction, Mont Ventoux had long offered Petrarch—who had lived in the region since childhood—a challenge...