france 2003

I.

An early oughts’ travel diary gleans shabby brochures, pressed flowers and printouts of information and itinerary. Hence, a diary from 2003 is both encyclopedia and archive, magpie and trash bin. It precludes forgetting. The diary begins, this journal was given to me by my mother, October 15th, 2003, for my school trip to France October 17-31st. My name is Sarah Burgoyne and this is my grade ten year. Likely, the diarist was being grandiose. Or maybe deep down she knew, as the archivist knows now, she would have forgotten herself someday. What would she come to recognise? A hole. A portal. Like this, the diary folds time.

II.

What is remembered around or near a diary, especially one written in childhood, memory prompted by the scrawl, makes for another shadow diary, one equally elusive, but more crypt-like, more open to scrutiny as the diarist ages. Didion tells us that the diary is not a record of what has happened, but a record of who one was. Delaney, that memory makes for one possible fiction among the myriad. The archivist excavates the girlhood diary. The question excavates the infinitely avoidable subject: faith, and the loss thereof. The mind activates the diary’s shadow.

III.

To get to the wine bar for to meet Gail Scott, the archivist trespasses through holes cut out of four chain link fences and hops four sets of railroad tracks. In the railside thickets, abandoned sleeping bags, sweatshirts, tarp. Narratively, the walk thickens. Utterances of the Canadian, feminist, leftist, experimental writer—now mentor, friend—follow the archivist through walks and years. Every period requires a different kind of experimentation. Scott describes what the archivist hopes to find in the diarist’s story: a hunt for love, intellectualism, freedom. Shape-shifting possibilities. Experimentation. Air. Thinking dislocated by travel. Our schools make us. But we make them, too, shards, tendencies, a little knee-bending to please whatever cohort, for one must have love somewhere, subsumed—IF there is writing—in the woof + wharf of a trajectory. Having taken the aleatory for freedom, having pasted EXPERIMENTAL over the identitary tags on my travelling accoutrements, I, after a trip to San Francisco, begin eliding experimental with queer as per the local New Narrative writers. Indeed, the shape-shifting identitary + art possibilities of ‘queer’ felt airier in that moment of severely backlashed 90s feminism. Self sheds to new self, until all selfhood blurs, revolts.

IV.

The fact is the diarist had been matched with a family who lived on a vineyard for the three-week school exchange. Their house is very big and decorated with these gigantic portraits of people I don’t know in elaborate golden frames. They dress rich as well, with their gold jewellery and jewels. All in all, they seem very nice and I’m glad to be with them. The luster of wealth is ambiently noted. Bottles of the family’s wine sell for eighty dollars at the marché down the street. It describes a relation between salaries. Tragically, thinks the archivist now, the French parents had been told that the Canadian students should not be allowed to drink. The site of youth’s contraction is the diarist sitting down for dinner each night next to the 12-year-old whose crystal glass overfloweth. Luxury pulls a coin from behind your ear and makes it disappear. The wine bottle is the unnatural sculpture of being less than grown up. It is the bottle’s profane task to signify your constraint.

V.

What did the diarist’s innocence look like from the outside? The archivist wonders.

VI.

Unlike other entries unearthed from before and after the trip, the diarist’s tone in France 2003 is assured, keen. Tentative, at times. Boys appear as curious livestock that need tending to. Colin C. was sick and while I was walking beside him asking him how he was, he pushed me away and threw up on the sidewalk, poor guy. Boys remind her of other boys. They do not figure in her wonder.

VII.

The archivist skims the diary for what is “of note.” The list is pencilled on scrap paper and goes on longer than anticipated. Thus, the page is turned upside down and the list medusas its way back in the margin. A list is always timely: hotel prank calls, farms, fields, oak trees on a layover in England; popular fashions observed in France: Puma shoes, scarves, speedos; regional customs: three bisous on alternating cheeks, la crèche with characters from Provence; what is known of Canada: les totems; collective awkwardness with the host families; the diarist’s debut as la Canadienne; a Roman theatre with quite the history plus amphitheatres, Alyscamps, le portail Saint Trophime, les cryptoportiques, le Pont du Gard; Chateau Grignan, Chateauneuf du Pape half destroyed by the Germans, Chateau Fortia, Chateau des Baux, Moulin Daudet, Palais des Papes; tremor of joy at developing fluency: it gave me confidence, a game of handball at the lycée won on behalf of les Canadien(ne)s: I scored twice, the pleasing un-Canadian politics of being known as les Canadien(ne)s, and not les Anglais, because the mind doesn’t immediately recognise controversy; purchases recorded: a belt, some film, a pen with real ink, soap, a Jenifer CD, baguettes, coconut perfume, candy, and things not purchased: shoes that were too expensive. In the diary, plans for the future are pencilled in with caution. England is beautiful for the little part that I saw. Along the whole highway were farms and fields, which I found very interesting. The oak trees were gorgeous. I need to explore the United Kingdom to a further extent someday. Later, I told my twin that I was going to come back here probably after school and ‘améliorer’ my French. She said, ‘You are always welcome here.’ Perhaps a list is wonderful.

VIII.

Faith is only mentioned twice, once when mass is skipped, the diarist preferring time alone with God, and another of gratitude for the trip, the Lord receiving the credit. The final entry mentions the mystery of the origin of the water in the Fontaine de Vaucluse. The birthdays of each child in the host family are recorded, with a note to send the youngest an e-mail on his birthday.

IX.

Things despised: the Tiki 3, a boat on the Mediterranean Sea, very crowded and uncomfortable with all these noisy kids who were quite rude, in which nothing spectacular was seen, a long and hot bus ride to a bird sanctuary that wasn’t very interesting either, an executive decision not to go to Moulin d’Alphonse Daudet which would have been the most worthwhile, instead having to endure a lady we didn’t listen to switching back and forth from French and English explaining wine to us in a one-room museum. Thankfully, these misfortunes are relegated to one day.

X.

Several pages in, the archivist wonders that this is, perhaps, simply the diary in which the diarist learned to eat. The diarist is served meals with four courses: soup + bread, eggs, pasta, and fruit + yoghurt; soufflé; caviar d’aubergine; pizza margherita, dame blanche, lamb and something similar to rice but smaller, rounder and orange that tastes kind of like bread; two recipes are copied out with the new pen “with real ink” in indigo cursive, crêpes and gigot roti, the latter of which the diarist describes as actually very, very good.

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[This essay was originally published by WORMS Magazine and also appeared in Runway Magazine. If you wish to continue reading, please click here: https://runway.org.au/issues/issue-50-correspondence/france-2003]