Cemetery guardian

I love serendipity. Yesterday while working in the kitchen I turned on BBC Radio 4, as is my wont, to find a Great Lives biography programme just beginning and the subject this week was Louise Michel, the 19th century French revolutionary and anarchist. Described in the radio blurb as a school teacher, writer, orator, anthropologist, feminist and cat-lover, she was known as 'the Red Virgin of Montmartre'. She fought on the barricades in the revolution of 1871 and when captured and tried by the French government, she told her accusers: Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little lump of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance and l shall avenge my brothers. If you are not cowards, kill me!
Instead of a bullet she was give seven years' exile in the penal colony on the Pacific island of New Caledonia, where she studied the language, taught and supported the rebelling indigenous Kanak people before returning to Europe to pursue further radical activities.

Today I happened to make a detour into a neglected (but not disused) graveyard behind one of Fishguard's nonconformist chapels. The grass and wild flowers have been left delightfully uncut making it a magnet for butterflies and bees. Crouched among the gravestones was a handsome black and white cat whose formal attire reminded me of one of my most loved and much mourned past felines.

At the same time I recalled one of Louise Michel's translations from Kanak, translated in turn from her French by Robert Helms, also known as blipper Guinea Pig Zero.

He is there night and day, old Nehewoué, the guardian of the cemetery.
Each rising sun finds him sleeping, exhausted as he is by night work, and the light of every moon sees him stand.
He goes to gather the herbs that conjure: they conjure life and they conjure death.
He knows, old Nehewoué, how to conserve the spark that animates the old man, and he can extinguish the hearts of strong men, just as we suffocate a torch underneath our feet.
From far off, we come to see the guardian of the cemetery and consult with him; with the one who lives with the dead that sleep in the branches and the dead that sleep under the earth.
He hears the sounds that climb and the sounds that descend, Nehewoué the guardian of the dead.
What do the bones say to you, Nehewoué, when they crack in the branches with the wind's breath?
Do you hear the worm in the flesh? Do you hear the eager hawk?
Why have you become powerful and terrible, Nehewoué? It is because you live with the dead, and death is more powerful than life.


A nice sequence of serendipities.