{"id":7128,"date":"2010-09-06T00:00:52","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T22:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=7128"},"modified":"2010-09-05T22:21:02","modified_gmt":"2010-09-05T20:21:02","slug":"jean-giono-1895-1970-the-energies-of-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/09\/jean-giono-1895-1970-the-energies-of-the-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean Giono (1895-1970): The Energies of the Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>The Bridge of Beauty and Understanding<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Only the bridge of Beauty will be strong enough for crossing from the bank of Darkness to the side of Light<\/em><\/p>\n

–<\/em>– Nicholas Roerich<\/p>\n

The United Nations General Assembly in resolution A\/RES.62\/90 has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures \u201cto promote universal respect for, and observation and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms.\u201d Cultures encompass not only the arts and humanities but also different ways of living together, value systems and traditions.\u00a0 Thus 2010 should provide real opportunities for dialogue among cultures.\u00a0 It is true that to an unprecedented degree people are meeting together in congresses, conferences and universities all over the globe. However, in themselves, such meetings are not dialogue and do not necessarily lead to rapprochement of cultures. There is a need to reach a deeper level.\u00a0 Reaching such deeper levels takes patience, tolerance, the ability to take a longer-range view, and creativity.\u00a0 Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jean Giono (1895-1970): The Energies of the Earth<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Jean Giono was born and died in Manosque, a town in the mountains above Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Although he lived all his life in Manosque (except for his military service in World War I) he was a bridge builder to the world of the spirit of the classic Greek gods.\u00a0 He is often considered a regionalist writer, but, in fact, he uses the background of the region to deal with broader, cosmic issues.<\/p>\n

Giono\u2019s family name comes from a north Italian grandfather whom he never knew.\u00a0 The grandfather was a carbonaro, <\/em>a member of a secret society that worked against the rich landholders and the different authorities in Italy prior to the 1860 unification of Italy.\u00a0 The grandfather, accused of murder, had crossed the mountains into an isolated part of France where people by tradition were against authorities and seldom asked questions about a person\u2019s background.<\/p>\n

Giono\u2019s father was a shoemaker who carried on his father\u2019s anti-authoritarian tradition.\u00a0 He became a Protestant in an area where there were no Protestants and left an interest in the Bible to his son. Giono\u2019s father, whom he describes in his book of early experiences Jean le bleu, <\/em>died when Giono was only 15. Giono left school to help his family.\u00a0 He is thus basically an autodidact, influenced by his father\u2019s reading of the Bible and The Odyssey <\/em>of Homer.\u00a0 Homer was his basic teacher, a writer he would continue to read all his life. The Odyssey <\/em> also provides the key theme of all of Giono\u2019s novels: the long voyage home \u2014 an experience through which one grows in awareness and understanding.<\/p>\n

Influenced by Homer to look for the activity of the gods behind human activity and influenced by the open mountain area where he lived, Giono saw Pan at work, a Pan who followed in the procession of Dionysus.\u00a0 However Dionysus was too powerful a god to be dealing with the small farmers of the area.\u00a0 Pan was more appropriate, and Pan is the basic protagonist of the first three novels of Giono \u2014 novels which were designed to be a trilogy before he started to write them. Giono\u2019s first, and I think best work called Colline <\/em>(Hill) in French but is published in English as Pan: Hill of Destiny.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>Giono believed in what are now often called ley lines \u2014 the energy currents of the earth that are more powerful or closer to the surface in certain areas than in others.\u00a0 On these outcroppings, the gods and the nature spirits are present and so interact with humans more directly.<\/p>\n

Pan, however, is not a gentle nature fairy, and those who follow him are also in danger.\u00a0 Nature for Giono can also be the sudden storm, the rock slide on the mountain side, the wild stampede of the sheep.\u00a0 The south of France is not all sun and light.\u00a0 In this, Giono differed from Marcel Pagnol who used only the human side of Giono for his films drawn from Giono\u2019s writings Regain <\/em> and La Femme du Boulanger<\/em> without the Panic element always in the background of the books.<\/p>\n

If the energies of the earth are to be used for creativity, war is the opposite, the withdrawal of natural energy leading to the withering of man and so to death. Giono had been a soldier at the endless and military-stalemated battle of Verdun.\u00a0 He returned from the war knowing that war was destructive of all the values that he saw as \u201cnatural life.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the clouds of war started to gather in the 1930s, first in Italy which had always interested Giono, and then Germany, Giono started to gather around him people who were opposed to war and who wanted a \u201creturn to nature\u201d, to a rural, simpler life.\u00a0 They started to meet each summer in a small village higher in the Lure mountains than Manosque, Contadour, and then published their considerations in a journal Les Cahiers de Contadour. <\/em>Giono\u2019s Contadour writings have been collected in the Ecrits pacifists <\/em>(Paris: Idees\/Gallimard, 1978) and made explicit in his book Les Vraies richesses <\/em>(1936)<\/p>\n

Giono\u2019s pacifist writings led to his arrest for \u201canti-military activities\u201d in 1939. He was released without a trial after two months as the French became more involved in fighting, and there had been no massive refusal to fight on the part of French troops \u2014at least not as a result of having read Giono\u2019s writings.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Giono was re-arrested in 1944 probably to protect him from the savage revenge killings that followed the liberation of France, but officially for having been one of the ideological \u201cfathers\u201d of Vichy France.\u00a0 In effect, the Vichy government had used many of the themes of Giono\u2019s writings, some administrators because they had read him, others because the themes were also part of traditional Catholic thought which influenced Vichy: the return to the land, the vision of the small farmer as honest and satisfied by the simple life, a hostility to the cities where there lived Jews, trade unionists and Socialists, a sense of solidarity among small farmers and their emphasis on \u201cfamily values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giono was again not brought to trial because in effect he had had no direct influence on the propaganda administrators of Vichy.\u00a0 However the image of a pro-Vichy writer lasted until the early 1950s when there was a general consensus in France to \u201cforget\u201d the war and the Vichy government. Giono left the active political-ideological scene.\u00a0 He concentrated his later novels on the period of his grandfather when Italian activists took refuge in France.<\/p>\n

A less political Giono was re-discovered in France after May 1968 and the strong\u00a0 Gaia\u2014spirituality of the earth current of thought.\u00a0 With Le Serpent d\u2019Etoiles, <\/em>thoughts\u00a0 looking at the Big Dipper, and especially Chant du Monde <\/em>Pan is replaced by Dionysus as the chief god motivating action and the cycle of the seasons.\u00a0 Dionysus is the god of Nature beyond the control of humans but who is always present in action with them. Giono is a bridge builder to the world behind the nature we see, a bridge to a world still filled with the energies of the earth.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Rene Wadlow:<\/em><\/p>\n

Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens.<\/em><\/p>\n

Member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures. Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}