Gordes was the plan for today. Gordes is still the plan. What actually happened is that I got as far as the bridge at ten to nine, stood there watching the Sorgue come over the weir, and quietly handed the day back to this town instead.
Two streets later, this one. Sitting dead centre of an empty lane like the whole thing had been booked out for the morning. Small, black and white, completely unbothered by me and my phone. There is a sign on the wall behind saying PROPRIETE PRIVEE, which I can only assume is addressed to the dog.
On a hoarding further along, the poster for Presence at the art centre here. Twenty six artists, 4 April to 4 October, photography and immersive and digital and visual, which is a great many words for we could not narrow it down. The picture on it is a woman with her back to you inside a round mirror, a rope of pearls running down the centre as a spine. Not one face in the whole thing, and it is stronger for that.
Below the old grenier there was a table out on the pavement, lace cloth, little wooden easels. Cyanotypes. Eva Erdmann works here in the town, and after years of street photography that got her into Women Street Photographers in 2021 and into teaching in India and Istanbul, she has gone backwards on purpose, into cyanotype and gum bichromate. Un hiver en Camargue. Le petit cabanon du Luberon. Prussian blue, titles in pencil, signed in the corner, out on a lace tablecloth at half past ten in the morning. No gallery, no lighting, no wall text. A cloth, some easels and the work. I keep a list of how people in this town actually sell things, and that page is getting long.
In the afternoon I walked out to the Partage des Eaux, where the Sorgue splits itself in two and sends one half to Velleron and the other to Entraigues. I sat with my boots hanging over the edge for the best part of an hour. You can count the stones on the bottom. In the nineteenth century there were about seventy water wheels turning on these channels, driving silk and wool and paper and flour. Fourteen are left. The ducks appear to have taken over the rest of it.
I did not sit there for an hour to be restful about it. Moving water is the thing I came to Europe to solve, and this stretch is the hardest kind. Nothing breaks, nothing crashes, the surface barely lifts, and yet every single weed on the bottom is bending downstream. How do you draw a thing that is only moving underneath. Not worked out yet. Sitting in it helps.
Home, and there were figs. Green ones, the sort that turn pink and jammy the moment you open them, four of them on a plate that was in the house long before I was. That is your lot for today. No hilltop village, no chateau, no bus. A weir, a dog, a table of blue prints, and a river that cannot decide.
The famous Sunday market at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, walked from twenty to nine while it was still cool. Rusted chairs, a canal hung with old linen, a wall of masks, and a lesson in selling from a leaflet.
Saturday’s list said one thing, go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and find paper. What I got first was a cliff with a castle stuck on top of it, a ruined garden, and a river that comes out of the ground and will not tell you where it has been.
An early loop around the town before the shutters went up, which turned into a dog in a doorway, a cat under the postcards and a brocante with nobody in it. By midday the lot of it was in blue biro.
