A Lunation at Camaret

by Dane Rudhyar, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I. New Moon

The harmonium in Saint-Rémi had one dead reed, the low E-flat, and Anselme Couderc had learned to compose his voluntaries around it, the way a man with a stiff knee learns which stairs to take. He was playing round the hole in the bass when Yvonne Le Goff came up the nave in her Sunday coat on a Tuesday, holding a square of paper folded four times.

She waited until he lifted his hands. The church smelled of wet stone and of the tar the fishermen carried in on their boots and never quite left behind.

"You do the stars," she said. "Madame Quéméner says you did her son's."

He took the paper. In a schoolgirl's round hand: a name, Yann Le Goff; a day in October 1921; an hour, a quarter past five in the morning, according to his mother.

"Monsieur Quéméner has offered him the Belle-Étoile," she said. "Skipper. For the Irish trip. They sail when the moon is full. Three weeks, if the langouste are where they were last year." She put both hands flat on her handbag. "I want to know if he comes back."

The sky outside the high window was empty; it was the night of the new moon, and the harbour lamps were doing all the work.

"Madame," Anselme said, "I will draw the chart. I will tell you what I see in it. I will not tell you that."

"Then what is it for?"

He did not answer at once. He was from the Cévennes, a Protestant country, and had come to Camaret twelve years before to play for Catholics, and he still weighed his words like a stranger paying in a foreign coin.

"Come back on Monday," he said.

She went out without crossing herself. Through the open door he watched her stop on the quay, look across the water to the other side of the harbour where the old Kerlann woman kept her lamp burning in the window, and stand there a while with her collar up.

II. Crescent

He worked at the kitchen table with the ephemeris, the tables of houses, a compass that had been his father's, and a tin of pencils sharpened to needles. He drew the circle first, as he always did, before a single planet went into it: the empty mandala, the whole before the parts. A man is a circle before he is anything else.

Yann Le Goff had come into the world in the last hour before dawn, with the Sun just under the eastern horizon. Saturn was now coming, by its slow transit, to the place where that Sun had stood. It would arrive within the month.

Anselme set the pencil down and listened to the house tick.

The old books on his shelf, the ones he had read at nineteen in Nîmes and never thrown away, would have had a sentence ready. Saturn on the Sun: sorrows, losses, the hand of the father heavy upon the native, danger of death to the eminent. He had spent half his life refusing that sentence. Saturn was not misfortune. Saturn was form: the walls of the vessel, the bar-line that turns noise into measure. A man past thirty, offered command of a boat, was being asked to take a shape he had not had before. That was the meaning. The transit was a phase, not a blow.

He wrote it out fair for Yvonne Le Goff on two sheets. Your husband stands where a cycle closes and a new structure must be built. He is being asked to become the man who decides. The question the configuration poses is not whether he will be safe, but whether he can carry the weight of others' lives consciously and not by habit.

He read it back. It was true. It was beautifully true, and he could hear, from across the harbour, how it would sound to a woman who had asked whether her husband would come home.

By one in the morning the young crescent had long since set. He went to bed without looking.

III. First Quarter

It was Yann who came on Monday, not his wife. He stood in the doorway of the sacristy with his cap in his fist and the smell of diesel on him, a short man, wide, with the hands of someone who had hauled pots since the age of twelve.

"Yvonne says you won't say yes and you won't say no."

"That is right."

"Then what did she pay for?"

"She did not pay. I do not take money for it."

Yann looked round the sacristy, at the hymn-boards, the box of candle stubs, the pitch-pipe on the shelf. "The Kerlann woman takes money," he said. "Two hundred francs. She told my mother in the war that my father's boat would come back and my brother's wouldn't. She was right both times."

"I know."

"So." He turned his cap a quarter-turn. "Is it bad, what you saw?"

Anselme gave him the two sheets. Yann read them standing up, slowly, his lips moving at consciously. When he finished he folded them along Anselme's own creases.

"The man who decides," he said.

"Yes."

"Quéméner's nephew wanted the berth. If I say no, he gets it, and he's twenty-four and he's never been south of Penmarc'h." Yann put the sheets inside his jersey, against his chest. "Here's what I think you're telling me, Monsieur Couderc. I think you're telling me it's my business."

"I am telling you it is your becoming."

"Same thing," said Yann, "said by a man who plays the organ." But he said it without rancour, and at the door he stopped and asked, as if it had only just occurred to him, what day Anselme thought the moon would be half.

"Tomorrow night."

Yann nodded, as fishermen nod at weather, and went down the steps to the quay two at a time.

IV. Gibbous

The waxing moon grew fat and lopsided over the Goulet, and Anselme could not leave the chart alone.

He told himself he was refining it. He worked out the progressions. He worked out the transits for the whole three weeks of the voyage, which he had never done for anyone, because to do it was already to treat the chart as a timetable. And there, on the sixth day out, Mars came up to join Saturn on the place of Yann's Sun: iron against the wall of form. In the twelfth house, the house the old books called self-undoing.

He sat with that a long time.

Mars, he had written in a book that nobody had published, is the function of the outgoing act: the hand that reaches, the will that cuts its way into the world. Joined to Saturn it is the act meeting the limit, and what is asked is that the act learn its form. That was the doctrine. It was humane. It was, he believed, true.

And it was also true, and he knew it the way he knew where the dead reed was without looking, that the old men with their malefics would have looked at this page and said the hauler, the knife, the boom across the deck, keep him ashore, and that if they had said it and been right the whole of Camaret would have believed in astrology for a generation.

He took a clean sheet and wrote, in his small Protestant hand: Madame, on the sixth day of the voyage there is a configuration which the traditional authors regard as dangerous to the body, and in particular to the hands. I do not myself read the stars as foretelling events. But I would be failing you if I did not say that the old method would counsel caution.

He addressed the envelope. He set it on the mantelpiece against the clock.

Then he went to Saint-Rémi in the dark and practised the Bach chorale for Sunday with the dead E-flat, so that the bass line climbed past the gap and the gap became, if you listened rightly, a kind of breath.

V. Full Moon

The Belle-Étoile sailed on the morning tide, under a moon that had not yet set: full, white, sitting on the masts of the boats still at their moorings. She was a forty-tonne langoustier, high in the bow, her wells scrubbed and flushed, her deck stacked with pots and coils of rope and the crates of tinned pâté and wine that would feed eight men for three weeks. Half the town was on the Sillon to see her out. That was not unusual for a first command.

Anselme stood at the back, near the chapel of Rocamadour, where the ex-votos hung: model ships, a crutch, a sailor's collar framed under glass. He had the envelope in his coat. He had carried it there meaning to give it to Yvonne Le Goff before the boat cleared the mole, and he did not give it, and could not afterwards have said at what moment he decided not to.

Mother Kerlann was there too. Everyone saw her come out: a small woman in the black coiffe of the old style, which by then only a few still wore on weekdays, walking on a stick she did not seem to need. She went straight to Yvonne, took her wrist, and said something in Breton. Anselme had no Breton, but he saw Yvonne's face close like a hand.

Afterwards, on the quay, it was all over the harbour in French. The sea will take its tithe of the Belle-Étoile, and give the rest back.

He heard it repeated three times before he reached his door: once by the baker's wife, once by a boy selling Le Télégramme, once by Monsieur Quéméner himself, who laughed and said the old woman had said the same for half the boats he had ever sent out, and who was it ever cost him but the insurers?

The moon went down into the Iroise, and the boat went after it.

VI. Disseminating

For four days there was nothing to hear, and then the owner's office had the radio report: the Belle-Étoile on the grounds off the Kerry coast, good weather, the wells filling. Quéméner chalked it up on the board in his window the way the bakery chalked up the price of bread, and people stopped to read it on the way to Mass.

The moon waned. Anselme played at Mass, at a funeral that had nothing to do with the sea, at a wedding. In the evenings he took Yann's chart out of its folder and did not look at it, only laid his palm on it, the way one lays a palm on a closed piano lid.

It was in this phase, he had always taught, that what had been illuminated at the full is carried out and given away: the disseminating moon, the teacher's moon. He had no one to teach. He had a letter on a mantelpiece.

Yvonne Le Goff came once more to the church, on a weekday, and did not come up to the harmonium. She lit a candle at the side altar and sat in the third row with her hands in her lap. When he finished the piece he was playing he turned on the bench, and she was looking at him.

"You knew something," she said. Not loudly; the church carried it anyway.

"I knew what the circle looked like."

"The Kerlann woman says one won't come back whole."

"She said the sea would take a tithe."

"It's the same."

He could have gone down the nave to her and given her the letter there and then; it was in his coat again, he had carried it every day, and its corners had gone soft against the lining. He stayed on the bench. He said, "Madame, I do not know what will happen. Neither does she."

Yvonne stood and buttoned her coat. "She isn't afraid to say," she said, and went out into the light.

VII. Last Quarter

The Belle-Étoile came in on the eleventh day after she sailed, ten days early, low in the water.

The word ran ahead of her up the quay: the wells were full, the langouste were alive, Quéméner would get a price at Brest that would pay the boat's whole winter. And the skipper had a hand in a sack of ice.

It had been the pot-hauler, on the sixth day, on a swell. A turn of line had jumped the drum. Yann had put his hand in to clear it, as he had done a thousand times as a deckhand, as a skipper should not have done, and the drum had taken the third and fourth fingers of his left hand to the second joint. The cook, who had been a medical orderly in the war, had tied it off with fishing twine and a spoon. Yann had then taken the decision, which half the crew had argued against, to keep fishing three more days until the wells were full, and to bring her home himself.

Anselme was on the Sillon when they made fast. He saw Yann step down onto the stone with his arm strapped across his jersey and his face the colour of putty, and Yvonne take his good hand. He saw Mother Kerlann, on her stick, at the edge of the crowd, not coming any nearer, not needing to.

Two fingers. A tithe. Everyone on that quay was doing the arithmetic.

That evening Quéméner bought rounds at the Café de la Marine and said the old woman had been right again, God help us, and somebody said right about what, the Belle-Étoile's back with every man on her, and somebody else said she said whole, didn't she, and is he whole?, and they argued it until closing, and in the morning they were all still arguing it, and both sides were sure she had won.

Anselme took the letter off the mantelpiece and sat with it a long while in his lap, unopened, the clock going on behind it.

VIII. Balsamic

Yann came to the sacristy in the last thin days of the moon, when it rose only an hour before the sun, on his way back from the hospital in Brest. His hand was dressed in clean gauze now, a smaller, odder shape than a hand.

"Quéméner's given me the boat for the spring trip," he said. "Full shares."

"I am glad."

"Are you?" Yann sat down on the vestry chest without being asked. "I read your paper again, out there. In my bunk. Whether he can carry the weight of others' lives consciously and not by habit." He held up the gauze. "That was habit. Twenty years of putting my hand in the drum."

"And the three days after?"

Yann looked at him. "That wasn't."

They sat a while. Through the sacristy door came the faint sigh of the harmonium's bellows as the wind got in at the west window and stirred them; it did that when the wind was in the west.

"The Kerlann woman says she saw the hauler," Yann said. "She didn't. She said tithe. She says tithe to every boat that goes to Ireland, my mother told me, since before the war. Some years she's right." He got up. "You, though. Did you see it? The hand?"

Anselme took the envelope from inside his coat and gave it to him.

Yann opened it awkwardly, with one hand and his teeth, and read it standing, his lips moving at the hands. When he was done he did not hand it back, nor tear it. He stood turning it over.

"You didn't send it."

"No."

"Would I have stayed ashore?"

"I do not know."

"No," said Yann. "Neither do I." He folded the letter into the same pocket where the two other sheets had been, and went to the door, and stopped, as he had stopped before. "Your organ's got a note missing," he said. "Low down. Did you know?"

"I know."

"You play round it."

"Yes."

Yann nodded, as at weather, and went out.

Anselme sat on until the light went. Then he took Yann Le Goff's chart from its folder, and from the tin a fresh pencil, and in the margin beside the place where Saturn and Mars had met he wrote the date, and the hand, and the three days, one beneath the other, and did not draw a line between them. Outside, very low over the Tas de Pois, there was no moon at all, only the place where the next one would be.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Danō Rudhyar per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Dane Rudhyar, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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