Mythological Beauty
Big Thief, book wobbles, and a week of beautiful mushrooms
On the train between Clermont-Ferrand and Brassac-les-Mines I listened six or seven times to “Mythological Beauty”. Mostly for the moment when the second guitar disappears and it’s just Adrianne Lenker singing If you wanna leave / you just have to say. Less for the words than the sudden feeling of weightlessness. I was on my way to Chassignolles to visit my friend P, who runs an inn there. It was the week before my first book came out.
P picked me up from the station in a truck with a cracked windscreen. We had been apart for almost a year and it became apparent even on the drive back that we would not manage to really say everything — but she was there, anyway, with her same face. She had given me a room that looked over the main square, straight at the eleventh-century church with its squat rounded tower. It was the off-season, just. The inn was officially closed to visitors but there was a butcher from Paris floating round with a bone-handled knife in his pocket.
In the mornings I woke early and went out walking. The church clock rang its bell at 7.00, 7.02, and then for almost a minute at 7.06. ‘The angelus,’ explained P. ‘It called the shepherds into the fields, once.’ Chassignolles’s buildings are all made from the same local buff-coloured stone. If you follow the road that leads out of the town there is a pristine graveyard made from the same stone, followed by miles of russet and maroon and dark green forest. Once this was a town of several hundred; now it has fourteen year-round inhabitants. People come from all over the world to visit the inn, which is famous for its food and wine. When a new car drives up, everybody comes out to see who it is.
I always get a bit lost in the middle of the song. It feels like there are one too many verses. But then the refrain comes back around: You’re all caught up inside / but you know the way. The song solves itself, over and over.
A local woman came to sell P some mushrooms she had gathered from the surrounding woods. ‘Regarde la bête,’1 she said, handing over a cep as big as my head. At the wooden desk in my room, I listened to the soft prickling of a glass of sparkling water and tried, unsuccessfully, to write. You have a mythological beauty, / you have the eye of someone I’ve seen / outside of ordinary situations, / even outside of dreams. The song was stuck in my head, related to everything I looked at or touched in that place. As always in European towns, I felt uncomfortably conscious of not being white — and yet, there were many moments to forget it. A wasp begged at the window. Below, on the terrace, one of the waitstaff lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, slowly. In the evenings I descended to drink wine, not a habit for me. ‘You must try this one,’ said P, and poured another luminous glass. Why am I so affected by beauty? Why isn’t everybody? I would have done anything she suggested.
Some things I ate in Chassignolles: a long thin quivering slice of lemon tart, brioche tawny with einkorn flour, inky chocolate cake set with Armagnac-soaked prunes. Oysters mignonette. Côte de boeuf with wincing quantities of mustard. Impossible tomatoes under minced shallots and greenest olive oil. Apples poached in brown butter, lemon thyme ice cream, a buckwheat sablé that snapped with the sexiest little clp when you bit. Softly set boiled eggs, yolks shivering. A fascinating white bean and tomato soup — how could soup taste like that? Chestnut pasta with the chanterelles picked that morning. Homemade coppa in marbled deep-red slivers. Rabbit, ceps swimming in butter, cheese that wept openly at the touch of a knife.
On the last morning, the inn’s chef gave me a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper with ♡ BON VOYAGE ♡ written in Sharpie. I looked at P, sunlit against the inn in her apron, in a landlocked town on the other side of the world from where we had met. I thought of us swimming in the winter together a year earlier. The memory already had the quality of myth. When I hugged her goodbye, she would not submit to a photograph, so afterwards I doubted I had really seen her.
In reverse I took the train from Brassac-les-Mines to Clermont-Ferrand, from Clermont-Ferrand to Paris-Bercy. To say goodnight. I flew from Paris to Birmingham, where I ate a Tesco chicken sandwich on arrival at 9pm and felt queasy. The week had run out, my first book event was tomorrow. To leave your light on. I checked into the hotel room, which was cramped and dark and beside a railway line, and listened to the quiet inside myself. I washed my face and slipped on my headphones. Do you leave your light on?
The song had nothing to do with anything. The song had everything to do with everything. The song was there at the right time, and now contains the train ride, the oysters, the wasp, the goodbye.
This essay is part of a series of writing about music I’ve been exchanging with my friend Sophie. You can read Soph’s most recent words on music here.
‘Look at this beast.’