In the absence of a list of good resolutions, Monsieur Nostalgie places the year 2025 under the sign of magnetic mystery, Italian ballads and French police farces. On this first Sunday in January, he invites us to go to Easter Island, to listen to Lucio Battisti and to see the fake Car(r)el couple in the post again!
Nostalgia guides our intimate world. Without it, we would be deprived of our survival ration. From our last reserve of humanities. How can we bear the decline of new times without leaning on the zinc of old times? For men of heart, it is a question of mental balance, of ethical stability. By indulging too much in the news, we end up imbibing our body and mind with a harmful poison: self-loathing. Without the guardianship of the past, our present would have no materiality, no echo, it would slip away from under our feet, we would walk like drunkards with unsteady steps. The past, fantasized or not, idolized or not, is the only key to unlocking locked lives.
The mysterious island
So, this year again I will continue to spread my old stuff, to share with you my sentimental diversions and to dive into mothballs. In this uncertain period where disgust with politics and moral surveillance prevent us from thinking calmly, where no plausible horizon seems to emerge, it is good to draw telluric strength from the most distant civilizations. A little mystery does not harm the rational, the needy and other conveyors of misfortune who try to govern us. We may be surprised, but media memory is more than fragmentary, that the name of Francis Mazière (1924 -1994) has disappeared from the frames. This archaeologist and ethnologist with a radio voice, dissident by nature, explorer of primitive peoples, would have been 100 years old. As I often write in these columns, literature takes side roads. I was interested in this scientist, a brilliant speaker, who was widely publicized in the 1960s and 1970s through a family anecdote. My brother-in-law, collector of Citroën GS and CX, great organizer of the tragic end of the Trente Glorieuses, through an antique dealer, bought a piece of living room furniture that belonged to this unclassifiable figure. To realize the impact that Mazière had on younger generations, you have to see him, in movement, recounting his adventures and his discoveries. He bursts the screen. The passionate and exciting traveler reprimands the proponents of pure science by sending them back to their studies. He, unlike the bureaucrats of the expedition, saw with his own eyes the Indian sons of the Amazon, the Tiki archipelago, the Sinai desert and the giant statues of Easter Island. His bestseller Fantastic Easter Island published by Robert Laffont in 1965, was included in the “Le Livre de Poche exploration” collection alongside adventure stars Alain Bombard, Commander Cousteau, Maurice Herzog, Haroun Tazieff and Paul-Emile Victor. This paperback book was even offered at Elf stations. Mazière becomes an extraordinary teacher, charming and convincing, in the documentary “Heading for adventure” (available free of charge on the RTS website). He has the poise and charisma of people penetrated by another truth. In 1975, in Apostropheshe warns us against hasty conclusions from a progressivism that answers everything and asks us to be modest in the face of “ to worlds we don’t know “. Already in an issue of Screen folders titled “Did the Ancients have secrets that we have forgotten”he captivates the average viewer with his abrupt and lively, anti-academic and adventurous way of recounting his journeys, notably that towards the navel of the world, which left France on November 22, 1962 on a 16-meter ketch with a hundred and sixty waterline days at sea. And the mystery of the giants continues to haunt its readers. How could blocks weighing tens of tons move on volcanic earth, on an island where wood was rare. Could there be other reasons? “ What if certain men, at a certain time, had been able to use electro-magnetic forces or the force of anti-gravity? It’s maddening, but less stupid than the story of the mashed potatoes (some authors claimed that a real coat of sweet potatoes and yams was placed under the statue, a sort of slippery mash), he writes.
Bewitching Italian variety
There is also a mystery Lucio Battisti (1943 – 1998), the most enigmatic Italian singer-songwriter of the post-war period, gifted guitarist and holder of a secret with his lyricist Mogol, that of a variety bewitching, both popular and metaphysical, with a semantic finesse and apneic depth which gives us a little courage at the start of the year. Lucio was a show business enigma. He refused interviews and there is no biography of him translated into French. His hits “Ancora tu” or “Prendila così” act like the placemats of my childhood under Gien earthenware, they open the floodgates of an emotion too long contained. Instead of listening to Bayrou, I suggest you take a course of Battisti throughout the month of January, it cleanses the soul of all the slag.
And my final advice is to watch “The Chameleon investigations” (INA Madelen) with the couple composed of Dany Carrel and Roger Carel, their children Sabine Paturel and David Brécourt as well as curator Jean Rougerie. This mini-series is outdated, therefore essential. It happened in the last century, in 1987, on Antenne 2. Happy New Year 2025!
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