QUATRE SIECLES - Elisa GRINDALE (pseudo) - Baudelaire 24/9/25 - HISTORY, Family de Meese

                                                   

Code ISBN 979-10-203-7549-0

HISTORY

Hachette Distribution (Dilicom)

"Four Centuries" traces the search for the author's ancestral family past, conducted using the earliest official church archives dating back to the 17th century. This essay is the result of ten years of research and two years of writing. Illustrative reefs, a biography, and supplementary texts complete the story of a war diary. Enriched with anecdotal events, the work surprisingly yet skillfully combines the family genealogy of French and Belgian Flanders, the two being closely linked.

The accumulation of archives and a keen curiosity about the ancestral family past gave birth to this unusual essay that traces the thread of history over four centuries. The adventure is guaranteed to be fascinating, filled with strong emotions combining joys, sorrows, pains, astonishments, and sometimes the ultimate surprise of discovering an ancestor or a notable forebear like Guido Gezelle, a well-known Flemish poet. Guido Gezelle was a multifaceted individual. In addition to being a poet, he was also a journalist, teacher, linguist, translator, and priest.

Elisa Grindale is a bilingual Belgian. Since her tender childhood, she had been immersed in the duality of two languages and two cultures constantly clashing socially and politically. This ambiguity has been conducive to the development of open-mindedness and a broader tolerance for global diversity. More oriented to science and mathematics, nothing disposed the author to write late. However, irrepressible forces led her towards an unexpected desire to write family history in order to ward off the fate of heritage extinction.

If we don't know where we're going, we can find out where we've come from! Today, everyone can, in a few clicks, go back to the origins, the way of life, and the historical environment of the characters who marked the ancestral history of their family. Then follows a long-term work of rigor, patience, precision, and logic requiring detective skills to meticulously assemble the scattered pieces of elements of different origins like an incomplete puzzle. A perfectionist, armed with unlimited patience and endowed with a keen, observant eye on human history, the author pictorially retraces the decor, the settings, and the subject of this eventful family history.

Throughout the pages...

SCHOOLS

A daughter from Meese participated in the instruction and the foundation extension of the congregation of the Sisters of Mary in Pittem.

Very quickly, it was understood in Pittem that the education of young people was of paramount importance. This notion was mainly put forward by the parish priest, who wanted to educate the young people of the village on a Christian basis and, through catechism classes, to teach them to read, write, and calculate. Thus, he had a wooden and clay school built in the garden of the church in 1622. Between 1651 and 1652, the commune had this basic building demolished and a school worthy of the name built of more solid materials. Religion was the main instruction to give young people a positive conscience; then, reading and writing as well as calculating would complete the program. At the beginning and until 1798, it was religious figures (canons or vicars) who instructed the children and ran the school. The last one was the vicar, Jan Retsin. His son Léo would become an official primary teacher at his death. In 1810, J.-J. Ocktet arrived as reinforcement, helped by his sister Francisca, as he also served as municipal secretary. This school soon took the name of the French school because French, Dutch, writing, and arithmetic were taught there. This school was considered for the intelligent, the quick-witted, and the privileged with financial means.

Of course, the commune was full of small private schools run by village women who taught mainly spinning to girls, but also reading and writing. At least six excellent small elementary schools were operating in the territory.

When we love life, we love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in human memory.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Generations

Nowadays it's not rare to live with four generations together. Conflicts have always existed, but they are more obvious, actually.
A century ago, no one could preview the inversion of the population pyramid, as to know thinner at the base and fatter at the top. The number of old people is increasing all over the world. Population projections confirm that this evolution due to better food, life hygiene, and medical care will continue.
Fewer children are born each year. The general fertility of humans shows a significant drop, and birth control is higher. The children wish for a lower wage with a better social life. Slacking work opportunities tend to make people stay studying longer and to postpone marriage and parenthood.
Strangely enough, in spite of higher life expectancy in better health, people will retire earlier. The working class is shrinking seriously, bringing financial incomes of some governments to lower rates. Globaly the expectation is to keep so long as possible people to work.
More frequently than before, aging persons are considered a troublesome giving group; undeniably, at older ages, health deteriorates, which means we can expect more people to be confronted with diseases, illness, or invalidity. But before reaching this group, aged people can be very useful in different economic activities with their high professional experiences as luggage.
The result is various generations having lived in very distant periods coexisting. The oldest grew up in adolescence years during the marking world war and evolved in the golden sixties, while the youngest progressed in what we could call an acceleration of history. In the last decades, technologies and general knowledge never extended so quickly as before, resulting in very divergent artistic, cultural, social, and economic views between the class ages, making communication more problematic.
Fortunately, more and more intergenerational meetings are organized, and probably young and old can try to understand each other while exchanging experiences: wisdom for one, high technology experiences for the other.

climatic changes

Pollution is certainly a major factor for climatic changes, but the destruction of significant areas of forest is another that degrades the environment profoundly and reduces biodiversity. The tropical
Rainforests attracted most attention, but tropical dry forests are being lost at a substantially higher rate. The industrialization and the extensive agriculture of the beginning of the 20th century were undeniably the start of pollution and deforestation.
I'm really sad that the newspapers all around the world focus their attention more on pollution, apparently the principal cause of changing climate, and never treat deforestation. Last year, only a few high temperatures in the world were responsible for dangerous rising wildfires deforesting great parts of dry areas in Europe and California. The rising intensity and frequency of the hurricanes in Florida are another consequence; we all remember the New Orleans catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
Another aspect is the flash flooding of the Danube (Europe). Scientific studies prove that planting new trees can lower the water tables and drain rivers. Shrinking forests lessen the landscape's capacity to intercept, retain, and transport precipitation.
Forests are the barrier against wind erosion and the transportation of large amounts of sand. North and Northwest China are a good example of suffering decreased evapotranspiration and the extension of the Mongolian desert by extremely hard-blowing sandstorms.
The principal causes of deforestation are human-related: agriculture, livestock grazing, urban sprawl, mining, petroleum extraction, and last but not least, the forest industry (the industry of rare exotic wood species).
Forests can extract carbon dioxide and pollutants from the air and produce oxygen via photosynthesis. But it is not the only reason why forests are so important; they are also the biotope of many animals and plants in extinction.
It's really urgent all around the world to protect our woods and reforest large areas to increase the benefits of forests for nature and humans and preserve biodiversity.
Deforestation is compromising life on earth.

women condition

Living in a kindful environment, better where women are relatively respected, I couldn't imagine that the condition of women still is a hot subject. I was convinced after almost fifty years of battle that things have changed and women are definitely able to embrace all kinds of places in society as men. In appearance everything is done, but nothing is less true. My mother had the chance to be married to a comprehensive husband, and as a liberated woman, she could develop her intellect and qualities for a career as a businesswoman. I believe my father was absolutely proud of his advanced and beautiful wife. In such a middle, I was undeniably pushed to make a career for myself. In order to make a link with the following generation, my daughter became a SuperJet pilot. In Europe, as in other places in the world, it is not rare to see women at the top of their country and become prime minister. But if a minority of women have enviable places in government, business, and other central positions, this is only hiding the majority of bad women's conditions. Looking around me, I can't deny that reality is totally different. In fact, there is not a single country in the world today where women have the same opportunities as men, and although progress has been made in some areas in recent years, women are still disadvantaged in economic and political life. In my country it's still common that women gain 20% less than their male homologues for the same studies and qualifications. Worse are the conditions in fighting countries. Incidents of violence against women increase, and rape is often used systematically as a weapon of war. It's impossible to traverse the African continent without an enveloping sense of horror and despair at the carnage amongst women; battling, excision, vilifying, and marrying off women are still in use. The Asian continent is not better; human trafficking, sex, pornography, and sexuality-based attacks are notably common.
There is a lot of struggle to deliver for equities and the importance of working together to improve women's lives around the world.

Contrasts

As a child playing with colors rapidly, I noticed the harmony and beauty by juxtaposing contrasts. The most evident are black/white, dark/light, and warm/cold. But if you read The Elements of Color by Johannes Itten, you'll see a lot more possibilities. In fact, everything is a question of contrasts. This allows us to take our bearings, and life would be terribly monotonous without it. It is by differences our world becomes comprehensible. How should we appreciate silence if we don't know what a noisy environment is?
Humans always must be able to compare and have a scale of values. In films, paintings, and photography, it's with differences that we can situate objects and persons in space by creating an illusion of relief or profundity.
What's true for art is always true for society. Why should we banish differences of culture, way of life, mentalities, traditions, religions, social levels, and so on? One of the most important rights of humans should be to be ourselves!

mode and fashion

The portrait I painted of Sonia Rykiel gives me mixed sentiments. I'm proud of the career of this characterful woman and the charisma her face reflects. Fashion is not especially a kindful environment. In the years she started her business as a young woman among a majority ofn, it was certainly not easily done. Nowadays extravagance is not rare, and despite being wearable sometimes, I agree it can be very artistic.
Last 28 September, the opening of the new shop Rykiel Woman defrayed the chronic in proposing the next fashion, the sale of erotic objects. It's a strange idea for a famous fashion house, and, however, it does not have the same carriage as a sex shop! It's a place of sensuality and pleasure, associating classical products with other more avant-garde and provocative ones. Only the subsoil of the shop offers chic sex toys. This space is fortunately not free; you must be escorted by a shop assistant, and it is forbidden to underage people.
Nathalie Rykiel, the daughter of Sonia who directs the new shop, doesn't contradict the fact that her mother always has been provocative. From the beginning, her creation scandalizes but has never been really common. The daughter is scared of a new scandal defying the market another time, and finally this adventurous step has been accepted with the actual very enlarged mentalities. Next, I fear we find it absolutely normal to be able to buy sex toys together with a lot of other objects and presents relating to love without any shame. I'm still astounded at the manner in which mentalities change faster than advancing technology.
For interested people: Rykiel Woman
4, rue de Grenelle
75006- Paris (France)

Lost Fight

Just like other years, birds are singing in the trees covered with flowers, and narcissus are growing in the green grass of the backyard, but I can't help that this year isn't like another, and I don't feel like the usual spring flowing through my blood. It took time before I noticed why: it's a year since I lost my bosom friend, and evidently I didn't reject the pain yet. In spite of the age difference (17), we could handle with each other a real unconditional friendship. I don't remember if we quarreled about something. She is the kind of friend you can never replace.
About two years ago she suffered from back pain, and her walking was every time very painful. Her toubib diagnosed spinal stenosis, and he doesn't let her take time for reflection about a surgical intervention. So an orthopedist took the job to operate on her and placed stalks and pins. From the beginning, she recovered very badly, and when she returned home, she couldn't come above the pain. Her last Christmas was horrible. Nothing could stop her pain, not even the patches with morphine. Unhelpfully, she returned to her surgeon, who decided to reopen 3 months after the first intervention and drop away all the material he placed. But here started the final battle. She couldn't recover, being too weakened. It seems afterwards she got that famous clinical MRSA (multiple resistant Staphylococcus aureus), against which they don't have any remedy. From that moment, I saw the very active and frightful woman she was giving up the battle. In her very last moments I wasn't allowed to greet her, so sick she was. I can't drop away from her mind, though we have all deserted her.
Where is the time between the two world wars? The antibiotics and vaccinations started making miracles and saving so many lives. Some diseases were eradicated totally in our countries with their efficacy. But then came the time when doctors prescribed inconsequentially those types of medicines in such a manner that on one side they had to force the prescriptions (more and more resistant pathogens), and on the other side they caused an imbalance between the pathogens themselves (the most resistant could develop without the concurrence of other pathogens).
And today we are evidently losing the whole battle against viruses like AIDS, Chikungunya, H5N1 (bird influenza), and so on. We are disarmed momentarily and perhaps for a long time. Again we are in the desert and hope there is on earth somewhere a good working brain that finds the solution.