Published on March 6, 2003 – Supplement to La Vie N°3001

There is something of the calandrelle that wanders in the workshop... Something futile for time, important for the soul.

What is wonderful about children's nursery rhymes is that one never understands them, yet cannot detach from their rhythm. Convinced that there is always a small truth hidden within, the mind searches for an exit, a dignified and respectable way out. And one always ends up with the jester's hat... We find ourselves extracted from ourselves for a tiny moment, a time of insubordination to the order of things.

Thus, the calandrelle has always captured my attention. I realized it would always have a privileged place in my life when I read the onomatopoeia, which, in scholarly books, distinguishes its song: “Tsisisivouitsivouithiou.” An existential message. Like you, who just read it, I tried to replicate this delirium of sounds. After many unsatisfactory efforts, I mostly tried to hear it. This sonography remains an indecipherable riddle if separated from its habitat. Because without the help of the wind, the forest edge, the meadow, the terrain's slope, it simply cannot sing! Its modulations inscribe their counterpoint on the biotope with absolute determination: it is there and only there that its young will see the light of day.

I will not give you an ornithology lesson, but you will have understood that the calandrelle is a lark and that its programmed return, with its ascending trills, is indispensable to the spring sky... Imperatively... exists..in..sky!

In the small Parisian garden where my workshop opens, I regularly accompany children in their discovery of art. This autumn, I took the risk of explaining to them... the falling of leaves… A little girl then very radically asked me: “In autumn, do tree leaves commit suicide?”... Her painting vividly expressed the great upheaval of the tree and what the nudity of branches thus stripped evoked for the child. How to approach this emptiness without fear? The child senses a rupture, an end, and expresses it with their words, colors, and then questions the return of things. How to live through winter, this time of burial, without darkening? This time of slowness without hastening the return? We are not alone in traveling through the seasons. It is a shared privilege. The child quickly discovers small signs of communication, clues, and all the little hiding places invented by insects to survive the winter.

But why am I telling you all this? For no reason, except to share the indescribable, the fullness, the emptiness, the seasons of the soul and their turbulence. And how life, in small strands, visits our homes... our gardens, entering so furtively that the slightest heaviness veils its appearance. I believe that life is beautiful only when rendered light. There is something of the calandrelle that wanders in the workshop and prevents me from succumbing to the temptation of heaviness, of discouragement… Something futile for time, important for the soul.

The little girl of autumn will return; together we will look at the branches of Easter, bushes, twigs, ultimate and initial buds. Surprise will triumph over fatality. Not knowing is still a way of praising. We will revisit our hiding places: the jay and the squirrel often forget where they buried their provisions. The juvenile feathers will soon replace the down of the young calandrelle, and we will rejoice together.

Hopscotch and calandrelle – one – two – three – sun!

Perhaps the aspen
Knows more than all the trees
The reserve of song
Hidden in the soil
(Guillevic)

Jano Xhenseval

Born in Liège, Belgium, Jano Xhenseval (pronounced Enseval) has been living in Paris for 40 years, in the 15th arrondissement. A painter, she has also created engravings, drawings, tapestries, ceramic collages, and numerous stained-glass windows, including those of the chapel of the Jesuit community at the Centre Sèvres in Paris.