Coming Into Paris Early One Morning, A Layover Into Memory
What is the place of memory in a story, any story? What is the place of memory in a life?
We crawl through memory to find ourselves; we plod through it for significance — and then we adjust ourselves, define ourselves, sometimes even accept ourselves. We do plenty of rejecting. Memories exaggerate; they cloud over and erase certain things, accent others. Navigating through memory is the terrain of stories; they smooth them out, even them.
We should look at this now and clear the air.
Fifty or so kilometers northwest of Paris the green fields roll gently in the early morning. The sun rises almost unnoticed, embracing a composure that can only be achieved by indifference, Nature’s indifference — even though we’ve been way too adamant about touching it, influencing it, extracting what we can. It moves on anyway, regardless.
I glance at the sun emerging over the horizon through the lozenge window of my tiny black Renault Twingo. I squint. And feel around the passenger seat for my sunglasses, eyes on the road. A quick glance or two at the seat. Back on the road ahead.
The windshield clouds and I have to keep raising the defrost and turning on the wipers — it’s that early in the morning in July and in hollows mist hovers.
I’m all alone on the road — or it seems that way even as a lonely, singular vehicle, in a highway lane in the opposite direction, speeds across my line of vision; the always present trucks, too, which we expect in this topography, as if they were born to be here.
In the middle of open green fields, stucco and tile farmhouses interrupt the eye, draw it in and I wonder about the length of time these places have been here — their memories almost impossible to get at so deep in the stone they’re buried. The intermittent farmhouses appear as if they’re bobbing in a vast, uncharted sea. You feel the age of the land, its harmony — but you know great disharmony got them here to this moment.
Or am I just imagining this, projecting this melancholy view of history onto them?
I examine the road, empty and long, and I look to the farmhouses, again, and feel as if I’ve been here before. Of course I haven’t — but it feels that way, a kind of in-between reality, a memory I didn’t know I had and the newness of the place, this geography, pressing up against one another.
And I realize where my sense of this place, this location, comes from: the deliberate meditative pace of French film, a remnant of a celluloid memory, Daniel Auteil in The Well-Diggers Daughter, Gérard Depardieu in Jean de Florette.
So much of our memories are mediated.
Marcel Pagnol, the French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker, first made La Fille du puisatier in 1940. Daniel Auteil remade it in 2011. Pagnol wrote Manon des Sources, in 1952, which was later novelized as L’eau des collines and, in 1986, remade into two parts as Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. A lot of interpreting and re-interpreting of memory and desire.
Pagnol sets his films in the yellow fields and inscrutable light of Provence that so drew Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Signac, Matisse, Braque, Derain, Duffy and others — all influences on my sense of this place as well. They too enlivened a Romantic memory for a past, says my mother, that was ours — on the Sicard side, her side. She says we came from the Cathars, heretics in Montaillou, and found our way to the South of France, chased away by the sanguine Inquisitor, Jacques Fournier. I saw Sicard written on the tin roof of a very large storage barn at the edge of the Durance River as I crossed it during a trip, traveling from L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue to Avignon where all of life genuflects to the noble Rhône. (Our other side of the family, Vila, comes from Spain, journeying from the South, Andalucía, North to Madrid where the name still exists.)
Cézanne, a favorite of my mother’s and me, he didn’t paint pictures, you see. This is how one enters into the artifice of eternity — this much I learned: Cézanne understood that a painting is an object with its own weight in matter, its firmness, its structure. He delved into objects, life’s objects — or objects with life. That’s what he painted — objects with life.
In The Sainte Victoire mountain seen from les Lauves — 1904–06, a painting he completed shortly before his death, we can see several spaces contained in it: the foreground, the plain, between Les Lauves and Sainte Victoire, which spreads out like a soft settee. Something, maybe a dazzling performance, awaits beyond. In this blue object there is movement, something that came before, and l’avenir, the future yet to be. Maybe it’s the death Cézanne knew imminent. Our death too.
It’s really what we’re all preparing for, is it not? Death. As the philosophers say, life is a preparation for death. Thus, we need art; it is an essential element for our preparation — a guide. Art helps us look backwards and forward, but more critically — and inquisitively — at our in-betweens, the moments, the instances; we’re transfixed by art and we find ourselves in unbridled contemplation, even dreaming perhaps. Art helps us dream, imagine, fantasize. Fantasy is an essential element preparing us for the inevitability of death. The imagination keeps us moving through an interactive play between an object and ourselves — fantasy; it’s the engine of hope. Art and play are missing from our lives, which is one reason things are so grave today. Art helps us play, it presents it to us, an essential engine of the mind; play introduces possibilities — a tenacious embrace of what is yet to be.
Like the French’s l’avenir, the Spanish, too, have a great word for that which is yet to come, which requires the full use of our imagination, porvenir. Por — by, because of, for, or about to; venir — to come, to arrive, to be from.
The French and the Spanish are linguistically stronger in acknowledging the significance of art — the artifice — that is essential for our need to be held up by hope; l’avenir and porvenir linger in that half-space of the mind where nothing is concrete — except death — and only sensuality helps us navigate our vulnerabilities. The English future is barren, a declarative statement, a surety that hints at Reason and Logic as antidotes for our ambiguousness; it pushes art aside, the artifice needed to enable a contemplative — and playful — approach to our end. Hope must be forcefully placed onto future, not the other way around, which is how l’avenir and porvenir work: they compel us into the imagination where hope resides. Future asks that we somehow pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, alone — there is a prescription; it suggests that we can quantify hope, a typically American mindset. It’s harsh. An algorithm for hope can be constructed, we think.
But a painting stops the onlooker; we pause between the past and the future and try to recognize what it is we see of ourselves — l’avenir and porvenir are what art is about. That’s a painting’s weight, its firmness, I believe: it points to the moment you find yourself in the act of looking, the moment of observation that conflates the art itself with the onlooker’s ambiguousness. Life’s ephemera ceases for an instant; and the endless quality of life, which we sense, enters.
I desperately looked for Van Gogh’s Irises, (1889), in Saint-Rémy. Being their in June, I figured that the irises were gone after May, which is when the painter gave them life after death. I found his Cypresses, (1889), though, and stood before them for what seemed a day and tried to transcend the heavy air so as to enter that painting. I walked among Olive Groves, (1889), and lost myself, so transfixed I was by studying my every step, imagining Van Gogh walking the same ground, in these exact groves — that I was, indeed, walking the same ground, covering his every step.
I also wondered who, among the Sicards, from my mother’s side of the family, wandered through this terrain? Did they make wine? Write? What was their toil? I’ll never know the answers to my questions. They must have used their hands, I believe, because I do — I can.
The olive groves will out live us, I think. Paintings, art, will out live all of us, too. That’s why we create. That’s why we exert ourselves so, to give meaning beyond the nothing.
Is my work — teacher, writer, part-time, gentleman farmer (where I use my hands) in Vermont — somehow linked, through the fog of time, to this place in the South of France, to the Sicards of my imagination?
It is believed — we know this now from science — that the hypnic jerk, that involuntary sleep twitch that happens as we fall asleep, is a nervous reaction that comes to us from our time sleeping in trees when we’d fall asleep and fear falling and turning unexpectedly to easy game for predators. Lucy, AL 288–1, the female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, taught us this. The twitch, the hypnic jerk, is an adjustment we’ve kept in our DNA for 3.2 million years, at least.
What else remains with us?
The imagination gives us a sense of the long view — it carries forth the past and points to el porvenir, l’avenir; that somehow after death something remains, something others cannot touch but something that’s felt in the pull of memory, even experience, a twitch.
Life doesn’t end.
I never want to leave Saint-Rémy when I’m there, and I return to it every time I’m in France, no matter where I am in the country. And maybe that’s how a painting, a memory and a place become a person — longing is brought into the frame. The longing to live fuels the imagination; it’s food, an ache formed by desire. Desire gives life.
So let’s frame all of this into a picture: This ache, all of this, comes to me 450 kilometers north of Provence. And Saint-Rémy is but a dream, a pastoral topography in a Pagnol that arrives, first, through Auteil’s lens, and then Claude Berri’s, the director of Jean de Florette. It’s not mine; it’s traveled nearly 60 years urged to the surface at 112 kilometers per hour. It’s Cézanne’s, Van Gogh’s. Not mine — but I’ve made something of theirs into mine. My own hypnic jerk. Art and life are one, in my mind; there is no separation.
“I placed a jar in Tennessee,” says Wallace Stevens in Anecdote of a Jar, “And round it was, upon a hill./It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill.”
I possess both an illusion and a reality — the artifice of eternity — something lost and something acquired and new, a sensation, new and vibrant. I am 450 kilometers north of Provence — yet I’m not sure where I am, but for the feeling of elation that comes when recognizing something. It’s not the land, not the place, though these play a vital role — they ignite; rather, it’s the sense of me that melds the experiences of the past, films and paintings, and the present, coming into Paris early one morning in the fog of time, that is most crucial and basic. It’s the story I am making that is vital.
Somewhere between the past and the future to be there occurs a thought: who I am and what I am come from a strange brew of culture and nature, of histories I’ve not lived — Nazis of Argentina’s past and celluloid images compressed in time, the art I’ve seen in museums in Manhattan, Paris, Madrid and Toledo, Sevilla, Córdoba, London and Amsterdam, the literature, always the literature I’ve read. Ancestral time also has a hand, it’s implicated in all these places — involucrada, a much more beautiful, and therefore romantic word in Spanish, which insinuates the narratives of family lore that hang in time, awaiting our plucking.
Jean Paul Sartre says that, “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs life out of weakness, and dies by chance.”
The narrator in Don DeLillo’s White Noise says that, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of all plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”
Here’s Keats, a few lines as antidote to Sartre and DeLillo, perhaps, the beginning of Book 1 in Endymion: A Poetic Romance, a sort of anthem for me, I suppose:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth.
Romantic hope — or that hope that springs forth from all Romanticism. Without it I think we’re doomed.
And Whitman’s Poets to Come. It’s relevant to see, hear, and feel its entirety — something I believe as if it were a religious conviction; hell, it is:
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater
than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back
in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,
turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.
I am expecting the main things from you, too, dear reader, for only you can be a witness to me; only you can prove and define me. I am expecting the main things from you. This is what this is all about. Why write, otherwise? That’s my obsession: another person can only be my judge. There is no god for this, no religion; these are impossible creations to justify. Only one being can justify another.
Art is a justification — and a verification — for having spent time walking this earth.
If chance is to usher in my death and all narratives lead deathward, the “thing of beauty” I am looking for, that thing to be “gather[ed]…Into the artifice of eternity,” only you can give me. That’s the story of life. Isn’t it? The stories we tell, through the eye of memory, an Other must attest to. This truth is as old as Homer — we bear witness to his being. His life is in his stories, ours in ours. We are each other’s witnesses. No one else can do that.
Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Confessions is a model for me: “Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.” Indeed. Only…after I have been read. You have to read me and determine my vitality. This is the essence of the oft overused word, sustainability — nearly benign by now; it can’t exist without stories and our mutual acknowledgement that our stories consolidate our brief moment together, here. Environmentally, socio-economically, and politically we’re broken because we’ve wrecked the bind — and bond — stories create between us, and about us. We’re engaged in writing only a single story we are all abiding by — dominion is its theme, and it’s highly destructive. Look around. Stories require collaboration, cooperation, and acquiescence instead. Moving towards this reality is the single most important act we can all engage in — now. It will change everything and move us away from the quagmire we’re in because reading an Other requires compassion. We cannot be civilized without compassion.
And then, as we travel gracefully towards Paris — and in our own thoughts, don’t forget, we’ve been moving towards Paris — almost unnoticed, not even an interruption, rather as something easily emerging out of a dream, a story, or some movie yet to be, the movie we’re making in our minds, my mind in this case, the harsher reality of modernity creeps in, its borders shaking me out of aesthetic dreams and into another, the outskirts of La Ville-Lumière, literally, “The City Light” or, for us, The City of Light, a name it owes to its fame as the center of education and ideas and its early adoption of street lighting.
This is the side of the story that dominates us now and compels us to move away from our more pastoral fantasies: The beyond, this new environment advertises, is to be disciplined quite differently — and by man’s desire for dominion everywhere, indeed; this is done through learning, education, the formulating and testing of new ideas, theories, otherwise known as modernization, a discontent with the tribal and primitive, which are romanticized by narratives of colonialization. The city.
A neighborhood of mid-sized buildings, then corporations that dot the suburbs, big, non-inspiring, cold buildings of shinny glass and steel — today’s chapels vying for our very souls — rise up and push back the farms; it leaves them behind, almost forgotten — perhaps even taking for granted that they’ll always be there providing us with sustenance.
“Paris-Centre”. The first sign.
Traffic — there’s plenty of it now making its way towards the work of the day, life’s labors that hold all cities up — slows and narrows, though in 6 lanes and displaying a newfound determination, ordered will. It’s the resolve of the city commuter.
“And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,” writes T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
A dark tunnel. More traffic now even more disciplined in its manner.
“Unreal City,” London for Eliot, Paris for us ascending, beginning to soar beyond us, the Siene running alongside the highway urging me on.
I get goose bumps. Tears well. I grip the steering wheel tighter, but ease off, breathe, sit back. A this is it, sit back and take it in gesture.
The day and night before I crossed southern Sweden, a half of Denmark, and a major part of Germany — Hambourg, Hannover, Düsseldorf to, finally, Luxemburg where I saw my first grape vines and I smiled because I knew France was near. I began the day by leaving Lund, Sweden, at 7AM and got to about 100kilometers of Paris by midnight or so. The key to my apartment in Paris was being held in a café (very French) and I tried frantically to call on my cell but I was doing something wrong and couldn’t get through. I knew they’d be closed by the time I entered France — besides, I didn’t want to tackle Parisian streets in the dark without the guarantee of a bed to lay my head. So I did what I would have done 30 or years ago, I slept in my car at a truck stop. I slept through the night and awakened a bit stiff at 4AM, washed up, drank a double espresso and began the journey into Paris.
I don’t know, maybe I’m overly romantic, but when I saw “Paris-Centre,” I got emotional. Perhaps it was simply that I was working really hard to erase all images I have of Paris, all of which come from literature and film, and of course my family, mostly my mother. The emotions escalated when I realized that the entry to Paris, the way I came in, is almost identical to the entrance, by car, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even the first signs of the city immediately catapulted me to Buenos Aires. I was in two places at once — a very Borgesian experience; or to put it in the tradition of contemporary French philosophy: since I’m here, I’ve always been here and was always who I am, always being the other I find now. I have always been here, though I was literally seeing Paris for the very first time. The hypnic jerk of being, of history. I was experiencing myself in this light for the first time. This implies that psychologically I had been ready for this experience and that all my experiences leading to this moment had prepared me for my first visit to Paris. I was always already in Paris.
I hugged the Seine and drove ever so slowly. The pay off for sleeping in the car was coming into a city awakening, coming to life. I drove carefully, deliberately, alert, my eyes on the classic beauty, the barges, the old buildings, the narrow streets — and the street signs and my map. That’s how I did it: I’d go so far, stop and look at my map — no GPS for me, no. GPS is like using blinders; it prevents the traveler from looking around; it prevents the traveler from getting lost, which is what we want to do. Then we have to write our way out — and back. Create something new, imagine it. I’d memorize routes and street names, calculating how much time I’d travel to get to my next stop. Then do this again. Stop, study and reflect, and go. Within ten minutes of being in the city, I found the Restaurant Retirement, which held my keys. Unbelievably, they were cleaning and I had to wait only five minutes for the keys held by the manager. She gave me an envelope with my name on it and I opened it. In it, the keys and the address — no directions. Very French! This, too, made me feel as if I was in Argentina — same minimalist approach to everything, letting one fend for himself. Argentina and France share a similar aesthetic in that the native wants the tourist to interpret signs, thus moving him or her towards becoming a visitor, one who is not there to merely look at sites, but rather, one who is there to be affected by the place, its people and history, linger and perhaps stay. I got some directions, but I knew, between their French-English and my English-Spanish-French, that I wasn’t being told the entire story. We never are, are we? We have to complete the stories we’re told.
Back to the map. Immediately I found the street on the map, but I had to go through a series of circles, “DO NOT ENTER” circumlocutions, until, a half hour later, I found the place.
I lived on Rue Mouffetard, a street in the Ve arrondissement, near the Sorbonne. It is a quiet, narrow little area; it’s very neighborly, which is what I was looking for. I was on the first floor of a beautifully renovated 18th century building with a wonderful interior garden — something you read about or find in French movies, or see in paintings.
Next door, a Creperie, of course; and down the block, about 50 meters, a small grocery store from which I purchased eggs, juice and, yes, bread, wine and cheese. And right in front of the little grocery store, a wonderful circle, all cobblestone, lined with cafes. Streets I walked — Diderot, Pascal, Descartes — are the history that will not release us.
It’s appropriate to turn to Jacques Derrida, here. The Gift of Death:
The incorporation of one mystery by the other also amounts to an incorporation of one immortality within another, of one eternity within another. This enveloping of immortality also corresponds to a transaction between two negotiations or two disavowals of death. And in what amounts to a significant trait in the genealogy of responsibility, it will be marked by an internalization; by an individualization or subjectification, the soul’s relation to itself as it falls back on itself in the very movement of incorporation.
When I arrived at my studio apartment, the city was barely awake. I could hear faint voices of passersby outside from my opened balcony windows. I could also hear the swallows and the pigeons. It was overcast and cool, so good for walking. Numerous church bells sang, calling, reminding us of our past and our future yet to be, nuestro porvenir, notre l’avenir — “an incorporation of one immortality within another, an eternity within another.” And I felt very, very lucky. Very fortunate, indeed. I was in a foreign place, a new place — yet I knew where I was, who I was for the briefest of moments, somewhere in the haze of memory designed in time by art, literature, and the stories of my family, and I came to realize that I had no choice but to be where I was; that all signs pointed to this moment. I was brought here. And I came here. There was no other way, the very movement of incorporation that was me.
