JEAN ARENE, L'intérieur de la maison, 1977
Desire
is the honest work of the body,
its engine, its wind.
It too must have sails-- wings
in this tiny mouth, valves
in the human heart, meanings like sailboats
setting out
over the mind. Passion is work
that retrieves us,
lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us,
JORIE GRAHAM, fragment from “I Watched A Snake”
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Sep 26 — To go for a walk is to try to determine what makes a city. This denotation is somewhere dangled in front of you, in mid-air, so you keep walking. Here is the old document of the Seine, its creases somehow finer than any other river you’ve seen, rippling fragile under the bridge— here are figures in twos, mouthing one another from their bench-perches. Coils and spires, scrolling hearts in spectacles, spell out a quiet decadence. You are its parasite, suckling from the glimmer, like the yellow hornet on the end of the china plate feeds off a stray daub of confiture.
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When things are this lovely and you scarcely have time to write them down, the order in your memory struggles— a puzzle to be arranged— although every night before you close your eyes, the kaleidoscope appears, a montage of images and replications, interiors from the day, and occaisonally, the faintest music of running water.
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You broke purple bulbs of figs over gingham napkins, watched the necks of ducks disappear in the pond at dusk. At some point you mounted the steps to Sacre-Coeur, your fingers grazing the rails heavy with brass heart-locks. A panoramic view of a blue roof-system, the massive star of Paris sprawling in the heat— here another foreigner stopped you and you to took a photograph of him and a drawing of the basilica he made in charcoal pencil. He rejected your version, because you had not managed to get the very top dome in the frame, your composition not properly containing both the monument and its reproduction. The monument itself is a spectacle, and so is the reproduction of it, which must also be documented.
You think of the woman you watched in Gustave Moreau’s studio, in a brilliant coral-colored ensemble, a proper outfit with a large feathered hat, tracing out perfectly the banisters of the spiral staircase. There you’d peered at drafted masterpieces left undone, spooling open. You think of the meticulous lines threaded over the bare wash of oil-paint, gifting them not only shape but ornament, where everyone is something and you can’t break eye-contact with white-eyed myth— and later think of the soft pearl, almost satin, limbs furling out of Rodin’s rough marble blocks, the obsessive iterations marked by scalloped thumbprints. Here, the pallor of allegories: Salome or sister of Icarus hiding plain in bloodless marble, not to touch, but you can sense their temperature just by looking.
Each museum cares for the art it imprisons, but with due attention to the cell blocks themselves, the play of atmosphere with the pieces— wall color, arrangement, and with the heat you’re melting into every room. Even the studios appear left untouched, Suzanne Valadon’s with layers of paint shed off from brushes, the cloudy scent of turpentine suspended in the air with some permanence. Giacommetti’s slender crowds, faceless etchings in plaster haunting, empty bottles of chemicals. In Cezanne’s, there’s the slender A of a ladder meeting at the edge of the peeling ceiling, things drawn as they are now left as they were— but surely someone replaces those yellow apples each week, even if long enough for them to wrinkle (some things do rot). Everything, otherwise, is ambered over.
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Since you can’t stay long, you want to take it all with you— you exert this desire on found objects in the South, with pebbles and pearly snail shells retrieved in medieval rubble, with burrs caught in your crochet shawl as you meander through the reeds toward the remaining arches of a Roman aqueduct. Sight in a site, folded into your pockets. A plastic Ricard ashtray, another apertif-brand keychain, cheap things from the Curio shop— a wooden boat that looked just like those you saw later, hung precariously on strings in the cathedral on the high hill in Marseille, surrounded by the heat of candles, a reverent silence, indeed golden, that made your jaw slack. A type of materialism that comes with being greedy about time that’s already passed, which feels deceptively circular when you are there, the slow aching rotation of these wind mills.
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Sometimes the churn of your own procession stops and you are stunned, still, images come to you. Through narrows, stone homes blanched by the sun, sea-foam shutters and charcoal-colored roofs. A choir practice humming from the church behind bundles of wheat fronds, street cats chasing lizards up the walls, an ancient man playing the radio at a table and waving at you through the window, two pale horses emerging in step from around the corner of the Impasse. You stop on the side of the road for genetian flowers, walk the verge of nothing, find reeds caught in the churn of the creek, ants thronging through the dirt, the many-pointed spark of the sun lapsing through the clouds over the olive orchards and the dark, irregular spires of cyprus trees, and here the air is thick-brushed, curvilinear. You have to take pictures to stop yourself from crying.
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In Burgundy a man with blue eyes tells you the grapes are harvested earlier and earlier each year. The stirrings of heat somewhere above have little regard for the Gregorian calendar— and so the vines proliferate, grow green and reddish at their tips, unfurl in August. Eventually, dark globes are torn through with limpid space, a bitter seed spat out of the window, maceration between molar and cheek, another day passed is not unlike your canker sore prodded uselessly by your tongue, and two years must have been a hunger.
For some essence of a memory is kept, even when removed from origin, even when tampered with— in spite of omissions, the eyelets of whatever has been cut or lost— something still felt, the thought of the soil where a grape grew still somehow in the bite of the glass. Or what has been redacted in blue pen, something or other about listening to The Window in the very early morning with one side of your face against a mattress, the trickling water of that sound, gray light and thinking of how tragic and pulled-taut that one time was, the little needle of someone’s forever-leaving, and you wonder what it was that made you think of this, how non-sequitor a pang can be.
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When you eat you cannot avoid the bones, sinew, shells, eyes of animals on plates, and when you breathe there is the damp smell of grapes bubbling against wood, and dried lavender and sometimes shit and so much dust, and when you close your eyes, the abtract patterns of architecture float in maroon, imprinted, everything is indeed a circle, a curvature, a curl and a cradle. Even the sky is an overturned bowl above the Mediterranean, washing out the darkness at its edges, dipping into that glassy water, when you say it now, there are elipses escaping through the gap of your closed lips, because it is mostly gone.
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The rest, what you have not preserved in words, does slip away. And the snail shell you brought home with you moves places every few days— oh, the guilt of taking something living— it leaves the slightest trail of residue, the color of candle wax, on your mantle.
this is absolutely beautiful
Good shit my friend .