Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  In 1907 Picasso, seeing Matisse’s early Blue Nude at Gertrude Stein’s apartment, had objected: “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.” It was the vexed response of a younger man, looking for categories (not something we associate with Picasso). But for Matisse the interior was a metaphor he could not ignore. He had to paint his way through it to the figure. For the interior, all that festering wallpaper and billowing textile, was the world. Our place.

  Now, finally, in The Pink Nude, background becomes pure grid, rectilinear, without flower, without curve, a telegraphy of straight lines, the simple squares of abstraction. The odalisque herself possesses the joyous, liberating arabesque, the lifeline that once belonged to the walls and hangings of her chamber. She has drawn into herself all of it—flowers and fruits, all the curvilinear satisfaction of just being-here-now, of being alive.

  She is not, after all, an intimate figure, not indolent and domestic. Cast upon the abstract latitudinal/longitudinal lines of her global background, she proves to be a monumental presence. Finally, painting Lydia Delectorskaya, a model who was “not his type,” Matisse got the goddess. His odalisque had come to stay. She was there to do the heavy lifting.

  Matisse and Delectorskaya lived above the Mediterranean, in Nice and later, during the war and after, in the little town of Vence, working, working in the blissful light until the end came.

  OF THE THREE great “sky-god religions” as Gore Vidal calls the religions of Abraham, only one has remained loyal to the first imaginings of their common ur-metaphor: the garden with its streams and fountains, its flowering fruits and vegetables, the docile animals of the peaceable Kingdom. This is the paradise that Islam apparently has never abandoned in its poetry. The youngest of the monotheistic religions steadfastly clings to its central metaphor, the dream-enclosure surrounding the seraglio, the baths, the sensuous life of the body-soul known as human life.

  While Judaism and Christianity also enshrine the creation-myth garden metaphor, they stray from it theologically and poetically as Islam does not seem tempted to do. Whatever the reason, religious Judaism does not dream of a domestic garden as its destination (even if the early Zionists were determined “to make the desert bloom”). Judaism dreams of Jerusalem. Its dearest metaphor is the sacred City.

  As for Christianity—it long ago traded in its garden for an eternal governmental unit, the Kingdom. And for the better part of two millennia it did everything possible to reify that metaphor into a political reality—Christendom.

  The garden metaphor abides in the very image of the harem’s enclosure, the paradise of the domestic park, the bower of bliss: the garden as maquette of the world as it should be, could be. All of this exists in the poetry of Rumi, the Sufi mystic who was the elusive author of vast reservoirs of Persian odes and lyrics, and who also founded the trance-dancing order of Mevlevi dervishes, the “whirling” dervishes. He spent his active years in Konya, a city on the great Anatolian steppe in what is now Turkey. He died there in 1273. A monastery-turned-museum houses his mausoleum, surrounded by a garden.

  “Seek sweet syrup from the garden of love”—this is the kind of religious poet he is, shocking and erotic, refusing to let brittle piety smother his shattering experience of divinity. He doesn’t mind displaying his heart aflame:

  Where is a bunch of roses,

  if you would be this garden?

  Where, one soul’s pearly essence

  when you’re the Sea of God?

  A BROILING DAY in late May, tree roses pumping color, fountain burbling in the formal garden of the museum-monastery, shoes off at the entrance, and then into the dark interior, padding around on threadbare carpets, gazing in the dim light at The Tomb. Feeling, of course, nothing much. The tourist malaise.

  It’s another of my ardent pilgrimages, seeking the place where. . . . Here, perhaps, Rumi composed his ecstatic loverlike religious lyrics beneath the archways of the monastery enclosure, below the minaret’s spire. “The bird of my heart has again begun to flutter / the parrot of my soul has begun to chew sugar.” For lines like these I have tromped to what was once called Asia Minor with several friends, as pilgrimage-beset as I, to this dusty Anatolian plain. ”The hour is late, the hour is late, the sun has gone down into the well, the sun of the soul of lovers has entered the seclusion of God.”

  Rumi is a poet by accident, the best way to be a poet, no doubt. He has to write this odd stuff that apparently turns out to be what people call “poems” because only the peculiarity of poetry, the bent and broken images, the glimpses, allow for the ducking and leaping, the lunging and feinting, he must perform to express all his feeling, as Matisse said of what it is to try to give testimony of the experience of living in the world.

  But Rumi is trying to render the non-world. The mystical transcendence of being. God, in other words. The encounter with That-Which-Is. This task, however, puts him in yet deeper relation with the world. And poetry writing, all this trafficking in language, only causes him to realize his subject is its opposite. He sometimes signs his poems as Klamush—the Silent:

  Silence! Go sauntering through the meadow for today it is The turn for the eyes to behold. . . .

  Choose that dessert which augments life, seek that wine which Is full-bodied;

  The rest is all scent and image and colour, the rest is all war And shame and opprobrium;

  Be silent, and sit down, for you are drunk, and this is the edge Of the roof.

  WE HAVE ONLY a single night in Konya. The hotel is a good one, which is to say there are a lot of mirrors and crystal chandeliers, a spiral staircase with a gilded railing, an absurdly loaded buffet table in a massive dining room. Our little group of five combs the buffet, piling on the creamy eggplant, the lamb kebabs, the cucumbers and tomatoes, the little fried whatever-they-are. We complain that there is too much food, but we go back for the chicken with mint yogurt, and ask for glasses of the salty sour-milk beverage that has become a low-grade addiction. Finally, the “sherbets and fruits” that couldn’t appease Delacroix, do, after all, satisfy us.

  There is a rare chance, we discover, to see the dervishes perform. Except we are not to think of it as a performance. We are not to clap. This is the Sema, a ritual dance, a religious rite. The hotel has provided the Mevlevi order with a private area in the basement with a small dance floor (obviously set up at other times for a band). We file downstairs with another group, Japanese tourists who bow to us. They have been told not to take photographs, but they cannot help themselves, and during the first few minutes, as the dervishes file in, the snapping is quite intense.

  We are seated around the little parquet dance floor. The men wear loose white soutanes, except for one, the dance master, who is in black. On their heads, upside-down bucket hats, also white. The white gowns are the ego’s burial shroud. The toques on their heads are the ego’s tombstones. Several other men, in black, are the musicians, playing reed and string instruments and a drumlike object. Two singers settle in with them against the wall.

  I expect the dancing to become a frenzy, a wild-and-crazy ecstatic loss of control. But the stately turning never speeds up madly. The whirling is the soft insistence of billowing water lilies opening on the dark surface of the dance floor’s shiny water. They go around and around, in some hermetic pattern of their own hypnotic rhythm. There is nothing virtuosic about the dancing, and yet the dignity of it is compelling, demanding even. Their hats, for some reason, do not look silly. They need the hats. They are part of the dance. Well, they are their tombstones. Even the Japanese have settled down, cameras no longer snapping. We simply stare. Our eyes follow the billowing skirts of the solemn men as they turn, turn.

  At some point they become fish moving in water. The movement is no longer happening from their feet. They are mermen moving in the dark dance-floor air that has become water. It is impossible to stay awake. The ease is so overpowering my head lolls forward. I’m not exac
tly asleep. I’m just limp, watching the white garments swirl, swirling with them as I sit in one of the straight-backed chairs ringing the seedy dance floor. And that is how it is until—when? an hour later? longer?—the white waterlily men, the mermen, move in formation, a school of fish, off the little hotel dance floor into the back room from which they first emerged, and it seems that all of this might never have occurred or that it might have been happening for a long time, much longer than anyone would believe.

  Then, perhaps because it is all a little disorienting and it is impossible to think of going to the bar for a drink, everyone goes upstairs to bed, overtaken with a kind of floating exhaustion. But I have seen a sign—BATHS—on a door and I’m determined to take advantage of the chance, the first time on our two-week trip a Turkish bath has been offered. No one will go with me—but finally Susan agrees, the redhead who knows I’m afraid to open the door and enter alone the room next to the one where the dervishes danced that is marked BATHS.

  We are met by a barrel-chested, mustachioed man, sent by Central Casting for a Monty Python version of The Arabian Nights. He’s wearing a small red towel tucked around his shiny, bulging midsection. And nothing else. His feet slap on the wet floor, his hairy shoulders gleam with the damp of the place, as if he worked, like the night watchman of my father’s greenhouse, in a hellish cauldron of heat. His bald head wrinkles with the smiles that start at his face, rippling upward. He looks like a man who would have a substantial harem.

  He leads us to separate stalls to undress and gives each of us a skimpy towel. Then we are to go into the sauna, step one. We sit there, just the two of us, sweating in the cedar, throwing water on the hot rocks, our lungs seizing on the steam. I feel a kind of miserable desperation—why am I doing this?—and I realize Susan is the only friend I have in all the world. I’ve left my glasses in the dressing room, and the world is not only steamy, but terribly imprecise, wavering. The beginning of a bad dream.

  A rap on the sauna door, and we look at each other, clutch our thin towels, and emerge. Then we are scrubbed . . . within an inch of our lives. Susan first. I see strange narrow gray ropes forming on her back and slipping away under the corrugated rubber mitt of the mustachioed sultan. It takes me a while to understand this is skin. The same happens to me, the outer layer flayed, even the heels rounded off and made new.

  He has tried to speak to us, but he doesn’t know a word of English—not many English come here. We can say hello and thank you in Turkish, and he rewards us with an alarming smile, his bald head crinkling. He knows some Japanese—Do we know Japanese? Ah, too bad—he makes this gesture. Many Japanese, he mimes, holding his hands to his face, making clicking sounds with his invisible camera.

  We are shampooed and lathered, washed and rinsed, pails of water sluiced and gushed over us. Susan looks like a rosy goddess, laid out on the round marble slab in the middle of the room. Out of a pillowcase (it looks like) dipped again and again into a bucket of milky water, the burly man casts a down comforter of suds over her until she is entirely covered, as if for night, under a duvet of dense bubbles. Then he massages her body, working with one leg up on the marble, knee bent, hard at it, giving her shoulder an impersonal little slap when it is time to turn, to move, to get up.

  Then my turn. Under my blanket of bubbles I lie content, spent without having done a thing, cast upon the warmed marble, my body broken of its vertical, the arabesque of ease pounded into me. Then a sharp rap on my shoulder, and I rise on one arm, leg extended, the marble room whirling with steam and myopia. Susan is a lolling rose nearby, a girlfriend talking about what constitutes a good manicure—and did I know that the root for the word cosmetics is “cosmos.” Think about it, she says, swigging mineral water from a plastic bottle, the petals of her body open, blushing with color.

  We stay like this for a while, long minutes swooning in the warm fog. The Turkish bath man, off duty now, regards his handiwork. He turns the little water sluicing pail upside down on his head, and begins moving, round and round, slowly on his delicate dancing feet, a pudgy cartoon dervish, whirling around the marble plinth on which we lie. Then he stops before me, offers his arm to lead me back to the little dressing room where—is it hours ago?—I left the tokens of my other life. He knows I cannot be trusted to walk upright alone. I lean into him, feeling deliciously collapsible. This night I’m an odalisque at last, all fish, all float.

  SIX

  Balcony

  The Côte d’Azur. The ultramarine basin of what used to be called Western Civilization. In Marseille, twelve miles from Jerome Hill’s house in Cassis, a bronze medallion is embedded into the cement at the edge of the old port where fishermen still dock to sell their catch from the back of their boats, but where the real business is tourism. Ici, it proclaims, exactly here, 2,600 centuries ago, Phocian traders arrived from Asia Minor and established Civilization—hauling it in tow, apparently, a commodity much in demand. From this spot, the medallion reads, Civilization radiated across the world.

  You have to love the French—Ici and nowhere else. Still able to think of “Civilization” as singular—and theirs to dole out. There was considerable consternation several years ago when archaeologists determined that the ancient port, long silted in, had, in fact, been several blocks away from the current vieux port. The Ici, it turned out, was actually Là-bas. For a while the question of removing the plaque to this more accurate, though less touristic, site was a matter of civic debate.

  For inspiration-idolators as well as sun-and-light seekers keep coming generation after generation to this ridge of the Mediterranean running roughly from Marseille all the way to Nice and Menton, riveted the whole length with gleaming villages and towns. I’ve come here, too, to Cassis, looking, like everybody else, for inspiration. That’s what it means to seek a place apart, especially a beautiful, exalted place. My plan: to sit here for a few months, write some short stories, head back to Minnesota, my northern place and my fate, where I will—what else?—write more stories, possibly better ones, at least probably not worse ones.

  The inspiration artists seek is surely not all a matter of location location location, but there must be a reason why artists and writers keep wandering about, seeking the Right Place. And why generations have come here to this string of towns facing across the great blue to the rim of Africa: for inspiration, we say—or don’t say, but secretly think.

  It’s strange that we still believe in inspiration when, compared to earlier ages, we seem to believe in so little. Inspiration may be the one bit of God we haven’t managed to kill off. The big bearded Primary Cause and his timepiece may have stopped ticking for us, Jesus may have become “historical,” but the Holy Ghost is still aloft.

  Even rigorous atheists speak easily of what “inspires” them—presumably this is not just a figure of speech but an attempt to describe a galvanizing, unbidden inner impulse. And while many people are careful to make clear they have no time for “organized religion,” they attest fervently to the importance of their “spiritual life.” Spirit exists, in other words. It continues to go about its primordial job: to breathe its mystery into our fiber so that we might breathe out the bit of meaning it entrusts to us.

  But these gustings are idiosyncratic, personal, often a bit nutty. They are as impossible (or boring) to recite (or rather, to listen to) as a dreamer’s breakfast-table attempt to convey the numinous power of the night’s dream. These romantic inner-inspirations only come alive in translation—in a story, a poem, a picture. Such inspiration, romantic and real, is everywhere, not just, or not especially, here, along this glittering coast where, for ages, so many have made pilgrimage and even made their home, at least for a lucky while.

  But a more antique form of inspiration haunts this Provençal place and has brought me here, I think. Or has presented itself now that I am here. This older inspiration is the austere classical cousin of the wild Romantic not-I-but-the-wind inspiration I have always trusted, with its passionate commitment to Henry James
’s “rich principle of the Note,” the Romantic habit of personal attention and naming, Matisse’s attempt to “convey all his emotion” in response to experience.

  This older piety of the ancients was rooted in a reverence for ancestors, an instinct to bow the head to those who preceded, who lived, worked, loved, and sometimes died along this curve of the Mediterranean, first colonized well before the birth of Christ by the Romans who brought here the gnarled grapevine and the silver olive. Theirs was not the Christian piety of personal do-gooding, but the placement of the small self in relation to history.

  But what is to be gained by lighting a taper before a shrine, any shrine, sacred or secular?

  An accurate gauge of one’s own smallness, for one thing. And paradoxically, an intense sensation of companionship, of kinship with—and now, rounding the corner, comes the word that won’t be denied—with greatness. “You and your four-bit words,” my modest father, toiling in his northern greenhouse, used to say. But he smiled. He believed in the four-bit words, too. Not the greatness of individual accomplishment, but the grandeur of endeavor, the splendor of the attempt that links immortals to amateurs, from age to age, and finally latches on to the inspiring impersonality of history itself.

  I speed along the autoroute to take advantage of the deals at Auchan, the hypermarché spread out, as such places are everywhere, in a massive commercial plain dislocated from anything but itself. I am living, for these lucky months, along a filet of real estate that is now so valuable no artist seeking to revolutionize the world’s eyesight (Matisse figuring out fauvism in 1904 at Saint-Tropez, in Collioure in 1905) could afford to rent a view here. No consumptive English short-story writer (Katherine Mansfield after the First World War) would find her Villa Isola Bella available (with garden and housekeeper) on a hillside overlooking the sea for so many guineas a year.