Orphic Paris

by Henri Cole

  It is difficult to think of lyric poetry without any separate word for “self.” Can the strange confusion of lines that is despair really be conveyed without it? Perhaps it is the article before moi—le moi—that is enough to make it entirely different from “me,” so that moi is more subjective (me) and le moi more objective (the self ).

  In any case, Stevens knew French closely, and would have been aware of these differences. Though he traveled only once outside the States—to Havana—he was an avid Francophile, giving titles to his poems like “Esthétique du Mal” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.” Making the excuse that his wife was not a good traveler, he seldom ventured far from their quiet home in Hartford, Connecticut. To a friend visiting France, he wrote, “On my death there will be found carved on my heart, along with the initials of attractive girls that I have known, the name of Aix-en-Provence.”

  La closerie des lilas means an enclosure of lilac bushes, and adorning our table was a little vase of ethereal freesia. I like people who are fond of flowers. Though it is difficult to divine their supernatural qualities into words, I try to do so again and again in my poems, as in “Bowl of Lilacs”:

  My lilacs died today, floating in a bowl.

  All week I watched them pushing away,

  their pruned heads swollen together into something

  like anger, making a brief comeback

  toward the end, as if secretly embalmed.

  Part III

  THIS MORNING I sat in the disheveled Jardin des Plantes reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Blue Hydrangea.” He describes the leaves as being “rough and dry” and the pretty umbels as being like “old blue letter-paper which the years / have touched with yellow, violet, and gray.” Rilke is said to have written his final drafts on old blue letter paper. This week, pondering the flowers—with their complex shadings of blue—in all the flower shops of Paris, I was reminded of how short life is but also of how tough and durable humans are.

  I first encountered the Jardin des Plantes (opened in 1626 as a garden for medicinal plants) in Rilke’s 1903 poem “The Panther,” one of several he wrote about animals in captivity, in which he describes the panther’s gaze as being worn down by the bars of the cage: “His sight from ever gazing through the bars / has grown so blunt that it sees nothing more.”

  Like me, the panther is a solitary traveler and he paces, as I sometimes do, with melancholy intensity. Then, suddenly, he opens his shining eyes and is pierced by the world:

  Only sometimes when the pupil’s film

  soundlessly opens . . . then one image fills

  and glides through the quiet tension of the limbs

  into the heart and ceases and is still.

  (translation by C. F. MacIntyre)

  In Rilke’s essay on Auguste Rodin, written the same year, he describes the sculptor’s visits to the Jardin des Plantes early in the morning to sketch the sleepy animals. Later, in Rodin’s studio on the rue de l’Université, he observes a tiny plaster cast of an antique wildcat that Rodin treasured: “There is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand. . . . If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.”

  ON THE SOUTHWEST EDGE of the Luxembourg Gardens, there is a beekeeping school (rucher école) and a small sign warning of the danger of crossing bees. With their ornate metal roofs, the hives look like little Victorian houses.

  There has been a beekeeping school in the garden since the last century, and one can buy delicious honey produced by the bees. Sometimes, passing by, I pull up a metal chair to read for an hour or two, and the bees are so numerous—buzzing as they work—that the sound is almost cerebral, as if the mechanism of my brain had been recorded and emitted through a speaker. On the morning when a hive queen chooses to be impregnated, she flies out of the shadows into sunlight, which she has never felt before, and because of the many dangers—birds, wind,insects—she is followed by an army of males, one of whom will intertwine briefly with her in flight. Then, back at the hive, the queen returns through curtains of golden wax and honey and is greeted by drones, who help her remove the entrails of her lover, including his organ, which she no longer has any use for, with his secretion deep inside her spermatheca.

  IN FRENCH, one can say Je suis seul (I am alone) or Je me sens seul (I feel alone), but nothing as baldly distressing as “I am lonesome.” Or, even worse, “I am a loner.” My first poems were often about loneliness. My father was a military man and my brothers were athletes, so I was always looking for a different way to be a man. To look inward and explore the darker corners of the soul is one of the functions of lyric poetry. I think immediately of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems I love. I hate having to apologize for, or defend, my inwardness. It was the American poet Marianne Moore who said that solitude was the cure for loneliness. Yet, if I spend too much time alone, I am called égoïste, or selfish. Surely it is impossible to be a good writer without being égoïste.

  On her deathbed, Mother told me that she had been lonely all her life. Her twin died at birth. She lived through poverty and war. Her first baby died. Her husband left her. She worked hard but never seemed content. She had chronic back pain and became addicted to painkillers, which led to a mental break and suicide attempt, forcing her to be hospitalized. Still, she had a sense of humor and we laughed often when we were together. My last memory of her is of when she peeked out from under her covers to say goodbye. She’d become a Frenchwoman again, saying, “Je suis prête à m’allonger,” which means “I am ready to stretch out.”

  THIS MORNING, walking down the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, I crossed the Seine into Les Halles (once the central market, or “belly,” of Paris) and stopped at the Centre Pompidou to see an installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which consisted of a single, serene strand of lightbulbs looped against a pale wall.

  What does it mean if a lightbulb burns out, I wondered? Is this a self-portrait? In 1996, Gonzalez-Torres died from AIDS-related complications. Is this a picture of his solitude? Was he égoïste, like me? In another minimalist work—“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers)—identical clocks are displayed, barely touching each other, on a light blue wall. A letter Gonzalez-Torres wrote to his partner, who died before him, explains one potential meaning for this work: “Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. . . . We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time. We are synchronized, now and forever. I love you.”

  LAST NIGHT I met James Lord again at his apartment and brought a bouquet of violet tulips, which he immediately placed in a vase on a side table in the living room. As I poured myself a scotch, he said that scotch and soda—or “fifty-fifty,” as it had been called—was his preferred drink for many years, but now it is Diet Coke. At Le Voltaire, on the quai Voltaire, we sat at the same table where we’d sat during our first meeting, and James pointed out something called oeuf mayonnaise “James” on the menu. Long ago, boiled eggs in mayonnaise had been one of his favorite things to order, and when it was removed from the menu he complained, so the owner resurrected it at the original price and named it in his honor. James encouraged me to order filet mignon, though it was expensive, insisting that “the poet of iron needs red meat now and then.” During our meal, he told me he’d gotten what he wanted from his life, and that he was content. He told me that meeting his partner, Gilles, had been the best thing to happen to him.

  Again, we discussed Brokeback Mountain, the heartbreaking film about two ranch hands who carry on a sporadic affair, and whether it was a “universal love story,” as Hollywood wanted us to believe, or a gay tragedy recording the effects of homophobia. We agreed that it was not about love but instead about the damaging effects of the closet. Neither of us could bear to see it again.

  In Annie Proulx’
s story, she writes, “What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.”

  TODAY I VISITED Deyrolle, the taxidermy shop in the seventh arrondissement on the rue du Bac, where one can buy a butterfly, beetle, baby lamb, or black bear. I came home with an Australian finch whose forehead, nape, and cap are pearl gray. He has black around the eyes, and his rump and underside are white, with pink flesh legs, and he wears a black bib.

  Like me, he avoids populated areas and prefers the woodlands. His song is a soft hoarse whistling, and his cry of alarm is strangely sweet. He eats mostly seeds, but also flying insects, ants, and spiders. He is a gregarious drinker, taking long sips. In order to preserve him, I must twice a year “gently and softly clean him with a napkin moistened with white gasoline.” I’ve named him Keats, because he reminds me of the sonnet:

  O Solitude! . . . it sure must be

  Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,

  When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

  Part IV

  THOUGH I HAVE a fear of heights, last night I rode La Grande Roue, the big wheel, in the Place de la Concorde, and afterward drank a glass of champagne to calm down. During the French Revolution the government erected a guillotine in the square and many important figures lost their heads there in front of cheering crowds. So it was given the name Concorde (meaning harmony, consensus, solidarity) after the convulsions of war. The wheel is situated at the entrance to the Tuileries Garden beside the giant Egyptian obelisk, where together they look like man and wife. The original wheel was built in 1900 and the cars were so large that they were used as homes for French families during World War I, when the region was devastated. With forty-two cars, it’s now the biggest wheel in France, and “green,” they say, with bright white LED lights and low CO2 emissions. Around and around and around I went, like a piece of chewing gum on a bicycle tire. But now and then, when my car rocked to and fro in the wind, it also felt like a cradle, and I could almost hear a voice singing, “There is no one, no one, but thee.”

  ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES (was I three?) is of sitting at a kitchen table in Marseille while eating a warm, buttery croissant dunked in my grandmother’s bowl of café au lait. It was adulthood I was tasting, and love. Every morning, in every French city and town, there is the endless shriek of steam whistling, as if from another century, through shiny stainless-steel espresso machines. This morning, standing at a nearby café bar, I listened across time as the boiling water, under pressure, was forced through finely ground beans, and my shot was poured into a little bowl with piping hot milk and served with a pyramid of sugar cubes on a tin plate, each square as flawlessly cut as a stone block made by a mason for an aqueduct or a temple.

  RÉVEILLONNER means to eat a dinner of saturnalian splendor on Christmas Eve, and I had my first réveillon many years ago with my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Gabriel, and his family in Marseille. Gabriel was a cobbler and sold shoes at the outdoor market, but his lungs were “like rotten sponges” from inhaling glue at the shoe factory, so he was living on a subsidy. Still, the meal dear Aunt Suzanne prepared was splendid.

  To start, my uncle and I drank pastis, a high-proof anise-flavored liqueur that we diluted with water. Pastis emerged following a ban on the highly addictive absinthe, which was once known as “the green fairy” because of its pretty color and powerful effects as a muse-like alcohol. “I want to dance with the green fairy,” I told my uncle, taking my first sips of pastis. Absinthe was also the beverage favored by Baudelaire, who might have said about it what he writes about wine in his poem “The Poison” (“[It] can conceal a sordid room, / In rich,miraculous disguise, / And make such porticoes arise. . . .”), and other poets, like Verlaine, though it was banned in 1915 because of its psychoactive effects.

  Our réveillon was served in small courses, including pâté, lobster, an assortment of cheeses, walnuts, hazelnuts, clementines, red wine, and champagne. Then, after dinner, Père Noël arrived with a sensible gift for everyone, though this was not the point of the gathering.

  YESTERDAY, my friend Jenny Holzer, the American artist, and I wandered around the Louvre hunting for the still life The Skate, by Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699–1779), in which a gutted ray fish with a human face hangs on a meat hook and is visited by a greedy cat. Chardin rarely left Paris and made a modest living producing work in various genres for whatever customers would pay. Eventually, Louis XV granted him a studio with living quarters at the Louvre.

  Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) admired the canvas so much that he painted his own version (Nature morte à la raie) after making pilgrimages to see it. I want to write poems that convey the same intense realism as this painting, in which Chardin proves that still life is not an inferior genre. He was breaking a mold. The work is meticulously observed, in the manner of Flemish painting, and unafraid of disgust. I like how food—an ugly sea creature—is its subject. No subject should be too low for a painting or a poem.

  But is it possible that Chardin sees blue in his still life when there is really white? If so, is there more truth in the crockery and vegetables than in the grimacing ray? I don’t think so, because a painting, like a poem, can have emotional truth whether or not it is based on fact. The imagination is god. Still, why do I love this painting so? Is it because it’s conventional while being thought provoking, too? Is it because it says something true in an atmosphere of beauty? Sometimes, when I look at art, all I see is ambition. And the same is true with poetry, when ambition is larger than talent. This, in part, is why I’m drawn to the sonnet, with its lean, muscular, human-scale body.

  MY FRIEND JENNY is making paintings based on declassified, redacted documents from the war in Afghanistan in which prisoners describe being forced to kneel in the snow for many days while a snow-and-water mix is poured on them, and how during interrogations they were repeatedly punched in the face, chest, and flank. The testimonies are painful to read, but—unexpectedly—there is a formal dignity and beauty to the calligraphy and brushwork of Jenny’s oil paintings. The handwriting reminds us that in the Islamic faith the written word is of central importance, and that on the earliest pages of the Koran the pen and the writer are glorified.

  Jenny and I wandered through the Louvre from one gallery to another, full of paintings by David, Ingres, and Géricault, and when we sat down on an old wooden bench to process what we’d seen, she told me the story of a foal that had been born that morning back home.

  A healthy, perfect filly, she had a palomino coat. Last Christmas, the foal’s half brother had sneaked out to help make her. “Incest works better with ponies,” Jenny said drily, showing me a picture in which the unsteady foal is still wet from the insides of her mother.

  Part V

  WALKING ALONG the Seine today, I found a monument to Thomas Jefferson, who first sailed to Paris in 1784 to negotiate with European powers. Taking a carriage drawn by horses, he traveled south to Aix-en-Provence as a private citizen, without servants, because he believed that when one traveled alone one reflected more. Jefferson had injured his wrist and wanted to try the mineral waters at Aix for its restoration. His six-foot-two frame must have stood out among the comparatively small Parisians. I like to think of him—with his red hair ruffled by the mistral—standing before the Maison Carrée (Square House) in Nîmes, where he found inspiration for the buildings he would design back home in Virginia. The Maison Carrée, eighty-two feet long and forty feet wide, isn’t really square but rectangular, and it is one of the best-preserved temples of the Roman world, built by the emperor Augustus around 19 BC to commemorate his adopted sons, Gaius and Lucius, who died as teenagers. The biographer and travel writer James Pope-Hennessy called the temple “echoing,” “dust-laden,” and “somehow far too old,” but Henry James wrote, “The Maison Carrée does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it.” Ford Ma
dox Ford compared it to reading the words that are “the most beautiful in the world.” One is certainly impressed by the temple’s versatility throughout the ages, since it has been a town hall, church, private house, market, and stable. Though the mineral waters didn’t ease Jefferson’s discomfort, he loved “the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine.” About the people, he said that you must have a “look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft.”

  When I was a young man still getting to know Mother’s family in Marseille, I found enchantment in the South of France, too, after having been raised rigidly in a military and Catholic household. Visiting the Maison Carrée—with its graceful edifice on a tall podium, with its single portico and six tall Corinthian columns, and with its rosettes and acanthus leaves carved out of limestone—I wonder if I didn’t see a metaphor for the sonnet, a form I love, with its mixture of passion and thought, its infrastructure of highs and lows, its volta and the idea of transformation, its asymmetry of lines, like the foliage of a tree over a trunk, and, most of all, its intensity. The Maison Carrée inspired the neoclassical Église de la Madeleine, in Paris.

  “JE N’AI PAS LES YEUX EN FACE DES TROUS,” my friend Claire said to me today, meaning, “I do not have my eyes in front of their holes.” Since having cataract surgery, she has not been herself, so I coaxed her out of her lonely apartment, and over a warm meal she reminisced about her father, who died of typhus and dysentery in Bergen-Belsen just five days before it was liberated in 1945. Her father was a miner’s son, an unusual background for a member of Parliament. But as a schoolteacher near Albi, he’d fallen under the spell of the charismatic Socialist Jean Jaurès, a great figure of pacifism on the eve of World War I and an architect of the Socialist Party as we know it today.