by Henri Cole
“Everything has been said about these great churches,” Rilke wrote. “Victor Hugo penned some memorable pages on Notre-Dame in Paris, and yet the action of these cathedrals continues to exert itself, uncannily alive, inviolate, mysterious, surpassing the power of words. Notre-Dame grows each day, each time you see it again it seems even larger.” Rilke, with his youthful anxiety, found Paris to be “rushing headlong out of orbit, like a planet, toward some terrible cataclysm.” During his first days, all he saw behind the trees of the long avenues were “hospitals all over the place” and “long monotonous buildings.” He clung to the few things he regarded as different, like “the great old man,” Rodin, with whom things would end badly, and the sumptuous statue of Nike of Samothrace, at the Louvre, which made him feel the breath of Greece instead of the heavy, oppressive, mournful, solitary, dead air of Paris.
THIS EVENING AT MASS, there was a baptism of a small child, and I thought about how Rilke found Paris’s churches to be closer to nature than the public gardens, which were, for him, too much like works of art. Instead, he deemed the city’s big churches to be “uncannily alive,” with their solitude and calm that is “inviolate,” even in the middle of the metropolis. During our church service, a white-robed monk dipped the naked baby into a baptismal font three times, bathing him with water that his parents had brought from the Jordan River, which flows through Israel and Palestine. Then the baby—like a fish gripped at its head and foot—was lifted up into the altar’s bright spotlight so that all of us in the congregation could see his shining pink flesh.
After dusk, before the vespers candles are lit, I—an agnostic—always feel alone in the darkness of that heap of crumbling stone. A hand held in front of my face is invisible in the dank dark, where the only real light is the light of the imagination—until morning, when sunlight once again penetrates the stained-glass windows of the apostles, among them Matthew, the evangelist, who said, “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life.” After the religious service, out in the square, there was a great drama after a handsome black-and-white duck escaped from a butcher’s shop. Three men with ladders, brooms, and stones were trying to capture the frightened creature, which plainly understood that it was soon to be eaten for Sunday dinner. I remembered the Jean de La Fontaine fable in which a drunken cook mistakenly thrusts a swan instead of a duck into his stew pot, and just as he is on the verge of cooking him, the swan’s melodic death song forces the cook to open his bleary eyes (“What have I done?”). A sensible man would never put such a fine crooner in his soup, he thinks. The lesson of the fable is that, when confronted with danger, a song (or poem) doesn’t do any harm at all.
MY FAMILY’S FIRST PET, when I was a boy, was a Siamese cat named Chou-Chou, which means “little cabbage,” though Chou-Chou was a muscular hunter who roamed the streets every night and left his trophies—lifeless sparrows and robins, mostly—on our doorstep. Sadly, one day, he didn’t return to us. Half a century later, to honor him, I’ve translated (from the French) an essay by Rilke about cats, written to accompany a suite of black ink drawings by his eleven-year-old friend Balthasar Klossowski, who became the Polish French modernist artist Balthus, whose mother was Rilke’s friend. When Balthus was a boy, he adopted a stray cat named Mitsou, and when the beloved Mitsou mysteriously disappeared, Balthus was so heartbroken that he commemorated the relationship in forty expressive drawings, which delighted Rilke—a sort of father figure—so much that he arranged for their publication. Rilke’s introduction begins:
Who knows cats? Is it possible that you really only claim to know them? I admit that for me their existence has always been a fairly risky proposition.
Animals, of course, must enter our world a little in order to belong to it. It is necessary for them to accept, no matter how small a part, our way of life and to tolerate it; otherwise, being either hostile or timid, they will grasp the distance between us, and this will become the basis of their connection.
Look at the dogs: their confident and admiring attitude is such that some of them appear to have renounced the oldest traditions of dogdom in order to worship our own customs and even our foibles. It is just this which renders them tragic and noble. Their choice to accept us forces them to dwell, so to speak, at the limits of their real natures, which they continually transcend with their human gazes and melancholy snouts.
But what is the demeanor of cats?—Cats are cats, briefly put, and their world is the world of cats through and through. They look at us, you say? But can you ever really know if they deign to hold your insignificant image for even a moment at the back of their retinas? Fixating on us, might they in fact be magically erasing us from their already full pupils? It is true that some of us let ourselves be taken in by their insistent and electric caresses. But these people should remember the strange, abrupt manner in which their favorite animal, distracted, turns off these effusions, which they’d presumed to be reciprocal. Even the privileged few, allowed close to cats, are rejected and disavowed many times.
RILKE WROTE in a letter, “The life of great men is a road bristling with thorns, for they are utterly dedicated to their art. Their own life is like an atrophied organ for which they have no further use.” Is it possible for a writer to love words more than life, I wonder? I don’t want my life to be an atrophied organ. I don’t want to be sidetracked from my dreams, like my father who enlisted as a soldier to escape the life of a sharecropper. Striving to assemble language into art, I don’t have an agenda for poetry, though I believe that too much skill can be boring in art.
A knack for writing verse doesn’t necessarily make one a good poet. What defines a poet is a certain universal quality that entails being attuned to the secret vibrations of the world; this does not always include a gift for versification, which is an aptitude practiced by many who are not truly poets.
James Lord was—to me—a remarkable man whose life did not become atrophied, though his friends found him secretive and devious. He grasped the complex nature of artistic inspiration. He was cultivated without being a snob because he did not see the world hierarchically. There are drawings of him by the willfully enigmatic Balthus, whom he visited at his home, Château de Chassy, in Burgundy, where the sketches were completed—the first in fifteen or twenty minutes, then a second and a third, the final portrait, according to James, “decidedly the best.” “Well, now, my dear Jim, we shall have our little session of posing, shall we not?” Balthus had said to him when he came down from his studio carrying a large sketchbook and a handful of pencils. “Just sit in that armchair and face me. Good. Like that. And lower your head.” James thought that the sketches were among Balthus’s finest portrait drawings, and when he was leaving the château, Balthus told him, “You came all this way to pose for me, and I’ve very, very rarely done drawings of men. So it’s really I who owe you a favor. You must take all three and be on your way.” It was as if the drawings were a record not just of James’s youthful profile but also of the courteous nobleman Balthus’s revelation of something within himself, resulting from James’s intrusion into his solitary existence. “Balthus was a loner,” James insisted, a lordly, romantic loner, “who thought of the artist as a heroic, mythic figure.”
THE FIRST TIME I came to Paris, I was a little boy, and the memories I have come from my family’s Super 8 movies. In one, we are on a tour boat on the Seine, and I am seated next to my handsome father, who is wearing a summer suit with a white shirt buttoned at his throat. He is looking downward pensively. I am wearing a zippered gray jacket and squinting in the sunlight toward the camera. My older brother stands behind us with a sullen face. Death, fear, dream, and poetry are far away from the little boy I am. At the age of three, do I even have a self ? If so, how I must be striving to not be annihilated by Paris, which I find so overwhelming. My face looks solitary and calm. Behind us, the Seine is dark, reflecting the sunlight like a black mirror, instead of t
he murky gray water I crisscross in my comings and goings each day. The statues, parks, churches, fountains, and monuments await my young family and me. What perplexing messages memories can yield. As I write this, their odors, their shadows, and their sweet music are almost too much to bear.
Part XIII
SOMETIMES ROSES—especially the velvety crimson ones, with red-bronze leaves—remind me of the 1980s, when I lived in New York City during the AIDS epidemic. They make me remember chaos and fear in connection with the symptoms—fevers, chills, headaches, diarrhea, swollen glands, muscular aches, fatigue, weight loss, thrush, insomnia, and the lesions, which, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, bore a stigma.
But the neat, perfectly formed, soft-domed roses also remind me of hybrid vigor, or heterosis, a term used in genetics. Hybrid vigor hypothesizes that crossbred plants, animals, and humans are genetically superior to their parents, since weak, undesirable, deleterious, recessive genes, which might be harmful, are suppressed. Hybrid vigor can fortify a voluptuous rose’s seventy small petals against beetles and disease, just as it can fortify and strengthen a man or a woman against the effects of an incurable virus.
And sometimes, pressing my nose into the dark-crimson button eye of a rose, I think of Black Saturday and the weird, frightening stigmata of Christ. On Black Saturday, the day before Easter, the “Harrowing of Hell” is said to have occurred, and Jesus descended into the underworld to visit the realm of the dead and to rescue the good men and women held captive there, not unlike the poet Orpheus seeking his beloved Eurydice.
WHEN I WRITE about flowers, I think I am trying to find out what I really feel, so there are digressions and sometimes incoherence. But flowers open me up and smash the water that is frozen inside me. As John Ashbery says, “We are all confessional poets sometimes. That is, we sometimes write about our personal experiences. And there should be no stigma attached to this.” In French, the word rose (from the Latin rosa) means both the woody perennial and the color pink. In Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful unpublished draft “Vague Poem,” she is smashed open, too, while playing with the confusion between rock roses and rose-rock quartz. The fragment concludes, euphorically, with an intimate and erotic chant affirming the female body:
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—
In these lines, the handsome rose-rock quartz merges in Bishop’s thoughts with pink rock roses, which then call to mind the desirable flesh of her beloved. Rock roses are showy flowers, with five petals crumpled in the bud. They are short-lived, bisexual, and solitary. There is rose imagery in other memorable Bishop poems, too. In “The Fish,” the brown skin of a caught fish is described as ancient wallpaper with “shapes like full-blown roses.” And in “Cirque d’Hiver,” about a mechanical toy circus horse, the little dancer on his back has “artificial roses” sewn across her skirt and bodice, and “Above her head she poses / another spray of artificial roses.” As the toy flits across the floor, the dancer’s body and soul are pierced again and again by a tiny pole, and the roses are an evocation of her femininity.
“Poetry bloweth where it listeth. It should never be thought of as a practical solution to life’s mess. Its value is in its total uselessness,” Ashbery has said. “It’s the roses we are always being urged to stop and smell.”
IN PARIS, during the early part of the nineteenth century, there was rosomania, resulting from the first wife of Napoleon, Joséphine, who was a passionate gardener. After she was replaced by a younger wife, who was of royal lineage and could give Napoleon an heir, Joséphine lived at the Château de Malmaison (House of Misfortune), seven miles west of central Paris, where she transformed the dilapidated estate’s plain surroundings into a glorious garden with more than two hundred varieties of roses. Plants were brought from England and China, and Joséphine’s enthusiasm was so infectious that between 1810 and 1830, roses reached the height of popularity and France became a center for their hybridization.
Even the way that roses develop their petals into blossoms was reconceived, and the flowers were induced to repeat-blossom many times in a season and last longer once they were cut and displayed in a vase. But after Joséphine’s death, at only fifty-one—from pneumonia, after a walk in her garden—Malmaison fell into decline, the grounds were sold off piecemeal, the roses dug up by thieves, and all the traces of the imperial garden vanished. Joséphine’s real name, in fact, was Rose, but Napoleon wanted her to have a more regal-sounding one. Though she lived with emus, black swans, sheep, gazelles, antelopes, and llamas at Malmaison, it is said she died of a broken heart.
WHAT STRANGE aphrodisiacal powers the roses at my local florist seem to have. With their deep cups and wide rosettes and vigorous upright branches and tight inner petals, I cannot resist bringing them home as often as I can afford them. In Keats’s long poem “Lamia,” written in 1819, about a boy looking for a girl and a girl looking for a boy, the darker side of truth and eroticism is explored with mild sadomasochistic pleasure. Lycius says to Lamia,
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
And in Louise Glück’s hauntingly inward collection The Wild Iris, a book of rapture, a white rose’s monologue touches on religious motifs of suffering, death, and resurrection. Observing humans in the distance, the white rose presents a little spiritual meditation:
All night the slender branches of the tree
shift and rustle at the bright window.
Explain my life to me, you who make no sign,
though I call out to you in the night:
I am not like you, I have only
my body for a voice; I can’t
disappear into silence—
(from “The White Rose”)
Glück is a lyric poet in the line of the metaphysical poets, like George Herbert, who also used flowers as images of the soul, and the poems in her book have a despairing, vatic power.
In Paris, each day I am aware of the presence of roses everywhere—in the dark red tips of the matchsticks I light the gas stove with, in the pretty pink blouse of my neighbor on the birdcage elevator, and in the soft hues of lampshades, illuminated in the windows at night across the street from where I live.
THE MOST-READ and most-translated book in the French language is The Little Prince, a poetic children’s story for adults by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry about a pilot, stranded in the desert, who meets a prince fallen from an asteroid. I read the book when I was a boy, looking up every word to understand its French meaning. In this idealistic tale, roses are a symbol of something good inside us that we must struggle to preserve because it is ephemeral, like a flame in a lamp that must be protected from the wind. Without this rose, we would be empty and no one would want us. Saint-Exupéry’s story teaches us that sometimes the things that are the most essential in life are invisible.
Each of us has a rose that must be nurtured. It is a symbol of the spirit in our bodies. We cannot make it up. It is not a habit. Crudely stated, without it we are merely perfected corpses. A poet at twenty is twenty. A poet at forty is a poet, Lord Byron said. But what is a poet later on in life? If language is the poet’s medium, its suggestive powers must be used together with the poet’s biological presence to make something pure, something more logical than deductive thought, something comprised of language without which we cannot seem to have lived.
Sometimes, I have the strange sense that my poems are like small bodies whose validity is without savor unless they can pierce the membrane of normal existence. Because the amount of poetry that dies away is enormous, I must risk failure while striving to make something new, an original kind of rose, perhaps, in the book of roses, which climbs, and is shapely,
and durable, and fragrant, too.
Part XIV
I LOVE THE STORY of Apollo, which is the story of a god born in a child’s body, and of his growth and learning. In 1928, the choreographer George Balanchine made a dance for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that retells the Greek myth. It opened at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, in Paris, and was a turning point in Balanchine’s career, though he was only twenty-four. In his revised version, three Muses—Calliope (poetry), Polyhymnia (mime), and Terpsichore (dance)—teach Apollo what there is to know. Not surprisingly, the Muse of dance gives him the most, and the two perform a pas de deux (literally “step of two”). Like Apollo, the Muses are the children of Zeus, so his education is led by his half sisters. It is one of the only Balanchine ballets in which a male dancer is highlighted, and every male dancer aspires to it. Balanchine liked speed, but men don’t have this, so in his ballets the male dancers usually support the women in the company, who have small faces, long necks, little heads, longish arms, and even longer legs. Balanchine loved tall dancers—elongated and stretched out—because there is much more of them to see.
