Full Moon Plays

 

We first see her near midnight a few blocks from our flat, high above l’Hôtel de Sens, down-turned eyes, mouth opened in song, cloud plumes scudding across her radiant face so fast you cannot tell if one of the three stars to the right might be an airplane. 

They’re taking down the Christmas lights on the Île St-Louis. From the Pont des Tournelles we can see the Cyclops of the Tour Eiffel scanning the midnight sky.

 

It’s been a day of plays. Bien sûr, it’s the Full Moon!

First, a comedy on the rue des Ancienne Comédie. Chrystine and I chat in French as she cuts my hair. Her husband, Marc, has a French client; their French is better than mine, by far.

In comes a woman from Mexico with her German boyfriend, bearing gifts. La Virgen de Guadalupe (in chocolate?). She speaks only Spanish. Her boyfriend speaks only German, with a little Spanish. She wants to convey to Marc the haircut her boyfriend wants, only Marc doesn’t speak Spanish.

Ah, but his client does. The German communicates to his girlfriend in Spanish. She tells Marc’s client what he wants in Spanish. Marc’s client translates it into French for him. Chrystine speaks no Spanish; I understand it, but mix it up too much with French now to try speaking. We listen. The communication is full of laughter, and finally everyone understands. The Mexican woman and I speak and I think she’s said she’s from Los Angeles, but no, Angeles is her last name. More laughter.

Next, a surreal drama: Richard and I are on a crosstown bus, late for a party in the 20^th arrondissement given by a street artist we dearly love, to honor his friends. We’re standing—the bus is crowded—when we hear the sounds of love-making, groaning, panting and moaning, over the p.a. system. Everyone glances around at each other—was that the bus driver, or are we picking up signals from some other, full moon, dimension?

A few minutes later, the bus driver announces on the p.a. that he’s annoyed with a young man standing near the back door. Everyone looks puzzled. Annoyed? Really? Et pourquoi ça?

The young man, who is tall and self-contained, shrugs, Qu’est qu’on peut faire?

More moaning sounds. There’s a ripple through the bus: do we have a demon bus driver here? Hmmmm…

The bus stops. I ask a French woman near the door what she thinks is going on.

She responds by calling out to the bus driver, Why are you bugging this man?

Street art © 2014 Fred Le Chevalier

The driver calls back in a baritone voice, It’s my bus; I can do whatever I want here.

The woman says, So you are the dictator, huh?

Oui, he says, C’est moi.

You certainly can do whatever you want, she says, but you might do it with a bit more grace.

Now, two North African-looking women at the front of the bus object to this woman’s calling the man’s authority into question, and shout at the French woman. The bus driver, his fans, and the woman at the back are going at it now.

Most of the other passengers laugh, or make that disapproving moue. Two Saharan African men roll their eyes, at either the voice of authority or the voice of rebellion.

And then we arrive at our stop on rue de Ménilmontant. All of us who disembark are laughing, laughing! Richard shakes hands with one of the African men. Good luck, they say in French. The bus to hell goes on.

Finally, a love story. Our friend, Fred, is seated at a long table surrounded by friends. He greets us warmly, makes introductions all around, shows us the buffet where we help ourselves to pasta, salad and tangy, salted feta straight from Greece. He pours us a good red wine. In the room at the back, an exhibit of Fred's artwork, the last day of the show.

Fred, the quintessential romantic, hovers close, protective, around his new girlfriend, whom many of us are meeting for the first time, pouring her wine, bringing one arm around her to do so like a chevalier sommelier.

Two gorgeous women who look like sisters, with bangs and deep red lipstick, turn out to be, not sisters, but band mates for a punk band who write their own feminist lyrics.

A screenwriter and her two friends arrive. Richard and I talk to her about our friend, John Truby’s screenwriting class coming next week to Paris. Oui! She knows his name, would like to take the class, but is about to start a new job.

Next to me, Fred’s oldest friend, Estelle, a lawyer, and I talk about vision quests and love.

A lately arrived artist, Doudou, has an open face, great warmth. He and Richard like each other, stumble through French to a few laughs.

Street Art © 2014 Fred Le Chevalier

But it’s now time for our trek across town home. We tell these new friends it will be an hour walk, and to a person, they are amazed. "Walk? An hour?" In a land of motor scooters and incredible public transportation, the thought of a midnight walk across Paris seems alien to the natives.  

The hour walk clears the head of wine, but not the giddiness of this full moon, full of drama day and night in Paris: language drama, attitude drama and the best kind of drama, gathering with friends to celebrate art and love. 

Street art © 2014 Fred Le Chevalier 

Message to Jane

Image of the Milky Way by G. Brammer / ESA / NASA

Message to Jane

Where are you now, Jane?
Have you sailed to the Milky Way?
Do you dwell in the heart of our galaxy,
winking at us from the constellation Sagittarius?

Do you know what you are to me?
Can you feel my gratitude?
I see you walking in beauty still
at home in the immensity,

visiting me in dreams.
Today is your birth day
but you are beyond measure,
pouring your light into the eternal flow.

13 December 2013

On Sadness, Joy, Writing, Hélène Cixous, Montaigne, Mothers and Myth

After the saddest year of my life (but was it, really? I ask myself, and answer, Yes, it was), I was surprised tonight to feel the joy returning. That old version of joy, of life as overflowing abundance. First, Richard and I went away for four days to Amsterdam. More on that in a later post. 

A leisurely break, a honeymoon of sorts, followed by fresh energy for each of us in our work. The day after we returned to Paris, I sent off a chapter of my novel to a literary magazine. It’s strange, the shift, a new kind of detachment from the results of submitting work, a new kind of unwavering resolve.

I’ve had many professions, U.C. Berkeley language lab, tutor for the blind, model, cook on a schooner, waitress, bookseller in Sausalito, Cambridge and NYC, real estate agent, on-the-road art dealer, teacher of Greek myth.

As an art dealer, I learned two things: finding the right gatekeeper is a simple matter of love—the artist’s sensibility resonating with that of the dealer/agent/buyer. And the value of the best art often takes people the longest to see.  

My favorite of the artists I carried was invisible for a full year to everyone to whom I showed paintings, until, one day in my suite at Los Angeles' Chateau Marmont Hotel, a couple of top collectors walked in and flipped over this artist’s work. A few minutes later, they were in the hallway conferring, and minutes later, writing a big fat check. No accident that they did not need my vote of confidence in their taste (as many collectors did).

The structure of my novel is unorthodox, but the characters will not allow me to change it. Last night, after two-and-a-half hours in my favorite café, doing final editing and finishing chapter nine, the young couple next to me and I struck up a conversation. They asked me what I was writing. I told them (very briefly), and added (since they were Greek) that its structure was based on Greek myth. And then the woman and I began to talk about what is so wonderful about Greek mythology. (After a couple of millennia of strict monotheism in Greece, I am always surprised—delighted!—to encounter a Greek person, an engineer, no less, who loves Greek myth.) We agreed on three things: it represents divinity that is both male and female; these gods and goddesses are like human characters, with all their strengths and flaws; and it is essentially stories. I left the café feeling I'd been given a message, a gift.

And then tonight! Yow. Hélène Cixous read from her latest book, Twists and Turns in the Heart’s Antarctic, at Shakespeare and Company bookstore. First, her translator, Beverley Bie Brahic, read an English translation; then Cixous followed with the original in French. The text was poetic fiction, an essay, an epic, a Greek myth, about a daughter named Hélène, a brother, O., with whom she has a murderous relationship, and their 100-year-old mother, Eve. The images were closely observed, intimate; the metaphor, of Euridice (the mother) following Orpheus (the daughter/writer) shakily down some stairs. Stunning writing.

 

And this was peculiar, an image that sounded wonderful in English, the mother’s recent bond with a teddy bear, sounded slightly sentimental in French. In addition to the gorgeous writing, I felt a longing to live closer to my mother, the pain of being far from home soil, a pang of admiration-envy of my two sisters and brother who live so close to her. (For everything, there is a price, and this is the price for me of living in Paris.)

I have loved Hélène Cixous’s work for years. I drew closer, standing in the doorway, as H. C. answered questions after the reading. A beautiful face, big ears, long nose, Algerian-French, German Ashkenazi Jewish on her mother’s side, Pied-Noir Sephardic Jewish on her father’s. A fez cap, gray-green cardigan and scarf over a black sweater. A relaxed and delicate face. Nefertiti eyeliner. She looked a bit like Nefertiti.

She could not “enter” France for years, found the French too bourgeois, “carpeted,” until she found the door. That door was the tower of the small castle that had once belonged to the great essayist, Montaigne, in the town of the same name. His writing room was about the size of the room in which we were gathered. A view from the small windows of vastness, reminding her of Goethe’s view in Strasbourg. She felt the imprint of the books that had once surrounded him, though they are long gone.

 

She now goes back to visit Montaigne’s tower once a year for inspiration. Of course, she says, you have to have read all of Montaigne’s essays for it to mean anything. Important things happened in this tower where he wrote. Kings visited the writer there, among them, King Henri IV, the first Protestant king of France. Henri IV, like Nelson Mandela, was a mediator, mediating between the Protestants and Catholics. 

In response to a question about why she so often used the first person in her writing, Cixous said, the self is multiple, legion. (Yes! as are the forms of the divine, which is no longer entirely “out there,” or “up there,” but envisioned now as inside us, aspects of the collective unconscious.)

The translator discussed a French word haimé, a word Cixous invented by joining haïr, "to hate," to aimer, "to love." She struggled to find a graceful equivalent in English, and settled for "hateloved."

I asked Alex to save me a copy of Twists and Turns, and bolted out of Shakespeare and into the street, too happy to wait in line. I called our favorite restaurant to see if they had a table for one. “Oui, Karine!” said David. Had hareng with potatoes and carrots, and warm goat’s cheese on tiny pieces of toast. Then as the restaurant filled with no one but French-speaking diners who were spilling over with exuberance tonight, I left to walk to my (second-)fave café to write this letter to you.

 

A Few Things I've Learned from Living in France, In No Particular Order

 

1. To wear skirts again.
   
   
2. Fifteen ways to wear a scarf.
    
3. To embrace cold weather.
    
4. To pay attention to seasons for various foods.
   
   
   
   
   
5. To commiserate with French women on the terrible spatial organization of most large markets in Paris, and the remodel hasn’t changed a thing.
    
6. To weigh vegetables and put little stickers on them before going to the cash register.
   
   
   
7. To walk and walk and walk.
    
8. And to sit in cafes, enjoying the theater all around you.
   
   
   
   
   
9. To live (quite easily) without a car.
    
10. That when your melancholic man says there is only one thing that prevents his happiness and it is having to drive everywhere, and that if he lived in Paris and could ditch the car, all would be well, you should believe him.
    
    
    
     
11. That when you tell him you cannot live without your entire library, and that giving away 2/3rds of it will simply mean that you’ll have to replace it all after you move, he should believe you.
    
    
    
    
     
12. To say goodbye to Marley, and accept that no other cat will do.
     
13. That your greatest fear about living in another country, losing touch with family and friends, is easily solved by airplanes, phone calls, e-mail and Facebook.
     
14. That having international friends is a good idea.
    
    
    
    
     
15. That the street art scene is the most alive visual art in France now, and perhaps in most of the western world.
     
16. That it is possible to understand a French washing machine by living with it for three years, consulting a plumber twice, and having a Darty technician come to your home and explain that two soap tablets in the tray are appropriate for a regular wash, but only one can be used for a delicate cycle, and must be placed, not in the tray, but in the machine, and then the water will not leak all over the floor.
     
17. There is no cure for the French dryer sounding like a jet airplane taking off.
    
    
    
     
18. There is no cure for the French love of bureaucracy.
     
19. It takes a year to stop sampling all 365 French cheeses before you can respect your arteries and get a grip.
     
20. You can laugh at your doctor when she laughs at you for suggesting that sugar might be bad for your health. After all, she is French.
    
    
21. You can finally listen to your L.A. healer, Dr. Mao, and substitute green tea for coffee and still write.
     
22. You can write through grief, you can keep working in spite of losing the woman with whom you are closest on earth, your sister, Jane.
    
    
    
     
23. Socialism is fantastic for mothers and families and anyone who is vulnerable (let’s just say, most of us), but it’s not good for entrepreneurs.
     
24. But the French are right, you need to take weekends off and you need to, regularly, get out of town.
     
25. There are cultures where literature is so important that you can hear it discussed by writers and critics every night on TV if you want.
    
    
    
    
     
26. Ancient is beautiful, and living in a modern city in harmony with the beauty of the distant past increases the power of a place.
     
27. Paris is our city, but the U.S. is our country. We can see our own country more clearly from afar, its craziness (guns, greed, hubris and politics), but also its beauty (energy, resourcefulness, freedom of expression, warmth).

 

It's Just a Kiss Away

 

I decided to swing by Shakespeare and Company at the beginning of my walk. I'd quickly pay for the book of poems I'd ordered from the U.S., Anna Journey's, Vulgar Remedies. But there was a crowd in front of the bookstore. The sign said Halloween Celebration of Dracula. Book Purchases after the Event. 

Ah, rats! It was already too crowded inside to enter. But here was Ben at the door, asking me if I wanted to get in. And Alex asking if I'd come by to pick up my order. Mutual appreciation: how we all love it. Alex went in and rang up the book and brought it outside to me.

I'd now heard a bit of Jacques Sirgent, of Paris' Musée des Vampires, speaking over the loudspeaker about Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula. Compelling, but I needed a walk more. Maybe I'd stop by on the way home.

Halloween was in the air beyond the bookstore, too. At Place St.-Michel, two young men with guitars were playing Sympathy for the Devil. Above the fountain, Saint Michel was vanquishing the devil, with two seated dragons to either side. I remembered reading that "dracul" in Romanian means "the dragon" (drac "dragon" and ul "the") and that later the word meant "the devil."

On rue St. André-des-Arts, I passed a Greek restaurant open to the street. A man stood in his stall next to a giant hanging slab of meat, his face so red and immobile, he looked like a figure in a wax museum.

I walked for an hour, and circled back around to join the crowd in front of Shakespeare and Company. Alex and Ben sat in chairs in front of the shop, their backs to the door. Jacques Sirgent's voice was spinning strange tales.

Sirgent asked if anyone knew why Bram Stoker set the tale in London. Apparently no one did. Because, he said, it was the wickedest city in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century; London had the highest rate of women murdering their babies.

And why was that? Young women who came from the country to work as maids and nannies in the houses of the rich were raped by their employers. Because unmarried pregnancies were considered so shameful at the time, the women would give birth and flush the babies down the toilet. The women who were caught were arrested. But since it was in neither the perpetrator's nor the victim's interests that the information be published, the women were sentenced to prison for three years, and released after one year. That's crime times three: Woman raped, child murdered, woman imprisoned. Victim times three.

I looked up at the gold-framed portrait of Shakespeare above the window. A red leaf had landed on the bottom of the frame. A spider web fanned down from the roof to the top of the frame. Of course I noticed it--we'd been dusting all our bookshelves earlier that day.

Why were vampires invisible in mirrors? asked Monsieur Sirgent, and answered his own question with a question: could it be because the vampire represents the darkness inside all of us? Our own inner Dracula? And, he continued, there was a connection to the troubadour love tradition. At one time in Europe, all love relationships were sealed with the blood of the couple.

I read a few of Anna Journey's poems later that night. Here's a bloody love poem for you from her book:

Vulgar Remedies: Tooth and Salt

After extraction, a tooth is smothered

in salt and burned to stop a wild

animal from finding it. Because if

a fox gnawed it you'd grow a grey

fang and if a bear chewed it you'd wear

its yellow snaggletooth. You've taken me

to the exhibit called Vulgar Remedies: Belief,

Knowledge and Hypersymbolic

Cognition in L.A.'s Museum

of Jurassic Technology. We'd married three

weeks earlier on a seaside cliff. If

a person doesn't burn

her childhood teeth, I read on the exhibit's

glass case, she's cursed to search for them

after death in a pail of blood. Suddenly,

I knew what I should've written

in my wedding vow: how forever feels

too vague a word, that I'll stay

beside you until we rise in the shine

of our fangs, our silver pails

filled with blood. We'll recover

all we've lost: our bodies, the blue-slate

roof of our home, each frail and traitorous,

old, unsalted bone.

Poem (c) 2013 by Anna Journey.