Pre Ambles on Imps

“Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman”—John Berger, Selected Essays.  I imagine that man sweats, tantalized; his sweat becomes the Seine, and Paris, contretemps gender-hopping, bats her eyelashes, full of lights.  Whatever is going on here, it must involve the illusions or clarifications of ecstasy.

Berger also insists that the artist’s way of looking “ increases our awareness of our own potentiality.”  Because so-and-so has now framed it this way, the universe does a tap-dance, when you had experienced said universe as merely shuffling along in holey Keds. Why we need, and I mean need, art.

The aperture shifts; life is capable of being re-seen.

But as artist, to worry that what you are writing must be important, or somehow matter, must shift somebody’s seeing, is a worry that can instantly crush the tip of your moving pen.   It’s the swift stomp of a Jolly Green Giant on a not-so-Jolly day, on which lording over the frozen pea-crop has made him more of a melancholic than megalomaniac.  The pen then bleeds its blackening blood, as when a jugular is tampered with.

Better to put the question of importance onto one of the delicate wooden sailboats on a leash in the public park of Paris, hand if off to a local kid to drag round and round the circumference of the excitable fountain.  The kid will be thrilled, while you can continue unperturbed on your tryst with your page, that placeless space.

For the psyche of the page is uncontained in an inverse proportion to its absolute physical limit.  Here, you will deposit yourself at the mercy of the familiar conclusion that being alive makes, radically and rudely, no sense at all.  In fact, it is a beguiling experience in the first place, so thank goddess someone went and invented the normalcy of pizza, which exists in every country like the sky exists in every country.

to tree or not to tree

Arrivals are a part of Departure, the Butt-end part: Views of Aix

We stay on a winding street, which curls up from a bridge Cezanne particularly loved. On the side of the shoulder-less road, where one harrows with speeding compact cars, lives a stoic Titan’s Bonsai with a towering Afro.  Good thing it is kosher to tell your boyfriend you’re in love with a tree, because he knows you won’t ever, exactly, leave him for it.  Our front yard, tickled by the mistral, has a cedar tree as mayor; I fall in love with this one too, fickle-hearted arborophiliac.  But tell me: what woman can resist a tree in a powerful position?  The cedar gesticulates as if an Italian explaining an opera plot to another deaf Italian.

There are, in fact, many Italians who live here in Aix-en-Provence, or so says our delightful host, Jacques.   Jacques also tells us that the French complain and complain about the current proliferation of Franglaise.  But, truth is, France lent us the words in the first place! So it is rather like recalling tires: Come home to Mama, you funky English bastards! France calls.  And the Anglophone lexicon takes off running.

To not at least attempt to learn the language of the place where I am strikes me as unforgivable, as if I were, by ignorance, tacitly authorizing a (purely) linguistic genocide.  And so for three months, caught up in other mechanics of living, I shyly avoided French.  Now, in the space of a week, I invite it in, to excess: a language binge.  My head swims with words that won’t combine symbiotically.  The entire French vocabulary is at a seventh grade dance, publicly and pubic-ly exhilarated, and yet hugging the Doritos bowl instead of each other. Moi and aussi in contractual avoidance; etre and avoir just puked bright orange in the bathroom. The prepositions dans and en have phoned their mother, from the last working payphone on earth, to please come take them home.   The pages of the dictionary flap in the illiterate wind.

flossing the toes

Stretches

Weeks later, J reads aloud from an interview with Jim Harrison who reports that, honestly, much of life is not disappointing, but vast, open spaces; “The character in [his] book, Home, feels a delicious and particular sense of nothing.”  When one travels, those same vacant interstices either yawn or utterly evaporate.  It is easy to feel that one, as a particular being, is a palpable stretch of nothing (see note above, on importance).  But it is easy to feel the opposite, too; life is so congested with experiences that spaces of nothingness must be possible only in the hereafter, wherever here and after might be.  Or perhaps this is only true for one who lives in cities.

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