retreat

A little road in the monastery complex, up in the mountains, Notre-Dame du Laus, a place of christian pilgrimage, and probably the only standing showers in all of France. At least the only ones I’ve seen. Mostly they have these tiny cubic bath-tubs, that are waist-high (for me) off the ground, and so deep that in order to get inside, I have to lose my balance. Very inconvenient.

This pilgrimage hostel is very nice…also for the morning quiet, fresh air, and view. And roosters pointing out that the sun has risen, which can be a little *early* sometimes.

Blah-di-blah. But this is quite charming, isn’t it?

blue skies

Road and mountain range from the monastery towards the city of Gap.

I didn’t think I had any other photos than the dusk one, but these are a little bit of alpine France, a lovely corner of the country, and in the cheerful daytime.

As the postcard says… “wish you were here”…

the Alps

Coming back from a family reunion in Gap, in the Alps today, on the train…and the beauty of the landscape hits me, from either side of the train. I am making mental notes of dazzling places to return to, deserted, mountainous, shimmering. In between two snow-capped mountains, the sun shines, and valleys of green cascade down from the peaks, along the flanks of the range. If you blink, you miss the rushing river, snows melting from the heights, cascading down along the rocks, past ancient farm houses.

Here, a ruin from centuries ago, stands on a peak. There, the names of farmers is painted along random stone walls on a hill, in giant letters, washed away by fifty years.

The Alps, all around us when I was in Gap, are in my mind. I was standing in the parking lot of the supermarket, with snow-covered peaks all around, breathing in the crisp mountain air, thinking with a sigh of the grey city I was returning to.

We stayed in a place of pilgrimage (where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a peasant woman for 50 consecutive years in the 17th century), on our way to Gap. A beautiful, serene monastery, far away from everything, nested in the mountains. And I woke up in the morning to the clearest blue sky I had seen in a long time.

The landscape flattened, over the next few hours. Eventually, the mountains turned to hills, and we left the passionate peaks for tamer hills, then flat-lands, fertile, still, with fields and houses, and grazing cattle, and I eventually read my papers.

The train arrived in Paris, and the people were well-dressed again. The placed was bigger, more crowded, faster, there were lots of people, and I looked behind me. No mountains, no snow peaks.

I made my way into the tunnels, not having seen the sky, waited with the hundreds for a train that was delayed, and started thinking of how cheap 5 bedroom flats were down there, down south, in the Alps, where my family lives.

And why am I here? Couldn’t I just go there? etc. etc. etc. Thinking…well, what’s good about this place, anyway? when, all of a sudden, the little girl next to me, sitting on her mom’s lap, looked at me, and smiled. She reached down, (probably thinking she was grabbing her mom’s hand) and tightened her little warm grip on my index finger, squeezing, and fell asleep.

I laughed, and pulled the “wrong” index finger from her nice little grip, and thought, well….this won’t happen in the Alps. For one, there’s not much public transportation (and how miserable I would be without public transportation) and for the other..this is the place I choose to be. Maybe it’s choosing me back, but I have to give it a shot to know, either way.

endless pairs of things

” The world is a Noah’s ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconciliable and inseparable. And heat will always long for cold, and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.”
-Diane Arbus

Maybe it isn’t so much nostalgia as balance. But nostalgia is such a beautiful word.

The cover of my weekend magazine reads:

TOMORROW:
HAVING THE BABY WITHOUT THE PREGNANCY

Imagine that kind of unutterable nostalgia. A world without wombs? They say it’s only decades away, now. Are we, as a society, becoming that far removed from anything approaching physical pain or death that we are willing to completely thwart nature?

I find very few things as beautiful as the relationship between a mother and baby during pregnancy, brestfeeding. Maybe it’s the romantic, maybe even the nostalgic in me. Maybe it’s also the abstract of that notion. I don’t have a kid, I haven’t gone through preganancy, childbirth and breasfeeding.

Science is miraculous. I imagine the joy of mothers who could not carry a child due to a uterine dysfunction, finally able to have their own child through ectogenesis (pregnancy outside the mother’s womb). But the article makes a good point, that many women will choose to go this route. Why deform my body? some may ask. Why risk discomfort for nine months, and possibly death at childbirth?

Of course, as with all articles on scientific prognostics, it makes claims like “the face of womanhood is about to change” and states that the biblical curse of “in pain thou shalt bring forth children” are finally eradicated from our lives. It says that now the traditional differences between men and women will no longer exist, since women won’t carry the children, then definitions of what is male and what is female are to change, as well.

They talk of “post-humanity”, the future of a self-defined human race, perhaps.

I don’t know. At every moment in our collective history we’re standing in a state of semi-confusion as to the current advancements of science, the future of mankind, what is real, where are we going etc. and we have hosts of brilliant thinkers postulating, hypothesizing, guessing, in short.

But imagine…none of your close friends have had a pregnancy, and you’re faced with the choice: same baby, no pain, no birth.

What do you do?

I wonder what an entire generation of womb-less birth-less babies will be like. That’s interesting to me. I wonder what that would be like, never to have been born. Would the ties between mother and child be the same? what about breast-feeding?

The world is a Noah’s Ark, sailing over its own floods, charting a course in troubled waters, and somehow, it’s getting somewhere. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, and whichever way we choose to do it. But one thing is for certain, science is definitely very entertaining. It’s one of the few things that pushes us to thinkabout our beliefs, our values, our understanding of life.

I can imagine lots of things, but I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be alive without science at our fingertips. I had a friend in college who was a medievalist, arguing that the world was better off in the middle ages, when it could still dream and every magical occurrence hadn’t been explained away by science.

Life was better when the sun wasn’t an incandescent mass of gas, life was better when we were superstitious and looked in awe at the heavens, life was better when we didn’t look for the tire tracks on the moon….etc.

I like this life, there is still plenty of magic to go around, and as a bonus, we get to bang our heads against impossible things to grasp. We get to expand with each new discovery, and no matter how hard those scientists work…they still don’t have the simplest answers.

I bet you they’re focusing on ectogenesis so that we let them forget that there are some things they can’t answer.

moments of beauty

Do you ever feel like you want to break free from your life, your body, gravity? Break this shell, and just soar?

That’s what ties me to writing in moments when I write what I feel, when it spills out of me to just express itself. It’s why art is so important, because it communicates, because it transcends a state or an experience.

It’s the opposite of writing a resume, which has been my occupation lately. Strangely enough, someone reviewed my resume and tore it apart as being completely inadequate. In the most profound way that honesty just liberated me and I was able to work on something new. I don’t know if this is making sense, and well…tough.

But I was needing levitation, and I just walked the streets of Paris, I got out at the Musée d’Orsay exit on the train, and turned into the Left Bank, wandering the streets, towards the general direction of the House of Latin America. There was a free exhibit there, and that’s my price range. I had seen a photograph of one of the paintings online and I had to meet the artist.

Cicero Dias was a surrealist before he even knew what surrealism was.
At 19, in Brazil, having never heard of the movement, he started painting watercolors of dreams, visions of bodies floating above strange landscapes, heads separated from their levitating trunks, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in images, sort of. His early watercolors I find very moving, and I am not particularly fond of his later work, but I found the separation I needed in his canvases, foreign, dream-like and absorbing.

 

 

I met a woman today, in the underpass that saves us from the roaring highway above, and I was lookig at the graffiti sprawling the cream walls. Thinking how far this was from beauty, when we started talking, and she asked where I was from. When I said Congo, she stopped and asked which one, and I said, as I usually do, “both”.

She is from ex-Zaire, and was so surprised to hear me talk of Limete, Matonge, Les 3 Z..that she shook in her laugh, and asked me…”Can I call you ’sister’?”

And there, in the ugly underpass, life was made a painting again.

We’ve set a date to go out on the town and find some good saka-saka to eat, somewhere in the 18th probably. But I feel like I had dessert before dinner again. :-)

the steps of Montmartre

You may know Montmartre from Amelie’s scenes, her creperie was a the foot of the Butte Montmartre (the hill) that overlooks Paris, from which you see that lovely panorama (the same you can see from “my” forest, but at a different angle, and…closer. It’s in the 18th “arrondissement”.

Paris is a fantastic organisation of circular quarters, (thanks to Baron Haussman who “redid” the city in the 17th century–I think and may be wrong, but we owe him some landmarks, like the arrondissements, and l’Etoile) starting from the centre, on an island in the Seine. This island is better known for Notre-Dame cathedral, in front of which lies a star, the origin of all of France’s roads (“point zero de toutes les routes de France”). All the quarters sort of follow each other from that one, clockwise, in a sort of spiraling snail, that coils along on top of each other, to the outskirts of the “Peripherique” to make up Paris intra-muros, inside the walls. The real city, not the suburbs. There is a distinction, mind you. Along the “wall” are doors that lead to Paris, and have beautiful names. “Porte Doree”, “Porte de Bagnollet”, “Porte de Vincennes” Porte Maillot, Porte de la Chapelle, Porte d’Orleans…there is a bus that goes around all the doors, and isn’t THAT interesting, other than for a documentary purpose, or to get from one to the other. I took it once, with a friend, some bread and cheese, I think about 5 years ago.

So each quarter has a bit of it’s own feel. The 34d-4th is pretty historic on one end, and Jewish in one part, and commercial in another, it’s the only pre-revolutionary part left, I think of Paris, and is called “le marais”,the swamp. This is where Bastille is. The 5th and 6th are called the Latin Quarter, very hip, this is where Sartre and Hemingway starved and wrote, mostly fueled by (then)cheap coffee and thousands of cigarettes. Etc. The 20th (where my monthly Classical music appreciation takes place, and is a PHENOMENAL, and hilarious experience, given by a very popular young French prof) is the youngest of the arrondissements, and was traditionally more working class, and has more recent architecture.

The 18th was a bit of a painter’s neighborhood. Picasso et al had their studios here, and it’s very touristy, but pretty. The cobblestone streets are small, cute, and mind-boggling, there are outdoor terraces, and great painters in plazas, but it’s more interesting in winter, when there’s no one here because it’s so cold, and the place has a more tangible atmosphere. I took some photos of the basilica that I posted a long time ago in black and somewhere “down there”.

It’s next to the red-light district and the Moulin Rouge, in the same neighborhood.

Two very very good friends recently came to Paris and we went to Montmartre, bought a baguette (which, as I was scolded by the salesman, was a shape and size known as “bread” or “pain” not “baguette, which are thinner and longer–ooops) some stinky cheese, cold cuts, and drinkable vanilla yogurt and we sat on the steps of the park under the basilica, and ate one of the best meals ever. We were in heaven.

It made me realize how fantastic it is to finally live in a place, where I can be as difficult as I want with food, and still be able to eat, well, and happily. Food is good here. Or maybe I just have a French palate, but I keep getting confirmations from visitors. You buy bread and cheese, and it’s a fantastic, flavorful meal. We went out for pizza twice, and it was gourmet pizza, finger-licking good.

We sat, there, perfectly contented, watching the third musketeer guzzle down the last Dr. Pepper in Paris. Literally the last, since they were unfindable after the contract was cancelled off last month. Dr. P must have had un-French conditions or something.

It was a wonderful afternoon, and we walked until our feet nearly came off, found a bus that dropped us off in the Trocadero area and walked around the 17th quarter (very posh) before finding a cafe to park ourselves, to talk, eat rhubarb tart and wait for evening to settle so we could find a place to eat a nice, cheap dinner.

It was so nice to have friends here. It was so nice to speak English…I missed the taste of the language on my tongue. It just rolls off like honey, effortlessly, none of those hard vowels to puncture the fall, and spike it, spice up the flow of words. English is so interesting.

That evening, we sat around, listening to our friends play guitar, and sing their songs, listening to their fingers, run along the strings to find old melodies of their college days, perfectly contented, in from the cold.

I miss them already…

But we’ll always have “Paris”….

the castle park.

I live near Louis XIV’s childhood castle. He was born there, and it was the main royal castle in the Paris region until he came about, for obvious reasons…he built the other ones.

It’s a pretty lovely city, really. Small cobblestone streets, dozens of fancy cafés, bars, restaurants, shops with overpriced, exquisite hand-crafted items. The castle is both beautiful and strange. There is a large park behind it, huge, as usual, but I’ve only ever walked through its adjoining semi-wild but maintained forest.

This past weekend, we did a very weird thing. We set out to go to a chain restaurant, a Belgian chain called “Leon de Bruxelles”, which serves only mussels and french fries, being Belgian. Unlimited mussels and french fries for 10 euros. We got a stupid order of “Moules gratinées”, basically mussles in butter, garlic and parsley, smothered with melted cheese. Good but wicked. I had to order a huge coke with industrial quantities of ice to de-grease my system, in an unscientific but largely psychological sense.

Anyway. We tumbled out of the restaurant, not knowing what hit us, not really walking straight after the quantities of cheese and mussels and fat we ingested, but very happy with a lovely meal, and we drove the ten minutes to St. Germain-en-Laye, to go…”walk it off”. Or so we intended to.

The two passengers were already sprawled in a post-food comatose state, me in the back seat, Mussels from Brussels stretched out in the inclined passenger seat, until our “designated driver” parked the car next to the municipal swimming pool, still enthusiastic, and chirpped, “So, everyone up for a walk in the park?”

Silence.

She pushed her seat back and we all kind of kept quiet, baking in our comfortable positions, sleepy, contented, unable to move.

We all slept for two hours in a public parking lot.

Then we got up, slowly, and laughed at how ridiculous our afternoon had been, heading off for the enchanted forest, its oak, beach, birk, plane trees, towering and majestic, our living cathedral of fresh spring. Awed by the beauty of the forest, we walked and walked, stopping to pick prehistoric stones, notice new plants, talk about forest memories, made fun of our afternoon some more.

We found a clearing that we followed, and saw, over the top of an old stone wall, something that we joked looked like the Eiffel tower.
Making our way through a little doorway, we ended up on one of the main alleys of the castle’s park, and found that it was indeed the Eiffel tower, and a breathtaking view of Paris, from our little elevation. The city, circular within its walls, lay about 15 miles South of us, and we looked, pointing to the different landmarks,neighborhoods, and a few minutes later, headed back into our forest, for more “exercise”.

I think that will be one of my favorite weekend days in “Paris” so far. I did zero of the things I had planned to do, ate a meal I probably will never eat again, and fell in love with my little countyry-side town and its cobblestone streets, enchanted forest, and views.

Finally, we stopped at the grocery store on the way home and bought fresh strawberries, which we slaughtered when we came home and ate, four hours after our greasy mussels, dripping with fresh whipped cream and vanilla sugar.

I’m giving my liver a rest this week…

the sexy midnight bus

I bury my head deep inside my leftist newspaper, “Libéraction” or “Libé” for short, or inside my balanced, or rather center-right “Le Monde”, or my extremist denunciating, conspiracy-filled satirical newspaper, the one that tells me what “people” try to hide, and that goes by a name I particularly favor, “The Chained Duck.”

I read my papers, fingers steadily staining, and I pretend to avidly ready my novels, ever the little intellectual bookworm, so that people won’t talk to me, but really, it doesn’t work. Occasionally someone strikes up a conversation, and in a city where everyone complains there is no sponatenous human interaction, I seem to witness it daily.

People don’t expect kindness in big cities, and the shocked, blank look they give, if you extend a helping hand is often sadder than the general apathy towards lifting a finger. I’m careful, I don’t act stupid, but I also don’t want people to think the city is heartless, because it isn’t. We make it what it is.

I leave origami frogs with messages on them in subways. Sometimes.

Around midnight the underbelly surfaces, and I love them all, the drunks, stumbling along the urine-scented corridors of the sad bus terminal. It reminds me of the Port Authority, minus the desperation of public transport in America. Here, normal people take the bus, not just the destitute. People in Paris who have good jobs, expensive appartments, find themselves queuing like me, at quarter to one in the morning, glad they made it for the last bus.

Makes for early nights out, but what the heck. At least there’s fauna to keep me titillated.

Tonight, a bunch of horny teenagers were racing down the halls, torsos naked, trying to negociate drinking beer (Heineken) and smoking cigarettes and touching each other’s cheeks at the same time, singing loud songs of 1968 protestors that made the older folks hide a smile.

People duck their head when they smile. Hiding their defeat at being moved by someone they don’t know?

The bus isn’t always pleasant. Caught one night, at one in the morning in a super-full bus with a couple necking two feet away from me, two men coughing up phlegm behind me and next to me, and a fleshy person leaning against the bar I was supposed to be holding, made it a bit…uncomfortable.

But there is charm even in the midnight bus. The last bus home, the bus of urgency, and when I take it, I almost don’t mind living so far away from the City. It affords me still, my perspective, always the perspective I love. The outsider, eternally. The outsider, looking in. In onto the old man, tumbling drunk, barely standing up, leaning against the metal wall who misses the phone call that emerges from inside his jacket. After royally cussing, and nearly falling down, he fumbles, finds the offending object, and manages to dial back, still vacillating, but somehow managing to do two things at once. He dials the lost call, and in a slurred voice, manages to say “hello…honey bunny? my love, I’ll be riiiiight there, I’m coming, my sweetheart.”