The third bit of this travelogue (part one here; part two there) was originally set aside for the visual-arts. I had an idea to assemble, in a loose narrative essay, some of the most beautiful things I’d seen in Paris, whether framed & hanging in museums, pedestalled in the Jardin des Tuileries, carved into old buildings’ facades, wrought from iron in door-knockers’ visages and gates’ dense scrollwork, sprayed in graffiti’s curl and code, or arranged in the symmetry of the flower-lined paths of gardens. But then I got to thinking about gardens, how not all of them are so symmetrical and arranged, and eventually decided to take part three and change tack.
     A little backstory is in order:
     My girlfriend and I were in Versailles, walking towards the Petit Trianon, in search of Marie Antoinette’s charming faux-medieval hamlet. We were on a lush path, winding along a snaky stream, surrounded by trees and growth that felt different from what we’d seen on the main Versailles grounds. We drank in the view, and my girlfriend made some remark appreciative of the surrounding “English garden” style. I asked her what she meant, and she explained it to me: how the English style’s scaled smaller than the grander French garden style, is more relaxed, sweeping, less constrained and formalized; more about abundance & burgeoning & little ornaments called “follies” (think fake grottoes and bridges and little temples). I thought a lot about that, about how many of the gardens we’d been in so far in Paris were beautiful because controlled, with highly-defined symmetries & geometries, low sculpted hedges, stout cone-tree topiary. But this part of the Versailles garden, this was different, less grid than ramble, and it seemed to me to be gain in beauty and soothing aura from being allowed to breathe, stretch out and sprawl.
     There’s actual planning in an English-style garden of course — it’s not just a vegetal free-for-all — but the plan is to ensure one doesn’t notice the plan, or focus unduly on geometry & symmetry. The idea’s to create a calming simulacrum of nature untrammeled (this is just what I needed, having found myself vaguely disconcerted by the grand-scale formalities of the Versailles grounds: too much held breath and tense muscles, all those clipped branches straight plantings, like thousands of people ordered to stand perfectly still). Doing my own research later, I found there’s a subtype of English Garden know as the cottage garden, which is even more informal, featuring asymmetrical path-work and an encouragement of grass and shrubs to cross boundaries with flower-beds.
     And so in the spirit of the English cottage garden, here’s part three newly-conceived, not so much essay as seed-scatter of distinct Paris art-impressions offered in loose meander, circuitously pathed together and hubbed at occasional follies, weedy and a little overgrown, thick with hiding-places and benches & rogue veggie patches:
 (Read More . . .)

     If you travel to Paris an ascetic, you come back an epicure. If you go there an epicure, you come back a hedonist. And if, god help you, you go to Paris a hedonist, well, you’re not coming back. Come the hour of departure you’ll be gobbling ganache in the back-room of some confectionery, rifling through rues for one last macaron shop, or just sitting in some square, serenely feasting on the fresh memory of how a tomato or chanterelle or asparagus spear startled you into new recognition of a food you thought could not surprise you.
     Of course, we do come back — bellies full, livers bruised — but some part of us never really does in quite the same way; this of course holds true for any place we visit that deeply moves us. We come back with some faculty or sense transformed, and that changed part of us is perhaps the most satisfying souvenir we can hope for when we travel. Maybe it’s the texture of the pillars in the Place de la Concorde or the brocade wall-coverings in Versailles that gives us new eyes; maybe it’s a week of being balmed in the honey of spoken French that gives us new ears. Maybe some lingering walk through the medieval Ancien Cloître Quartier’s street-tangle awakens us to history, opens it within us like a nova, revealing to us the depth of ages, a gift of an awakened sense of what has preceded us. All these things and more were true to some extent for me, but the simplest way I’ve come to feel altered by Paris is in my relationship to food, drink, and all the collected table pleasures of texture, vision, taste and smell.
 (Read More . . .)

     I was in Paris with my girlfriend recently, first time for both of us. And yes, yes, every single thing that’s said is true. The bread, the wine, the cheese, the markets, the veggies, the haricots verts, the chocolate & desserts, the views, the history, the grands boulevards, the Art Nouveau, the monuments, the métro (I love living in New York, love its subways, but 468 stations and 24/7 don’t give license for running a broke, broke-down, filthy public transport), the museums, the fashion, the beautiful people, the ugly people, the chainsmoking hipsters, the prampushing families, the squares, the jardins, the light at 5pm, at 10am, at goddamned _:__ _m, the gutters, the homeless, the doggies, the birdshit — you fall in love with it all whether you want to or not, are jetlagged or not, are homesick or squabbling with your partner or nervous about how wretched your french is or not; christ, you end up falling in love with the spit hanging from a wino’s scabby lip by the time ParisLove is fever-raging in you. That city sexes you to pieces with both the myth of itself and the sensual richness of its actual substance and you get to where you don’t care where the line ends separating the ideal of it from the real of it. Somewhere between your first café dinner & your last pain au chocolat you fall headlong, succumbing to all the starry-eyed movie clichés with unembarrassed abandon.
     But before the love stuff, there are other stages. The fingernail-chewing what-if-they-laugh-at-our-American-asses stage. The mundane get-our-Euros-figure-out-Métro-ticket-machines-get-the-hell-out-of-Charles-De-Gaulle stage. The I’m-airsick-maybe-we-can-stay-in-and-watch-BBC-and-eat-cheese? stage. And because I’m sadistic, and I believe in build-up, I’m going to frog-march you through these stages (not all of them so ordinary, some in fact quietly thrilled or outright celebratory, just not that roseate Paris-Love) before I get to the sunset on the Seine in a snug rowboat (it was a big catamaran with tons of other folks on it, but still).  (Read More . . .)

        From Roberto Bolaño –


“Then I told him that I thought poets were hermaphrodites and that they could only be understood by each other.”


        & from Coleridge via Virginia Woolf:


“Coleridge […] said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. […] Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. […]


         & more from Woolf:


Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”
 (Read More . . .)

A Message to the Universe
by Kazuo Ohno, 1998

“On the verge of death one revisits the joyful moments of a lifetime.

One’s eyes are opened wide-gazing into the palm, seeing death, life, joy and sorrow with a sense of tranquillity.

This daily studying of the soul, is this the beginning of the journey ?

I sit bewildered in the playground of the dead. Here I wish to dance and dance and dance and dance, the life of the wild grass.

I see the wild grass, I am the wild grass, I become one with the universe. That metamorphosis is the cosmology and studying of the soul.

In the abundance of nature I see the foundation of dance. Is this because my soul wants to physically touch the truth ?

When my mother was dying I caressed her hair all night long without being able to speak one word of comfort. Afterwards, I realized that I was not taking care of her, but that she was taking care of me.

The palms of my mother’s hands are precious wild grass to me.

I wish to dance the dance of wild grass to the utmost of my heart.”
   

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I think about what Ohno meant. The wild grass dance: can this be where we converge, if we are able, with mother of womb and mother of soil; with both at once? Where we creatively express (in dance, art, smile, love, song) so joyously in life — “joy” not as a function of happiness but simply of pure coursing blood & exhalation — that we merge with the core within us [our past, our genes, our biology] and outside us [our partners in soil, in air, on land, in the tiniest cells of the smallest motes; all of which are also us, comprised of the same stuff as us]?

Creativity and expression as acts of radical reconciliation between ourselves and ourselves.

Ohno talks of stroking his dying mother’s hair. Is it so with our planet? We tend as best we can in her Autumn, already having grieved her to collapse after the Spring and Summer of our human life with her, stroking her in a comfortless set of gestures. In reality, she is the one caring for us, still allowing us to live and breathe, and eat, and enjoy & survive by the still-interwoven but slowly-fraying web of vitality connecting bees to flowers to birds to wind to soil to sun to leaf to oxygen to us, to us.

There is nothing to do but feel this to root.

Be wild grass even as it dies back, falls back to cracks in pavement, roots slow-buckling slabs of it up in joyous revolt.

(More about Kazuo Ohno here)

Advice to my friend Jess on drawing and sketching:

* Draw like you sing — from your gut, freely. Just let the hand guide the pen wherever the spirit wants. Let loose with line and form until recognizable Things emerge — or not. And be content even when they do not.

* Color opens up worlds. It blesses line and form. It makes so much possible. Big bold color, like a voice filling up a silent room.

* Draw what you can draw well when you feel stuck. For instance, I can only draw faces and bodies. And rooms. Everything else is very hard for me. So when I get stuck, I just draw what I know over and over, ignoring narrative or theme or logic.

* Let feeling over-ride logic … this will free your pen. If you draw an arm or eye strangely, don’t judge it; Let it flow. It’s a clue that what you’re feeling inside wants to come out through that bent, long mutant arm or bizarro, wonky eye.

* Try out, sometimes, thicker pens & even ink & brush drawing. This will help you sing your line out more clearly and the boldness imparted makes your expression all the more uncompromising.

* Be content with doodles, scribbles and repetitive shapes if that’s what your heart and head needs at the time. Unless you’re staggeringly gifted, 90% of what you draw isn’t meant to be seen — it’s just for you and your own soul.

* Draw for yourself, to amuse yourself, first and foremost. If others take pleasure in your work, so much the better. But look at that as a bonus and not an end to what you do.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

7 pm, work’s over, the subway platform’s stinking, boiling & rattling with jackhammers, a train arrives, it’s full and clearly seatless, I let it pass, another comes, haggard curds of humanity ooze out, I slip in fast and gratefully sink into seat, I settle in, air conditioning washes me, & I exhale.

And inevitably it’s happened: I find myself directly facing or seated beside some reeking, twitch-gripped, leering, sweating, muttering man or woman (usually man) on my hourlong subway ride home. Sometimes I get up and move, sometimes I don’t. If I don’t, it’s because I’m kept rooted by inertia, pride, masochism, exhaustion, or an abiding hope that the squirmy gremlin that’s unsettling me to the spine is just some normal schmuck who’s suffering from indigestion and/or my own warped & mottled outlook on fellow humans.

Would it help to survey faces before I take my seat? No — the sly dogs, they surprise me. They muster just enough poise & discipline to look like average, work-day-defeated middle-aged sighing subway-serfs like me — until the doors close, at which point the facade’s gone and they triumphantly collapse into the truth of their nail-biting, eye-darting, crack-jittery, randomly-cackling writhey selves.

I remember a 20-something to my left, staring at his filthy nails, picking them with clicking noises, looking at everyone around him intently, otherwise dressed neatly & normal-seeming; occasionally, in the midst of his disturbing spasms (fits that suggested some kind of allover-body itch), rubbing his shoulder into mine, and soon doing so deliberately, in what seemed like almost sexually physical appeal.

I remember a humid, damp-browed crone sitting next to me at the Port Authority 1 stop, cocooned in a black puffy nylon coat in the middle of spring, immediately setting her witch gaze on me as I sat and read the paper, saying, over and over again in what would’ve been a rich & sensuous slavic accent had the circumstances been different, shaking her head for dramatic effect: “It’s no good, NO GOOD what you do to yourself.” Stare, pause, headshake, repeat.

And I remember an old, bearded homeless man who would sporadically stamp his foot HARD on the floor, an enormous black & bulging garbage bag held protectively at his side like some alien, orificeless, insensate beast-pet. He’d utter something gnomic, vaguely threatening, stare out the window, and then petrify, remaining absolutely still. Time would pass. Hope would arise in our hearts, tentatively. Until FUCKING SLAM the next thunderous heel crashed down, more violent muttering, splintering conversation into dead shards. That loveliness lasted from 59th to 125th.

Oh, and lest I forget one vital detail, it was obvious to all seated nearby that gorgonzola-stuffed mackerel-carcasses were jammed deeeeeeeeep in the pockets of his sweatpants.

But where is my compassion? Where is my empathy? Here are people trapped in dire straits, whether streetlocked, disabled, mentally-disrupted, emotionally-taken-apart. They mean me no harm. They are suffering more than I am, ever will perhaps, ever could. And yet here I am, privileged & whining about having to occasionally endure them. What the hell is wrong with me? They deserve a handout, or some compassion, not a wordy web-post.

I used to excoriate myself in just such a way for my recoil, disgust, irritation. I used to really lay into myself for failures of understanding around these kinds of encounters. But gradually I started accepting and owning my responses, and realizing that empathy doesn’t preclude frustration. New York, after all, poses pretty serious social challenges to some of us: we’re thrust into each other cheek & jowl, from dawn to dusk, wedged & pressed & forced to accept the kind of proximity that doesn’t come second nature to us introverts and/or transplants (I’m from the south). Most of the country (for better or worse) lives at a remove from others: sprawl is the rule, not the exception. New York, on the other hand, for all its splendor & beauty & opportunity, is a goddamned fetid warren of flesh, and you can’t get away from that aspect of it if you live, work & love here. You’re going to run smack into it, in all its vast array, in all its bewildering catalogue of souls.

So, given what we have to face, is it so wrong to have our reactions? What’s more New York than being blunt about what thrills us, annoys us, delights us, disgusts? All this compress of skin & face is burden, and if it ease it at all to allow ourselves mutter & groan about that compression’s occasional extremities — someone deranged, lecherous, menacing, reeking, explosive, insulting, insinuating, deranged, invasive; whether rich or poor, black or white, male or female, young or old — then why the fuck not? We can & should have our understanding, compassion, awareness of everyone’s circumstance — AND we can be gagging, fuming & ready to switch cars the next time a gorgonzola-pants lumbers near and starts stomping imaginary roaches.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008