Commes Les Fleurs
Dedicated to Flowers (The Cat.)
I came here alone, on a grey day, turning my eyes in my head
so as to find the airport exit. I walked back and forth near baggage claim
rotundas to find the slit in the wall leading to the street. Charles de Gaule
felt like a Gameshow. I exited onto the soundstage where 50 men and women
holding signs with names on them surveyed my presence. I was looking for two
people, and they were looking for me.
Marie Genevieve prefers to be called Marie-Ge. She has the
cell-phone in the family and is wearing a blue hat. Jean-Michel will sometimes
go by Jean-Mi, but for now is going by smiling man with grand features wearing
a plaid cap. They were the only people wearing colors in the airport reception
area.
Fast. Quick. The kisses on the cheeks. I smell them.
Jean-Michel has a smell I have found in people I’ve trusted. Marie-Ge has a
smell that I associate with math and science teachers. It’s not my favorite
flavor, but it is not a negative odor. We all have scents. I smell like New
York and sleeplessness.
We walk down a long hall. From this point on, the Hall will
never be a Hall again. From this point on, I am in France and the “H” is
dropped. I walk down Alls. My hosts begin the conversation. I am delirious.
It’s the morning. Their French is practical. Words are used to remember where
the car is parked. I am following, I am flowing. I am trusting, I am listening.
I am responding in salty chunks of French I never knew I’d taste. An elevator,
a parking garage, a family with bags and luggage carts. Keys. A red Peugeot,
stick shift, not more than 6 or 7 years old.
As we pull out over the grey spiral, cement meets sky in a
shade of rain. Marie-Ge and Jean-Michel apologize for the colors outside. I try
to say that the grey of the weather is appropriate. That it is preferable for
poetry. I try to say that Paris has inspirational rain like Seattle and Olympia.
I try to say everything by acknowledging that which binds all strangers, the
weather.
The weather is a man in France. He is the sky and he is
always doing something.
“Il fait mal” (He
is doing BAD = rainy, cold)
“Il fait beau” (He
is doing GOOD = sunlight, children in
the park)
Later, I will be in a hostel at a
family reunion planning dinner for the Piquard Family. A woman in her 70’s
named Marie Louise will hand me a head of lettuce. She will tell me that “she
is very cold” and will be referring to the frozen head of lettuce. In France,
the weather is a moody man and lettuce is a cold girl.
I get used
to this. A fiddle player named Marius walks with me through Aubervilliers, a
suburb to the North East of Paris. He tells me about prenoms, which are pronouns. They are the little sounds that precede
the noun in a sentence. Weather one says Le, La, Les or Mon, Ma, Mes depends on
the noun being described. A head of Lettuce gets a La or a Ma if she is alone- La salade. If there are many of her friends
around, we’ll say Les salades. But
never, ever, shall the little lady be pre-ceded by the masculine pronoun/prenom. There is no le salade in France. The Masculine Le pronoun is reserved for things like pens, bass clarinets and
salt.
(Le Stylo, Le Clarinet
Bass, Le Sel)
When I
found out where the salt and pepper were kept in the apartment, I put them on
the table before meals. I found out where to put things as time passed. I
didn’t know what to do with the towel that Marie-Ge gave to me the first hour
I’d been in her home. We’d returned from the airport and I wanted a shower very
much. The water flowed for a moment, up through some pipes and onto my flesh.
After one minute, it stopped and would not turn back on. Here was the first
time I had to express that I needed help. I’m naked, wet and I don’t yet know
that an apartment building like this is called un immobile.
The word
hurts the ear when spoken. When Marie-Ge and Jean-Michel look out over
Bagnolet, they lament the scene around the apartment. There are too many grands immobiles out there, beyond the
windows. Big immobilized boxes of people spread the distance of our vision.
When the shower stops, I walk out
of the bathroom and try to explain the issue. This has never happened before in
the house. Marie-Ge is dumbfounded and apologetic. She says it’s a problem in
the immobile. I can’t be sure what the immobile is because I have not learned
the word yet. Instead, I am convinced that I’ve got to be causing some glitches
in the immobile patterns of life. My presence in the apartment feels virtual
and unreal. I sense that the shower doesn’t like my hands, doesn’t trust me
turning its knobs, and has stopped in order to calculate my existence into the
system.
The first
day, I get my own keys. I try to eat a croissant but nothing tastes like food.
I walk down a road and look at every building. For the first week I can’t sleep
right. I see more sunrises than I have in the last two years in my first seven
mornings. There are words of a Chinese new year and a celebration wherein
people eat crepes. I ask Jean Michel to show me is vinyl collection. Vinyl is a word that does not come out
sounding French no matter how hard I try.
He brings
me to the room full of plants, masks and mirrors. It’s my favorite room in the
apartment, but I don’t go in there much. Because I can understand little of
what he says, I read the moment with my other sensory organs. I see images of
Jazz men and traditionalists from Bretagne. I see gypsies and Africans. I see
poets and pianos. On two records, Jean-Michel has drawn his own covers. The
lines are crisp and create people and waves of color. I compliment his drawing,
but he shoves the records back on the shelf before I have time to remember his
art.
As we move
through the shelf of records, I move a few inches to the left and right. He
does the same, as he is taking out each record and describing the music on it.
The process takes about an hour. In that time I notice photographs of a man
with wild grey hair and the crazy eyes. Later, a boy named Thomas will describe
a young woman singer as having the crazy eyes. She fancies him, but he will not
return her advances. Last time I saw her was at a concert. We had both come
alone, but she wore a long black wool jacket and red lipstick.
The man in
the photographs on the shelf above the vinyl is Jean-Michel’s literary idol,
Georges Perec. I think that Perec is the best French name I have seen. I notice
it on the spines of an entire shelf of books in the room of plants, masks and
mirrors. I choose a title called Les
Choses for its simplicity, and pull it off the shelf. Things.
Marie-Ge
enters the room and unveils her distaste for the author. She thinks that Things is a superficial book. She thinks
that Perec is unconventional and rebellious to the determent of his work. It’s
hard for her to read it. Jean-Michel and Marie-Ge describe for a while a book
of Perec’s which has no “E”. In french, the letter “E” is pronounced like the
English letter “I”. I have no idea what E is until I see that it is not there.
After long enough, Jean-Michel retrieves the book in question. The letter E is not used in the book.
It’s open on my lap.
A world of O’s and A’s is in my aura. Book of G.P. has only AIOU, Y symbols throughout whole book. Our most popular symbol
is not found. Our result is an odd talisman of other-worldly sounds and script. O's I's and A's control his book. Outside of his book is a world of
books using the symbol G.P. omits. Known to the author was a gift of form. I thought of how a world could go with AIOU and Y only. I
find joy in writing or talking in this ways. Try noting using it. Hard, huh? His book, A Void shows moi that sound is an option.
And so I am
inspired. I take the challenge to limit what I can say. Like the loss of E’s in
George Perec’s novel, I enforce a new rule of language on myself. I will not
speak English, not no more, not in France.
At an open
mic event, a young guy tells me I have an accent from the South of France. At a
bar, a Welsh man talks to me in slow English which I do not respond to. He
thinks I cannot respond because I don’t know the language. At the English
language bookshop, Shakepeare and
Company, I buy a used copy of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. At the cash register, I speak
to the British clerk in French. My time in Paris is marked by a refusal to
speak my easy tongue.
This brings
me to an acute sense of sound. Language becomes music and ideas become a bunch
of kindergarteners with electric guitars. Inside of my head is much louder than
outside of my mouth.
Each
morning begins with “bonjour”. My
hosts live in a suburb called Bagnolet. Their daughter told me before I left
that I would have to start saying,
“Bagnolet, Ouais Ouais…” in a slow
stoned voice.
“Baniolay,
Waaay Waaay” is the English equivalent of this phrase. Drink four bottles of
Nyquil and lie on a couch at noon and say it. Your intonation should be
perfect. I met Clara at the Monday Night Red Beans and Rice Bluegrass Jam
Session at the High Ho Lounge in New Orleans, Louisiana. We sat next to each
other and tried to play along with the fast new songs of the old-timers. Our
musical ability was aided by being given cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from
the cooler under the guitar player. I play banjo and she plays fiddle. In old
time and bluegrass, there is nothing more sacred than the banjo/fiddle
connection. We had the same type of beach-cruiser bike for city travel and
became fast friends.
After I
decided to come to France to learn her language, she insisted that I stay with
her parents, hang out with her friends and embody her world in Paris. The trade
was set up. Jean-Michel and Marie-Ge would visit their daughter over Christmas
in Louisiana. While they were in New Orleans, they would stay at my apartment
in the French Quarter to enhance their sense of vacation.
Jean-Michel,
in much the same was as the record collection, showed me all the pictures from
their Louisiana trip. He had no interest in America before going to New
Orleans. He admits to having misconceptions of American culture as we walk
around a cold lake one afternoon. Nowadays, his musical world centers around
Free Jazz, Klezmer music and New Orleans’ Sound. After breakfast, he retreats
to the office to ride a stationary bicycle and watch Treme. When Mardi Gras comes, I whip up a feast of Red Beans and
Bread Pudding while he DJ’s with Louisiana CD’s borrowed from the local
library.
Each
weekend, the parents talk to their daughter, who lives in uptown New Orleans
and works at a neighborhood association there. Each weekend, the culture and
light of Louisiana slips through a webcam and a wireless network to a computer
screen into our 7th floor apartment in Bagnolet. Skype has replaced the letter as a medium of
reminder for the separated of the physical world their beloved inhabits. Clara
puts on her Mardi Gras outfit of sequins and yellow for us after dinner one
night. A few nights later, her mother will wear a bird mask and set a table for
ten.
We
celebrated Mardi Gras for the hell of it. No one in France understood much
about a big dinner on a Tuesday night, but one guest could recall when Mardi
Gras day was celebrated here. As a young girl, she and her schoolmates would
make masks and sing songs in class. At our Mardi Gras, she sipped wine and
explored the difference between anthropology and sociology, and talked about
her daughter’s future as a documentary filmmaker.
It was her
daughter I’d met one evening, when Le Sacre Coeur cathedral poked out from an
alley. The daughter could speak the most French in the least amount of time. She
was faster than any nightmare. She moved from the kitchen to a chair to the
couch to the computer, explaining filmmaking, imitating the voices of other
girls and critiquing the Islamic fundamentalist opinion on le mariage gay.
She ate two
silvers of chocolate cake in two different sittings.
She wanted
a projector to be mounted above where I sat on the couch.
Her
bathroom was tiled with green ceramic.
She had a
roommate who didn’t say much. Her roommate disappeared on the phone having
received an emergency call from a friend. He was getting ready to leave his
wife the next day. Turns out he loved another woman. Two young children had
been created during the marriage, and they were sleeping while their dad packed
his things. I took the opportunity to ask about the rate of divorce in France,
just as I noticed the telephone in the room.
I took the
next opportunity to ask about home-phone ownership rates in France amongst our
generation. The roommates said divorce and home-phone ownership were two very
common practices these days.
In February
in Paris, the sun comes out sometimes. In the first mornings, when I’d wake up
too early with jet-lag, I’d lean out the window and photograph the sunrise. In
the evenings, I’d lean out further and curl my camera around the side of the
Immobile to capture the sunset. In the day, I’d find patches of light and
wonder where the people were who would like to photograph me.
One
evening, I lifted the camera to take a picture of the two girls who’d sung with
me. The dark haired one with the Jazz voice took the camera out of my hand and
insisted that we three be in the picture together. She’d made a pot of cinnamon
tea when the evening began. By the end, we were drinking alfalfa. Our voices
were soothed with the flavor. I bring the diva blues, Sarah brings the country
swing and Amelia bring the angel air. Music had poured from us for several
hours. Stories of lovers were shared in a Chinese restaurant. A package of cigarettes appeared on the table
while we’d been out. Sarah’s boyfriend was home, in his room with the door
closed.
Sometimes
the boy smokes and the girl doesn’t. Sometimes the girl does. I rolled a
cigarette on a marble table after eating shrimp sautéed in Cognac. It was my
first time smoking anything right after a meal. I watched the pink shrimp
bodies in the bowl of discards as I inhaled the Native American tobacco loaned
to me by a French boy. He’d handed me a bouquet of parsley earlier that afternoon.
He said Kind Crimson was perfect breakfast music.
His best
friend noted that, when they hitched-hiked together in America, all the American
girls went crazy for Thomas, parsley giver. Leo plays an Iranian drum with
attention while Thomas inhales sharp air through his nostrils. The guitar
Thomas fingers adheres the Leo’s rhythms.
Before we
entered Thomas’ apartment, far from the afternoon of shrimp and champagne, Leo
finished his cigarette on the sidewalk. We
stood in front of a horse meat shop.
“One of the
last ones in Paris,” said Leo.
Thomas
keeps herbs in an ornate metal container. They are included in what is smoked
and then accompanied by grapefruit juice and citrus salted pistachios. We watch
a film called Arizona Dream. Leo has
explained it to me on the subway. What we have here is a surrealistic film
produced by the French, directed by a Serb, staring major American Actors.
Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway make love in a series of used car transactions and
eskimo visions to the music of Iggy Pop in the early 1990’s.
The first
person I meet in Paris to mention the 1990’s is also the first person I meet in
Paris to mention the catacombs. He says that there used to be entrances all
over the city, and spending time in an underground of bones was a common
practice among the curious. Nowadays, one has to be an Urban Explorer to access them. He is seeking a new entrance after
the closure of his parking garage entry near the Parc Montsouris.
He is a
bright and clean young man I meet at the concert of the girl with the crazy
eyes, who is vying for the attention of Thomas, giver of Parsley. The bright
and clean young man speaks to me in English. I respond to him in French. In
Canada, they say he speaks,
“Pretty
good English- for a French guy.”
He does so
because he has a Canadian girlfriend. He’ll be seeing her soon. Before he goes
to Toronto, he will go to China. He also knows where Olympia Washington is and
how it was that the punk scene started there during the 1990’s.
When he
hears me play banjo, he says
“Genial!” which is what I believe he will
say when he finds another entrance to the catacombs.
The 1990’s
are pronounced, “Les annees
quatre-vingt-dix.”
Mattheau,
the Lover of catacombs and Canadians, refers to these years when he is talking
about the soundtrack of a new film, Le
Monde de Charlie. The activity takes place as the 1980’s are becoming the
90’s. The music whispers teen angst and ambiance. I’d watched the film on the Air France flight to Paris, over a
little red wine and cheap cheese. Le
Monde de Charlie (Charlie’s World) is an adjustment to the American title, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. If
there was a word for “wallflower” in French, I’d cling to it to describe
myself. Instead, I say I am “une
voyageuse” when questioned. A traveler, an observer, an outsider am I.
But even at
the Irish Jam session in the stone bar basement, I get plucked from the
outskirts. There is no hiding. I don’t know how to play Irish music so I sit
and watch instead. My legs are spread over a chair facing the circle of
musicians. One woman speaks French with a Scottish accent and plays the fiddle
and drum. She refers to the bar as a pub.
I watch her as she leads the reels and jigs. I laugh, I scoot over, I drink a
beer and I enter le circulation (traffic)
of soundmakers.
Later, I
will walk downstairs on a boat and run into the pub woman near a coatrack. I greet her and continue my descent into
the belly of the Peniche. I enter the
old-time jam with banjo and voice and lead songs I know by heart. She is on the
outside of the circle, watching. We flowered both from the walls that make
tourists of strangers, settling instead for the gardens in basements of sound.
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