FIELD REPORT: Fog on the Ile de France

October 29, 2009

I went to sleep last night watching the stars over the North Atlantic, as the jet barreled through the skies towards Paris. Tonight, Paris is a saxophone dampened by a red velvet fog, where I watched the moon rise from atop the Eiffel Tour. Tomorrow it’s an early sojourn to Gare de l’Est to sort out a train passage to a town that everyone in Paris believes does not exist. No, they say, you are mistaken. But I know a farmhouse waits for me. Along with a glass of Pastis, and a new cadre of fellow artists.

It’s been a day of spectacular peace and beauty, and a persistent human gentleness that has met me with a grin at every turn.

A few of today’s memorable moments…

…on the flight to Houston, where a WWII vet pilot stood up and shook my hand at the conclusion of the flight, and said thank you. I said, For what? and he said, I always like to say thank you to somebody after the plane lands safely. You never know which of us is secretly keeping the thing in the air. It was a frightening flight – we introduced ourselves to the realities of gravity in short bursts of turbulence-induced free-fall, and on one of these plummets I nearly tore the bicep off the teenage boy seated next to me. He had been engrossed in watching Transformers and he shrieked out, loudly, flailing to fend me off.  For a moment he had mistaken my long sharp fingers for a cyborg paw.

…when the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle, the French girl seated in front of me pulled aside the exhausted flight attendant – whose English very audibly placed her origins deep in the heart of South Texas – and told her, your French accent is as exquisite as your Southern accent is beautiful. The flight attendant, immediately elated, beamed at us all, and I shot her a quick right-handed hook-em horns in the only moment of alumni solidarity I have ever experienced in my lifetime.

…why two gigantic pink four-story-tall fiberglass sumo wrestlers on the interstate outside of CDG?

…for the second time, lighting a candle in memory of my friend Peter Fuller at the shrine to Saint Peter at Notre Dame, and feeling the dizziness come over me as my prayers for him were met by a thousand years of invocation soaked into those formidable smoke-blackened stones. Lighting a candle at Joan of Arc, as my global pilgrimage for misunderstood epileptic mystics continues. I love Notre Dame because its mystery and splendor are so vulnerably human, so much about the best of us reaching far beyond our imagined capacities. Feeling a happiness at returning there, and shuffling along the black and white squares as though I have stumbled out from a witch’s hut of straw and mud and come in secrecy to stare slack-jawed into this new vision for the house of an unfamiliar Christian god.

…Outside, an Eastern European wedding party all in mini-skirted suits and high white stiletto boots, the groom still shocked by his relentlessly thorough haircut and lost in ponder over his new ring. The girls white as steam around him. On the doorway arch, the beheaded king holding his own head, as the angel looks on, poised to catch it if it tumbles any further than it has already. And far beyond them all, the ghastly green bronze of Charlemagne and his steed keep their corroding eye on conquest and submission, refusing to acknowledge our contemporary mediocrities of Euros and polyester down below.

…at the Louvre, standing in front of Antoine-Jean Gros’ enormous painting Napoleon on the Battlefield of Elyau and feeling a deep sense of belonging within it, of familiarity and kinship and resonance and thinking how peculiar, because it’s Napoleon in the snow, and I have no particular affinities there. But being unable to move, feeling as immobilized as his soldiers. I roughly translated the description, and learned the scene depicted Napoleon in Eylau, Prussia, which is actually in Lithuania, in a tiny region where my ancestors lived. How likely they witnessed that scene. Perhaps their DNA-tangled memories, long dormant within me, stirred at the sight, and for a moment I looked with their eyes. This is the glory of a museum. My traveling companion pointed out that I wore the same white (faux) fur hat as the Lithuanian soldiers. When we stood in front of the painting of Saint Quentin, my entire ensemble matched, but for the sword.

…hailing a taxi near the Place de la Concorde, where the African emigrant cab driver was singing In the Village, the Peaceful Village, the Lion Sleeps Tonight, and we all sang the remainder of the song together, all the parts, all the harmonies, and drove along the Tuilleries in complete silent afterwards, considering lions and villages and – perhaps – the achingly precise geometry of Louis XIV’s arboreal fantasy and aweemawekking the remainder of the way to St. Germaine.

…how the deep glistening fog that cast itself over Paris all afternoon seemed – precisely at midnight – to begin to whir. And then, as the fog shook its head no, it’s not me, the whir sustained itself to a nearly noiseless graceful mechanical glissade, as though diamond scythes were resecting the asphalt to reveal, swath by swath, the ancient cobblestones below. But no, as it dawned Halloween, the streets closed to a slippery hoard of rollerskaters, skiing alongside the Seine by the thousands before twisting over to the Champs Elysees.

BUT my very favorite moment:

…at the top of the Eiffel Tour, a mother pointing out the landmarks of Paris to her young daughter. Look, there is the Arc de Triumphe, she said in French, it’s made of marble and it reflects the spotlight. So pretty, isn’t it? Paris is called the City of Lights.

The little girl squirmed, frowned, and forcefully extracted her hand from her mother’s grasp.

Non, Maman, replied the little girl, gesturing broadly as Napoleon, Paris is not made of lights. Paris is made of chocolate and meat.