November 13, 2012
I met an older fellow tonight at a sidewalk cafe in St. Germain, halfway between Montparnasse and the Pont du Caroussel. He leaned over and told me that once – when he was a quite wealthy, quite young man – he had a severe nervous breakdown. He decided to spend exactly one month eating four meals a day in the very finest restaurants in all of Paris. No establishment with fewer than one Michelin star. And each night, he demanded the very best bottle of wine, and drank it all himself.
It was the most emotion of his life.
It was the best food of his life.
After a month, he said, he was fully and forever returned to a state of complete sanity.
He related the story with a satisfied hauteur – any potential shame in disclosing mental illness clearly ameliorated by his valorous choice of tactics: his total avoidance of psychotherapy, the reassuring triumph of unsuppressed bourgeois self-indulgence, the innocent, harmless hedonism of entrecote and haricot vert…yet also the utter annihilation of emotion, neurosis, chaos, uncertainty, pain, suffering, horror, torment, disorientation, vertigo, despair, anxiety, psychosis.
As he left the cafe, he carefully jotted down for me the complete list of the restaurants, with an initial enthusiasm that faded to melancholy and a half-suppressed, entrenched frustration and contempt. He said that in the fifty years since his breakdown, he has returned again and again to the same restaurants but the food is simply not as good, not now, not even close. The ingredients are lower quality, the flavors are mediocre, the subtlety vanished, the exquisite power of each ingredient has faded and disappeared.
This, then, the price of his sanity.
“Parisian cuisine has gone to the dogs,” he says. “You should have been there when I was crazy!”
After he left, I sat a while, brooding, then proceeded circuitously back home…lingering a while at a small sidewalk cafe on a damp and emptied street to drink a hot milk with rum. Bundled in wool coat and gloves, scarf and hat, my fingers wrapped around the boiling glass of milk, I watched elderly neighbors carry small and fluffy near-weightless dogs downstairs for a late night micturation at the gutters. Boys zipping up with a glint in their eyes after pissing along walls in the moonlight, holding a cigarette in one hand and a penis in the other, smoke and steam rising from each.
I finished my rum milk and left, walked behind the boys and dogs along the half-abandoned foggy, winter avenue. Past the unilluminated churches, even their stones brooding in the green-grey charcoal night of French winter. Glimpses to interiors: gold-painted ceilings, chandeliers, baroque plasterwork ceilings. And outside, stalking the walls were affixed the familiar enameled signs attesting to history. Napoleon’s cavalry officer here, de Medici there. Birthplaces of Pantheon denizens to the left and to the right. And then a beautiful low wall of an elementary school, with mouldering rococo scrolls of stone marking each of three gateways. An enamel sign memorialized one hundred and twenty French children from that school, deported to the death camps in 1942. The dogs barked lightly. The elderly neighbors shuffled and coughed in the fog. The boys in their running shoes padded silent – fierce soft tomcats by starlight. Me. The Medici. The murdered toddlers and their yellow stars. Napoleon. Vanquished. Annihilated. Faded and disappeared.
Hot rum with two sugars, and three ladles of boiling milk poured into the glass. It tasted like a miracle. It contained a constellation of Michelin. A galaxy.
It tasted so good I knew: I am insane.
I have the stomach of a small animal. Full, tight, distended, overfed, full of milk and fat and heat. Heavy.
Light.
———–
Celan:
Was geschah? Der Stein trat aus dem Berge.
Wer erwachte? Du und ich.
Sprache, Sprache. Mit-Stern. Neben-Erde.
Ärmer. Offen. Heimatlich.
Wohin gings? Gen Unverklungen.
Mit dem Stein gings, mit uns zwein.
Herz und Herz. Zu schwer befunden.
Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.
John Felstiner’s translation:
What happened? The stone stepped from the mountain.
Who awakened? You and I.
Language, language. Fellow-star. Earth-cousin.
Poorer. Open. Homeland-like.
Where it went? Toward not expiring.
Went with the stone, and with the two of us.
Heart and heart. Weighed and found sinking.
Growing more heavy. Taking on lightness.