FIELD REPORT: WHEN POUSSEZ IS NOT A CAT, AND A CHESTNUT IS NOT A CLICHE

November 25, 2009

WRITTEN IN PARIS.    With a relentless procession of holidays emerging from the sepulcher, we stare into the gullet of familiarity, of tradition. Some chew into a turkey neck with a gristly soupcon of delight. Others reel off in a mad jig of horror at the prospect.

This is what we do, and this is how we do it. This is who we do it with, and this is where we do it.

Who are you? Would you like to join us? At their most provocative – and perhaps, most successful – holidays dare us to look into each others’ hearts, eyes, homes, and souls and see what mysterious gears whir in there.  To commune with the mirror and the window as they become the same. What do each of us call comfort and security, and how do we balance it, perched on its perilous see-saw with the counterweight of complacency and atrophy.

I’ve long stood on the outlying borderlands of other people’s holidays, and so mine come with a voyeuristic Oliver Twistian lasciviousness. What do people do? I’m curious, bored, titillated.

Wide eyed and observant, the holiday interloper has the opportunity to compare and contrast: so this is what they do, and this is how they do it, and this is who they do it with, and where they do it. During holiday time bystanders and rubberneckers and various pathetiques gain semi-non-representational access to our intimate domestic realities – a sort of short-term tourist visa. Case in point: the emerging trend of Passover Tourists, who – like daffodils, burst into blossom in the spring, oftentimes outnumbering Jews around the seder plate, yet vanish in the grim autumnal chill of Rosh Hashanah.

I don’t generally serve myself a plate of feet. And yet incipient vocabulary failure in a Paris restaurant plunges me into the realm of those who do. I am a trapdoor witness to their happiness, in merry counterpoint to my agony (and presumably that of the creatures now possessing legs but no paws). It’s delightful.

After nearly four months on the artist-in-residency road, nothing – anywhere – has been done the way I do it. Turkey? Please. What is this thing you call a Pilgrim. We have them. They go to see Saint Joan of Arc’s house in Domremy. Hm. Something new to learn.   I like this quite considerably.

My visa status provides holiday entertainment to all: kindly moron from the hinterlands. Adept at the maladroitism.  Imperialist I am not – I am a colonial, come to see how it’s really done.  My rustic clunkiness indulged with patience and childish explanations.  To interlope. To encounter myself in the mirror of cliche. Henry James made his living documenting the sweetly gauche American in Europe. The Americans, he called his novel, in perhaps the same tone as the the concierge employs, exasperated, behind our absurdly eager backs.

All the same, liberated from the pressure to orchestrate anything or be clever, I have time for flights of idiocy and fancy.

For instance, a sign on a French door marked POUSSEZ surprises me when I try to pull it, and it doesn’t budge, and I fall over from the misbegotten transfer of energy and the passenger on the metro laughs at me as he speeds away.  By the time I realize its actual grimly utilitarian meaning of PUSH, the meaning glances off my consciousness with the barest of impact. Because my mind has been whispering POUSSEZ POUSSEZ to itself and its scrumptiously evocative pronounciation of PUSSY has long since spiraled off into a mischievous conjurer’s journey of cats and girls and seashores.

Daydreaming is different in the winter. The mist obliges. Standing at the Pont Neuf with a twisted curl of yesterday’s Le Figaro containing roasted chestnuts and I’m warm in tall boots and suddenly without shame or shyness, the tropes gather round the warmth of my thrilled self – every tarnished stereotype, every dog-eared cliche, every trite pathetic platitude and truism has drawn chummily, intimately close to my damp woolen side to gaze with me into the Seine.  We smile at each other. We shrug. We nod. We hold hands. We lean too far over, just to feel our stomach turn a little. We are old friends.

We are fully reconciled to our ridiculousness, me and my typecast misty winter reverie on the Pont Neuf.

We are taking our place at the shrine. We are pilgrims, come to do our duty to our gods.

At the Pont Neuf, gazing through the mist into the Seine, it is possible to actually hear the click as dream interlocks itself with reality. This is why they exist. To offer that moment of familiarity, of belonging.

I feel a kinship with every other well-intentionally pretentious, craven American bohemian bon vivant who has stood here before, feeling grateful. For a moment, fitting perfectly into place. Because without us, the Pont Neuf would be unable to fulfill its duty as an overwrought trope.  Otherwise, it’s not really thanksgiving.

An American artist gazing into the winter Seine is as precious as any Massachusetts turkey stuffing. These are my holidays. These are my tattered and glorious celebrations. The tropes, my troops for today, are content.

Next to me, the two Moroccan men selling chestnuts have devised a marvelous roasting machine that yields a rusty, musky nut: a steel grocery cart contains a blackened 10 liter metal canister filled with charcoals – overtop it a scrap of sheet metal stabbed through with gruesome holes.  Everything oxidizing and ominous, post-apocalyptic. Colonial like me. Their chestnuts are the best in France. Their workplace the prime of Paris. They are genius at harvesting chestnuts from the trees at Pere Lachaise cemetery.  When they take my euros and hand over the hot twist of newspaper, it’s the nutmeat that matters, and not the glitterati’s exegesis on the shoes of Carla Bruni. They wink at my ecstatic grammatical abominations. It’s not their native tongue. They love the butchery. It’s like rebellion. Their fingertips are sizzling and blurred, burned from snapping and flicking at the sooty chestnuts.

They sell to Louvre-soaked passers-by whose eyes are glazed over by highly enfranchised art, our dormant organs awakened by the sultry marble flesh on pedestal and dais, by the burnished oils, by the obligingly informative brass plaques affixed to the gilded frames.  Vermeer.  Cassatt. Some sort of old mirror so many eyes have stared into, looking for something – a mirror dusty through familiarity gained from reprints on cocktail napkins and tote bags.  Dismissable as turkey and stuffing.  But somehow, we find ourselves hungry nonetheless. Hungry for something that goes into the stomach, but doesn’t live there, and feeds something else.

While the Centre Pompidou holds my heart, the Louvre is like a series of windows, a peep show, a ventriloquist act, a sideshow of sleight of hand tricks. Why do I stand here, feeling this way.

The oblique power of the artist to entangle the participant in something simple, like a trapdoor. Just stand here. What are you worried about? It’s just a little piece of wood. And then whooooosh, the latch catches, the hinge pivots, the bottom drops out, and there’s that plummet through into the mystery.

Coming out of the Louvre late at night, stars are visible through Pei’s pyramid. The Tuilleries are filled with cymbals – Irish football fans pelt them with stones and they ring out. What would Napoleon do. And what the decapitated Queens?

Night falls early now – if any, my holiday is solstice. Winter solstice the mother of all celebrations – a holiday so familiar that we forgot her. Maman! The children of Paris only need her when it’s time to cross the street, and similarly we remember Solstice when the long winter nights comes down to frighten us, and we seek a path through towards the other side. Maman.

I love the galactic slinkiness of daylight and night. I love feeling my sense of time stretch out into long, exhaustively neurotic summer soliloquies, where obsessive thoughts go unbroken and yet battered by the relentlessness of heat and sun. All the soft sweetness of dark cool winter sizzled and fried into a crisp muscular determination. Sinew of summer against the winter bone. The power of light and dark to cause cravings.

What could be more stereotypical than sunrise. What could be a greater cliche than a sunset. From my apartment in the Marais, there is a pinch of light at the top of the courtyard and twice a day it briefly stains the walls in variations of color I recognize as beaujolais. The Milky Way makes me thirsty. Summer grapes, winter pressing, glass bottles on a white tabletop glow against a candle.  How trite. How delightful.

Candles are winter, too, are our Ambassadors from the Realm of Fire. Stalwart, dignified magis from a faraway land we distantly remember. Mischievous. Utilitarian, incandescent, primitive – walk into a room of electricity and they eclipse it. Their ancient nature is incongruous – they surprise us with their glory.

This is what we do. We walk onto a shore, somewhere where we clearly do not belong. Where we are generally not wanted, or needed. Where we are ignorant. Where we proceed to make limitlessly tiresome idiotic mistakes born of innocence and desire.  We Americans invented it. We called it Thanksgiving.

So thank you, Paris, for making me part of your cliches. Thank you, old tired custom and convention that makes me feel at home on the cobblestones. Thank you, you dear sweet formulaic mouldy tropes that make me happy to be a girl with a pencil and paper in a Parisian attic. And please, sell me another twist of chestnuts. After all, it’s Thanksgiving.

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