A Mute-able Feast

Some bare bones journal sketches from my first trip to France in Winter 2006...


Paris! Going to Wimbledon Station, walking gingerly over snow-covered sidewalks.  Pulled out of Waterloo into snowy South London.  The towns here look like suburban New Jersey, just as North London looks like industrial New Jersey.  Went forward through England, then changed at the Chunnel and rode backwards through France.  The English end looked like Mexico with the bilingual signs. French side more fortified, with parallel barbwire fencing.  I never actually saw the Channel.  Once in France, the train announcements were now in French first, followed by English, the reverse of the other side.  The towns of France even look more European.

Paris!  Home of some of the best art the world has ever seen.  So why couldn't I create while I was there?  Few photos, and no words.  (I'm in a train waiting in Dijon as I write this.)  I'm buried under the weight of history -- how could I present this city in a different way?  Instead, I chose to walk and experience it -- stepping through the past and following the ghosts of those who'd inspired me, therefore using the city to build upon the artwork that is my life.

S. met me at Gare du Nord and after dropping my bags, walked to the Palais Royale for lunch at a Morrocan place. We caught up, and I liked the fact that the lunch spread out for two hours, with wine, espresso, etc.  (Over my time in Paris, I'd come to love espresso.) 

S. went back to work, and I wandered past the immense closed Louvre, past Les Halles, and the Pompidou, down into the Marais to get lost in its narrow streets.  I found my way to Jo Goldberg's Deli, which I'd heard was a center of intellectual debate, but all I found was a couple of American students and some uninspired service.  Pressed on to the scene of Jim Morrison's death, its side wall heavily painted. Walked on through the day into the falling light, following the maze of streets as the whim took me.    

That night, S. and I went to dinner with other film people:  J-M, a former actor/director, his wife, and L. an Australian born producer.  When we got into the car, all was riotous, everyone talking and gesturing like crazy.  At the restaurant it was more of the same, incredible amounts of food washed down by about a dozen bottles of wine brought with the shout of "Madame Mollier!"  I felt that the French are incredible at enjoying life, so different than the Japanese.  I also felt somewhat at sea, entering a new country where I don;t really speak the language, yet everybody looks like me, then to be whisked along on these mad fast-paced outings before i could get my bearings.  

After dinner, J-M drove us around a nighttime Paris, which, despite the hype, was still unable to stun me.  At midnight, we stood atop the Place de Varsovie, watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle.  Later, from farther away, I thought that it looked like it was being beamed away a la Star Trek.  It began to snow.  We drove through the light falling snow looking at famous buildings, round and round roundabouts, and through the arches of the Louvre.


I slept late and went out around 11.  There was plenty of snow on the ground, and it was still falling as I made my way to Notre Dame ("Our lady," J-M had repeatedly said last night.)  I followed my Pais walking book, which took to all the major sites in literary history.  It was an incredible book, leading me on a treasure hunt where the treasure was knowledge.  I started at Shakespeare and Co., and wound my way over the Latin Quarter and the Rive Gauche until sunset.  Kids played in the snow in various parks.  Older kids would scoop snow off cars to throw at each other, a scene I'd see repeated all day. People wrote messages in the snow on car windows.  Homeless sat on grates to keep warm, or huddled in vast doorways under piles of clothes.  

On Ile. St. Louis, every person I saw had a camera.  A house on the Island had a cracked facade, with a pigeons in the eaves.  The back of Notre Dame, with its eerie gothic spires looked as if designed by Giger.  Out front, a camera team was filming three men talking close while wearing elaborate robes.  Women stood nearby, far warmer in furs.  I sat awhile indoors, trying to warm up while reading Hemingway.  An organ began to play.  the nearby confessionals looked like interrogation rooms.  there was a beautiful statue of Joan D'Arc, and on the other side of the church, a young woman knelt, looking up at Mary with rapture.   

I eventually made my way to the Sorbonne where the students swarmed the cafes looking for lunch.  I passed a man whose clothes clashed badly.  Not everyone is fashionable in Paris. 

At Deux Magots I had a plate of cheese to accompany my bread and espresso.  As the hostess pushed in the chair across from me, I looked up into a faceful of cleavage.  I read Hemingway with my lunch, self-consciously trying to hide the cover under the table.  My waiter seemed chilly, but at the end of the meal, we talked a while about Japan. 

Back on the street, I continued my zig-zagging path along the narrow streets, including one lined with galleries showing African and Asian art.  Someone had written some racist graffiti on the window of some of these.  

The sun had appeared by now, and was melting off the rest of the morning's snow.  It was still a bit cold and I decided I needed more food to keep warm.  I chose a cafe that was built on the site of Hemingway's favorite.  I walked in and up to the bar.  The guy behind it said nothing so I held up one finger.  He gave me a puzzled look, so I said, "One man. I am one man."  He said, "I am too." I smile embarrassed as I'm led to my seat.  Then another guy gave me a look without speaking .  This must be the game here.  I don;t mind the famous surliness, and I started this whole thing acting like an idiot, a fact that was quickly being proven.  I had been afraid to speak my basic and rusty French for fear of being judged, but by saying nothing, I've come off worse.  Happily, my onion soup was tasty and warm, and I'm happy that it didn't give me gas like the cheap canned stuff does. The espresso that followed sent me on my way.

I wandered the rest of the day, musing at how small the flats of artists and writers were pre-fame, and how huge they were  in proportion to their fame.  I finally wound up on Rue de Fleurs and the home of Gertrude Stein.  Amazing how this was the start of it all -- my walk, this journal entry, the 20s scene, Paris as the heart of the art world.  I walked to the closed Jardin du Luxembourg, virgin snow covering it all.  Flakes began to fall again, in the dusk with its dull light.

After a long tramp to the Seine, crossing Pont Neuf just below the point of the Ile de la Cite. It was exactly 7 pm, and the Eiffel Tower went all sparkly.  I entered the Louvre through Pei's glass pyramid, then walked the long hall, past statuary brilliant in the dim blue light of night.  I wasn't able to imagine this in the day. I walked along the old Italians, gallons of paint splashed out for the Popes.  I was exhausted and was taking in too little, too drawn by what I saw out the windows and the life that created all this art in the first place.  It had been less than an hour, but the heat and the crowds and the sheer scale of the place had worn me down.  I retreated back to the flat.       

S. returned around 9:30.  Neither of us wanted to eat heavy, so we had dinner at a Cambodian place, which still wound up to be too much food.  The service was great, the wine not so.  S. and I discussed jazz far later than the owner might have hoped.  Back at the flat, she introduced me to the world of digestifs,  It became a late night...

(A suivre...)  


On the turntable:  Brian Setzer, "The Knife feels like Justice"

Sunday Papers: Honore de Balzac

"A travel book is a chimera in which the imagination must know how to soar on a magic carpet."


On the turntable:  Bruce Springsteen, "The Wrecking Ball"

Sunday Papers: Napolean Bonaparte

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."


On the turntable:  Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Sunday Paper: Honore de Balzac

"This is why the Orient boasts so few writers. One lives too much in oneself to have anything left of the self to hand out to others. What is the point of thought, there, where all is feeling?"

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "Going Going Guam"

Sunday Papers: Marcel Pagnol

"No history textbook in the world has ever been anything but a propaganda pamphlet in the service of governments."

On the turntable:  The Continental Op, "Stitch Music"
On the nighttable: Alistair Horne, "Seven Ages of Paris"

In the Protective Arms of the Father

It was still early when I climbed out of the Metro, but I knew that there would be at least one open cafe, and there was.  I sat and nursed two orders of croissant and cafe creme. The cemetery wouldn't open until 8 am, and I suppose it isn't tactful to wake the dead. 

I'd wanted to come to Père Lachaise since I first read Danny Sugarman's "No One Here Gets Out Alive," which detailed the madcap fan devotion around Jim Morrison's grave.  I'd made the long hike out here during a previous visit in 2005, but two days of snow had iced up the cemetery's hilly slopes and I had found it closed. 

The cemetery's distance from town had always been a problem, but a necessary one.  Until 1785, many of the town's residents had been buried in the near-open grave beneath today's Fontaine des Innocents near Les Halles. After the rains, the area became a mire of decomposing body parts.  Napoleon had those bodies moved to the city's famous catacombs, and when these began to fill people were buried out at Père Lachaise.  At first, residents were turned off by the cemetery's distance from the city center, so some of Paris' bigger names were moved here, in order to improve its cachet.  Writers La Fontaine and Molière were brought here first, then the tragic and celebrated lovers Abelard and Héloïse.   Steadily, the dead of Paris began to undertake this one-way trip, and Père Lachaise eventually grew into the city's largest necropolis.

Relieved to find them open, I entered the front gates and found a bench midway up the hill.  Nowhere else in Paris can there be found such a concentration of her history.  There were so many names here, and the grounds so expansive, that I needed to plot a route.  As I sat in the shade, listening to the birds, it dawned on me that I had finally escaped the incessant horns and sirens of the hectic streets of Paris.  A man with a cane hobbled by at that moment and said to me, "It’s beautiful isn't it?"  I had to agree. 

I continued up the hill in front of me.   This was the original section of the cemetery, and certainly the most beautiful.  Gothic and sometimes macabre sculptures decorated the graves of what must have been some of Paris' most noble families.  Each sculpture was a masterpiece, rivaling anything in the sterile museums of the city.  Here, surrounded by trees and dappled with morning light, the stone figures came alive.

I topped the first hill and looked to the west, catching sight of the Eiffel Tower and the domed Pantheon, itself a repository of renowned dead.  I saw too the man with the cane, ducking down one of the small cobbled trails that extended the wider "boulevards."  As he disappeared once more from view, I wondered if he was here due to grief or mere curiosity.  Through the morning, I'd repeatedly wonder this any time I encountered any other strollers, offering a subdued smile rather than a boisterous "Bonjour."

I found Colette's grave first, then sought out Chopin.  As I was looking, I took a photo of a life-sized figure of a man into whose hands someone had placed a rose.  I liked how the red of the rose contrasted so strongly against the grey stone.  Just then someone shouted out at me, and I turned to see a man with wild hair approaching, holding a thick notebook to his chest.  He repeated what he had shouted, then asked me, "Speak English?"  As I nodded, he told me that I was looking at one of the men who had designed the Louvre.  He then launched into a frenetic spiel, throwing out names of the famed dead in between answering questions.
"Do you know Chopin?" Gesturing behind him.
"Yes."
 "Balzac?
"Yes"
"Proust."
"Of course."
"Thierry Le Roi?"  I paused and apparently made a puzzled face.  Then he held out his hand to shake.  "And you?"
"Ted Taylor."
"Ah, English!  There are (X) English people buried here."
"My name is English but my family is Irish."
"Ah, Oscar Wilde!  There are (X) Irish people buried here.  The first person buried here is Irish.  A young girl.  Do you have time for a tour?"
I regret that I said no, that I didn't have time.  I liked the idea of wandering around the cemetery in the company of this eccentric, slightly mad person.  But as I made the universal gesture of tapping my left wrist he simply smiled, said "Enjoy Monsieur," and sped off again.

I continued my own perambulation, to pay tribute to Balzac, Yves Montand, Sarah Berhardt, Proust. The latter's grave was littered with Metro tickets, so I added my own.  I was amazed how simple some of the graves were, and how difficult to find were others.  The most elusive grave was Edith Piaf, with whom I played peek-a-boo awhile.  I admired the prone figure of Victor Noir, whose crotch had been polished to a fine sheen by the hands of women who rubbed it as fertility talisman.  Oscar Wilde had been encased in plexiglass, yet the cherub upon his grave had been emasculated, a fate that poor Abelard had suffered in actual life.  The glass didn't stop people from kissing the cherub's face.  And of course I found the grave of Jim Morrison, though it had been barricaded, and a group of workmen had chosen that area for a smoke break, which prevented a longer visit.

I visited too a few of the names in the crematorium, including Maria Callas and Isadora Duncan.  There were a number of people standing in front, and others continued to arrive.  Some were in black, and all looked to be in their 30s.  A friend had died I suppose, someone far too young.  It was a reminder that not all of us here had come for sightseeing.  Moments like this always bring to mind one of my favorite song titles, "Strangers Die Everyday."

I continued on to the back wall of the cemetery, its strip of lawn dedicated to mass graves, to air disasters, to the members of the French resistance, to Jews killed during the Nazi occupation.  Around and to the left a stretch of wall sat beneath an apartment building. Covered now with ivy, very few bullet holes were visible from the day in May when 147 Communards were shot.  There was no information on where they had been buried.

I allowed myself some time to wander free, coming accidentally to a few interesting graves (such as the Camera installed in the tomb of the very much living cemetery ethnographer André Chabot), and missed a few that I'd have liked to see.  But the hollow grumbling in my belly told me that it was time to get back to the world of the living.   LYL had chosen to opt out of this morning excursion, not wanting to risk polluting herself with the ultimate impurity of death. As it was, I later made her anoint me with salt as a means of purification, before we went out to celebrate the rest of the day.

On the turntable:   Billy Joel, "Songs from the Attic"

La Rive Gauche

Where yesterday's walk north of the Seine had been a stroll amidst the classics of Parisian monuments, today we would take in the other side of the river, where the heroes and giants of the time hadn't been afraid to get a little dirt beneath their fingernails.

But first breakfast was in order, and what better than bread and chocolate and a cup of frothy caffeine taken upon the sidewalk?  The nearest cafe was the oddly named Cafe Winston, after Churchill of course, but I couldn't help think of 1984, as Orwell too had spent time in this city, and had penned one of my favorite books about it.  It was we who did the watching however, not Big Brother, as the passersby on their way to work offered endless entertainment.   

Closer to the river, we forewent for a moment the sound and sights of the city by ducking into the Paroisse Saint-Pierre de Caillot, a hulk of a building that was as monolithic as the Arc de Triomphe just up the street.  This was church as fortress, a square squat edifice originally built in the 11th Century, but redesigned in the 1930's.  It quickly became my favorite church in Paris as it was completely without pretense, free from spikes and towers and gargoyles, though those too have their charm.  I suppose I liked it because its minimalism could almost be Buddhist.

A short walk away was the river, and La Flamme de la Liberté, modeled upon the Statue of Liberty's torch. At its base lay a number of flowers to Lady Diana, killed as she was in the tunnel beneath nineteen years before.

Crossing the river now, Eiffel's creation rising sharply to our right.  The left bank of the Seine was as noisy, as hurried as the right.  We tried to ignore it, hugging the shore of the river as we went, but like yesterday, we never seemed free of the roar of cars, and what seemed the near incessant scream of sirens.  The latter was a constant for the three days we were there.  Despite its reputation as the apotheosis of Western culture, Paris is almost Asian in its chaos. The hordes of people with their hard closed faces, throwing accusative glares your way as if deciding what part you play in the whole melee of aggressively pushing along the crowded streets, constantly on their mobile phones, constantly arguing.  Motorbikes raced through and around the stand-still traffic, and on the sidewalks, very large men patrolled with very large weapons. 

The traffic was horrendous, the flow of the streets poorly planned. It was with great relief that we escaped into the Musee d'Orsay.  I loved how it maintained its look of old railway station, albeit one quite short.  How pleasant it was to walk where the rails had once been, overlooked by the statues of marble and bronze.  I liked too how it picked up where the Louvre left off chronologically (and the Pompidou Center likewise picks up the story from there).  Unlike that more visited museum across the river, the d'Orsay had a steady even tone to her collection, rather than wing after wing of overlooked works, followed by the sudden crescendo of a Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo.  More friendly too was the scale, which lessened the possibility of burnout.  (My trip to the Louvre a decade ago made more understandable Godard's famous scene shot there, and I found myself constantly looking out the tall and plentiful windows, wishing to just get on with it and return to the snow-covered streets outside.)

Ironically, it was nature brought indoors that I appreciated most today.  The big names of Impressionism wowed me, as I knew they would, but what I took away from the museum was a newfound appreciation for Sisley and his landscapes.  As a writer I've always envied painters their ability to capture light, as it is something that can't be done well with words. And Sisley presented light perfectly. Scanning my eyes across the far wall, I found myself surprised that there were so many shades of blue.   

Sadly that blue wasn't with us outdoors as well.  Clouds and rain had been a persistent travel companion from prehistoric UK, down the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel, and now again in Paris.  I was beginning to learn it was quite a wet city, a fact I recalled from films and paintings where the light glared off the city's slick streets.

After a quick visit to the Beat Hotel and its old photos and ghosts of tobacco past we decided to reward our other senses with a meal.  Hemingway took his initial immoveable feast at a good cafe on the Place Saint-Michel and we did the same, though I've already forgotten its name.  We left the bustle of the plaza for the uphill climb past the old Roman baths, past the more Greek looking Pantheon and Clovis' ancient Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.  Here began the Sorbonne, and further on, the quiet, somewhat run down neighborhood where Hemingway had cut his teeth as a writer.

It was a shift downhill from here, then a quick diversion across the islands to Notre Dame.  I'd been of course, and the long queue turned me off, so I carried on back across the Seine over its oldest bridge, Henri IV's ironically named "Pont Neuf."  Not far from here was the famed Shakespeare & Co. bookstore (or at least an homage to Sylvia Beach's original), which I had made a priority on this visit.   Unfortunately I had made an appointment which I now needed to rush to keep.  What I remembered from 2005 as a slow pleasant meander through snowy streets was now a dash in the steady rain.

I arrived at Cafe Deux Magots a bit late.  Richard Dindo, a well-know Swiss documentary filmmaker, was waiting at what had been Hemingway's favorite table.  A fifty year resident of the Left Bank, he told me a number of tales about his life and history here.  It was a easy relaxed conversation, where we discussed French filmmakers and Japanese poets.

The day was growing late so we did what the economically-minded Hemingway rarely did: catch a taxi.  It was a mad ride, the stresses of which dissipated with the magic-hour views from the rooftop of our Hotel Raphael.

There was one more stop for the day.  During my last visit to France in March I read Colette's classic, "Gigi," and upon returning to Japan, had watched the film with my musical-crazed daughter.  The most memorable scenes had taken place in Maxim's.  Pleasantly surprised that it still existed, we decided that we needed to visit.  Walking through the door was very literally a time-warp to the Belle Epoque, where waiters in long coats offered a level of service rarely seen anymore.  Amidst a very red interior of mirror and velvet, we sat beside what later in the night would become a dance floor, and from somewhere behind the darkness of the stage a woman began a chanson croon.


There was yet another day, with drinks at the Buddha Bar (in the darkened basement of Hemingway's Crillion Hotel), a side trip to a tourist infested Versailles, and an oasis of quiet found within the Rodin Museum and garden. But by then we were growing  a little tired of Paris and its roar.  (Though we agreed that we'd like to come back a spend at least a week next time, to mop up the final sites as it were, to take in the lesser visited crumbs.)  For now we would set the plate aside.  Going beyond the metaphor, we were in fact quite looking forward to time spent in the south, to the quiet meals we'd have there.  Though Paris does deserve its food reputation and its constellation of Michelin stars, the feasts were always a little too bombastic (a criticism that could equally be leveled at Saint-Tropez).  Even with my limited time here, I was quickly beginning to realize that the best meals in France could be found in its villages, of a renown that went little further than its confines.  To quote LYL, why go out for a meal that is inferior to one that you can make yourself?  And there would be plenty of those too.

So we left Paris with a simple breakfast of croissant and cafe, taken at Gare de Lyon's Le Train Bleu, where we awaited our own.  It took us south, over hills rolling long and green, eventually beginning to shorten into a softer, cafe au lait brown populated with short trees and sheep. These shortened ever still into higher rocky spires, then fell away completely with the sea.


On the turntable:  Bill Withers, "Best of Bill Withers"