X in Paris
I arrive in Paris late one night and go to a hotel not far from the
one I stayed at two years before. Why Paris. Paris is an exercise
in despair, Paris is the workshop or rather the quarry whence I
extract raw materials to be worked, later, into a coherence
acceptable to what I perceive as the laws of my vocation. I note a
few American girls being talked to by a young man who does not
move his arms like an American. The American girl is unmistakable. She listens smugly. skeptical, half or three quarters
of her attention already clawing toward an elsewhere, the
something better just around the corner. The hotel clerk looks
at me with a calm that contrasts starkly with the anguish I begin
to unload. Before I turn on the light I am already resisting what
I perceive of the room's contour. The next day I begin what I
have, In part, come to Paris for. I have come to Paris to pursue
what bears the configuration of a shameless activity. We will call
it X. I need not specify, specification will only obstruct the
elaboration of a network of relations, connections, to which X
lends itself easily enough when unencumbered by, depopulated
of, specific features, ubiquitous nuances. So unencumbered X
becomes my foothold in, pretext for, thought, or rather thoughts,
since my capacity to survive is dependent on their increase. X is
the theater of my anguish. This means that this anguish is
estranged in, displaced to, X. This means that once submitted to
X, to the protocol of X, I undergo my anguish, my despair, only
in the form of a perpetual conflict between resistance and
surrender to X. The conflict breeds thoughts. In return for
undergoing the full weight of my despair as a human animal in
X--for railroading my despair to the domain of X--I acquire
thoughts, thoughts about being. But thoughts about being come
to me--indemnification is allowed me--only after I have shown
myself willing to submit to collision after collision with the
tenuous protocol of X. So indemnified, with thoughts, I can go
on. I acquire thoughts, therefore I am. Acquire Is the key here.
Very early the next morning I buy the weekly listing the significant
events of the week. I feel I should visit the museums, attend the
respectably important film and theater events. For whatever
enrichment comes from X--of course I anticipate a future,
retrospective enrichment but deep in the domain of X or even
on the margin of that domain enrichment is inconceivable--is
axiomatically illegitimate, frenetically disordered, far outside
computability. I sit on a bench. For summer it is cold and
drizzly. Parisians are on their way to work. I debate whether to
have breakfast in a caf&ecaute;‚ or spend fourteen francs on breakfast in
the hotel. It could very well turn out copious enough to permit
my going without food well on into the late afternoon.
I am here, in Paris. For so long I have been anticipating this
visit. But, a ravenous anticipation never took into account my
own participation, inevitably, in the spectacle anticipated. I
never considered what the reality would be once infiltrated with
my concreteness, the concreteness of my warring needs and
primordial sorrows, my waking odors and secretions. Anticipation
of participation Is always delicious because it is always spared a
preview of the participant's symptoms. I rise from the bench.
Those benches at the edge of the wide pavement fill me with
delight. Two wings separated by a partition. And there is always
a handsome plane tree nearby, its roots put to rest beneath a
perfectly circular grate.
Having left wife and son on the small island where her family
continues to spend its summer vacation I am on the verge of
being overwhelmed by despair. Is this despair at, in, separation
the cause of or the pretext for re-immersion in X. "Is this despair
at, in... ," this is a sample of the kind of indemnifying thought I
await.
My son stood on shore with his mother and waved and waved
and waved at the retreating prow. On the train from Nantes to
Paris I found myself sitting across from a thin, middle-aged
woman with a worried shrivelled face, smoking. She was not,
contrary to my fears, In the least revolted by my nibbling
surreptitiously and absolutely without appetite at the cheese
sandwiches, grapefruit and pain au chocolat solicitously packed
just before departure. As long as I could reassure myself about
the accumulated tortures awaiting me upon return to New
York--from job, coworkers, bosses, burglars, and from the
stalemate which had long before joined forces with my vocation--I
felt comfortable on ferry, bus and train. The inevitability of
future pain was something solid to oppose to the partial obliterations inevitable once I
placed myself in the hands of the city of
light. On the bus to Nantes from Fromentine I found myself
hungering after the anguish undergone two years previous,
when I had left wife and son in Brive for the same destination in
order to get a few days' headstart on our projected brief sojourn
together before the tumult of Roissy. I found myself hungering
fore recrudescence of that anguish because now, at a distance, it
seemed airtight, secure, eminently enviable. Then it had been,
doubtless, as massive and as clandestine as the version just
about to spring but now there was no intrusion of a writhing
physiognomy--no intrusion of a symptom-laden concreteness--to
mar the contemplation of what, serene and devoutly to be
wished, flashed forth the surety of its own concludedness replete.
with beginning and middle in addition to end. This remembered
anguish was nothing less than the only legitimate--the only
conceivable--anguish. But I was incapable of clothing myself in
such borrowed finery since I was clearly not the being of two
years before. Somewhere in the space between the first paroxysm
and this second taking its time about unfolding I had altered.
Hearing a cat mewling in the back of the bus I felt myself on the
verge of a thought. The thought told me it was not so much
separation and departure and its aftermath that was about to
torture me as the freshly intuited tension between the hunger to
undergo present anguish as the exact facsimile of retroactively
paradigmatic anguish past--or rather the hunger to undergo
present being as anguish in some form, in other words in its only
conceivable legitimate form, that of anguish already over and
done with--AND the impossibility of thrashing past the barrier
of an inurement, an evolution in the interval between present,
past. The thought did not give up: It was not so much despair at
separation that was about to be undergone as an agonizing
confusion over the nature--name, rank and serial number--of
what was at present unfolding or about to unfold. What was it. It
certainly did not resemble, from where I sat, despair in its
paradigmatic form. I played back the thought. The thought
stated that it was not so much despair at separation that was
being undergone . . . not so much despair at separation that was
being undergone . . . not so much . . . hut this was absurd. But I
was too happy with my acquisition to take issue with its content.
The thought had spoken with authority. I knew without articulating that if the thought was to qualify as a precious acquisition,
an affirmation of persistence in my own being, an encapsulated
dramatic event, an undergoable convulsion, then it must embody
the supersession of one state or affairs--the obvious, the incontrovertible--by another. The obvious state of affairs was simple
anguish at being separated from those I loved. But what could
that state of affitirs yield me but anguish. Could submission to
that state or affains indemnify me in some way. In the plane of
ihought it was possible to avenge myself on the state of affairs for
the state of affairs. Only in the plane of thought. In the plane of
thought the one, the only, state of affairs, in submitting to
certain tricks of syntax, relinquished its preeminence, its
incontrovertibility.
The thought told me it was not anguish at separation that I was
enduring but . . . Not A but B. In the plane of thought my
indemnification for undergoing A was a thought--was the
acquisition of a thought--in which the shelving, the denigration,
the supersession of A was secured for all eternity. But only in
the plane of thought for as I descended from the bus and
struggled to remove my duffel bag, brown and green, stashed in
the hold I felt myself being felled into permanent inconsolability
by a particular slant of sun on the white wall of the gare.
The next day, after the copious fourteen franc hotel breakfast, I
take the metro. Having bought a carnet the night before I am
sure to save a considerable amount of money. Two years before
tickets were purchased only one by one. This tactic had denied
any fixed duration to a sojourn scheduled to last the several days
until my wife's arrival. This time I am accepting the fact of a
fixed duration by adopting the rational maneuvers appropriate
for making it most agreeable even though at every moment, or at
every other moment, my state of mind implies immediate
departure. By buying a carnet I eliminate the need for frequent
transactions with ticketsellers under glass, I no longer count on
those spasms of connectedness to postpone by obliteration. In
spite of my grief I have succeeded in resolving the problem of
whether I ought to make myself responsible for my own being,
my own foul-smelling parcel of reality, or disseminate it among a
host of curtly efficient functionaries. Yet at the same time I
loathe this proof of a progress, an evolution, a . . . rehabilitation.
Surrendering myself to X I move from one of its theaters of
despair to another. Delivered up to X I am incapacitated for the
observation of trees, cafe habitués, streets--all the official raw
material whence my vocation, ostensibly at war with the descent
into X, strengthens its sinews. I loathe myself cutting myself off
from all this precious raw material. All down my peregrinations I
can feel myself fighting in vain the disorder and deprivation
suppurating from the wound of my thralldom. I am plunging far, further and further, from the legitimate site of acquisition.
All is lost. Paris has never seemed darker, less yielding. Then a
thought comes, not far from the Place Clichy. The thought tells
me though I feel myself fighting against the ostensible chaos
induced by thralldom to X I refuse to feel myself fighting,
through X, via X, as X, armed with X, suffused with X, against
the rigidly imprisoning edicts designating what is and what is not
legitimate fodder for the vocation,--for being, in other words,
since it is only through the vocation that I am at all--which I
construe as emanating without pause from its every nook and
cranny. This thought, in addition to being a bona fide acquisition
to be opposed to the obliteration waiting at every crossroads,
also awakens me to the possibility that in its way X embodies a
fight, my fight, to be. It might be more than an embodied
negativity, a fanged void which has somehow managed to usurp
the ground of my real being. Yet as anything but an embodied
negativity can it be useful tome, that is to say could it serve as a
pretext for thought, thoughts. After all, a thought came, not far
from the Place Clichy, on the wings only of a conspicuously
failed fusion with X as a defiance of withered injunctions,
received ideas.
And why has the thought come. Why did the thought come
then. What was the meaning--what is the meaning--of a thought
. . . coming. Has the thought been sent to mask a painful truth
(that X is and will always remain incompatible with the vocation's
legitimate cravings) or as the only possible instrument for unrolling for my inspection an opposite equally painful truth. This
quandary has itself the makings of a thought, that is to say an
acquisition.
Just before I redescend I tell myself thoughts will be impossible
once I feel myself at one with X. Thoughts will exit only from
the seams of a failed coincidence between me and X.
Toward the middle of the afternoon I am approaching a saturation
point. But I can never be sure when I might redescend in blind
defiance of my own satiation. I am never sure how long I will be
able to tolerate the sunlight. I have a beer, standing up at the
counter, In a crowded café‚ on the Place Clichy and then, for no
apparent reason, begin a descent of the Rue Clichy, buying and
devouring en route two green apples from a small grocery less
from hunger than as a tentative affirmation of renewed connectedness with the real world, the clean busy world beyond X. I
devour them also to be rid of them as quickly as possible, for
once purchased they are immediately impedimenta on the way
to, on the way to, on the way back to X.
Reaching the grands boulevards I decide to eat in a self-service.
Only when I am well into the meal do I realize how deeply
Parisian self-services depress me. Outside it is greyer than it has
been all day. I am abundantly overcome with fear of loved ones'
loss. I believe that by entering a self-service I will be spared the
humiliating confrontations inseparable from sitting down in
even the lowliest bistro. But here, among these others equally
dispossessed, humiliation has been supplanted by overwhelming
grief and fear rendered all the more overwhelming because
unmitigated by prickingly abject collision with restaurant chessmen. The sky becomes too grey. I surrender to X. Yet once
surrendered I feel that I have only to wrench myself free of its
coils to be spared every conceivable form of torment. I wait. The
thought comes: Descent into X as a flight from torment is
immediately transformed, descent achieved, into an impediment
on the way back to clean and manly confrontation of those
torments, which confrontation viewed wishfully, wistfully, from
the depths of X is indistinguishable from nothing less than
torment's end. The thought continues: it is the evasion of
torment (excruciated separatedness from loved ones, from all of
being) in the depths of X that is equivalent to, induces, torment.
When viewed from the vantage of an impeding X separation is
no longer characterizable as unappeasable torment. Saddled
with the supplementary anguish induced in surrender to X I find
myself saddled concomitantly with nostalgia for the torment,
all those anguishes, masked behind lopsided allegiance to X, to
the grammar of X. The virulence of these anguishes are not
inherent: It stems from the virulence of X's obstruction of manly
confrontation.
I run out into the Boulevard St.-Denis. I find myself there where
the pavement rises high above the thoroughfare. The next
morning I again take breakfast In the hotel. Walking all down
the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg I am invigorated, ecstatic
over the renewal of an intimate relation with my favorite city, at
the height of summer already on the verge of autumn's fragrant
chill I am far from the craving to re-immerse myself in X. My
slate is wiped clean. Purity runs through me all the way down to
my bowels. But will this rehabilitatedness last, will I be able to
wander in neighborhoods far from my signposts, the theater of
my degradation. As a good tourist will I be able to contend with
the upsurge of details that have nothing to do with X. I proceed
down the Rue de Rivoli to the grands boulevards and upward to
the Place de la Republique. Sitting in its park, beside the
fountains and the mutilated-looking trees, I examine my map. I
am comforted. The clouds overhead are comforting even though
they are purposefully massed against the sun's emergence. A
thought is imminent. I am about to be rearmed, to acquire an
arm. A thought is on the way. A thought is coming. A thought
enshrining the connectedness of X to other states of affairs is on
its way. I take a deep breath. The thought's imminence allows
me to think seriously, detachedly, of X. Is there, after all, so
much difference between immersion in X and legitimate activity
--what I am doing now, for example, sitting absolutely still and
getting my bearings as the vehicles charge past. Reading my
map, I begin to accept myself as the site of a skewed compatibility
between X and all the legitimate and eminently acceptable
activities that need never, X-like, cringe against the incursion of
daylight. The thought arrives fully-formed: Turbulent anguish
emerges not so much in thralldom to, immersion in, X as from
the need to separate, to render it highly distinct and distinguishable from the sunny quotidian's respectable doings. Once again:
Not A but B. Once again: Vengeance on straitjacketedness,
fixedness, localizedness, in being, in my own particular form of
being. The thought jostles me forward: Repressing its memory
during those daylight or rare hours of night when I am allowed
or forced to commingle with the legitimate particles of my
chosen Vocation, I merely perpetuate X, nurture its infernal
glamor and insure its recrudescence. Insofar as I assimilate it as
a legitimate constituent of my being I rob X of some of its
virulence. But so legitimated, I wonder, is it still X, does it still
partake of the substance of X. That is, so devirulized, does it still
qualify as a thought-producing machine. I am not sure, staring
at my ragged map in the heart of the Place de la Republique,
whether this last query is part of my thought or a reaction
against it.
The Quai de Jemappes is almost deserted, except for a tiny fish
writhing its last in a net. After noting the footbridges along the
canal I turn into a street, the Rue Bichat. It drizzles. When I
emerge from my winding foray it is sunny once more. It is even
sunnier and warmer in a little park off the Rue Boyer. A child
passes through with its grandmother. I am sad but no longer
tortured. There is something in this little park which soothes,
maternalness intervenes at its most unthreatening.
In a few minutes, by metro, I am steps away from the Luxembourg
Gardens. I enter, sit down on an iron chair along one of the
many paths. I think back to the dark drizzle infecting the Rue
Bichat. With the sun blazing unequivocally now I am for a split
second transported far from the site of misery. Tabulating the
distance I have come, from drizzle to dazzle, in so short an
interval thanks to the efficiency of the underground and the
delirious mutability of the skies above, I am catapulted far from
my origin in grief, helplessness, excruciated separatedness. The
witnessed change from drizzle to dazzle suggests that my present
fixedness, stratjacketedness, localizedness in gapless pain, will
also change, end. Measuring how far I have come--from the
Avenue Gambetta to the Boulevard St.-Michel--I am transported,
I am the distance between these two quartiers, more, between
two states of being, participating in both and in neither--
completely ... inconceivable, unlocalizable, therefore insusceptible to pain. The state, or
rather the statelessness, does not last.
All of a sudden I am prey to another incarnation of despair.
Once again I find myself out on a limb without benefit of the
tightrope that lured initially. Somehow the contrast between
drizzle and luminosity, at first so bracing, so delightful, is now
boding ill. The contrast is now simply a . . . detail. I look around. Trees, playgrounds, tennis courts,
manege, pissoirs, little lac, all these details are lovely and ultimately disruptive. I
have fallen
back to being with a thud, the excruciation out of all proportion
to the impact. I continue to look around, to stretch myself out
on the rack of details.
I am conscious that I see them now with two successive sights:
first of pleasure and second of raging pain that their loveliness
should be lavished now, under these circumstances. Details
exist to torture my solitude, enhance my separatedness, contrast
expressly with my penury. Still I go after them. I turn around.
Outrageously, a man is sitting on the grass behind a bush eating
American fast food. Another detail. Another twist of the knife.
Encounter with this detail, with each and every, is a spasm of
flight. Perceiving the detail I leap toward it leaping toward me.
My anguish is obliterated for I am indistinguishable from the
fused leap and a leap (timeless, spaceless) does not undergo, is
never susceptible to, pain, my kind of pain. Going to greet the
detail expatriates me, blissfully, out of being. But then, but then,
colliding with the detail I am reminded of its context which is,
always, always, the same context. I am rebounded back to the
world, to the context of the world--the world as a totality of
details all smelling of the same slogan. Life--details--goes on. I
am separated from those I love, I am, they are, every moment
prey to annihilation, but life goes on.
Sitting on the bench, at the very heart of the detail circus (a leaf
falls), consists in fact of the incessant resurgence and decay of
the pulsion to get up and go away, back to X, far from the
excruciation induced by the omnipresence of details. Initially,
they all strain toward me with the promise of the beginning of
the end of pain, of separatedness, but then . . . Sitting on the
bench is perpetually smothered flight from the bench. This is
what sitting means. This is its concept. The part of me that will,
at the drop of a hat, unfurl its allegiance to the vocation's
legitimate enrichment, wants to remain, acquiring traditional
raw materials--thoughts about trees, paths, ice cream vendors
--tourist thoughts, broadened-horizon thoughts. The other part
wants to run. Back to X. Away from the reminder that I am
separated not only from my loveds but from all of being as a sum
of details.
It is dusk. Not only is the air cooler, windier, the park has
thinned also. Dusk is . . . exquisite. Then why am I compelled to
run from it. Once again I feel how X pulls me away from a
suitable field for the expanding exercise of "vocational skills"
but not how X, single-handedly, saves me from the excruciation
latent in even the most peripheral immersion in that field's--dusk's--warm bath of crystalline beauty. Dusk is not kind to the
solitary.
I run toward the metro on the Boulevard Raspail. The tower in
the middle distance buoys me up. It is exhilarating to be, once
again, within minutes, on the other side of Paris. These shifts
breed a kind of defiance, a sense of having shamelessly colluded
against all others--the very laws of life--all who must condemn
me for the feverish ignominy of my flight. As I am about to reach
the glass doors just below street level saying, Excuse me, I hurry
past someone who threatens to swerve into my path. I catch my tone. It is not, surprisingly,
the tone of one run ragged by obsession. No, it is not the tone of one run ragged by obsession, it
is much more . . . much more . . . Once again, a thought is on its way, I am propelled forward by
what I am about to acquire. No, it is not the tone of . . . it is much more the tone of . . . not A but
B. It is much more the tone of one who, with quiet heroism shelving his own preoccupations,
hurries surefooted to the site of another's crying need. My tone is much more that of one about to
intervene on behalf of what has absolutely no connection to his own picayune well-being. For a
moment it is no longer I surrendered to X, to the protocol, to the grammar, of X, I am merely
taking the part of one so surrendered. But without the least trace of condescension or reproach.
Home
|