These are facts, but what is to be made of them, if anything? I try to understand why they matter and if they can be relevant as I write this now. I await some strange enchantment to make them interesting. I put on my dark glasses to impose some new way of seeing, but they are just the same facts. Eventually, I shall make use of them, though perhaps without even knowing it. Or I will write about other facts, lost forever in my representation of them. The power is not in them but in the language, innocent and bold at once. My voice will say whatever it must, hurting, fearing, doubting, moaning, grasping for verbal connections that might possibly, miraculously explode into meaning. I think this is a kind of love, or self-love, and the resulting progeny is original language. A distant voice, and the ravishment from it (let us call it the hallucinatory power of language), can occasionally become even greater than the real, true, indiscreet version of love, the one between men and women. Here in Paris, there is a special mothering comfort, delight, and fulfillment for me, as if the real mother, with her mother tongue and mother heart, were coaxing me forward. There is no heaviness or melancholy. Instead, I find forgetfulness, like a fisherman accepting what comes to him from the sea. I am no longer an armored animal as I stroll along the bookstalls and cafés with wicker tables and polite policemen with their long guns.
I HAVE READ how the gardens and lily ponds at Giverny are not the landscape we enter in Claude Monet’s radical paintings. In the same manner, the bathroom in Pierre Bonnard’s home is unrecognizable from the shimmering, mosaic-like canvases that depict his wife bathing. The same is true for poetry, where the poet is like a steeple with a carillon of bells. There is only the sound of language making stanzas into feeling. When the imagination is role-playing as God, one is caught between the yawning ordinariness of being and another inrushing experience, of seeing, where it is as if one were being penetrated. The poet is like a peasant eating figs, nuts, almonds, and some fish from the river. When he looks out the window at the landscape, he sees spear-like cypresses, puffy swollen clouds, birds, oxen, and bleating lambs, but also high-tension wires supported by gigantic steel pylons that resemble dark stick-figure men, who complicate the idyllic landscape, as when one is hiking alone in the forest and trackless crags complicate a safe journey home.
Part XVII
WHEN KEATS’S BROTHER TOM visited Paris in 1817, he carried a notebook in which his brother John had written down his “Sonnet to Solitude,” which begins: “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, / Let it not be among the jumbled heap / Of murky buildings.” But for John’s brothers, Tom and George, Paris was not a place of solitude or a heap of murky buildings. Instead, they found uncommon delicacies, gambling halls, and brothels. They ran through their money too quickly and had to return to England sooner than expected. In a letter, Keats wrote, “Like most English men they feel a mighty preference for every thing English.” Keats was then writing (“till an utter incapacity came” upon him) his long poem “Endymion,” in which the shepherd Endymion is told by his beloved, “There is not one, / No, no, not one, / But thee.”
I think Paris is the city of the beloved. Some say a man goes mad if he is without love. Je t’aime: It is said with such childlike simplicity, the subject, je, and the object, tu, making a little clump of letters to support the aime and create a memorable sound package—Je t’aime. It seems to defy the need for further explanation, despite all the French love poems:
I’d been so seized by passion for this delectable lover.
—René Char, “The Lover”
(translated by Frederick Seidel)
Kiss me, rekiss me, & kiss me again;
Give me one of your most delicious kisses. . . .
—Louise Labé, “Sonnet XVIII”
(translated by Richard Sieburth)
I have dreamed so much of you,
Walked so often, talked so often with you,
Loved your shadow so much.
—Robert Desnos, “Last Poem”
(translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
Like the meadow,
Left unattended,
Overgrown, florid
With fragrance and rye,
Amid the harsh hum
Of dirty flies.
May it come, may it come,
The time when love astounds us.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Song of the Highest Tower”
(translated by Delmore Schwartz)
When Mother was in the hospital at the end of her life, her hands and feet were extremely swollen from the rehydration process done to excess. She was delusional and hated the hospital, where she was fed “mechanical soft” food. But my sister, Suzanne, was an excellent caregiver, rubbing lotion onto her arms and talking to her continually, which comforted her. Together we gave Mother a manicure, filing and painting her nails. “J’ai peur. Je veux ma chambre, mon lit. Ne me quitte pas. Je t’aime. Tu es mon fils. J’ai peur,” she repeated during my visits, grabbing the air. Je t’aime, Maman, I replied, feeling the inadequacy of my words. I think, in part, this is my subject as a poet—the inadequacy of language—and also my motivation. I hope my feelings are clear about this city that has been invaded, conquered, and occupied, but that still lives again. To write about Paris is not an easy endeavor, because when I write it is also a landscape self-portrait. Will I obstruct the landscape? Must I renounce myself to show the landscape without distortion? Is what I have produced a catalog of obstruction, whereby Orpheus lives not so much in self-laceration as in satisfaction? J’aime Paris.
J’aime Baudelaire, whose father died on his
