To start, my uncle and I drank pastis, a high-proof anise-flavored liqueur that we diluted with water. Pastis emerged following a ban on the highly addictive absinthe, which was once known as “the green fairy” because of its pretty color and powerful effects as a muse-like alcohol. “I want to dance with the green fairy,” I told my uncle, taking my first sips of pastis. Absinthe was also the beverage favored by Baudelaire, who might have said about it what he writes about wine in his poem “The Poison” (“[It] can conceal a sordid room, / In rich,miraculous disguise, / And make such porticoes arise. . . .”), and other poets, like Verlaine, though it was banned in 1915 because of its psychoactive effects.
Our réveillon was served in small courses, including pâté, lobster, an assortment of cheeses, walnuts, hazelnuts, clementines, red wine, and champagne. Then, after dinner, Père Noël arrived with a sensible gift for everyone, though this was not the point of the gathering.
YESTERDAY, my friend Jenny Holzer, the American artist, and I wandered around the Louvre hunting for the still life The Skate, by Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699–1779), in which a gutted ray fish with a human face hangs on a meat hook and is visited by a greedy cat. Chardin rarely left Paris and made a modest living producing work in various genres for whatever customers would pay. Eventually, Louis XV granted him a studio with living quarters at the Louvre.
Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) admired the canvas so much that he painted his own version (Nature morte à la raie) after making pilgrimages to see it. I want to write poems that convey the same intense realism as this painting, in which Chardin proves that still life is not an inferior genre. He was breaking a mold. The work is meticulously observed, in the manner of Flemish painting, and unafraid of disgust. I like how food—an ugly sea creature—is its subject. No subject should be too low for a painting or a poem.
But is it possible that Chardin sees blue in his still life when there is really white? If so, is there more truth in the crockery and vegetables than in the grimacing ray? I don’t think so, because a painting, like a poem, can have emotional truth whether or not it is based on fact. The imagination is god. Still, why do I love this painting so? Is it because it’s conventional while being thought provoking, too? Is it because it says something true in an atmosphere of beauty? Sometimes, when I look at art, all I see is ambition. And the same is true with poetry, when ambition is larger than talent. This, in part, is why I’m drawn to the sonnet, with its lean, muscular, human-scale body.
MY FRIEND JENNY is making paintings based on declassified, redacted documents from the war in Afghanistan in which prisoners describe being forced to kneel in the snow for many days while a snow-and-water mix is poured on them, and how during interrogations they were repeatedly punched in the face, chest, and flank. The testimonies are painful to read, but—unexpectedly—there is a formal dignity and beauty to the calligraphy and brushwork of Jenny’s oil paintings. The handwriting reminds us that in the Islamic faith the written word is of central importance, and that on the earliest pages of the Koran the pen and the writer are glorified.
Jenny and I wandered through the Louvre from one gallery to another, full of paintings by David, Ingres, and Géricault, and when we sat down on an old wooden bench to process what we’d seen, she told me the story of a foal that had been born that morning back home.
A healthy, perfect filly, she had a palomino coat. Last Christmas, the foal’s half brother had sneaked out to help make her. “Incest works better with ponies,” Jenny said drily, showing me a picture in which the unsteady foal is still wet from the insides of her mother.
Part V
WALKING ALONG the Seine today, I found a monument to Thomas Jefferson, who first sailed to Paris in 1784 to negotiate with European powers. Taking a carriage drawn by horses, he traveled south to Aix-en-Provence as a private citizen, without servants, because he believed that when one traveled alone one reflected more. Jefferson had injured his wrist and wanted to try the mineral waters at Aix for its restoration. His six-foot-two frame must have stood out among the comparatively small Parisians. I like to think of him—with his red hair ruffled by the mistral—standing before the Maison Carrée (Square House) in Nîmes, where he found inspiration for the buildings he would design back home in Virginia. The Maison Carrée, eighty-two feet long and forty feet wide, isn’t really square but rectangular, and it is one of the best-preserved temples of the Roman world, built by the emperor Augustus around 19 BC to commemorate his adopted sons, Gaius and Lucius, who died as teenagers. The biographer and travel writer James Pope-Hennessy called the temple “echoing,” “dust-laden,” and “somehow far too old,” but Henry James wrote, “The Maison Carrée does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it.” Ford Madox Ford compared it to reading the words that are “the most beautiful in the world.” One is certainly impressed by the temple’s versatility throughout the ages, since it has been a town hall, church, private house, market, and stable. Though the mineral waters didn’t ease Jefferson’s discomfort, he loved “the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine.” About the people, he said that you must have a “look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they
