A la Prochaine!

A Moment in the Paris Metro

Fluff

When I tell you that nothing else has been on my mind but my frustration with and resentment towards my recent writings, it is not true, but only a slight exaggeration. I have also been thinking about meringue. And colors!

To write about meringue seems insane. It has been the pillow of my life's sleep, a texture more familiar to me than most others. The tradition of the family meringue was, for years, one of the only measures I had for time and season. Winter smells like burning wood, feels like long-john silk, bright white mornings, and it tastes like the family meringue. The strange fluffy tear drop cookie with one very surprising ingredient specific to my family's recipe. The lecture on humidity, and the tearing of brown-paper bags. I rolled my eyes at my father and his insistent jubilance, but I would marvel at the sloppy batter, this thick wet snow just as sweet as I could bear, and sometimes more than I could. I would elbow my sister to throw the chocolate chips, and to lick the bowl. I have never, ever made these cookies on my own. I have a recipe for my grandmother's cookies which I've made on occasion and which I adore, but these cookies, my father's family meringue has been spellbound for years. Left to the family's resident Expert.

But meringue is a world, fluffly, and thick, and sweet. I am not a flitty character, but this.. this thing.. meringue, is, really, magical. A blend of egg whites and sugar frenzied into a mousey, tar-like sapcloud. The Italians, actually, do it best by first making a syrup to add to whipped whites, giving a firmness the French technique can't promise.

But what the French have done with meringue? Glorious. Decadent. Did you expect elsewise? There is a liberty to food coloring I'd never had the guts nor the opportunity to embrace and if there ever was an opportunity to embrace it, it is with meringue, in the macaron. Let it rest to say, like everything, everything else, it is a wonderful tool! The beauty of the macaron is in it's versatility. The rules are simple, and if followed will not disappoint in providing a vast and sweet canvas for creative feasting of both eye and mouth. Crunch and goo! As with the souffle, and with, I think all baking, the science and precision of consistency and texture, and temperature and timing holds the world in its orbit and allows it to spin and spin and evolve and be beautiful over and over again. Oh, what fun!

We made a dark chocolate ganache with orange zest, a butter cream with coffee extract, pineapple
compote with rum, and a vanilla bean pastry cream on macarons of both Italian and French meringue styles in red, blue, purple, green, and yellow. Can you guess my favorite?

At least now I've got something to share with my family.


*check the gallery for more photos!

Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard

The lounge chairs were huddled in groups circling the low and large pool of water with the giant golden ball seemingly floating or rolling in the center. They were deep bucket seats with a reclined back that bid you watch the clouds, forcing your head to hang too far back. The lad with smokes slid slowly and stiffly into the seat, hesitant to turn his belly up leaning back, and smacked the pack of cigarettes against his palm, turning the box and smacking the opposite end in nervous time. He had, because of his sunglasses, the impression of the gold ball being rather pink and he eased a bit in his seat, grateful for the protection not from the sun (which was in fact not a threat today), but from the terror of accidental eye contact with these strange people who walk in gardens in afternoons. He could watch safely the old man crooked in a constant bow shuffling his slippers (the man was wearing slippers!) across the dirt. Pigeons at his feet huddling like conspirators. A loneliness overcomes the boy, the weight and doom of time having bent this old man and he shifts his gaze back to the large pink ball to try recovering the easiness it gave him just a few moments ago. No avail; he is crushed and panics. Whipping his head round now, he's sat up straight and is ready to run, wants to scream. He opens his mouth, on his toes. The adventuress stutters a "bonjour!"
Stunned, he melts as if tranquilized back into the lounge chair despite how ill-proportioned it is to his height. He nods, weak.
"donc, uh.. ... Ca va!?" she tries hopeful, blind to his nausea. Nothing. Not nothing; another nod, and she smiles, screeching another metal disequilibrial chair against the sand and poises herself with one hand on the opposite knee, and one hand holding her chin. Feeling herself lubberly, she repeats to herself "What lovely company I am!" but having spent the morning talking with herself she unfortunately mouths the words silent as they were. Dammit.
Strange, he thinks, and glances through his eyeshades. She looks pink.
"Ca va." he says the two words separately, like two blocks brought up by coughing in his mouth, shyly. Plucking a cigarette from the pack sufficiently smacked, he tips the box toward her and thinks of sneaking his eyes over the glasses but thinks better of it; let her be pink..
The tobacco stink startles her, it seems wanting to burn. Violent, no? It occurs to her that she has smoked before seeing the comfort of her fingers as they pinch the filter. Leaning towards a light with mouth invariably pursed, saying, "if you please," with eyes glancing up, it seems difficult to retain grace or dignity. "Merci," and the smoke hurries up her nose, into the eyes, she winces, coughs, smiles. Dammit.
Hearing the word, he sighs, another stranger! He mentally beats himself on the back with a birch branch for not recognizing her sooner! Yes. She is like himself, strange, clumsy, here, and asks her name. "Al. Can I call you Betty?" She is not surprised at being found out, not surprised at his words and their language, she is not honestly surprised by anything. He shrinks, and nods, shy again though not as before.
She knocks the ash from the end of the smoke and watches herself as if she were the pink, or gold ball. The round surface spreads her wide, erases the details of her skin, the texture of her scarf, the discomfort of the chair, but magnifies one eye, the cigarette and it's smoke. Fascinated, she stares at herself this way. Seeing herself large, looming, deformed, unsurprised. She sees thus behind her a funeral procession. Squeezed onto the north pole of the golden ball, it is stretched thin and wide, the wheels of the hearse huge, the casket on shoulders thin like Italian meats. Her breath catches suddenly as she sucks the stub of cigarette burning fast and strong, the smoke more confidently now runs into her nose. Burns her eyes. Someone sings carols like dust from their mouths in the cold air and she remembers. Suddenly so, so sad.

I Can Be Your Long-Lost Pal

Taking for granted that we've no need of logic, we can rightly understand how someone without a proper home can well be tossed to the melancholia of homesickness, that even one well without memories or the furniture of habit around them can be made cold by the unfamiliar even when the warmth of his customs were barely felt. Considering, naturally, that we are all at some point, or to varying degrees at all times, foreign, as it were, we may regard as worthwhile the practice of adventure.

As a matter of habit, our adventuress, as well as I, avoid the coddling of children and the raffish tendency to paint them as a bunch of angels. In one way, however, some of these little things may well be an example of something good. For children will usually prefer to play than anything else, and if given their range of all the foolish accoutrements and stuff piled round them, they will unfailingly want, first of all, to play with you, over the mechanic contraption, and also to play pretend in any variety of archetypal identities invariably where they find themselves wielding a kind of power. At once 'Doctor,' and then 'Maman,' or if the role's been claimed, 'big sister,' and on to 'Teacher,' and back round again to try on the faces of these giants in their world. There is pleasure and learning for them in playing at influence and malleable self-hood, and you'll notice just as well that it doesn't satisfy enough to declare themselves the mother of the game, but they don a new name for you, too, for the pretend must be complete and completely different, as granted by the very lack of logic.

We do sometime learn contrary to our childhood pretendings that we won't mature into firefighters and princesses; only one will be the fate and likely neither of the two. And what foolishness it is that we learn this! That we grow to deny the glorious promise of being just one intricate person. For though it is true that we can only bother ourselves concerning the way this cookie crumbles, we can be sure that this one will hold the flavor of as many as ever were, and what a joy to be given such a dough to experiment, such a vehicle for adventure!

This darling walked the gardens of Tuileries without much sense of the thousands of memories she had forgotten of herself; the long-lost intimidation she had harbored of butter and bread, the way that her legs would once always be shaking, or the months spent trying never to sleep alone; walking as she was with an even step and steady pace, her shoulders slid away from the ears and even though the temples were pounding, she did not remember the teachings she used to give, nor that most embarrassing moment of her life in Mexico 3 years prior, neither of course did she recall the previous night and how she came to be, serendipitously, here in the gardens. She smiled, thirsty. Seeing a gentleman about to sit on a lounge chair in the garden with a pack of cigarettes, she thought, "I'll call him Betty, and me, Al."

If You'll Be My Body-Guard

The corner of her bottom lip was swollen and gray. It was sometime in the afternoon when she woke to find a thin gray cover of sky over the Grande Roue. Standing now, she shakes her head and wags her cheeks on her face wondering wha-...why? The immediacy of being awake in the afternoon in public impels her to do something, but being senseless as she was at the moment, all she could bear to do was to fumble hands in her pockets, and press her tongue to the welt on her mouth.
So often when we wake to find the world a stranger we fashion from our memories an excuse or explanation and from our habits some solution. We could call it a shame that this one had not the faculty at the time to remember of herself as a smaller child, sick to the stomach at the Taj Mahal and the photo taken of her frowning with arms barred across her chest, uncomfortable and angry as one could expect. Such a memory might have granted her the timely use of a tool well within her repertoire for exactly such encounters as these.

Alas, as she scanned the sky and scenery, the people strolling past her, and those vending hot wine, she happily found her gloves and hastily put them on for as well as she could not provide a reason for her being there, she also could not summon a reason for her to be anywhere else and away from need of logic, she knew that she was cold.
Without the need and indeed the capacity for reasoning, left in quite this state of desolation and fumbling as all she could do in her pockets, she produced a few coins and started towards the man with the vin chaud. Smiling at the man's bright white face, she let the coins clatter on the counter of his booth and asked with shrugging shoulders for a small cupful. His skin sagged heavily from his eyes that his smile was such relief, and she coughed back laughter, but the vinchaudman took the coins, and said to her, "Donc et voila, it's cold today! Wine...biensure c'est comme ca...you sleep...!" His meaning muddled and flung at her so violently and with such beneficence, she seemed to need to blink several times to see clearly that he was presenting her with her cup and some change. With a thank you genuine and meek, she walked away. Without having sipped yet, she sat down knowing that he was a good man and that it was good wine.
Simply enough, she found herself soon warm, and again watching the baskets of the wheel swept smoothly, swiftly up into the cold. Speakers stand embedded in the streetlamps showering "vive le vent" down upon the ramblers, the words themselves lost upon the girl; the tune, more powerful, unlocked nonspecific memories of cheerfulness, the feeling itself. Being alone as she was, blank as she admittedly was even with the reemergence of some memory, self-hood and context, and being also happy, she began to sing quietly to herself. First it was the American version of "vive le vent," but halfway through, the assertion of Paul Simon's "you can call me Al," was too strong to resist even if she had had reason to. The song made her laugh even without specifically remembering that time in West Virginia.
The quiet self-soothing of singing gave way to a quiet conversation just of her own. Someone's passing glance lingered longer than happenstance, and realized to the girl the visibility of her lips' movement, the impression it gives, and, as in a forced farewell, how happy it had made her to speak aloud to herself. "What lovely company, I am," she said as in finale, and wiped the grin from her face with the last sip of hot wine.
Warm, happy, and in Paris; no one could say she was lost. Not knowing for sure if she was a smoker, she set out for a cigarette, or a cigar, whichever came first, because, she said, "I might be."

A Narrator's Word

Arriving directly to this instant, I would guess at your sense of being unprepared, and your jitters would not be wrong in shying you away. I implore you, dear reader, to stay. I never have nor will I promise you of anything in regards to the story of our dear adventuress as it is not my place to make promises, but I extend to you a hunch of mine own, a suspicion that your unpreparedness will be not so harshly punished.

Again, rather than chewing till the marrow's dry, I shall straight away begin at the end of your readiness. This lady of ours, dear reader, is naught to me but a neighbor. I've never once yet written her, nor did we share many cups to drink together prior to her adventuring. She made me once this shawl, which I have worn rather regularly to save me from the chill of a draft I had once to her mentioned in passing. It was a gesture kind and unexpected never thereafter followed upon in further acts of generosity, until she packed her satchel, and kissed both cheeks of mine. She asked with a smile if I would receive a letter or two from her. I agreed to hold her keys and mind her car, as any kindly neighbor would, and with a bit of surprise accepted her letters, thinking them harmless at best.

Without admitting as much as the esteem in that I hold these letters, I suspect I needn't make overly clear how dear the darling girl has become to me, and what's more! how changed my days have been by these silly notes. Indeed I've seen my own pantry translate itself slowly; and the coffee table previously piled with bills, television remotes with dead batteries, and dirty tea cups; is now stacked in piles of her letters sidewise to the books she's recommended, and I do dare admit to waking brighter, smiling wider at the post-man, humming in the kitchen, and indeed practicing my penmanship and typing hand! I feel as a gift to her, and she to me, even considering my windshield ice-scraping duty.

Over years of quiet neighborhood, a cup of sugar or an egg from one to another and this stretch of pen-friendship, it would not be fitting from my position with her shawl wrapped round my shoulders to remark upon the exactness of her words. The words themselves would do little indeed to show you what I've seen, but there has been a shift in her as the letters arrive sometimes in swarms and then dripping drop by drop, again in throngs at my mailbox and then dry for days. I have seen her change her seeing, or her seeing being changed; I can't be sure which of the two or if there is indeed a difference.

Though her penmanship and choice of ink have varied very little; her vocabulary fluctuating as any person is wont to do between profane and delicate; she still dances round the questions which she so wants to ask, but there is something of the temperament in which she grasps the pen, something in the pace of her writing evident nowhere on the page but within it. Something, I venture, is different.

Now that you know that I don't know her well, and take, I expect, some grains of salt with all that I share, I do hope that your generous gut would grant you the fancy of belief in the face of doubt. For the sake of our lady and the letters she writes, I should hope there'd be someone worth their witness of this. That she is happy. And despite my position held in confidence and security,  I should wish that her life be borne a greater audience than an old lady in a shawl counting down to an oil change.

That the girl has met with cliches, and poor understandings, small children, great food, loneliness, and surprises. And she sits down to write with greater patience than ever. And she spells out these phrases one letter at a time, saying things like, "I am worthy of my own trust," and "Variety gives us our dignity," and "A word is made more of pronunciation than it is of letters," and she kisses tombstones and she laughs; she makes me laugh.

On Staying in Bed

With the kind of anxiety which can be put nowhere to use, and the heavy head which undoubtedly results, our lady friend has, after weeks gone dry, whetted her feather in ink. Her weak hand is evidenced in it's writing; the thin and noncommittal strokes of her letters and their lazy extensions below the line, but she assures us half convincingly that this sunkenness she rises from is not so grave as we might have taken otherwise to believing. In place of the autopsy to assuage retroactively, or the black-box clue to catastrophe diagnosis, we have rather, the low-grade determination of searching a knit for the one dropped stitch.

She reminds us what we already know though have likely forgotten; a wisdom left untouched in recent days or years simply because we've not needed it or have not had time to act on it. Silly, we reflect that such simple things are counted even among the bits of wisdom which we treasure upon remembering. We know that this thought itself accompanies every wise remembrance and so count that as well among them.

Such, she says, is life. We shall, for the moment, take her word for it, as we know she knows little else of life than her own, and that is enough for us. When bellies are empty, they want to be filled, and once full work only to be empty. The sun rises high wanting only to fall, and the moon chases endlessly after. And yet, given all, she confesses, our friendly adventuress had fallen herself to fatigue.
I read her confession, and sighed. Letting the parchment drift to my lap, I thought, somewhat angrily, "I could have warned her! But the darned dear girl never signs her address!"

Curious it is, the remedy of rest and the fact of remembering your body's water. For surely we must know by now, that if upon laying temple to pillow, a pounding resounds and persists, pushing sleep to the side and if upon rising, the back of the throat is coated with what won't go down, the eyes slow in peeling resenting the light, and if with a start, the big leg bones do rattle the hip, your pelvis shrugging and brushing it off, then it goes without saying what ought to be done. That in looking behind, and finding the hole in the scarf where the stitch ought to be, we are bound to see also the weeks without sleeping and excess of cheese, the wanting of water, the breeze and the sneeze. It won't take too long now we know this is true, just a day and a night, and hot cup of brew.

She signs her name smilingly tender, "with love," and presses the dot over "i" with satisfaction. And as I slip this thin envelope onto the stack and lean back in my chair, I wrap right around me the shawl which she made so many years ago, and recall that a sick day is always a good day to knit.

Donc Voila, Oh Yea, Comme Ca; Silence, Music, Laughter, and Cookies: Third and Final Installment

I never realized before how frequently the "th" sound demands itself in English until seeing how difficult it is to teach a French child to put their tongue on their teeth to block the airflow when I ask them to aspirate, no not "ff," or "ss," or "zz." I know they can hear the sound I make, and I know they can hear the sound they make, because when they have me repeat some word with a critical mass of 'r's, it takes a few minutes to get there. Or how assertive our pronunciation of "h" is. I end up feeling more than a little ridiculous in my demonstrations, particularly considering that much of the English they have been exposed to is a British English, and that I can only really show them the accent of one Jersey girl, with the limits and specialties inherent in the use I've had of my language. My sweet, sweet, language.
I do my best to emulate their French accent in my French accent to make myself understood, but there is a leak somewhere because when I begin to speak English to them, I am speaking in a way that I hope will allow them to understand me. Simply. Perhaps, my vocal chords have been tied and shortened, limited by the things I am able to say in French and left knotted in English as well. I speak English with a French accent, my language plated for their tastes, accessible in cadence, emphasis, and sound so that they can pick it up. I let it slide when the little boy leaves off pronouncing the 's' at the end of the plural word, because, really, I knew what he meant. I don't push too hard to impress upon them the difference between "'ere," and "here," because in Ireland there isn't one, and I'd rather not teach any one single authority in the enormity of English.

But when I bake my grandmother's cookie recipe with the girls, I want to make sure they know it is "la recette de ma grand-mere," and I have them repeat, "th-th-th-thanksgiving," over and over. Somehow this one is important. Even then, I had to convert the recipe from cups and
tablespoons to grams (which I concede is a better system of measurement), and they turned out slightly different.
 
French butter is, just is, better, and this recipe calls for a lot (225 grams, or 2 sticks). It was an idea of my grandmother's cookies, but it wasn't really her recipe. Albeit, still delicious.
When Celine asks me if the cookies came out right, I say, "ouai, c'est comme ca." And I know she has no idea how funny it was to joke about putting nuts on my grandma's half of the batch. How do I even begin to tell them that she's the reason I'm here?
---

La Cimetiere Pere Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris. I took courage on the train to get off at a stop further down the line than I've taken before and got off at Place de la Nation. Walking in a seemingly much more modern area of Paris among 7-11 type shops and brick buildings that seem somehow heavier than the marble and gargoyles of the lower districts, I follow the metro maps and street signs to Pere Lachaise. It is cold. I find a cafe on the corner of Rue du Repos (repose, or rest), just a few meters away from the cemetery entrance, and I warm up with my dose of 'expresso,' and a slice of quiche that makes me proud of my own recipe. I find the map at the entrance to the cemetery, search for who I came to see, and realize shortly that I confused Pere Lachaise with Montparnasse in my desire to visit Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I am quickly appeased as I scan the list of frequently visited famous dead people and find Marcel Proust, Colette, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Guillaume Apollinaire.


(*if there is not a video embedded here, please click here*)
Rows and rows of headstones, shiny marble slabs, and broken sepulchres, it looks like rain but it doesn't. The place is littered with flowers and chestnuts, some are hidden completely from view by the moss given free range. I find my way to the general area of Proust's bed, and when I think I'm getting close, I am clued into his exact spot by another visitor sitting and gazing at the hunk of sleek black marble delicately decorated with roses and nuts and one very worn copy of "Du Cote de Chez Swan," presumably left there by an admirer.

I sit on someone else's bed and stare across at Proust's name, "MARCEL PROUST," engraved in gold, and wonder why I am there. I respect and appreciate Proust's work, and what's done for me the little of it that I know, but I have no memory of what he smelled like. There was no moment of knee-buckling sadness and heaps of tears the way I have for my grandmother's passing. I 'pay my respects,' as if there were someone keeping account, and with a pat on the tomb like a dog, I walk to meet Monsieur Merleau-Ponty.

It took more effort to find his site than Proust's, namely due to the lack of another visitor to serve as an arrow in the still crowd of dead beds. Having walked for near 30 minutes from Marcel to Maurice, and having thought of Bach in the meanwhile, I kneel upon seeing the white tomb engraved in modest letters the names of his family now covered in pine needles. I turn the camera on myself and proceed to fold the life of this man, his works and thoughts, and the technology of his time into the modern day 'selfie.' I look ridiculous in this old cemetery, laying on the tombstone of this dead philosopher, puckering my lips and trying to get the right angle for optimum facebookage. You're mine, Mr. Ponty, you've been swallowed.
-
Outside of the RER station, I spot a magazine vendor, and check to see if the December edition of Philosophie has been released. It has, and it is also full to the brim with quotes from Proust and Sartre, Rousseau, and Nietzche among others. Sitting on the train on my way back to Rueil, I flip to this, from Mr. Proust,

"Comme nous ne sommes tous, nous les vivants, que des morts qui ne sont pas encore entrés en fonctions, toutes ces politesses, toutes ces salutations dans le vestibule que nous appelons déférence, gratitude, dévouement et où nous mêlons tant de mensonges, sont stériles et fatigantes. De plus, – dès les premières relations de sympathie, d’admiration, de reconnaissance, – les premières paroles que nous prononçons, les premières lettres que nous écrivons, tissent autour de nous les premiers fils d’une toile d’habitudes, d’une véritable manière d’être, dont nous ne pouvons plus nous débarrasser dans les amitiés suivantes ; sans compter que pendant ce temps-là les paroles excessives que nous avons prononcées restent comme des lettres de change que nous devons payer, ou que nous paierons plus cher encore toute notre vie des remords de les avoir laissé protester."

"As we are all of us, the living, but the dead who have not yet entered service, all these courtesies, all these greetings in the hall which we call respect, gratitude, devotion and where we mix so many lies, are sterile and tiring. More - the early relationship of sympathy, admiration, gratitude, - the first words we speak, the first letters we write, woven around us the first threads of a canvas of habits, of a genuine way of being, which we cannot get rid of in the following friendships not to mention that during this time the excessive words we have uttered remain as bills that we must pay, or which we will pay yet more expensively our whole lives with remorse for having allowed them the exception of being paid."

He refers to us, the living, as 'but the dead who have not yet entered service,' and yet we the living make so little use of the dead who are at our service! We utter les politesses in deference and respect to our living peers and to our dead models, but we rarely dare touch them, and in leaving them untouched, we tie ourselves, as Proust says, in strings of habit and accrue a debt of dishonesty.

I watch the girls, 7 and 3, dancing gangnam style, and am at once amused and despairing. We are, all of us, born into a culture only at a certain time, and it is our woe that we are not better provided the length of tradition behind us and available, and as Proust says, in service to us. We are either never told that we are a part of a culture with a history waiting to be continued, or we are only presented it behind glass and out of reach of our hands or mouths. We are restrained in our creativity in a lack of access to the resources buried under tombstones and we struggle with the internal contradiction of what does and does not belong to us.

On the page opposite that excerpt from Proust, is an article in which the author asserts a need for a "double lesson in humility and obstinacy."

humility

obstinacy

Donc Voila, Oh Yea, Comme Ca; Silence, Music, Laughter, and Cookies Part 2

I hustle on the left side of the moving sidewalk in the metro station, eager to make up for the time lost to a late train and I pass a couple planted on the right confusing their limbs around their bodies, their mouths open to each other. They are kissing amidst hundreds of hurrying people in a subway station in Paris. I walk by and notice them without changing my pace and smile to myself at the cliche quality of each description of that moment. I try to ground it in the possibilities of a living reality: maybe he's preoccupied, thinking about his laundry, or she has a nagging sense of her stockings falling down beneath her skirt, his stubble eats away at the intimacy of the moment, or despite the sweet reminder of love for the rest of us in the subway they are actually a bit self-conscious, too.

I love how wide the sidewalk is on the Pont Saint-Michel, the bridge I cross over the Seine to make my way towards the Quartier Latin for the weekly conversation group at Shakespeare & Co. There is a kind of nascent mist in the air, and a dark, dark sky. I catch a glimpse beyond several large buildings and at least several kilometers in the distance, of the Eiffel Tower lit up, scanning the sky with projector searchlights, and my hand goes to my chest in satisfaction. But then my spirits fall slightly because I know that the best way to enjoy the Tower is from a distance. I shrug, and look for a bar with the Bougogne Nouveau which debuts tonight.

[Let me make this perfectly clear: none of this is because of anything in particular. It's all because I gave myself permission. A kiss in the subway in Paris, or a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower are only out of reach because we put them there and keep them out of the realm of our reality. When we bring them close up, and see their pores and wrinkles, we have to resist the urge to push it away. All of the glory of these pictures and ideals lie within the regular of your day if you can bear to see, and to love the mundane in the romance. I made it so, so, sweetheart, stop saying my life is incredible as if yours isn't; it's begging you to be. This is a reminder to a later me as much as it is to you right now. Everything is everywhere.]

I slip through the bookshelves and narrow passages to the back corner and up the spiral staircase, nearly trip, and make my stumbling entrance into the rare book room with the window with a view of Notre Dame for the conversation group. Tonight I am the only Native English-speaker, so they are glad to see me.

Virginia Woolf writes in her discussion of a British and generally Western obsession with Greek literature,

"To laugh instantly it is almost necessary... to laugh in English. Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue..."

 I remember how cathartic a laugh I had throughout my reading of Orlando, of Candide, the sweet chuckles at Hugo's poetry, and of laughing with the little girls when the lego blocks fall, or when Eugenie plays with the speech aspect of Google translation. We yielded unbounded laughter at the computerized Brittish English soliciting her impersonation and gesticulation and her beckoning me to share the American accent. We laugh. Perhaps it is true that we are laughing at different sides of the same door, as undoubtedly our perspectives shine a funny light on what is uncommon between us, which stands in relief. The body, too is a language, a material half-shared half-foreign. Sometimes that is the funniest thing.

And I feel myself grabbing onto whole pieces of the language, saying, "donc, et voila," as if it meant anything to me. I see the way it sits unselfconsciously in people's pockets like pennies being dropped and tossed without thought. I can recognize and appreciate how ingrained, how much a friend this phrase is for people, but I cannot feign well a friendship with a stranger. I am given away in my stale attempt at swallowing this foreignness, and so I spit it out whole, trying again like a dog.

Eugenie asks me how we say "ouai" in English. She doesn't ask how to say "oui," she knows that is yes, she wants to know that Americans say "yeah." She laughs at the sound when I tell her.

And on saying how such and such a thing was, "comme ca," I know I am half avoiding further description, and half attempting to speak as a casual Parisienne would, but I am also just allowing myself to feel again how it was, knowing that they have no hibernating memory of the thing as I have to awaken. We allow this for each other. We grant conversation as a selfish opportunity also, to grant permission to enjoy our own thoughts, and we sometimes waive our own desire to understand for the sake of witnessing someone else's inner dialogue.

Donc Voila, Oh Yeah, Comme Ca; Silence, Music, Laughter, and Cookies Part 1

It was Friday. I had a strange agitation drawing me to weave through the streets in Rueil. This one narrow and paved, this one wide and cobblestone, here was a crosswalk half-heartedly crossing a road happily shared between pedestrians and the various vehicles sported slowly through town. I had just come back from Paris where I had spent the morning largely oblivious to the 19- and 20-year old girls' inside-jokes and story-telling. I hadn't been much interested in honestly and concertedly listening, given the snippets my skills granted me. I determined this to be a source of my uneasiness, but that determination did nothing to quell it as we often hope or expect such determinations to do despite their track record. I wandered. I knew I was in no hurry, and that satisfied me. I had a feeling that I ought to accomplish something, and found to my left a poster on a wrought-iron fence displaying the schedule for the theater in town. Scanning, I found two shows for the evening, then found the box office, and fumbled through a fairly simple transaction with a lovely gentleman in a bow tie and thick silver hair. He made sure I knew where the show was to be, and I assured him I understood, which it seemed I did, though less confidently than I led him to believe. Such are my survival skills; a shark couldn't smell my blood.

Back at the apartment, I helped in making sushi with Celine. She joked endlessly about my being in France and yet learning Japanese cooking, or not cooking rather, as the fish is raw. Celine eyed me curiously and stated that she thought most Americans do not eat anything raw; milk, cheese, meat, fish; she inflected her statement like a question which meant I had to respond, which I did. Celine insisted on me washing my hands after rolling each maki and each sashimi because, she explained, of the amidon which stays on your hands. I was too busy flipping through my mental roll-o-dex of French vocabulary that I went ahead and began rolling another sashimi without washing my hands. Meanwhile,Vincent was on his phone trying to translate amidon  for me, but he misspelled it as amnidon, and yielded an identical English word. This happens sometimes due either to a shared word that is not in my English vocabulary, or to misspellings. Vincent tried translating a French synonym to amidon and came up with something which he pronounced, "caribou ear wax."
Excuse me, reader, I sincerely beg your pardon, as I did Vincent's, but I thought he was joking. It was just so funny. I burst into laughter. I laughed heartily and genuinely, for a few inexcusable moments, and then looked at his phone's screen, which showed "carbohydrate," and I washed my hands.

Following our sushi dinner, I made my way back to the theater, asking one more time for directions just to make sure I was en route. I climbed the stairs into a low-ceilinged and dimly lit cabaret theater with a bar sprawling the entire back wall, and dark carpeting scattered with small round tables and identical purple velvet armchairs. With my jacket clearly marking my carefully chosen chair, I approached the bar for my white wine. Feeling the agitation settle, I glided back to my chair and found an older gentleman accompanying me at my table. His heavy wool sweater seemed to be purposefully unstylish and lent him an air of maturity and a well-paying job. I contentedly sunk into my chair, nodded to him as I slid my wine closer to my half of the tabletop and made it clear that he was welcome to share the table with me; he removed his trench coat, left it carelessly flung over the back of the chair and promptly returned with a beer and a glass which he poured properly while remarking that they had none of the white wine left, and was it any good, inflection. I juggled my inexperienced opinion of wine and my limited confidence in speaking French and passed for a response for a few back-and-forths about 'young people' not usually attending 'these things,' until I outted myself with an apology for not understanding another inflected statement. Conversation atrophied slowly after that, and then the lights dimmed such that I couldn't barely make out the silhouette of the person in front of me. The music began.

I sipped my wine, noting to myself that I did actually have an opinion of it, and a pretty good one. Not too dry, rather tart, a good enough flavor to drink alone, but one that I could imagine my sister not liking. Oh. I held my head in my hands, elbows on the table, uncaring of whether this was proper posture, thinking probably not and not changing positions. I could see the cellulite on the lady pianist's behind through her black stage pants, and could imagine dragging my tongue along the spinal crease nestled in the male pianist's posture. He hit the keys like a labrador with 10 tails on his hands wagging his body, the whole movement of the music from the nexus of his fingertips. She played a more metalic, sharper-tuned instrument more akin to bells than keys and her hands playful frogs from one note to the next. They subtitled the concert "Bach Transformed," with the headline reading, "Frappe, Pincee," meaning "hit, pinched" I assume because several times throughout the performance, the man with the spine would stand up and pinch the strings of the piano like a guitar rather than the keys themselves. I wondered about my inclination to close my eyes even in such a dark room, and let myself think about Bach, and about transforming Bach's work, and about laughing at Vincent. Also, there's this.

I've heard said that some pieces of classical music have caused riots upon their debuts. Certainly we know art to be powerful, sometimes politically threatening, often emotionally vulnerable. I needn't lecture on that. I thought of great artists and of how we teach art. There is controversy here, to be sure. Some may say that great art shows ideals, universality, and perfection. I am unimpressed by this. Great artists allow total emotion to be honest and complicated. Good wine, for instance, being whatever tastes good. We need little instruction in discerning what we like, only curiosity and willingness to change. When someone asks you if the wine is good, it is a question of taste. Of your taste. "It's just grape juice, after all."* I would once shirk this question, or preface my response with an apology for my unsophisticated tongue, thinking that someone else knows better than I what the wine tastes like. When we learn about Art, the kind we are supposed to worship in the museums, the Artists, the Real Artists mind you, who have books written about them, we are impressed by this sense of having to do what they did, as if they know better what life is than we do. They are dead. We keep swimming in an eddy of stagnant art culture where corpses float.

The theater is named for French poet, Andre Malraux, who once said, "la culture ne s'herite pas, elle est conquiert," which has since been painted on the side of the theater.

"Culture is not inherited, it is conquered."

Rather than emulate, we must learn to, once again, swallow.


Jan Svankmajer - Dimensions of dialogue par popefucker
--

to be continued.

Permission Granted

This is Related.

"Underneath everything in your life, there's that thing, that empty-forever-empty."

On Swallowing The Mouth and Other Foreign Bodies

Chewing on accents, the mouth becomes a foreign body, suddenly not ready-to-hand. Flavors unfamiliar and sounds that struggle out. I have sought the abject. My own language becomes distant: "Lasagna de saumon" for dinner. Emphatic mistakes and excessive silence, successful and unsuccessful attempts at eavesdropping, Google translates the name of this little girl from Eugenie to eugenics, and she sounds out a French word extending the gargling of the R as though the sound is a hair in her throat as she puts the word together.

My body is unable to excuse itself when it lapses social graces because my immediate response is unintelligible to whomever it is intended: "Sorr- Pardon!" And the body language is there sincerely gesturing to awkwardly compensate for the mouth like the friend of the inappropriate drunk.
But this abjection of the mouth is pleasant in a way, rather than the overwhelm of unbelonging of an eating disordered abjectedness.
--

early 15c., "cast off, rejected," from Latin abiectus, past participle of abicere "to throw away, cast off; degrade, humble, lower," from ab- "away, off" (see ab-) + iacere "to throw" (past participle iactus; see jet (v.)). Figurative sense of "downcast, brought low" first attested 1510s. Related: Abjectly; abjectness.

Sometimes I can feel November 17 as it looms in the distance, slowly creeping upon me with its full weight. Some years I only remember the date days after. Each year isn't easier, but it's also not that each year isn't easier.
Some people count from the first meal skipped or vomited, if they can even remember. Some people count by the number of bruises from their spine. Some people don't count. 7 years ago I was admitted. 7 years ago. Seven. Il y a sept ans. Sept ans. Sept.


--
The question, "what's really going on?" assumes some 'actual' issue as the cause of the disorder. It is a scapegoat.

"But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." Umberto Eco

Those reasons, causes, underlying issues, and all the factors we spend years in therapy identifying only work to sustain a recovery if we fashion them powerful enough. Because we do fashion them. We pick things in our lives that we can't make sense of and decide that it's a reason things went wrong. When you 'relapse,' it doesn't really have much to do with whether or not you've uncovered the root cause yet, as many therapists would have you believe, because there is no such thing. There IS realizing that you are totally in a world that is completely available to you, verifying that it is full of stuff like sadness and weirdness and that it has not been set up for feeling acutely, and then deciding to live how is best for you. That itching in your skin and the discomfort of a body, the sense of being constrained, and foreign to yourself, or made of something else entirely from the world, this is a thing.

That abjection is expected is terrifyingly freeing.
That you can indeed, survive it; solicit it; even enjoy it, allows you to make it your own and in doing so strips it of it's destructive aspect for the moment.
And then the foreignness dissipates and you are yourself entirely because you have swallowed the foreign body.

The ED is a constant attempt at suppressing the experience of unbelonging, abjection, foreignness, being-in-the-world, being human. BEING abject, fully inhabiting your foreignness is an assertion of a whole you. The abject may have some history in your relationship with your mother or early sexuality or bullying, but those reasons only work to fuel a sustained recovery for as long as they are important and emotionally charged enough and in as much as they bring you to inhabit yourself, your sensations, your world.

The work is actually much simpler than any of the therapeutic tools they throw at you and shove down your throat: Actively permeating a philosophical shift in your psyche, in your everyday, in your actions and your speech and your relationships to people and yourself and and the world and the things which remind you of your separateness, the loneliness of abjection, the isolation of foreignness, that is where the work of 'recovery' happens and exhausts us.

"to regain consciousness," from Anglo-French rekeverer (13c.), Old French recovrer "come back, return; regain health; procure, get again" (11c.), from Medieval Latin recuperare "to recover" (source of Spanish recobrar, Italian ricoverare; see recuperation). Meaning "to regain health or strength" is from early 14c.; sense of "to get (anything) back" is first attested mid-14c. Related: Recovered; recovering."

And we may throw that word out because it is not something that any of us are doing again as the prefix would indicate. There is nothing before that we must find to repeat or return to; to attempt to return to a prior point would only have us running the same course. There is no blunder to repair for we have only ever been being human and there is no mistake in that. Even to uncover, or discover, replacements which others have suggested, summons images of revealing some actual truth which laid hidden all this time, and such a notion is not only misleading, ineffective and disempowering, but also makes us feel downright stupid for having missed the truth, being unable to find it in it's hiding place, or for having misplaced it ourselves. This is unhelpful. What we are doing in this work is much more akin to something with a eu- prefix, a new living, a new being, a new body, for in our authentic 'recoveries' (with their highs and lows of all varieties), we are continually renewing an effort to be honest, to incorporate the world into our selves, to change, adapt, grow, be in the world and in our bodies. Perhaps we may simply refer to 'recovery,' and better yet, to our lives, as an 'oeuvre,'

"a work, composition," especially a musical one, 1809, from Latin opus "a work, labor, exertion" (source of Italian opera, French oeuvre, Spanish obra), from PIE root *op- (Germanic *ob-) "to work, produce in abundance," "good deed;" Old High German uoben "to start work, to practice, to honor;" German üben "to exercise, practice;" Dutch oefenen, Old Norse æfa, Danish øve "to exercise, practice;" Old English æfnan "to perform, work, do," afol "power"). The plural, seldom used as such, is opera.

An artist's work in entirety is often referred to as their oeuvre, and also sometimes as their body of work.
--

The work of body is about an exertion, an openness, and continual redefinition. It is easy not to do this. There are so many other things to pay faster attention. It is easy to let the lips numb up, for the tongue to mechanize and teeth grind to stubs. And when we do allow the abject in foreign flavors liven the mouth, the strangeness of our existence is on the tip of the tongue and teeth clatter in confusion of what they are. These sensations threaten to override the rest and render us so entirely foreign to ourselves, so completely self-disgusting that it drives us to the edges of possibility well beyond the realm of a world worth living in; where I was 7 years ago. What I do now, in this happier place, in this place more accepting of the dross; is to let my mouth be wretched with accents and strange words, with new foods at different hours; is to let my body be awkward in waving the waiter, delayed from the dub of my French words slightly out of sync in conversation; and to gather all that bizarrity and swallow it. Incorporate.

On Regimens and Being Genuine

Souvenir is the French infinitive verb form 'to remember.' We buy Eiffel tower key-chains and "my sister went to Paris and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" t-shirts supposedly to help us remember our adventures. The verb in French is reflexive, so you would be saying something akin to "I remember myself when I was in Paris." Perhaps it carries more impact to show you, "Je me souviens..." or even more pointedly, "Je ne me souviens pas," I don't remember myself.
The biggest problem I have with all these souvenirs besides them being tacky, overpriced and ubiquitous, is that they are so universal and insincere. In leaving the moment, we reconstruct it almost immediately and in so doing, perpetuate false ideals which hold the rest of us on call for disillusionment. We all have romantic ideas of the Eiffel Tower from the 40's, where people would sit and picnic, and walk freely around the base of the structure, leisurely and unburdened with pickpocket-paranoia or the threat of rain. We still buy the post-cards of these images to send back to friends and family and we reinforce that stale lie of paradise, we say things like, "Paris is the city of love," and then we crawl back home at the end of a grey night, lonely and bloated. Shamed and confused at not fulfilling the "ought-to" of being here and all that is composed of. And this can render a young adventuress insane, to say nothing of language barriers, reliance on strangers and variable schedules.

This is not the kind of insanity I'm talking about

I remember myself on the verge of college-bound independence being told by a mental healthcare professional that no matter where I went, I would have to take me with me. I nodded one of those uncomprehending nods which I practice frequently here as well. Weeks later on the floor of the locked two-door bathroom which I shared with three other girls, I realized what that meant for the first real time, because it is so tempting to believe that fairy tales are made of the same material as our lives, so tempting to think that we could escape our own baggage, contexts, pasts rather than to embrace the messy truth of who we are. Voltaire satirized the phrase originally popularized by famous optimist Liebniz, "the best of all possible worlds," which optimists know this to be, while pessimists fear it to be so. It is, of course, the best of all possible worlds, for in despairing and wishing it otherwise, we miss the brilliance which is here for our making and finding. Best is merely what is, while better is the thing worth striving for. I can know myself as prone to a few specific breeds of insanity without submitting to them, instead placing buffers in their entryways and alarm systems that work and then go on my way. The dreams and fantasies which keep the dust off of my shoes and gloves are the only reason I have for amor fati, as Nietzche phrased it, for loving what I must bear, the key as I see it to a resilient happiness.

So there are things which I am wont to do in order to maintain a baseline of functionality, things which thwart the possibility of an emotional breakdown and a possibly more exciting story along with it. I try in my writing to show my life in as much honesty as I can muster, for my own sake, so that I will remember my life properly, but also for your sake so that disillusionment will be gentler when you realize that you have psoriasis even on Hawaiian beaches, social anxiety, yes even in Italy or India. I am reminded of parking in underground structures in big cities where you are required to validate your ticket and prove that you went where you said you were going. My journal and my writings here are a kind of album of parking validations. Yes, indeed, Sophie, you were here. Of course, you felt that. Remember learning that wherever you go, you have to take yourself with you? Remember learning that again? And again?

Because that was the point Voltaire was making, right. Yes, there is paradise on Earth. But El Dorado was impossible to get to, impossible to leave, and worthless to those who were there. For all intents and purposes, this world is a paradise waiting to be recognized wherever you are, just as much as it is a hell burning.

And yet, there is a tension between the regimens and being genuine. These regimens are sometimes things I would rather not do, and indeed part of why they are good for me is because there is something strengthening in doing something for no other reason than that I would rather not- an arduous lesson to teach kids. Because the truth is that situations do change us. How could they not? If we value our own authenticity then we must also be willing to explore what that actually is in the myriad situations made available to us. There is guilt here. Here, where I feel I "ought" to take better advantage of the world which offers itself to me unmasked rolling in ecstasy at my feet. I should get down on the ground, roll joyfully in the dirt, the muck and the mire, stain my blouse. I stay hesitantly crouched as if reaching my hand to an unfamiliar animal unsure of it's temperament. I try to keep my life a bit more neat and tidy, thinking the unbridled passion perhaps unseemly. I want to let it off the leash. I practice my yoga and keep my journal in as disciplined a way as seems to suit the situation. I accept any invitation. Unless I genuinely don't want to. I try not to forget myself. I cultivate my garden.

This is what French Yoga looks like.
yeah, I know. oohlala.

Parlez-Vous Franglais? An Essay

Essay: 1590s, "short non-fiction literary composition" (first attested in writings of Montaigne published in 1580 and in writings of Sir Francis Bacon published in 1597), from Middle French essai "trial, attempt, essay," from Late Latin exagium "a weighing, weight," from Latin exigere "test," from ex- "out" (see ex-) + agere (see act) apparently meaning here "to weigh." The suggestion is of unpolished writing.

Poise: early 15c., "weight, quality of being heavy," later "significance, importance" (mid-15c.), from Old French pois "weight, balance, consideration" (12c., Modern French poids), from Medieval Latin pesum "weight," from Latin pensum "something weighted or weighed," (source of Provençal and Catalan pes, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian peso), noun use of neuter past participle of pendere "to weigh" (see pendant). The sense of "steadiness, composure" first recorded 1640s, from notion of being equally weighted on either side (1550s). Meaning "balance" is from 1711; meaning "way in which the body is carried" is from 1770.

As much as I want to say that it is necessary for me to say this, I know it is not, but humour me, friend. If you can imagine a red-lipped young lady in a well worn grey sweater laid upon a bed low to the ground in a room with hardwood floors and a balcony, you must know that she has a dull and persistent pain in her low back which wraps around in throbs to her womb. You know that she wants more than anything to write with meaning the flashes and sparks which blink her eyes open at night, but that with her cold belly, her hand shakes at the temptation. She knows as well as you that she must try and she appreciates your allowance for her incapacitation. Of course it does not much matter to a common reader the sitting place and view or breakfast of the writer; indeed we could argue it the duty of the one with the pen to render something legible which has an absolute weight. Of course it matters immensely to the writer the minute details which are nigh-never shared, that the pen be specific, the feet dangling, and that it is a task to say anything at all for it is the fancy of those who never dare say a word that it is an easy thing which offers itself not to them; contrary, friend, this is why I mention the lady's fragile state as she writes.


Sometimes it will take three hours since the occasion to have the truth realized while walking to the train station that upon greeting the girls after school, the 3rd grader did not in fact say she had grandma homework ("grand-mere"), but grammar homework ("grammaire"); you must refrain from laughing out loud at yourself alone in public for that is a sorry sight in any language. Other truths elude us more easily than that however, and we must be tolerant of their beastly selves with their regenerative heads on long necks.
When we passively perceive our nameless neighbors on the street, we undoubtedly take for granted that they chose more or less deliberately the style of their hair, the rouge on their cheeks, the shoes on their feet and we undoubtedly take for granted the things which they did not choose, as they may well have too. Each moment just a moment and subject to whims of fancy. We know this, but oh how we love to immortalize. How we dearly love to declare things to be, for we are so well built for it, and applaud is due to all of us who have ever dared to declare ourselves a thing, only to redact ourselves back into raw material. The trouble with declarations is always who hears them and how.

We know as a matter of course the importance of language, and for sake of semantics I shall emphasize, for communication, as that is indeed the intent and cause eventually effected of such. We may reflect on the misunderstandings between friends over the use of a word with various connotations, to say nothing of every college-aged rascal in Mexico adding o's and a's to the ends of their American-English and finding their company sorely confused. For certainly if anyone must know what is being said it is the person doing the saying and so we are left with a question of the ears.

Now we pause. We turn to look at the task at hand: an essai. Simply, an attempt unpolished to weigh and consider things, and gauge a rough measure of balance for the sake of poising ourselves ready to face a truth, the world. And on we go.

There is no one who knows better than each of us what things mean. Or, to say more precisely, there is no one who could know better than each of us what things could mean. Certainly to operate otherwise would be such a dreadful act of disrespect, a folly waste of time trying to control another's life with any honest semblance of holding their sake in your hands. Knowing this, we must place trust in the ears of those who offer us their time for listening. So that when we ourselves lend our ears to others, we may feel at liberty to prefer this word to that, to remember the phrase as we liked it best, perhaps the way it was before the 'clarification,' to put all the possibilities of what to say in a pot and simmer. We may let the guilt of accent and dialect boil off like wine, and skim from the surface the questions of accuracy or equivalencies like bones and bay leaves in a stew.

We may prefer an English translation of an originally French poem, we may speak in slang, and combine recipes, so long as we know that quand le vin est tiré, il faut le boire! And remember that no matter where we find ourselves, we may always find refuge in an inflected, "huh?" and trust that the one thing that you can always make others understand is that you don't understand.

"Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter's night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than others." Virginia Woolf, On Not Knowing Greek, 1925

Just a Note

I made macarons (not macaroons, macarons) yesterday with my host. Y'know, just a Saturday afternoon. Admittedly, we needed to let the egg whites peak a bit firmer before folding them into the almond flour for the croques (cookie bits), and our experimentation with gelatin for the ganache will benefit the next batch. Our's collapsed a bit in the baking, but were still a delicious pink french cookie sandwich with strawberry chocolate praline ganache. Unfortunately, my camera failed me at this critical moment. But just to clear things up, here's this:

Rumination on Translation and Conjugation

"Sans doute, je vous ai; sans doute, je vous voi.
La pensée est un vin dont les rêveurs sont ivres,
Je le sais; mais, pourtant, je veux qu'on songe à moi.
Quand vous êtes ainsi tout un soir dans vos livres,"
-Victor Hugo, Paroles Dans L'Ombre

"Without a doubt I have you. Surely I see you.
Thinking is a wine on which the dreamers are drunk,
I know. But sometimes I'd like to be dreamed of too.
When you are like that, in your books, all evening sunk,"
-Translated by Louis Simpson: Victor Hugo, Words in the Shadow

La pensée est un vin dont les rêveurs sont ivres,
Thinking is a wine on which the dreamers are drunk,

Step 1. Dissociate.

Ready?

It was raining this morning but the sky has become less opaque since lunch and why not take a walk. Certainly the sun will break through. You hesitate at the T-crossing where you always turn left. A right today? No. You stop into the bakery where you always stop and buy bread because. You have a general idea of going towards the water also because. It is still early enough that none of the shops have closed but also late enough that the few people still on the cobblestone do not smile at each other. You don't know what time it is. Maybe they just know something you don't. There is a market ahead and you notice passively that your pace has quickened slightly since when you left the apartment. Through the market and under the vendor awnings your bread is gone and the water is in view again your pace leans forward. You are walking faster because it is colder than you expected because you can't recall when you finished the bread or if you fed it to the birds because the water entices you. You don't know why you are walking so fast as this and realize that it isn't all that fast given the context and so resolve to let yourself walk at the pace which seems to suit your feet. The water is on your side now and leaves wet under your steps. It must have been raining of course you were walking fast to get out of the rain. There is nowhere now that you ought to be going. You will relocate soon or search a new job. The new year will come soon and everything will change. The signs have stopped making sense pointing to the place that you started in the direction that you're going. You have been walking straight forward. Haven't you? The air is getting wet just a little at a time but it seems quickly. Your vision misted through the specs. There is a roofed gazebo but as the rain comes thicker your legs push further faster. You smile without knowing why but this feels good. Under the wet leaves under your feet is sand and above are the trees on either side as if on purpose shedding from windshook branches. It occurs to you at once that this is beautiful and myopic and vertigo. There is no turn or gate in the distance to mark a natural or artificial terminus. Walking faster. The wind against your wet face is stunning and you wipe above your lip with your wet hand. You will walk by the water tomorrow and also the rest of the days. You will do only this. You stop to break a two-pronged stick with a kick and hurt your foot while a runner pants mouth open past you. A dog muddied and head wagging with a ball in his mouth deflated shakes wet on you. It is not raining now but it was.

On Impossibility, and the Lord's Name in Vain.

Pardon the lack of excuse, lovely reader. I shall not, in shedding from myself this coat which has grown itchy and heavy and entering this piece of thought which having worn like winter warmth in spring into this armoire, plague it's fur and buttons with the lice and moths which so often feast upon and by which I am meaning to say, fancy language. Pray, listen simply to my simple words:

It's true (the little one says, "ouai, c'est vrai." usually when lying but, of course, not always.) that you can't know what it feels like to be here. Maybe I should lay out what my schedule is like for you; the mundane rhythm and inner dialogue which serves as a kind of refuge from not knowing usually what is going on round me. [I resisted from typing, "Perhaps it would behoove me to..." and then I resisted from typing, "I oughtta..."]. I'm not going to do that, at least not just yet. [I resisted from typing, "I shan't"]. I have to address some things first.

First. I am reflecting on how vastly bizarre a combination of stuff [it took me at least 3 minutes to decide to write 'stuff'.]  I have surrounded myself with to absorb and make mine and make me. Like, okay, for instance, the French language as spoken mostly by a 3 and 7 year old. Granted, I do speak with the adults, and I'm hoping to seek out more conversational outlets, but as of late the kids are my greatest exposure and interaction with the language in real time. And then, okay, I've got Sartre, George Sand, and Guy de Maupassant (among others) in their original French as well as Virginia Woolf, and Isak Dinisen in translated French and selected essays of Montaigne translated into English, and a very particular sort of English, mind you- an elevated tone, older style (if that's the right word). I watch French reality cooking tv shows with my host (Le Meilleure Patisser). These are the stuffs that are seeping into me; these are the influences I've chosen (to say nothing of the food).

Now, as I said, I'm no stranger to the truth that you can't really, really, know what it feels like to be here. I'm going to share with you a bit from Montaigne that just really chimed with my bones. And goddammit, it made me smile:

"As we see some idle fallow grounds, if they be fat and fertile, to bring forth store and sundry roots of wild and unprofitable weeds, and that to keep them in use we must subject and employ them with certain seeds for our use and service. And as we see some women, though single and alone, often to bring forth lumps of shapeless flesh, whereas to produce a perfect and natural generation they must be manured with another kind of seed. So is it of minds, which except they be busied about some subject that may bridle and keep them under, they will here and there wildly scatter themselves through the vast field of imaginations.

As trembling light reflected from the Sun,
Or radiant Moon on water-filled brass lavers,
Flies over all, in air upraised soon,
Strikes house-top beams, betwixt both strangely wavers.
-Virg. AEn. viii. 22.

 And there is no folly, or extravagant raving, they produce not in that agitation.

Like sick men's dreams, that feign
Imaginations vain.
-Hor. Art. Poet. vii.

 The mind that hath no fixed bound will easily lose itself. For as we say, To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

Good sir, he that dwells everywhere,
Nowhere can say that he dwells there.
-Mart. vii. Epig. 1xxii. 6.

It is not long since I retired myself unto mine own house with full purpose (as much as lay in me) not to trouble myself with any business, but solitarily and quietly to wear out the remainder of my well-nigh-spent life; where methought I could do my spirit no greater favor than to give him the full scope of idleness, and entertain him as he best pleased, and withal, to settle himself as he best liked; which I hoped he might now, being by time become more settled and ripe, accomplish very easily; but I find:

Evermore idleness,
Doth wavering minds address.
-Lucan iv. 704.

 That contrariwise playing the skittish and loose-broken jade, he takes a hundred times more career and liberty unto himself than he did for others; and begets in me so many extravagant Chimeras and fantastical monsters, so orderless and without any reason, one huddling upon another, that at leisure to view the foolishness and monstrous strangeness of them, I have begun to keep a register of them, hoping, if I live, one day to make him ashamed and blush at himself."
-from Of Idleness [Chapter VIII The First Book of Essais by Montaigne] translated into the English by John Florio in 1603.
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So when I looked back at an email I sent to a friend about a month ago in full Jersey-Girl English goddammit, something stirs in me which hasn't been touched since I've been here, which is why in this post I am nodding to it, only to recognize it and make it remember that it's not been forgotten. I am hearing such different things in every ear that I have, and so many things speaking at changing volumes within me, that not only is it impossible for you to know what it feels like to be here, it is also really hard, though not impossible, even to write it and then that much more challenging to make sense of it. Montaigne wrote that about discovering idleness nearing the end of his life, but I am 22, and have chosen not total idleness or isolation, but certainly a vein of the both.

Friend, I want to tell you about the French accent, my imitation French accent, and the little girls' French accent in English when they try. I want to tell about reading, and eating, and moving my body, and I want to tell about watching the little girls learning to read, and sounding out French. I want to tell you about poetry, and tale-telling, and the difference between playing "Simon Says," and "Jacque a Dit." I want to serenade you with expressos and butter and second-hand smoke. But for now, I'll just confirm that even though the language is different, kids are the same tout le monde.

And anyway, this is my register for the wild scatterings of my mind in the vast field of imagination. I hope one day it will make me blush. I think it shall.

The Difference, She Learns, Between a Chat and a Cat and What Happens After Death

If I may, dear reader, bestow upon you a secret unworthy of being kept, I would grant you permission to forget it from yourself upon the completion of the story which rests upon it. There are, as we know by now, things by the dozen which are known by no one besides the one who does, and which though technically so would never be once called a secret. A secret's existence is borne by the act of concealment, the intent of invisibility, or perhaps even, attempted denial in total of the thing in question. Of course we also know by now that there are indeed what we may call sleeping facts, those which had been by force of lock and key and bolt and guard dog kept removed so long that their efforts to free themselves have long since atrophied, their bodies long since fallen to dreamless sleep, and now so weak that the threat of their exposure has evaporated off the tongue of a yawning secret's mouth where fire-breath once blazed. Indeed we find ourselves with such a boring secret, pitiful really as an old honored warrior whose hands now shake beyond ability to hold a cup even half full without wetting the floor. The secret to be told has as it's keeper our dear friend the adventuress who writes now more fervently than if the pen was her sacrament. I've now bundles of letters with her name scratched as sender, arriving in handfuls day after day. To be honest with you my dear reader, I haven't had time nor really the interest to unstring the ribbon which holds them together, to tear through their envelopes and thumb through them all, but what I did weather through struck me half curious, and I blinked as she rendered this secret unkept. She referenced it without preface, and lingered not upon it, simply nodded it's existence and kept on with her tale. So here shall I follow the telling she told me of the afternoon spent spelling with a 3- and 7-year old.

If you, my dear reader, were to ask little Zoe the number of years which she has, she would flash up two fingers, which would become four, until her thumb found her pinky and shuffled no more. Her sister Eva, with 7, would nod to encourage her but still roll her eyes to show she knows better. Then Zoe would drag by a hand or a foot, her doll with the eyes which eerily close when laid on her back or turned on her nose, and Zoe would tell you that her doll is crying, and look to you for advice which you should be supplying. You might ask her why the poor doll is sad, to which she'd respond that it's afraid of dying. Now here, as we know, there are many responses, but shall we assume, for the sake of trying, that you, lovely reader, would say to her this: "But everyone dies, there's no use in crying." perhaps, in due time, you'd realize you were lying. For truly we know the end which we take, all of us, really, the dukes and the snakes, the darkness and vastness of which we know peep, though its sometimes a comfort to remember the fate, more often than not it's a cause for debate and more often than that, the reason we weep.
Well this is the story laid out in ink from a pen in need of replacing on a wrinkle-torn page stuffed into its casing and sent overseas. I'll pause for a moment, to just take a sip of the water which tempts me with each word that I scribble. And here, with lips whetted, I'll renegue on my promise, for having given it thought, this secret is truly due much more homage. Our lovely heroine was once not so much, a shadow, a cold thing, wet in the dust. Her mouth smiled strangely, unnatural, ashamed, and was often pried open to purge bile and pain. Her thoughts were once nasty, more nasty than now, and sometimes turned to face that fate: dying and how. There are jokes on attempters and those who then fail, but assuredly, dear readers, it avails you to think of the numerous times even weak efforts are made to tempt that strange fate by those who we know, once loved and with often played. And so without doing disgrace or dishonor, and with the utmost taste, we continue on knowing that our friend had once nearly been dressed in her best lace.

Zoe, it should be said, took this response in stride, promptly dropped her doll to the side and went off for a nap. Our heroine friend was sitting contented, when Eva descended and requested a game: "Le Pendu!" she implored, and grasped onto the wrist, pulling our friend to the floor. A moment, perhaps, is required to translate, for along with the menus, animals, and venues, games also have French names which differ from ours. Pendu is the past tense, sometimes a noun, or even descriptor, of the verb meaning hang, in this case "The Hanged." We have such a game in the US as well, though in that case we call it, "Hangman;" pray tell, have you ever played crosswords, scrabble, or boggle, in a language besides that in which your mind often squabbles? All of a sudden/soudain, things become more than you thought, and letters themselves have names which have changed and a frequency different than you're used/Je ne suis pas habitué à cela.

Eva gave clue that her word contained 4 of it's parts, and so drew on scrap paper like so: _ _ _ _. Our friend struggled in guessing. Rather, she pointedly lacked effort in direction, for to know how to guess by probability of letter and frequency of use, one demands an intimacy with the language, so it be ready-to-hand. Language, indeed is so material a thing, a tool to be wielded and an amnion to which we yield all at once. The adventuress is less philosophy and more curiosity, and so she continued to guess. Her mouth was the shape of mispronunciation, turning "E" into "U" and "I" into "E" and emitting what turned out only to be heard as grunts intended to indicate "U," she was finally left with C H A _, with one guess left before a sentence to death by hanging. "ENne?" she ventured, but nay, and her heart stopped by rope and dismay. CHAT was the word: cat, but of course. So simple a word, and yet so far from grasp.

Hélas! Alors, this is what makes the world. And she is now begging for life to go on.

To Share

it's a great compilation until they slipped in that overwhelming music.

Advice I've Taken

Yes, sir.

Une Pensée

Il me semble que, bien que je crois que je n'ai aucune chose d'ecrire, si je peut mettre des chausseurs sur mes pieds, et boire du cafe, je peut ecrire quatre pages dans mon journal avant que je sais moi-meme que je suis ecrivant.

Et je me souviens les cafés de "la bonne epoque" (ce que je vois célébré partout dans Paris, ici et là, et là-bas), où les penseurs, philosophes, artistes, etcetera (vous savez le genre de personne dont je parle) serait assis à discuter, écrire, exécuter, et je me souviens que beaucoup de gens ont dit que la caféine était très important de leurs pensées. Et dans ce moment de souvenir, je suis très reconnaissant pour mon expresso.

café crème

I'll have you know, dear friends, for sake of honesty, that GoogleTranslate is only responsible for approximately 10% of this writing, and in those instances where used, was only for the double checking of grammar, accents, and word choices. *brushes shoulder off*