Un Francophile Americain
By James Victor Yeary
Gertrude Stein also lived on the Rue de Fleurus, a famous hostel of sorts for the (International Francophile) expatriates, exiles, writers and pirates who would become famous war casualties. Now the streets were lined with expensive autos, it was still a place where Americans met to speak French, in hope of some linguistic transcendence, the language of critical passion.
I'd arrived a week earlier with five shirts, a sweater, another pair of pants, a couple of books, a guitar, and the address of an apartment. I didn't speak French, or rather, I could if I was the only speaker, and I could listen. A start, sure, and also a Stockholm syndrome: finding liberation through potentially crude limitations. I was looking for in Paris what I was hiding from in the States. I moved in next door to my ex-girlfriend, but I didn't mean for these to be the same project.
As it is a city of cryptic voyeurism, I saw her, I think, before she saw me. But sometimes we wait, and precariously turn our back on potential violences, a virtue.
I went out, my second morning, and this was the first time I saw her, here/there, walking to the elevator, I was holding the door open, and I saw her face as she turned to enter. She coughed, and I stepped back inside.
I was floating along the Metro (it's something else to float under) going to the museum, The Louvre, to the Garage of Ages to find 14th century Madonnas and neo-Classical garbage, the answers and the questions to the answers of man in the cell phone flashes that would clamor in light to immortalize and condemn paintings of the withering history as dream as held in the Garage of Ages.
A solemn place, the metro. A place to be solemn, unless you're beautiful and vain, or drunk. I realized this was the second or third time I saw her. The first was on the way to the underground, and the third time was on it.
She had seen me, as we were floating towards The Louvre, and the man she was with smelled her noticing. He smelled me too, and he said something in French.
The Louvre is beautiful; beautiful and drunk because it takes only itself, and weighs of physical and narrative history, into consideration when it is qualifying itself, which it does often, and never granting aesthetic shape into the humbling immediacy of the present.
I'm standing before the glass pyramid. She, Rossine, has just spoken to me. I won't repeat it. I'm not the only person here looking for secrets. The Bourgeoisie are here too, all looking for secrets and spiritual conspiracies. Though the truths they are driven to seek are the secrets that drive the poor, and these are signified in the same secrets, and money owns them. Which came first, the alluring rattle of its tail, or the voracious desire of the snake?
After descending the escalator in the glass pyramid, I position myself in line behind someone of about my own age so I can see and hear how much they pay for their ticket. There are a thousand people in the room with me, all speaking Imperial tongues, hundreds of thousands of dollars, euros and pounds, eight thousand years of history, commerce and theft, in this rectangle with a hollow center.
I'm walking in. The Virgin's tits are full to bursting. Some busts and bodies of antiquity are sweating in cellophane. Four satyrs with corkscrew penises face the cardinal directions in white electric light; the room is filled with every expression of the human condition before electricity.
People pose or have their children pose with the more famous or bizarre sculptures. They yell at you in a hundred Imperial tongues if you are anywhere near the shutter's field. "Please! Wait!" yelled an Italian in English. Can you believe it, an Italian?
Les Bourgeois de Calais, in the Garden, unlike those who show themselves to be The Thinker, or complete the circles of Adams, do not bear the same maniera that lend themselves to investigative mimicry. They stand in a circle, one, with a grim face, shackled. They hold the keys to the city, which they will present to the invaders for the sake of the citizens' lives, though it spells certain death for the noble bourgeois. One of the bourgeois' mouths is open to the other's ear. A rope of spider's thread is hanging from the roof of his mouth and is attached to a dried pea on his tongue. It moves in the wind, and I can hear him saying, "How lucky are we…"
For over two hundred years in France, breasts have heaved from their blouses, throwing their blouses open. Such a spectacle of flesh in ecstasy would not go unrecorded. Outside the Musee d'Orsay there are seven such women in bronze. It would be a lie to say I couldn't find seven female friends to pose beneath the statues and expose themselves in every heaving bosom of the human condition. I wouldn't even try. Such should say enough about these unremarkable times: breasts no longer heave from their blouses, and every woman that walks the streets of Paris is on the verge of tears, and Paris is on the verge of tears. Museums fool people into believing that they know the reason for which they are sad.
"What are you looking at?" asks Rossine. Something that isn't there. It's really all too big, though she can see it too, between the frame and the pedestal. She leaves me, and I can see her moving deeper into the trove of memory. The summation of all these artifacts is neither the present nor a deeper past.
Gertrude Stein also lived on the Rue de Fleurus, a famous hostel of sorts for the (International Francophile) expatriates, exiles, writers and pirates who would become famous war casualties. Now the streets were lined with expensive autos, it was still a place where Americans met to speak French, in hope of some linguistic transcendence, the language of critical passion.
I'd arrived a week earlier with five shirts, a sweater, another pair of pants, a couple of books, a guitar, and the address of an apartment. I didn't speak French, or rather, I could if I was the only speaker, and I could listen. A start, sure, and also a Stockholm syndrome: finding liberation through potentially crude limitations. I was looking for in Paris what I was hiding from in the States. I moved in next door to my ex-girlfriend, but I didn't mean for these to be the same project.
As it is a city of cryptic voyeurism, I saw her, I think, before she saw me. But sometimes we wait, and precariously turn our back on potential violences, a virtue.
I went out, my second morning, and this was the first time I saw her, here/there, walking to the elevator, I was holding the door open, and I saw her face as she turned to enter. She coughed, and I stepped back inside.
I was floating along the Metro (it's something else to float under) going to the museum, The Louvre, to the Garage of Ages to find 14th century Madonnas and neo-Classical garbage, the answers and the questions to the answers of man in the cell phone flashes that would clamor in light to immortalize and condemn paintings of the withering history as dream as held in the Garage of Ages.
A solemn place, the metro. A place to be solemn, unless you're beautiful and vain, or drunk. I realized this was the second or third time I saw her. The first was on the way to the underground, and the third time was on it.
She had seen me, as we were floating towards The Louvre, and the man she was with smelled her noticing. He smelled me too, and he said something in French.
The Louvre is beautiful; beautiful and drunk because it takes only itself, and weighs of physical and narrative history, into consideration when it is qualifying itself, which it does often, and never granting aesthetic shape into the humbling immediacy of the present.
I'm standing before the glass pyramid. She, Rossine, has just spoken to me. I won't repeat it. I'm not the only person here looking for secrets. The Bourgeoisie are here too, all looking for secrets and spiritual conspiracies. Though the truths they are driven to seek are the secrets that drive the poor, and these are signified in the same secrets, and money owns them. Which came first, the alluring rattle of its tail, or the voracious desire of the snake?
After descending the escalator in the glass pyramid, I position myself in line behind someone of about my own age so I can see and hear how much they pay for their ticket. There are a thousand people in the room with me, all speaking Imperial tongues, hundreds of thousands of dollars, euros and pounds, eight thousand years of history, commerce and theft, in this rectangle with a hollow center.
I'm walking in. The Virgin's tits are full to bursting. Some busts and bodies of antiquity are sweating in cellophane. Four satyrs with corkscrew penises face the cardinal directions in white electric light; the room is filled with every expression of the human condition before electricity.
People pose or have their children pose with the more famous or bizarre sculptures. They yell at you in a hundred Imperial tongues if you are anywhere near the shutter's field. "Please! Wait!" yelled an Italian in English. Can you believe it, an Italian?
Les Bourgeois de Calais, in the Garden, unlike those who show themselves to be The Thinker, or complete the circles of Adams, do not bear the same maniera that lend themselves to investigative mimicry. They stand in a circle, one, with a grim face, shackled. They hold the keys to the city, which they will present to the invaders for the sake of the citizens' lives, though it spells certain death for the noble bourgeois. One of the bourgeois' mouths is open to the other's ear. A rope of spider's thread is hanging from the roof of his mouth and is attached to a dried pea on his tongue. It moves in the wind, and I can hear him saying, "How lucky are we…"
For over two hundred years in France, breasts have heaved from their blouses, throwing their blouses open. Such a spectacle of flesh in ecstasy would not go unrecorded. Outside the Musee d'Orsay there are seven such women in bronze. It would be a lie to say I couldn't find seven female friends to pose beneath the statues and expose themselves in every heaving bosom of the human condition. I wouldn't even try. Such should say enough about these unremarkable times: breasts no longer heave from their blouses, and every woman that walks the streets of Paris is on the verge of tears, and Paris is on the verge of tears. Museums fool people into believing that they know the reason for which they are sad.
"What are you looking at?" asks Rossine. Something that isn't there. It's really all too big, though she can see it too, between the frame and the pedestal. She leaves me, and I can see her moving deeper into the trove of memory. The summation of all these artifacts is neither the present nor a deeper past.
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