PARIS NEWSLETTER: 11/15/24

IT'S MOURNING IN AMERICA, AND HERE

1.

As I was waking the other day, I thought about the above self-portrait by Parisian photographer Jeanloup Sieff and how it captures my complicated emotions and solitary pilgrim’s life at the moment as the decision continues to unfold to stay away from America and live mostly in London and Paris and Tangier in the coming years with extra little jaunts and journeys to where my instinct leads me, where my deeper surrender does. An argument could be made that each side of Sieff is facing forward, each side is backward-facing. He’s looking over his shoulder not at who he was, but who he is. Where he finds himself in this moment has to contain a contorted effort to face himself, to pay witness to being just that: a witness. There is a mannered mirroring. A self-regard that can’t be shrugged off, or at. A shrug indeed would destroy the careful composition that teeters on its studied, just-sturdy-enough lack of one. It is serious in its insouciance as if, teetering, taking itself too seriously would cause a collapse of both regard and the self.

I find all manner of mirrorings within my own life as a witness, a writer who can be described as a memoirist who has taken up residence - taken refuge - in the mansard of this column nestled beneath the overhang of my writing career that came before it, the magazine profiles, the nonfiction books that made bestseller lists, the notion of myself as a name. I named my feelings - a mannered mirroring itself - The Other Mourning the other morning for I am grieving deeply for the loss of America and a life that included returning there a bit each year. My otherness no longer belongs. My mourning is that of the other. “You are the u in this morning,” I thought, homophoning myself, the silent play of language how I begin to face each day no matter where I am, my brain opening its I.

2.

These columns are never a shrug.

3.

I more fully woke that other mo(u)rning and sat at my desk and typed in Sieff’s name on my MacBook Air to read about him as I had my first cup of coffee. The initial site to come up was The United Nations of Photography and its Icons of Photography series. “Jeanloup Sieff was born in Paris on November 30, 1933, to Polish parents,” the entry began. “Like many a child of immigrants, he never really found where his own home was. ‘My childhood companion was solitude,’ he wrote. ‘But I came to accept it and the pain it gave me.’

“He spent his life making pictures filled with longing for a past that he may or may not have known. ‘I have been searching for time past all my life.’ His work is, in a sense, a popular response to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. ‘I remember states of accidental euphoria, certain spring mornings, caused by the unexpected coincidence of a ray of sun, a forgotten scent and a childhood memory.’ He turned this sensibility into rapturous, sensual black-and-white, fixed forever via that most plastic and textural of film stocks, Kodak Tri-X 400 ASA.”

4.

Proust: “And so even today, if, in a large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know very well, a passer-by who is ‘putting me on the right road’ shows me in the distance, as a point to aim at, some hospital belfry or convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, may be amazed to see me standing there, oblivious of the walk that I had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, gazing at the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my way again, I turn a corner ....”

5.

Sieff, talking to fellow photographer Frank Horvat in 1987: “I bought my first wide angle in Tangier in 1954 because it was the least expensive lens I could find. It was by using it that I discovered a kind of view that made me breathe better.”

6.

I began to breathe better after the American election by imbibing in art and fashion and even a good-old American musical here in Paris. Looking through a wider lens, I adored the “Stephen Jones, Chapeaux d’Artiste” exhibition at the Palais Gallierie. It - and Jones in his genius - showed me how to be singular yet collaborative all at once. I was unexpectedly moved by the “Révélation ! Art contemporain du Bénin” show at Conciergerie and how otherness is always contextual and can so often be artful. And I loved the big group production numbers and choreography found at the production of Hello, Dolly! directed and choreographed by Stephen Mear at the Lido - even reveled in them. But the individual performances were a bit too broadly sketched for me, all signaling and performative even within the framework of a musical comedy - like someone polluted by politics, I guess, within the framing of a spiritual pilgrimage who feels the need to signal in a performative manner and then confess it. I did love the rendition of the big famous final Act One ballad “Before the Parade Passes By” in this production. Its Dolly is Caroline O’Connor and she delivers this number with the nuance and emotion missing from her performance in the rest of the show when in her own mannered mirroring she both plays the role and has a too playful take on it all at once, which is the danger diving into Dolly ever since Carol Channing did it and defined that twofold way of playing it while transcending it by just melding her own persona into the performance. But there was only one Channing. I saw her in the role, in fact, as well as Bette Midler and Bernadette Peters in its last revival on Broadway. O’Connor equalled the brilliant Peters in her version of that big final Act One anthem-like ballad. She too is a belter who doesn’t belittle the song with her need to outshine it but delved into it, submerged herself in Dolly, then emerged delighted by her own talent to accept her rightly earned ovation.

7.

Marcel Proust found a new way to breathe by reading the polymath John Ruskin whom he admired so much that he left his bed to make his own pilgrimages to a site or two that meant the most to Ruskin and translated some of his writings into French. “All art is but dirtying the paper delicately,” Ruskin rightly wrote.

8.

I had texts - even a video - from a couple of the young people I grew to adore - maybe even love if I dared to - in Tangier. They worked at the hostel where I stayed and sent their messages after I had written the word Tangier a couple of times in this column. I received their separate missives between my writing entries 6 and 7. “How was your days in France? I hope you spent a good time there. We missed you,” wrote one amidst his other sentences. “We miss you so much,” wrote another with four red hearts attached to hers. I told them I was coming back to Tangier and the Ancient Mountain that stands watch of it and them. And now us.

9.

I thought today of the Americans John Adams and his two sons, twelve-year old John Quincy and nine-year old Charles, and their 1779 pilgrimage walking the Camino into France instead of from France into Spain when their ship, the Sensible, took on water and almost sank off the coast of Finisterre at the western-most tip of Spain which had once been thought of as the end of the world. Adams had been sent as a minister from America and upon his arrival in Paris was to negotiate commercial treaties and perhaps a peace treaty as well with England if it were possible. But the mission turned into, yes, a pilgrimage for Adams who was an austere Protestant - an other - among the ornateness of Catholic Spain. He walked the wrong way on that spiritual path to get to where he was going. Was he backward-facing? Or facing forward?

10.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary on my MacBook Air:

Le·the| ˈlēTHē | Greek Mythology a river in Hades whose water when drunk made the souls of the dead forget their life on earth.

Her·a·cli·tus| ˌherəˈklīdəs | (c. 500 bc), Greek philosopher. He believed that fire is the origin of all things and that permanence is an illusion, everything being in a process of constant change.

I looked up both those dictionary entries after reading the Proust quote and then typing in Lethe at poetryfoundation.org and reading a poem titled HERACLITEAN by one of my favorite poets, Kim Addonizio.

It begins like this:

In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet.

In goes the philosophy teacher

explaining the theory of eternal

return, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet,

still owing money to Mozart. In

goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel

of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten.

Every river is Lethean,

so why should we care

if it’s not the same river?

11.

This ends like this:

All self-portraits are about stillness.

The parade still passes.

I dirty myself.

I do it delicately.

I seek my way again.

I turn a corner.

Mourning, I turn it …