Travel notes: Avignon

We were too late to catch the 1:15 train to Avignon from Montpellier, so we went to eat lunch at Le Faune, the pretentious restaurant attached to MOCO, the modern museum just up the street from the gare. Unfortunate choice – inedible fare – but nice exhibition of a very German German artist, Neo Rauch (we discussed whether his birth name was really Neo, but I can’t find different on Google) and then got the train into Avignon and arrived around 5:30. We left Montpellier on a summer day and got to Avignon on an autumn day – the season had changed in the couple hours of our train trip, borne northward on the Mistral. The wind flows like a river over Avignon. Its most famous inhabitant, Petrarch, disliked the town with the dislike of Jonah vis-à-vis Ninevah. He disliked it for the corruption during the brief era when Avignon was the seat of the Popes, but I suspect that the Mistral gave him headaches.

It didn’t give me headaches: in fact, the river of wind above the town, at night, was somehow wildly exciting. But a constant wind in your face is unignorable.

We made a reservation at Le Bercail. However, it was no good. When we walked through the town in the direction of the restaurant, we saw that we would have to cross the Rhone to get to it. There was a navette, a little boat, that crossed the river every fifteen minutes, or so the sign said. But that was no good. The air was cold and the boat was distant, and we calculated that we’d have half an hour to order and eat and finish our meal to catch the last passage on the boat. So we turned reluctantly away and found a small but tasty couscous place. It will be marked in my memory by this: I had my first glass of Algerian wine there, Sidi Brahim. I felt very Hemingway-esque sipping it: somewhere in his memoir of Paris, A moveable feast, Hemingway mentions cheap North African wine. I haven’t read A moveable Feast in a shark’s age, so I might be wrong about this reference, but still: the town, the wind, the square, the little Pied Noir man who served us with a few outdated server’s flourishes, it was all so the American abroad experience.

The next day we went to the Dom. We went to the Palais de Pape. We talked about Petrarch. But the main thing, the striking thing, the civilized thing, was nothing like we had previously planned to do. Walking down from the Dom, we noticed that there was a museum with no line outside the door – unlike the Palais. It was called the Petit Palais. So we ducked into it and there saw a collection of early Renaissance paintings in a space where we could really look at them. They were unframed. We were within real human space of them. And they were all remarkable. They were from Italian masters who travelled the circuit from Florence to Siena to Avignon. There were few pagan references in these paintings, but there was perspective and there were faces that, as Jacob Burkhardt might have said, were individual. Real expressions looked out at us, unsubsumed by their ritual  position, their beatification, their place in Biblical narrative. It was startling and exhilarating and it rapidly became  one of my top museum experiences.

The drain on a painting when it is being gazed at by a moving mass of people makes it as hard to experience them as it is to get to know a politician who shakes your hand at a reception. Acquaintance is not the same as knowing. But here, I knew these paintings.

We agreed, after they chased us out of the place for lunch, that we’d just done something incredibly touching

Then we had another go at Le Bercail, but again there was the problem of time with the navette. So we ate at a bistro with plenty of Provencal items on the menu. I bobbled it, having a middlebrow steak-frite. Then we did a few more tourist routes, got on the train at 5:30, and returned to Montpellier, satisfied with our one day jaunt.  More satisfied than ever Petrarch was with Avignon:

 

nest of treachery, where all the evil,

 

spread through all the world, hatches,

 

slave to wine, delicacies and good living,

 

where Luxury performs her worst.

 

 

age, breath

 

Age puts a hole in your pocket. You reach in there and find out that, without you knowing it, somewhere in the course of your days and wanderings, you’ve lost … well, all kinds of things that you thought you absolutely needed.  Memories. Desires.

Or, for instance, breath.

When I was a child, I thought about breath in terms of holding my breath. I’d exaggerate the whole not breathing thing, mumping out my cheeks, keeping from breathing through my nostrils, until I’d have to stop, breath in, breath out noisily. The rumor was that you could do this and at a certain point you’d turn blue and pass out. For some reason, I thought that sounded great, a feat worth doing. I never passed out, though. I never met anyone that did. I began to think this was a myth.

I also learned to hold my breath when I swam underwater. I tried to make it from one side of the pool to the other underwater, to build up my stamina.

Later, in my spiritual twenties, I took Yoga. As part of the routine, I tried to meditate upon my breathing.

And the Yoga phase passed. Decades passed. Wine and beer and coffee and all the starches and sweets of a developed economy passed.

Then, a few years ago, I came down with pneumonia. I’d had pneumonia before. We were old friends. But this was ultra pneumonia, like I never had before. It carved a month out of my life. Afterwards, I was short of breath whatever I did.

Since then, I am not ever long of breath. I sit here, breathing in and out, nothing simpler, but I know that I can easily get out of breath if I get up and run around. Breath has dribbled out of the hole in my pocket.

Mallarmé, in an essay he pieced together out of three previous essays and published in Divagations – Crise de Vers, 1895 – imagines poetry, or literature itself, as a sort of institution of breathing: “replacing the perceptible respiration of the in-spired ancient lyric (la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique)  or the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.” I could go all deriddian on this notion of a replacement, but I am more interested in the transfer of the breath in one body, human, with its tongue and lungs, to another, the written, lungless, an imprint of a long lost breathing – rather like the X rays that they took of my lungs when I had pneumonia.

 

One thinks of Mallarmé as the high priest of the blank page, the page addressed in A throw of the dice. But by grounding literature in breath, he foretells such poets as Olson and Snyder. The beats. Ginsberg.

 

How am I to locate, what am I to do with breathlessness? I’ve long thought we build our strengths out of our deficiencies – not in denial, but in experiment, pushing against the limit. So what am I to do with breathlessness?

 

I’m not sure I can follow out some ideology of strength and deficit and make it all a happy end. But what I know is that it makes the stairs more stairs, the hill more hill, the stone stonier. Perhaps shortness of breath, too, is a device. A god in decline, but a god still.

sleep

There's no estate in sleep

nor does it possess

height nor depth

(clumsy crooner!)

 

 

Of the barbarous clangour

that makes up the names of its gods

you cannot transcribe

them with your sublunar diacritics.

 

 

The human tongue’s

euclidean vocables

have no purchase on

sleep’s 'evidently'.

Paul Nizan's love letter

 

One measures the sincerity of a love letter by its attachment to the receiver – the lover, or hoped for lover, on the other end of this outpouring of sentiment. That attachment is signalled by a certain privacy of tone more than anything else. The tone in writing is, overtly, a clumsy thing – it is underlining, italics, exclamation points, a rather miserable attempt to make the hand that writes take on a function of the tongue that speaks. To make the tone work, to rise above these poor instruments, requires, even of the most silly love letter writer, a certain sense of nuance. A certain sense of tickling, so to speak. And we know that some are born ticklish, and others aren’t.

Thus, the love letter is bound to an aesthetic purpose that may not be shareable. Love letters that have passed into literature, that please people beyond the narrow circle of the couple, are rarely the most successful love letters in terms of their immediate purpose.

I came across this love letter from Paul Nizan to his wife, Henriette, dated 5 November 1939. P.N. is in the army, at this point, but the war seems “phony” – nothing seems to be happening. It is one of the rare love letters that delights on the two levels sketched above. So, I thought I’d translate it. Which is inevitably to distort it.

Perhaps this gains in poignancy for me, knowing the end of the story – Nizan’s mysterious death in the woods six months later, and the way his name was dragged in the mud by Stalinists for years, and Sartre’s amazing preface to Aden Araby which brought Nizan’s name back into the light.

    “Rirette my dearest.  Received your letter of Nov. 1 yesterday evening. It is so very nice to be able to say, after fifteen years, that we love each other enough to exchange love letters, and that we have triumphed in the end over everything that separates people. This stay in the army has reminded me a bit of my stay in Arabia [About which Nizan wrote his first and most famous book], but we know more things, we are much more deeply complicit, we have learned to go beyond mere literature. So that without doubt this time will not be lost, if it isn’t prolonged up until I have a long white beard and promenade along the Maginot line in a little tank. Julie de Lespinasse, Juliette Drouet, and other women only had to hold tight. You know, the legend says that, in order to appease the combattants and consecrate them exclusively to thoughts of war and the contemplation of their military destiny, the powers that be put saltpeter or camphor in the wine, the salt, and the coffee. This legend, I think, is frivolous : if there were camphor in the wine and saltpeter in the coffee, men with more sensitive palate would have perceived it, but I have no need for the witness of taste : it is enough that I read a letter of yours, or write one to you, that I think of your rose Piana dress, your pleated dress of last winter, of that return from Prague in December 37 when you could not stop climaxing, in order for me to have a personal and physical proof that they haven’t put saltpeter in the wine.  So that we shouldn’t have any worries for my moment  of leave, and it will be enough for me to see your knees, your thighs, that you, without any previous sign, put your tongue in my mouth for us to arrive at some frank result. Perhaps it will be wise for you to renounce the vain usage of panties. And there will be time to talk and to say important things to each other. A propos of the Talmud, I just read that Eben Haeser prescribes that workers not make love more than twice in the week, that savants confine themselves to the sabbath, that muleteers do it once per week, and camel drivers once per month, and only rentiers can do it every day: I will have to put myself in the last category. Also, I read in the Talmud, a naughtier books than I thought, that anyone who makes love to a woman on the bottom will suffer from delirium: ah, but what a wonderful delirium! I embrace you in this spirit. »

jetlag and the astronaut

 

D.H. Lawrence, drawing on Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, pins the ur-American hero as, famously,  isolate, cold, a killer. In fact it is easy to think that the American Adam, the first man in our cosmology, was clothed in a hazmat suit -  perfect for existing on this planet as a being entirely of the planet, from the rhythms of his blood to the Circadian cycles of his sleep. An astronaut in the anthropocene, a intruder from the beyond, perpetually alien, perpetually exploiter. Bless the alienation and count the money, we all say here.

A brilliant essay by Henry Sussman, The Phenomenology of Jetlag, Kafka is presented as the prophet of our time warped era, the era of insomnia and time zone smuggling – that is, smuggling time zones into other time zones. For instance, my cell phone doesn’t just tell me the time, now, in Paris, where I live, but also the time in the Eastern Time zone of the U.S., where I was visiting. And since I also visited Iowa, which is on Central Time, both of my numbers were off. Kafka, who worked with worker’s insurance and made it to many meetings in Central Europe to talk to factory officials and the like, was well aware of the hazards of sleep deprivation. Its effects could be tabulated in so many injuries, so many fingers cut off, legs wounded, muscles torn, etc. The effects of tearing away the natural attachment of our circadian rhythm from the light and night to which they are primordially coordinate makes for the heavy presence of sleep in his novels and stories. Sleep as something put off, sleep as something that occurs in highly inappropriate settings, such as in the Land Surveyor K.’s meeting with Buergel in The Castle.

Sussman writes: “… the recovering victim of a significant act of spatio-temporal dislocation and abuse, otherwise known as jetlag, is, unwittingly, subject to two sets of spatio-temporal parameters. There is the explicit one, clearly prevalent at the point of disembarkation in the form of a very loose etiquette defining the business day, customary periods for dining and rest and other conventional interactions: and then there is the holdover protocol of what Proust would call habit still operative in the zone of embarkation. It is surely in the most “jarring” and subliminal manner, Fraud would call it “unconscious” and Proust “involuntary,” that the recalcitrant regime operative a the journey-origins asserts itself in such forms oas sudden involuntary waking in a hyper-attentive state or equally abrupt onsets of fatigue at the least felicitous moments of the active day. We associate the sudden-onset phenomena of depth or unforeseen complexity that definitely establish the activity and output of  the parallel and embedded universe of aesthetic sensibility. Via this particular circuit of modernist invention we come to learn that K.’s pronounced episodes of jetlag toward the end of Das Schloss, of a jetlag before the fact, belong to his own heavily disguised apprenticeship as a performance artist.”

I’m unsure about that anachronism of “performance artist” in that last sentence – a phrase from a different embarkation zone than that of K, even if Kafka, as the author of the Hunger Artist, does come close to embodying, with dream-like precision,  the conceptual art theory of the seventies. Sussman’s larger point, though, is something I can affirm in my own disembarked experience now: the grogginess that succeeds a night of highly interruptible sleep on a transatlantic plane flight, and the ordinary surrealism of all the subsequent manoeuvres in the airport, the seemingly endless corridors and stairs and escalators, the passage through security, the waiting for your luggage at the carousel, the barking of the airport security, the awareness of one’s haggard appearance as one waits for the cab, and the sense that one is not in a good state, that one has been pickpocketed of something one didn’t even know one had, i.e. placement in a certain timezone.

Jonathan Crary begins his book, 24/7, with a story about the white crowned sparrow. The Pentagon is very interested in the white crowned sparrow. Why? Because this sparrow can stay awake for up to seven days during the migratory season. The Pentagon wants to unlock the sparrow and apply its lesson to the human astronaut – the astronaut human – in order to correct that flaw, our ability and need to sleep.  For Crary, “The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres.”

I’m awake now in the old world, contemplating the injury – and how much coffee it takes to bandage it – and wondering if I really was, yesterday morning, in the New World. What day was that the morning of?  And thinking of the magnificent ending of Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus:

“Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos,⁷¹ affords no advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon,⁷² I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes.⁷³ The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.⁷⁴ But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?”

 

 

The drive in experience

 Like many another whelp of the golden age of the American car, I remember drive in movies. In that toddlerhood which comes back to me in bits, a kind of primeval soup of dreamlike images, I remember suffering the passion of Ole Yeller at some drive in probably located, at the time, in the York Pennsylvania metro area, and now no doubt a parking lot or dump. There the dog faithfully defended its owners, there the dog, in a drizzle of images (sound via a gizmo one attached to the car door – and how my father, psychorigid about all things appertaining to paint scratches and fingerprints on windows, approved this I do not know), lived out the last of his, alas, one dog life, and there we cried. It is an incident, the popcorn, outdoor screen, car, that comes together as a hieroglyph of a certain kind of life, dead now as an Egyptian mummy. I also remember a certain erotic feeling aroused by another film from about the same time, a Disney film called, improbably, The Love Bug – could it have been about a Volkswagen? I’m not looking this up on IMDB. Let personal myth remain personal myth.

In a novel the paperback version of which I often press on friends (where it is destined to gather dust, no doubt, an alien to be pitched out or traded when the time comes to get rid of the junk in the house), Lookout Cartridge, the narrator is obsessed by an image:
“Or the Landslip Drive-in Movie, whose monumental screen under clean and clement American stars and in front of you and a hundred other cars without audible warning one summer night began to lower, to tilt back hugely and drop as if into a slot in the earth.
The image became yours even more surely by disappearing. It disappeared with a distinguished rumble mixed with what still came out of the speaker draped over the edge of your car window. An actress and actor in the corrected colors of the spectrum had been touching each other’s colossal faces and their breaths kept coming faster and more intimately loud to bring right into your car this whopping slide of mouths and fingers and nostrils inserted into the night-pines and sea-sky above the locally well-known clay cliffs that had just enjoyed their first clear day in two weeks. But now for the first time since before World War II a section of cliff gives way and the famous faces are swept as if by their camera right up off the monumental screen…”
The author, Joseph McElroy, was obsessed, in this stage of his career, with the media-mediated collectivity of images just beyond the proprioceptive zone, images that we barely but distinctly recognize as part of our “experience”, that word no longer denoting our face to face and tactile immersion in what is, but the immersion in what is represented, our, so to speak, zones of interest as subcontracted to the prevailing media regime.
My experience of the drive in was renewed – and Adam’s was initiated – last night in a field outside of Jackson Iowa, easily reached by way of State Highway 71 from the Iowa Great Lakes region. Adam, on this trip to America, has been longing for a drive-in movie, an item on his extensive trip bucket-list. A storm made that impossible in Georgia. Here, though, was an apparently clear evening, so we drove out and Adam got the hotdog, popcorn, fries, coke and ice cream sandwich that lays a ring of sugar and fat around our spectatorship. I warned, just like Dad did long ago, against letting any of that stuff drip onto the car seat. The Drive-in movie screens look a little anamolous out there amidst the corn and soybean fields. The man at the booth told me that there were only 230 left in the whole of the States, and we both agreed it was Covid’s fault. Instead of a gizmo, what you do for the sound is you tune in to a dedicated FM channel. Sweet! And it was thus that we beheld the wonders of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, a remake, as Adam reminded us. It was fun and cheesy and at a certain point the clement sky was overshadowed by clouds and lightning began to play on the horizon – not a bad addition to a haunted house movie. Just as the hero was embracing the heroine in the inevitable ending, the rain began to fall. Thus, in an additional dollop to the memory this will become for Adam, the parents scouted their way cautiously through a cloudbuster of a storm, across various bridges. As a driver, I’m on the spectrum with the Ancient Mariner – so cautious I’m a danger, or at least an irritant, to the poor unfortunate behind me. So we crept the 14 miles to home. And so to bed.

on the Des Moines glacial lobe

 

13,000 years ago, the Lake I look at from the dining room window would have been embodied in an ice sheet, around 1300 feet thick, the 'Des Moines Glacial Ice Lobe'. A mere millenium later, the ice wall had retreated north – glaciers have the attributes of troops on a battlefield, they are always advancing or retreating – leaving the depression into which water found its way.

The Ice Age! I love that term, and associate it with the American contribution to geology – via Agassiz. Who actually hypothesized the ice age in Switzerland.

‘On July 24, 1837, the Societe Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles ha its annual meeting in Neuchatel and Agassiz gave his opening addres known as the Discours de Neuchatel, which is the starting point of that has been written on the Ice-Age.” This I break off from Albert Carozzi’s “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: the Ice-Age.”

Like many a European scientist, Louis Agassiz eventually came to the United States – in search of proof for his glacial hypothesis. Carozzi sees, exactly, the romantic aesthetic behind Agassiz’s striking proposal.

“During his stay in America, Agassiz never lost sight of the traces glacial action, which had caught his attention the moment he land in the fall of 1846. Here is a striking account of his first impression:

"When the steamer stopped at Halifax, eager to set foot on the new continent full of promise for me, I sprang on shore and started at a brisk pace for the heig above the landing. On the first undisturbed ground, after leaving the town, I w met by the familiar signs, the polished surfaces, the furrows and scratches... so well known in the Old World; and I became convinced of what I had already anticipated as the logical sequence of my previous investigations, that here also this great agent had been at work.”

We could be reading the words of Dr. Frankenstein, in search of his great agent.

Hard to believe in ice on this sunny morning. But I must mention one other great agent in this dimly rhapsodic string: Marianne Moore. Her poem, the Octopus, is, to my mind, the most enigmatic of the American attempts to saw the epic into a form fit for the American tongue. It was one of John Ashberry’s totems, with its bristle of indirections and the babble of its mysterious citations. No other poem gets so close to seeing America as a poem, a geological, botanical, political epic, with all its bloody edits. Eliot might quote Dante; Moore would quote “W. P. Taylor, Assistant Biologist, Bureau of Biological Survey, U. S. Department of Agriculture.”

Hard to believe in ice. The lake bears its speedboats, water skiers, and lilly pads, made of some foamy material, perfect tabs for young swimmers to leap around on. Last night, in the storm, it was all bustling with white caps, and today it is placid and flat. We’ll soon take a boat and dock over at Arnold’s Park and go to the Nutty Bar.

 

The Ice. It is melting in the background, the planetary background, even as I type. But I like to think of Agassiz and Moore today. Vacation is made of blissful, intentional ignorances.

 

The fir trees in “the magnitude of their root systems,”

rise aloof from these maneuvers “creepy to behold,”

austere specimens of our American royal families,

“each like the shadow of the one beside it.”