Les Nuages. photo by sarah macdonald
My favourite person in Paris is the docent at the Musée L’Orangerie in the Les Nymphéas de Claude Monet room. It’s true that I don’t know every person in Paris, but let me tell you about her anyway. She’s small, middle aged, with dark brown hair that’s almost black. She wore a mask and her lanyards tangled across her chest. She circled the vast white room full of people taking selfies or groups getting their photo taken in front of Monet’s Water Lilies and she shushed us every few minutes. I loved it. I loved the way she shushed. It was abrupt, not easy. Not everyone paid attention to her but, the moment I heard the first shush leave her lips, I inhaled and held my breath. There’s text on a wall into the room that states the artwork’s intended experiential purpose is to be meditative. The room is meant to be experienced in silence. Of course I took my own photos, and a few selfies, but I tried to take the quiet communing aspect much more seriously this time around. It didn’t bother me, like it normally would, to see people take phone calls in the middle of the room, photo after photo and not look up from their phone to see the work. Instead, I sat down for 45 minutes and looked at what was before me.
Noticing is a difficult task for me. I’ve read about it in books, talked to my friends about it and if I’m doing it properly, and thought, what is it to notice? Observing seems to fit me better, like a familiar, worn in sweater. It’s active. Noticing, not exactly passive, isn’t that. Noticing is what mindfulness therapies teach us. Letting thoughts pass and not engaging with them but letting them go through. I don’t mean noticing in that specific sense because noticing, to me, is still that openness but with imprints. No strain of observation, keen to take notes. So I noticed. I saw ridges in the paintings where I’d not seen them before—little lines raised up from, what, moisture? The canvas? I noticed the direction and saturation of paint strokes, and how some strokes looked like rain falling. Les Nuages, or The Clouds, is the painting I adore most in the series. Soleil Couchant, or Sunset, is a close second for obvious reasons. (As I type this, golden hour has blessed the tippy tops of Parisian roofs after a long day of heavy on-and-off rain.) I sat in front of Les Nuages the longest. I didn’t realize how long it had been, people wandering in and out, forward and back, and I kept my gaze focused on a small yellow paint stroke in the furthest left hand corner, mesmerized.
My nephew asked me not that long ago what magic is and, of course, because he’s at that age, what it means and why. I can’t answer him the way he wants, or rather, the way I think a child deserves. He won’t understand what I mean when I say you just have to feel it. Magic is everything and nothing. It’s Les Nymphéas. It’s walking down familiar streets with ease, the way the moon looks against a cerulean sky, or taking a single solitary moment to yourself. Magic to him is anything and everything. It’s not specific yet. I mentioned a line at the boulangerie by my hotel and he laughed. For no reason at all he responded with a hearty laugh. To me, that’s magic.
When I left the gallery, I recorded a video for my nephew, which I do a lot on this trip (or any trip) because he can respond to it, unlike last year when he was just a little over a year old and still learning to form words. I pointed out the Eiffel Tower to him and the Seine behind me. I want to show him as much of the world as I can because I never had a relative do that for me. Maybe one day he’ll tell me he hates it and I’ll stop. But, for now, he gets videos of me explaining my day, and Parisian recycling trucks and tiny service trucks that he can ask my sister to play over and over as he, I assume, studies them. Notices, maybe. Magic, maybe.
~
On Saturday I walked over 80 feet underground and through tunnels and past millions of dead people. The Catacombs might be one of those sites I wish didn’t exist but I feel as though being this proximally close to death is still important so, in a way, I’m… not glad but okay with it being there. There’s a winding staircase to get down to the moist tunnelway with low ceilings. I tried to breathe but became very aware of how far down underground we were, which didn’t help me in my effort to inhale and exhale as a way to settle. Water drips from the ceiling and I don’t know where or what from. There’s gravel on the ground that’s slippery from the constant dripping. It’s a long lead-up to the actual bones of people exhumed and redeposited into one part of the Catacombs. First, there’s a long twisting path with a lot of obelisk illustrations and slick, smooth stone walls. Then, a room with a sign above the door that reads: “c'est ici l'empire de la mort / here lies the empire of death.”
Every bone is perfectly lined up. Skulls sit atop rows femurs. There are rows of arm or leg bones and then another row of skulls. I saw a pelvis. Some of these bones are over 300 years old. Many skulls are smashed in and, because people of course love to leave a mark anywhere they can, graffitied. One skull had someone’s scrawl in bright green. Parisians started seeing this empire of death in 1804. How many have walked through in the centuries since? Some visitors ahead of us were taking selfies in front of these bones—these people. It’s still astonishing to me—even when we watch such death in real-time on social media every single day and have been for months, and for years in newspapers and on television—how little care there is for life or even death. I heard the man laugh after he looked at the photo that was just taken.
I didn’t want to talk much about the Catacombs here, or in general, because I left feeling deeply unsettled by the entire project. I’m going to write about warm air and good food and bottles of Orange Crush coloured orange wine and still I had this experience. It’s a balance, I suppose. When the Catacombs were constructed it was with the principle of death being the great equalizer. (At least that’s what someone wrote for a sign I read 80 fucking feet underground.) Centuries ago, yes, death was more prevalent. Normalized. I haven’t exactly unstuck my feelings and sentiments about death, and I’m not even going to try here, but at once I’m moved to feel reverence for life and for death and for all of those bones I walked past, hundreds and hundreds of years old, while deeply saddened with how we are normalized to it now. And I know you all know exactly what I mean by that.
Walking in the sunshine afterward—in nearly 30 degree weather, people sprawled, eating, drinking, and just being in the Luxembourg Gardens—seemed to me to be a dream.
~
photo by sarah macdonald
Today, I went slow. My body asked me to. On the weekend, Canal St. Martin was packed at 9 p.m. at night like Bellwoods Park on a hot summer day in July. For one second, while wine drunk, watching people by the water, I slipped back into a self I had packed away and it felt really good. Then I felt my muscles ache, and needed to rest. Each day has sped up and finished before I could get some kind of handle on what was happening. I stretch my ageing body on the floor of my hotel room—twisting, pulling my knees in, folding over, finally pushing my knees apart and pressing my forearms into the ground for a child’s pose.
So today, in an effort of slowness, I walked to the Seine and over it to Shakespeare and Co. I bought my nephews a picture book in French, an essay collection by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and, long overdue, Hua Hsu’s memoir. The rain clouds followed me and opened as I arrived at Notre Dame. Visitors can sit on risers now to get a better look of what sits at kilometre zero.
I listened to my favourite records on the walk through the 3rd arrondissement. Pity Sex. Death Cab For Cutie. Laura Marling. I’m always drawn to Transatlanticism when I’m travelling. I sat in front of (what else?) a Monet at the National Gallery when I was 18 and listened to “A Lack of Color” on repeat, trying not to cry, but did a bad job of it. Today I listened to “Tiny Vessels” thinking of the essays I need to write, similarly themed to this song, gravitating back to the memories of all the bruises that had been left behind on my body. How all of those bruises that someone once judged me for are gone now. A girl I knew asked me with such disdain dripping from her bared teeth why I’d ever want that, as if I were the biggest slut and stain on her life. Once I knew exactly where each bruise resided and the mouths who left them, and I loved that. I loved tracking them. Whose saliva was the wettest. Whose teeth hurt the most. I wonder now if I tried to make out which ones had dental work and which ones didn’t. I often asked them to leave real imprints behind so I could see each individual tooth, and some did.
They’re all long gone now. The bruises, the people who left the bruises. I don’t love them anymore—the bruises, the people who left the bruises—and not because of how that once friend hated them. I listened to Song For Our Daughter, a record as old as this newsletter now, earlier today and the title track played as the sky opened up.
With your clothes on the floor
Taking advice for some old, balding bore
You'll ask yourself, "Did I want this at all?"
I don’t know if I wanted it at all.
~~