Chapter 52: Past and Present in Paris

Chapter 52: Past and Present in Paris

              Sometime in October I receive a text from Spencer asking if I want to go to Broadway in New York early November. Planning with Spencer is easy, so we quickly make plans for the first week of November and get tickets to both Waitress and Hadestown. We would be in New York in a little under a month.

              A couple days later my aunt emails. She and my uncle are in Paris and invite me to join them for a week or so if I’m able. There’s a blank spot in my schedule in roughly one and a half weeks right before the now-planned New York trip. I confirm that the dates work and buy some surprisingly inexpensive tickets to Paris.

              I learn later why my flights were cheap: they were operated by American. On the way there, airline related delays resulted in me missing my connecting flight to Paris. They refused to rebook me for the same day, even when I brought up the issue well before the first flight left. On my return about a week later, many of American’s planes were grounded in Dallas due to weather, requiring me to buy a new flight to New York following Paris, despite my plan to go back briefly to Salt Lake for a quick rest and restock.

…

Aunt Nance and Uncle Lew were staying at a friend’s apartment in the historic district. After a confusing taxi ride, I arrive near the apartment. Lew is outside to greet me and help me take my stuff up to the flat. The apartment sits above several cafes and bars and a fromagerie (cheese shop). Nance greets me with a glass of wine and asks if I want to rest before we went to dinner. I slept on the plane, so I decline. From the balcony restaurants below are crowded with patrons under characteristic red umbrellas. A sea of people moved across the cobblestone byway toward the subway like a single organism. It would be impossible to own a car here.

We finish that evening with a nice walk along the Siene River and around the outside of the Louvre before having a nice dinner at a Michelin Star restaurant with a lovely tasting menu. The experience was akin to watching a movie or reading a book. Each dish told a different piece of the flavorful story. The seafood was especially brilliant. A decade ago, I would have dismissed the dinner as overpriced, flamboyant and a poor use of money; however, because Nance and Lew had shared several of these dining experiences, I have developed an admiration for the craftmanship of food and the activity of eating it. Oliver Sack’s, in his collection of essays, “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat,” wrote about young man develops persistent and incredibly powerful olfaction after taking MDMA. He complains to Dr. Sacks because he cannot concentrate on work or anything at home; the smells of the world are too exciting and intoxicating. He likens himself to a dog on a walk that needs to smell everything along the way, as though the road is a story of all who had come before. The man states that, while he’s never felt more genuinely alive, the overwhelmingly enjoyable sense was ruining his life. Dr. Sacks postulates that our raw senses may be stronger than we presume, but strategically inhibited by higher-order brain regions to make more space for higher-order frontal lobe processes. However, in this man the drug had stopped this inhibition Whatever the case, taste and olfaction are the most visceral and alive of the senses; they are the only senses wherein something new or foreign enters our bodies and becomes a physical part of us. Just as I build my body through these senses, my atoms will likewise return to Earth in death. Perhaps there is something of mortality that can only be explored through these visceral senses.

…

The following morning Nance makes a quick egg and cheese breakfast with coffee. She then gives me my first glass of morning champagne of the trip. This would become a daily ritual. The champagne did not help in wakefulness but established a mental lightness for our day of museums.

              At Musee de L’Orangerie, Monet’s “Water Lilies” cover 8 massive canvases over two circular rooms. Their characteristically muted yet evocative color pallets are illuminated differently each hour by the circular sunlight above. As the light glints off the blended white lead paint atop their canvas sheets, they came alive and seem to present a new world all their own. It is as though the spirit of Monet has been trapped within. How could something so objectively lifeless exhibit so much livelihood? The colors and shadows shifted with the sun. Watching Monet’s water lilies was something of a theatrical experience. While they remained timeless and physically unchanging in that circular room, the “Water Lilies” danced with the passage of time to create life and spirit where there had otherwise been none. I thought back to the cadaver in medical school and how something so objectively dead could feel so alive.

At another museum we saw Picasso’s Guernica—a powerful anti-war painting and my favorite of his works. Black and white sharp lines and twist and entangle to create violent cacophonous characters trapped in a horrific scene. Guernica—representing the bombing of the city in the Spanish civil war—depicts the chaos, brutality, and melancholy of war. It was originally commissioned for the Spanish government to be displayed at the 1973 Paris World’s Fair. In fact, a tapestry copy of Guernica was hung at the UN in New York but was covered by a blue sheet February 2003 at request of Colin Powell and George W Bush so that it could not be visible during the televised broadcast of US diplomats arguing for war against Iraq. History cannot teach if we actively cover or burry it.

 

The Pompidou is an objectively ugly building from the outside that somewhat resembles a horrific, adult-sized McDonald’s Play Place. We went in to see a special Georgia O’Keefe exhibit, and the interior was surprisingly lovely.

O’Keefe is most notoriously known for painting the “vagina flowers.” O’Keefe rejected this interpretation as an extremely reductive reading of gender and sex. She painted during a time when the art world was dominated by masculinity and masculine expressivity and the pseudoscience of Freud and the idea that all art was fueled by sexual energy. femininity was synonymous with sensuality and delicateness, and so certainly a woman painting the sexual organs of a flower must be painting the female reproductive system. For O’Keefe these were only flowers, and she painted them due to their intricate forms and complex colors. Thankfully, today the vagina narrative of O’Keefe’s flowers has become less prominent. Regardless, the genitalia interpretation was first proposed by O’Keefe’s husband, Stieglitz, and it’s unfortunate that the opportunity of establishing meaning and interpretation was stolen from O’Keefe.

Walking through the O’Keefe exhibit I was enamored by her use of color and curvilinear shapes that brought life and activity to her mostly desert scenes. I could appreciate her development as an artist since the exhibit was arranged by year. The later paintings, with their unique contours and color choices almost seemed to glow in the low sunset light, as though they were a window to another place.

Before leaving the exhibit, we caught a beautiful sunset over Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The middle of the tower bisected a large cloud and resting on the tower’s needle top was the sun painting the area in oranges and reds and golds. The colors and flat light established a simpleness to the city that reminded me of the English countryside. It was not majestic, but it was beautiful. I never went to see the Eiffel Tower and I did not feel the need. The tower was impressive from a distance and meant more to me as a feature of the city and landscape rather than a destination to be visited.

As I left Paris, I knew there were several more things I could do in the city. I had a sense of finality with these kinds of trips, as though I were crossing them off a list never to be visited again. If time were truly so limited, would it even be a valuable use of time to return to a place? And so, as I left Paris, I had a deep suspicion that I should never return. It was in stark contrast to my trips earlier in life, when on leaving I felt a sense of excitement to one day return, and with the sense that I had become something more of a complete person. Yet now I felt none of these things, but instead a sense of undesired closure.