Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

Paris

Paris Your little canvas, a little autobiography littered on the surface. The way you first started swearing: on your back on the stone fence in Cassis, overlooking the stretch of mountains into the water to the calanques that spell you. Fingers spell down your back. Or spill. Taking the nightboat to Corsica, waking up in another country. Drunk year, stone year, tell it all backwards so what’s before comes after. You’ll manage it that way. I came to believe when I went into the cathedral of Chartres, raven in the field, to see the Veil of the Virgin. Came to believe the point is not to see through the thing that separates us but that the thing itself that separates is part of the point. Coming through the dark crowds I thought to myself it was a hoax, the foot of a saint or something like that. I said if it is fake it will be rich, blue velvet, embroidered with stars, but if it is real— Struck the sun sinking, the trees amber, ember of flowers, the membrane of skin, the stains of last year’s yearning, an urge of opening, on the verge of saying— What must such a cloth look like? | 57 Blue long since faded, embroidered stars unraveled. In the wind along the road to Chartres, but here too—where’s here— or on the walk through the Camargue from Arles to the sea. White threads reaching backwards. Catherine tells about her pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres following the medieval route, some pilgrims walking, in the old custom, on their knees. There, on Tuesday, between a raven screaming from the fields and a walk through the cold labyrinth, and a bowl of garlic soup, I wanted to see not through but at the veil itself. I threaded my way through cities, from bookshop to bookshop, church to church, and museum to museum. How could I have come there and not believed. At the chapel of Jeanne in the nave, a stone eagle bends to pluck grapes, saints lining the spires. Unwell at the chapel of Jeanne, lighting candles, in the dark recess two ghosts. One says “are you brave enough.” I could not say, I could not say. The river moves too quickly, separated stream from bank. In the shadows, bank of material for prayers: 5 francs for a candle. At the chapel of the thirteenth apostle the sun comes through the broken rose of lead and sand. 58 | Thirteenth station of the cross the hand is cut on the candle, a jeweled box holding the bones of a British princess, Saint Ursule, splintered. Dirt in my hands, dirt in my mouth. What is the sound of blood vessels ripping away from bone, the breaking of the casket, the walls of the cathedral held up by thin shafts, iron straps of a ship trembling. What is that sound we should not remember. Braque: La vase donne une forme au vide et la musique au silence. Novemberlight bent sideways and down, this is July walking down Champ de Mars to the water. A portrait painter on the bridge. There on a small island, near Bartholdi’s small model of the Liberty, I began writing in my journal in French, for five pages I wrote but only in the vocabulary I understood. When I next switched back to English I found myself confounded by the boundary of the French in my head—unable to write more complexly than what I could express in the foreign language. The condition followed me south on the train into the mountains of Corsica and back to New York. It wasn’t until years after that, when everyone started speaking in tongues that I. Came to the house at Giverny to speak in tongues. In the morning we saw the scorched cathedral of Rouen. Ruined. A gate to the garden, on the surface of the pond a dark shine. The windows of the cathedral had all shattered during the war and been replaced by clear panes, the nave flooded by light. | 59 Underneath the shine in the garden of a painter, a better pilgrimage site than any other, I stay on the bridge, wait for the dark to rise up, cover the paths. Pull the house down. In the Quartier Latin I wondered what quarter has torn. Feeling in pieces, I mean and not knowing why. The streets break...