Sublimating Paros

Enough denial. One must be affirmative. Enough wishing to be cured!

One must be sublime.

—Salvador Dali

Feb. 4, 2009

I suppose I could write a piece to turn Paros into Paris. About my dreams of going to Paris and sometimes waking up there without a map or itinerary of any kind. Of my picking up again of the French language over the Persian and the Aramaic, and before that, the Greek. Of my return to Joan Miró with more depth, finding him there, the man that he was, not the woman I suspected him to be. Or hoped he was. Or pretended he was.

Feb. 7

For the moment, I am reading French again. As I read—and it's like riding a bicycle—I can't suppress the delight I feel—it feels like I'm reading in English!—I decide I'm going to write like I don't have a moment to spare.

Feb. 9

I read in French, I look at sketches of the streets of Paris. I need my words to turn into poems. I even read the Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton, and although I don't expect to understand them, I do, and I end up feeling very close to Breton, as if we share the same experience.

Feb. 11

I haven't been to Paris in twenty years, but so many nights I dream that I am packing to go on a trip to Paris. I'm packing all the wrong things, all the clothes I never wear. Sometimes I'm packing whole closets of useless stuff. What am I doing? Every companion I've ever traveled with makes appearances in these dreams. For that night, they are my accomplices. But we never accomplish anything.

Feb. 13

Alice thinks I've mistakenly substituted the i for an o. Paros: a place we both love. "India, if you got off the plane in Paros, you wouldn't need a map or an itinerary," she says. "You would know exactly where to go." One of her friends got on a plane in Athens headed, he thought, for Paros, and he ended up in Paris.

Feb. 14

I haven't yet had the chance to explain to Alice why I can't go back to Paros. Why the changing of the o to an i is no mere Freudian slip. Why the possibility of changing the i back to an o would, in reality, please no one.

Feb. 15

My memory is a little rusty. I try to think of Parisian streets but I might be conjuring up Montreal streets instead. I haven't been to Montreal in seven years, but I haven't been to Paris in twenty years. I haven't been to Paris in eight years. No, I mean I haven't been to Paros in eight years. Aram was four then. Two years later, we left Woodstock. Now we've been living in Los Angeles coming upon six years. Los Angeles is our consolation prize for Greece.

Feb. 16

Right now, I'm sitting in a café Alice showed me on the Santa Monica end of the Venice Boardwalk, the one near where her son used to live. Here, Europeans drink tall glasses of beer on tap and eat Swiss food. And Americans drink beer and go back to work. There's always at least one local who has nowhere to go and talks about his DUI case or his friends' DUI cases loudly. Two Germans eat Bavarian pretzels.

Feb. 17

I'm sitting by the ocean right now, but I can't use it, it's broken, or it's too cold, or it's too dirty. Something. But the sun is good. And the ocean is a very big expanse. A very big unconscious. And the sound of that unconscious is very subtle, kind of like the breathing of sleep but somewhat heavier. When I sit beside it my mind is freed.

Feb. 18

If Alice is right, and I think she is, I may be trying to make Paris my new Paros unconsciously. But...