Mormon Pioneers

Salt Lake City Temple

An immense melon moon rose in Utah. We arrived late and in suffocating heat to begin a month in the American West. Distant purple mountains--the Wasatch Range--beckoned, but our first task was to discover the pioneers who came here first, the Mormons. A hidden sun beamed up pearly cirrhus strips.  

In Salt Lake City's wealthy and immaculate center a light rail carries you past perfectly restored turn of the century urban architecture to Temple Square, center of the Mormon empire.

The Mormon pioneers who settled this land strove, like all pioneers, against terrible odds. In 1847 Brigham Young (Joseph Smith had by then been meted out frontier justice) struck his staff in the unprepossessing flat and barren land (occupied seasonally by Shoshone, Ute and Paiute Indians) and declared the city of his visions.  It was surveyed out, and the pioneers began to construct the Mormon empire, far beyond the troublesome United States that had persecuted them. Today there are as many Mormons as Jews worldwide (about 13 million), and Salt Lake City has been, over the years, a wealthy crossroads of the West.

Spotless and tightly controlled, Temple Square's message is delivered relentlessly by young girls from all over the world who pop up everywhere in their modest dress, serving as missionaries (just as Mitt Romney did in France). The message is that the true scripture is found in the Book of Mormon, taken by its adherents on a leap of faith despite the obvious discrepancies with scientific knowledge. (For example, the modern horse mentioned many times in the BOM was not on the American continent between 200 BC and 400 AD.) It is drilled into you by elderly men, self-satisfied and friendly. On large screens with high production values giant colorful people enact the Mormon story, or testify to their living faith. There's a lot of money being devoted to telling this tale.

Where are the young men, or the older women? Some of them are in the Family History Library, the huge repository of genealogy that enables the Mormons to convert the dead along with the living. It is purported to be the Mormon's offering to you, so that you can discover the joy in connecting to your long lost ancestors.

Joseph Smith

The Conference Center is the largest in the world, its four-acre roof planted with a meadow. And everywhere giant wide-eyed colonial figures tell stories of religious persecution and life-saving faith, of the wonders the Mormons have built. Pioneer spirit shows in the 1882 Assembly Hall, and the home of Brigham Young, Salt Lake City's colonizer. The majestic Utah Hotel with its Florentine Renaissance ceilings and its marble staircases, was bought by the Mormons, and there a powerful documentary presents the story of Joseph Smith, pioneer and prophet.

What the documentary does not cover are some details about Joseph Smith, now being explored by a blog called Mormonthink. His more than 30 wives (nowhere on Temple Square is polygamy discussed) were in some cases already married to other men. He apparently propositioned many other women, blackmailing them into sleeping with him. Nor is there any mention on Temple Square of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, where non-Mormon pioneers were promised safe conduct and then murdered. An airtight pomposity on Temple Square raises many questions and exhausts the questioner with its obstinent silence.

On the other hand, it's the presence of Mormons in Utah and southeastern Idaho which contribute to an arresting brand of courtesy and cleanliness.

Bear Lake

On a more interesting level, it's easy to see how Tony Kushner arrived at the link with the gay culture in Angels in America. The museum has many large format paintings of Smith manning up--the one powerful beautiful man, glowing in light before handsome, naked Indians.

Other Salt Lakers are fun, friendly, willing to please, chatty--Spanish and British accents, Chinese spoken, some denizens are tattooed and costumed, others are debutante blondes. Public spaces are large and perfect, and the old turn of the century commercial buildings exquisitely restored. The ambience is not unlike New Mexico or Colorado, common sense threaded with serious outoor people and with Native Americans. And the seamless mass transit system is free.

Driving out of Salt Lake City toward Idaho, billboards read:

Wax on the cars, not in the ears! We hear you!

100% breast augmentation! How cool is that?

Mineral composition at Honeyville Hot Springs

The Wasatch mountains beckoned from the background, in a mist of dust and the smoke of nearby forest fires. It is easy to see how the Mormon pioneers were bound to their charismatic leaders by the majesty of these ranges. In the foreground:

alpinechurch. org

4 locations - 12 services

you choose

Paris Tabernacle

As we left Salt Lake City the land unfolded majestically. The Wasatch ranges waited in repose, sleeping beasts, tawny and green. America's immense lands of sage, pine, sycamore, gambrel oak. We stopped for temples and tabernacles and then a hot springs in Honeyville, family pools of concentrated mineral waters under the blue sky and Wasatch mountains, where Spanish and Russian were spoken.

We drove through beautiful Logan Canyon and Cache Valley, where natural stone grew high like ancient columns of mythical giants on the sides of our passage, then young tender trees reached across the road nearly joining hands.

Inside the Paris Tabernacle

Between 10,000 and 16,000 years ago, camels grazed in thick grass here, giant mammoths lumbered, herds of bison and horses roamed and grizzly and short-faced bears hunted. Bones and tusks and remains of such ancient giants have been found in Cache Valley.

The Canyon brought relief from the 95 degree heat, as it had for the trappers and pioneers. From a windy overlook we saw turquoise Bear Lake. We drove along Bear Lake into Idaho, where suddenly everything seemed a bit more free. Farmsteads and livestock seemed more relaxed on ranging pastures, by dilapidated old wool sheds and barns.

His grandfather's carved doors

In Paris, Idaho we found a quite beautifully proportioned Tabernacle in roseate stone. Mormon converts from Switzerland had brought elaborate skills in stone and wood for such hardy pioneers. Our fat bellied affable guide chuckled us through the Tabernacle, where his grandfather had carved the entrance doors. He told us of the laborious building of the Tabernacle, whose stones had been hauled 18 miles over the winter ice of Bear Lake. Each post of each banister was carved by hand. A shipmaker made the wood ceiling like an inverted boat. All this at the command of Brigham Young and in witness of God's glory. These people surrendered fully to the patriarchal will.

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In Montpelier, where the population explodes to 2,000, is a bank which Butch Cassidy robbed in 1896. But Main St. seems worn away to nothing. Perhaps that's Idaho.

Finding My Spine in Paris

Egypt, Tunisia, Libya are finding their spines. They are unearthing their forgotten treasure, their spirit. Paris herself, dry old spinster, emerges in the sun to feel her sap flow. Her spine must be the Seine, glittering vein of pulsating gold that seems to flow in both directions at once.

As my own spine sagged under the weight of life here a few years ago, my doctor sent me off to therapists--the last of whom dozed through our sessions toward her ultimate goal of finding her daughter a job through Jacques. Another one, French, urged me to get confrontational with my stepdaughter, which wasn't going to make things any easier at home. So I kept on searching for ways to straighten my spine.

I tried Nia and developed tinnitus from the sound levels in class. I took up mindfulness meditation. I tried acupuncture. (France has had acupuncturists since the 16th or 17th century, imported through Jesuit missionaries. They are among the best trained in the world, outside of China.) I've been exploring tai chi, dodging the egos and sifting out the gold. I'm rocking out with Zumba (led by a Latin Bruce Springsteen). And now, chiropractic. All in search of my spine.

This isn't just any chiropractic, but a subtle practice of reorganizing the autonomic nervous system, linking breath and movement, to wash away old traumas held in the back. The back has three kinds of tension: active, passive and skeletal, all interfering with the nervous system's coordination of a machine far beyond the grasp of rational thought--the human body.

The heart beats 100,000 times a day, pumping 5 liters of blood per minute, feeding 200,000 km of veins, arteries and capillaries. We breathe 26,000 times a day, sending 12,000 liters of air into lungs 100 square meters in surface area. But our nervous system surpasses all that, with 14 billion neurons, each one in contact with 25,000 others, trillions of connections. These govern our 640 muscles and 214 bones, of which 33 are in the spine, the coordinating center and origin of emotions.*

As I lie face down on a massage table my chiropractrice sends a tiny shock wave up the spine here, or asks me to breathe into my neck there, or to stretch beyond what my body wants, into a vertebrae that has been buried for 20 years. And all the time, breathing like bellows, on two other massage tables other bodies lie face down undergoing their healing, sometimes in tears, sometimes sighing and moaning, while our chiropractrice dances from one to another.

The stresses of a lifetime have been stored in muscles, in bones and ligaments, causing spines to twist and crouch even as they pretend to stand upright. The steady release of awkward asymmetry allows those stresses to leave the body, which re-experiences forgotten emotional energy in the process. It is a wild ride.

First my left and right side don't communicate, and then waves of depression return, or bliss, or some forgotten connection through time and the space of my spine, to the long, long journey I have been on for so long. Then the top and bottom are out of sync, then voices from the two sides of my body begin to argue, then someone at the next table releases it for all of us with a cry. Sometimes I feel a pressure on my head, though no one is touching it. Always I sit up to a reeling room, as my neck finds new space between the vertebrae. I walk home on air, but the ensuing days may bring crazy mood swings as the body keeps puttering with its own controls.

A little twist of the spine...

Meanwhile the body of Japan flexes forgotten muscles, in that extraordinary people of fortitude against all odds, like the Libyans who are being slaughtered by their tyrant. The spines of Wisconsin are a little straighter now, and even Democratic senators are finding some vertebrae they had forgotten about. All releasing emotional energy, all breathing new life. Like Paris in the spring.




*Petit Guide des Soins Chiropratiques Network

Journée au Musée du Louvre

Blue sky at the Louvre

It is difficult, even for a committed franco-skeptic like my beastly self, to ignore the wattage of the space-time continuum that is the Musée du Louvre. The first Sunday of every month it is free, like so many Paris museums (http://hubpages.com/hub/Whats-Free-in-Paris --my nom de plume being Victoire). Though I've already been some 40 or 50 times, again we went.  A sunny sharp breeze blew us along the bright rive droite, teeming with German tourists on this first day of blue sky.

But first, the Guardians of the Palace. At the Pont des Arts are the guardians of the children of Africa. Black men beseech you with clipboards of xeroxed sheets to sign in support of African children, and ask for a donation. When Jacques asks if they have a permit, they produce an ancient xeroxed sheet of an actual NGO serving Cote d'Ivoire. But they want your euros for the children of Darfur. When Jacques called the NGO it wasn't aware of any connection with the brisk business going on at the gates of the Louvre.

Further along the quai, the Guardians of the deaf and dumb, pretty girls who thrust clipboards in your face, pointing out the words Sourds-Muets, when they're not busy chatting among themselves.

The next bridge: the Ring Trick, where evenly stationed "workers" "find" a fancy ring on the ground and ask tourists if they've lost it. If not, they offer to sell the ring to the tourists. When Jacques has threatened them with the police, they were annoyed with his interference.

French sculpture gallery

The Louvre itself is well-guarded by long lines of tourists, winding around the Pyramid and Cour Carrée. But we know a trick. The Porte des Lions never has any queue. You can walk right in. Shh---don't tell!

Queen of Sheba, 12th c.

We know by heart that secret entrance, the white stone stairs past the small but fascinating African/Oceanic/Pre-Columbian section, up past a young Edward VI and large canvases of London burning, through a room with dying Elizabeth I looking like a gnarled transvestite, through Murillo and El Greco and the other Spaniards with their liquid eyes, through the Grand Gallery with cold Poussin leading to hot Caravaggio, including his ravishing canvas of the Virgin in stark, police-procedural death, the mannerist Italians and Rafael, through the packed room of the Mona Lisa with its astounding Wedding Feast of Cana'a among the Veroneses and other Venitians, more dark and dense, ending up with the living colors of Titian. We took an elevator down to the sculpture galleries flooded with light and height.

13th c. Angel

We visited the arcade of medieval French sculpture (which is outshone by the Musée de Cluny collection). We took a journey from 10th century Languedoc, where the broad pagan beasts of the Romanesque, with their bulging eyes, shade into one of the idiosyncratic glories of French sculpture, the gothic.

14th c. Virgin

Kenneth Clark, in Civilisation, describes the humanism of those figures, perhaps deriving their sweetness from the songs of the troubadors, for here we have for the first time truly beautiful women.

"The look of selfless detachment and spirituality is something entirely new in art. Beside them the heroes of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless and even slightly brutal."

The very stones radiate, in that moment of time, a kind of freshness and birth, before technique overwhelmed it.

Comtesse de Boulogne

But in the 14th century the angels turn inward, and Mary's smile is more superficial, and we come closer to the Renaissance, and the stones speak only to the glory of kings.

However, the 15th century brings a fantastic death cult, in the wake of the Plague in Europe and the Hundred Year War, when tombstones showed the very worms eating the guts of the distinguished deceased.

Marseillaise, imps reflected

The later French sculpture feels cold to the inner touch, except for the raging fury of La Marseillaise with her gash of a thundering mouth, and impish allegoric children in immaculate white marble.

Next door, space-time curved again, back to Mesopotamia.  Here is writing from Sumer, poems from 2500 BC. Here are the judicial reforms of the king of Lagash, Gudea.  He proposed relieving the sufferings of the poor and of women, as inscribed on a stone cone almost 5000 years ago. Then, the room of Hammurabi's code also speaks out for justice for the oppressed, but it is a fierce justice delivered by a demi-god.

And then the fabulous beasts of Mesopotamia----the massive bull men of Khorsabad of 700BC!

Khorsabad Court, Mesopotamia

So we end up more than 3000 years prior to the place where we had started. We'd seen only a small fraction of the Louvre. And that's where the great palace traps you---since you can never quite grasp the immensity of the sometimes suffocating collection, you can never resist going once again, the first Sunday of the month.

Strangers in Paris

In my last posting I wrote of exile. Pico Iyer writes of "lonely places":

 .. there are 101 kinds of solitude.... Some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them. Each makes its own accommodation with wistfulness and eccentricity and simple, institutionalized standoffishness. As with places, so with people.  

So with expats, it seems to me. In some lonely places expats are in danger of growing into self-caricatures.

In New York everyone's from somewhere else and the cacophony of souls whirls itself into a sublime dance. Here the inherently conservative French culture (belied by brief interludes of the avant garde) finds the solution to every problem is simply to be French. That certitude about formalities appeals to many Americans who live in a stew of contradictory life-styles. And yet, and yet. Sometimes the charming expressions of the French language seem forced upon the tongue. Sometimes I want to say something different.

And even though France is very French, so many people move here that parts of Paris seem like the British Isles, Africa, or the Maghreb. People like me make their homes here. The charms of Paris are in flights of the imagination, and sometimes making your home here can feel better than being at "home." (And sometimes it feels worse.) In the immigrant-rich Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris (which was a stronghold of the FLN during the Algerian war) African women walk with their colorful dresses pulled down their bare shoulders, their proud heads in turbans. Arab men wear long gowns, African men lavish robes.

And yet I have listened to a number of French women tell me how, when they were young and came here from the provinces to find work, they would cry themselves to sleep every night, feeling nothing but the chill of the old spinster Paris. Some ten years ago in the Goutte d'Or we paid our respects to African sans papiers lying on cots in Eglise St. Bernard, weak from hunger strikes to protest their alien status.

Some of the strangeness of being a stranger can be seen in certain kinds of homes that are not mentioned in the clichés of Paris. If you take the RER south from the Charles de Gaulle airport, for example, along walls near La Courneuve are built paper and wood shacks roofed with corrugated steel, on which children's toys are scattered. In the past few years my walks along the sparkling Seine passed by tent cities where tricycles and toys were scattered. These were homes of families, not nomadic hippies. Workers from an expanded Europe had come to find jobs, but they couldn't get apartments. You see doors in the wall ramparts along the Seine, from which people emerge. An old man has lived with his dogs in one such shelter for as long as I've been walking past. Some people have slept under those urine-scented bridges for years, and others have hung fabric along the quai to protect their nooks in the old stone walls by the Seine.

I made friends with a homeless man named Alphonse who told me he had been in subsidized housing till the funds were withdrawn. Now he was on a list several years' long, waiting for housing, living on the street with his shopping cart and collection of books. He always wanted to chat and expound his theory of benevolent dictatorship. He has disappeared, but his less voluble colleague still snores half the day in the doorway of a cinema. For years a woman showed up at Place Maubert in many different kinds of dress (perhaps she was not homeless, perhaps she lived nearby) waving a cigarette butt in your face, ranting unintelligibly, and relieving herself occasionally on the sidewalk. A group of men with the swollen red faces of drinkers sometimes gather on the cobblestoned rue des Anglais, with a golden retriever that gets her heavy body up each time another clochard appears, to greet him as is his due. When I had just moved to Paris I emerged one day from the cheerless La Pitié-Salpétrière (the hospital where Princess Diana was rushed), when a deranged woman screamed violently across the Avenue “Bienvenue en France!” on a cold and rainy afternoon. Le clochard is supposed to be a colorful character, a brand of philosopher. But when Jacques served on jury duty he heard about the horrors of life for the madmen who live on the street.

Compared to these hardships, how can I possibly feel the sting of exile? But I do. Especially yesterday, when Americans finally rose up to try and shake Washington out of its dogmatic slumbers, I wanted to be there.

And yet, and yet. Hemingway wrote in a cold flat on the 6th or 8th story of rue Cardinal Lemoine and could barely afford the twigs and logs to make the place bearable. He preferred writing in cafés or on the Seine with his sausage and bottle of wine.

Life on the street

And, for him, Paris was a moveable feast.

Connections in Paris

When I moved here I felt as if all the connections I had with Paris slipped away. Paris was different, perhaps because our relationship was suddenly different. It was not that I had romanticized Paris before---I had read a number of Balzac novels to practice my French, and felt the lingering aura of his underworld. But we had been different. A few months after moving here, I wrote a dark song about:

The stone walled city,

where redemption is lost

and the stars rarely dare

to shine.

And yet now I am encountering unexpected connections to the old city. Here is an odd one.

I am on my way to tai chi class, up in the 10th arrondissement. I walk along rue St. Denis, where I see only one prostitute. In years past there had been many, or perhaps that was another section of the street. She is large and blonde and bares her breasts even in the winter, presumably on the evenings when she really needs money. Her neighbors greet her warmly. She disappears down a dark passageway, divided by iron grills, Balzac's Paris, bearing no resemblance to the Amsterdam prostitutes in their gleaming white-tiled cells. I pass a man drinking a beer, muttering in deep guttural French to himself. I turn the corner on rue Saint Sauveur. I cross the beautiful cobblestoned rue des Petits Carreaux. Dusk is subtly lighting the cafés and Parisians rushing to meet their friends.

And there is, suddenly, a connection. A language school, a human resource center, which I imagine is a job agency, but in French sounds almost like a classical institute. This archaic looking store front belongs to Robert's cousin! Eleven or twelve years ago I lived in Portland, Oregon and had a friend from LA, who was in love with a man named Robert, whose cousin owns this place.

My friend was Beate. I was unsuccessfully looking for work in Portland, and she---well, this is how the story goes.

She had a rare autoimmune blood disease. We talked and laughed, hung out in the hot tubs of Portland run by hippies, went out for drinks and went dancing in an old blues club, just the girls, just for "therapy." We had a typical girlfriend situation except that she was undergoing treatments that entailed being drained of her blood, which was then irradiated, and returned to her veins. She never let me too close. I reminded her too much of her older sister. But we gossiped and hung together. Her daughter was developing a wildly successful career with her MBA, but she never introduced me to her daughter. At one point a suitor showed up. A friend of a friend of a friend, he was determined to marry her. He never got that far. He seemed a little like a gold digger, haunting the terminally ill older woman. We had coffee at Torrefazione's and met people, what with her LA personality and my New York personality. We passed a nice year. And she was in love with a man named Robert who avoided getting close to her the way she avoided getting close to me. Robert had this cousin in Paris, whose school I had dropped in on during a trip to Paris, investigating job prospects for my future life. No, Robert's cousin told me, we don't give you working papers, you need working papers FIRST, as I was to hear over and over again.

A year or so after I moved back to New York from Portland, my sister called to tell me about a notice in the newspaper. Beate had died. Beate had already distanced herself from me as my life continued its saga over time and space. And I wouldn't see her again.

Dragon flying over Jardin des Plantes

There it was, Robert's cousin's school. And I still don't have working papers. Some things last a long time. But not everything.

Dante in Paris

Yesterday we celebrated the 17th anniversary of our relationship. We had a late lunch at the Fourmi Aillée, a teahouse for elves located on the rue Fouarre. The vin blanc fleuri loosened our senses to the former feminist bookstore, still featuring its literature along the walls, with its ceiling mural of cloud wisps against that pale Parisian sky, the delicate blue that Renoir created so well. The restaurant's music evokes nothing but feelings, with a ravishing Beethoven Piano Concerto, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, arias from Figaro and Cosi fan Tuttie, and Peer Gynt, inter alia.

The rue Fouarre becomes rue Dante as you walk a few steps north. In 1308 Dante was said to have attended what was then one of the foremost universities of Europe, located in the Square Viviani (just north of the restaurant). Dante bedded down nearby in straw, hence the street's name Fouarre.

Bitter Dante at the College de France

I felt a vertigo in time, remembering our thousands of footfalls through Paris over 17 years. It was a strange coincidence that l'addition for lunch (quiche and salad, outstanding) came with two business cards, one of the Fourmi Ailée and another of a restaurant we had been to some ten years earlier, L'Eté en Pente Douce at the foot of Montmartre. In those days, since Jacques' apartment was rented out to tenants, on our visits to Paris we stayed in odd short term rentals. The one at the foot of Montmartre had been decorated with gauze.
 

Dante's stay in Paris was commemorated in the Divine Comedy by a tribute to the professor, Siger of Brabant, a dissident (and persecuted) Averroist who taught pure Aristotle, unassimilated to Christianity. Averroes, the brilliant Arab philosopher of 12th century Andalusia, had taught that philosophy and religion both reach truth, but by different pathways. How apt that was for our anniversary, at a time when we are deconstructing the effects of Paris' Cartesian logic on our relationship. La coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Dante wrote of his professor in the Paradiso:

«Celle-ci, d'où ton regard me revient,
est la lumière d'un esprit qui en graves
pensées trouva qu'il tardait à mourir ;
c'est la lumière éternelle de Siger
qui, enseignant dans la rue du Fouarre,
syllogisa des vérités qui éveillèrent l'envie.»

"He comes back to me, the light of a spirit who in deep thought found himself slow to die (he may have committed suicide). The eternal light of Siger, teaching on the rue du Fouarre, philosophised truths which stirred up envy"

Dante knew well the bitterness of exile, just as Jacques has also known from his years in the United States, a bitterness I have felt in my own exile in Paris. Dante wrote in Paradiso:

You shall leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste others' bread, how salty it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others' stairs ...

Beasts of Paris

Beasts at Reims Cathedral

Being a moveable beast myself (wolf? cat? fox? griffon?) perhaps I am coming home to the land of beasts here in Paris. The splendid bestiary of the Musée de Cluny, a block away from our apartment, displays the apogee of the Gothic bestiary. The most native art form of France, the gothic style, featured beasts mostly imaginary. Gothic flamboyant, the lush architecture of the Cluny museum (which was formerly a pied-a-terre for the prosperous Abbé de Cluny from the provinces) is resplendent with beasts. (For maximum beastliness visit the Cathedral at Reims whose exterior features some 2,300 statues of which more than 1,000 are animals, real and imaginary. In addition, at Reims was discovered a labyrinth modeled after the lair of the Minotaur.) Inside of the Cluny Museum you have the most wonderful of beasts, woven into the Unicorn tapestries.

On a less intimate level, the Cathedral of Notre Dame not only features magnificent beasts on her portal of the Last Judgment, but keeps a full time exorcist on staff.

But let us travel back onto that Roman road that departs a few blocks from the center of France, at Notre Dame's parvis, and winds up the Montagne Ste. Genevieve, the rue Mouffetard that I have written of in previous posts. At the other end of rue Mouffetard is l'Eglise St. Médard, whose leafy spires I used to see daily through my window in my small apartment at the edge of the square. What a pretty sight. It calmed me, cornered as I was in a deux pièce with a kitchen whose walls you could touch as you stood in the middle.

St. Médard had been a chapel built in the 9th century along the Roman road that has become the rue Mouffetard. A church was erected on the site around the 14th century. During the 17th-18th centuries it was a gathering place for the Jansenists, a fierce and dissident cult that adamantly opposed the reigning Roman Catholic church, but had a membership of luminaries including the brilliant Blaise Pascal and the deacon Francois of Paris. Its fanatical members gathered around the grave of Francois and went into trances and convulsions to achieve the healing power of miracles. So the Jansenists had beasts to deal with. The king Louis XV found this sufficiently alarming to order them off the site in 1732, whereupon someone wrote on the church doorway,  
De par le Roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.  

By order of the king, it is forbidden to God to perform miracles in this place.

The beasts of heresy have always been chased, but never vanquished, in Paris.

Liberté en vélo

In the rainy fall of my first weeks in Paris I lived near rue Mouffetard, the narrow cobblestone pathway over Montagne Ste. Genevieve that dates back to Neolithic times, was an early Roman road, and now is a hangout for students and tourists. One night, facing the marché  at the bottom of rue Mouffetard, I met with another American transplant for an evening drink. The rainy wind slapped at taxis and battered the few trees, and the traffic circle gleamed black and slick.  I waited to meet this man who had taught music to my nephew at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, and had now forsaken his career as a concert horn player to get a doctorat at the Sorbonne.  Mysterious choice, I thought.  As I waited in the warmly lit café an old skeletal bicycle rounded the slick pavement, and there he was.

A bicycle, in this weather?  Yes, he told me, he always travels by vélo. To chase away the blues of Paris, his advice was twofold: ignore the labyrinthine social codes of Parisians, and ride bicycles everywhere you go.  Never go down into the yellow lights of the metro, where you are faced with sad, gray faces.  Ride your vélo into the bracing wind! Freedom from the metro, and freedom from the society.

But--blues in Paris?  But---you may sputter--it's Paris!  I had already felt those blues descend, those first few weeks in Paris. Hemingway describes it.  "All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife--second class--and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked."  Those were the streets I also walked every day. And the light was drained from the city.

Before I had lived in Paris I had loved visiting the city in the late fall, for a Thanksgiving with no turkey but misty streets that discouraged all tourists but the intrepid Japanese. Fog enveloped Ile St. Louis, encircled by the glittering necklace of the Seine. The steps of Montmartre were wrapped in mystery, and all Paris was a Robert Doisneau photo. But living in Paris was different. And so, I started traveling by vélo.

In the container that brought my goods to Paris was an ex-racing bike, custom-built for my early triathlons, back in the mists of time.  And so I made good use of my little steel pony for several years, owning the hectic Parisian streets, as once I had felt I owned Manhattan by running over the Queensboro bridge every day to work.

Montségur

Jacques, my partner, took to the advice of my American friend like a boy to a bike. As a youngster in the departement of the Ariège at the foot of the Pyrenees, Jacques had torn up the countryside and villages on his little bike. He had climbed the formidable cliffs where the chateaux of the region were built on impregnable rock. He had also climbed the chateaux themselves, to their crumbling heights, long before they had been restored and opened to the public. Montségur, the spectral white castle at a height visible throughout the region, had been in the 40's and 50's an abandoned ruin. That had been where the last Cathares, remnants of a dissident Manichean sect, had awaited their death at the hands of crusaders in 1244.  It had taken the crusaders a 10-month siege to penetrate the fortress of Montségur and then burn the 215 Cathares in the meadow at the foot of the castle. Au bucher! To the bonfire! Little Jacques had climbed Montségur all by himself, and all because of the freedom of the vélo. (For more on the region, see my piece http://hubpages.com/hub/Another-South-of-France-The-Arriege.)

Au bucher! - (Reenactment)

And now we have Velib'! Stationed every few blocks a fleet of heavy, serviceable bicycles are waiting at computer-controlled stands, to be used at your convenience for a yearly fee of 29 euros, as long as your ride lasts under 30 minutes--then you pay for extra minutes.  Swipe a card, pick up a bike, and park it again at another station at your destination. Paris has no great heights to be scaled like the Ariège, but there are urban challenges to sharpen the spirit. Bike lanes intermingle with bus lanes and fellow cyclists swoop under your nose without warning. I have heard complaints of 90 euro tickets for traffic infractions (even while the younger set tears around the streets of Paris at top speed). Bicycle crashes surged to 700 in 2007, and there were three cyclist deaths that year, four the next. As of 2009, 11,600 bikes have been trashed, and 7,800 stolen, seen either as no one's property or as bourgeois symbols. But in general French motorists have a supple relationship with the road, as compared with Germans who attack city streets as if they were on the autobahn. Within a few days in Berlin I had been knocked out by a driver, perhaps because I am accustomed to the more perspicacious French.

And so, as I take off for the American library along the broad vistas of the Louvre, the Grand and Petit Palais, and Invalides along the Seine, I am glad for this direct relationship with the architecture of Paris. You can fly as on the wings of time, living with the ages of Paris. Liberté en vélo!

Hemingway's, and my, Paris

...wherever you go, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
                                                                               ------Hemingway


Paris stayed with me for 13 years of roaming, as I lived with and without my Frenchman on the other side of the Atlantic.  Our first night visiting Paris together we wandered beneath the shadow of Notre Dame and then watched her formidable towers from the Esmerelda, in those days spare rooms decorated like theatrical sets with doors that didn't lock.   In the morning we burst out into the Parisian April, a blur of medieval stone soothing my jetlag, as Jacques attended meetings and I waited in cafés of the stone-walled city.

And now I have lived here more than four years, have battled the reality of Paris as an outsider, and long for the rough and sodden days of Hemingway's Paris, when fishing in the Seine brought a good meal and men never sobered up at the Café des Amateurs on rue Mouffetard near where I, too, dwelt 3 years ago.

This blog is dedicated to the real Paris, that is to say, the Paris of the imagination, and the Paris of mutable time, that arcs from the ancient mountain of Ste. Genevieve (blocks away), the ruins of Roman baths (down the street), the asphalt by the nearby Sorbonne that had been ripped up in '68, the ancient center of a French Republic that struggled for existence (500 meters from here, the Parvis de Notre Dame), and the haunts of Hemingway like nearby Shakespeare & Co.  It is also dedicated to our travels--to escape the cold spinster Paris--which have taken us all over the world.  And it is dedicated to those of us who have tales to tell.