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

Le Ventre de Paris

The City of Light, with her smooth surfaces and comme-il-faut beauty, her orderly suppressed sentiments and preciosity, must be hiding the belly of the beast somewhere. (Molière immortalized the preciosity of 17th century Paris in Les Précieuses Ridicules, depicting a refinement that denied the very existence of a body. Customs still preserve a certain legacy, for example corporeal functions are not mentioned in polite language. Few people will acknowledge that you just sneezed.)

Danse macabre guard of Les Innocents

But Paris had quite a belly, immortalized in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris. Today les jolies rues  Montorgueil and Montmartre, white and gentrified, have lovely cafés and galleries. But for more than 800 years this quartier was Paris' digestive system. From about 1100 AD Paris' central food market fed the hundreds of thousands of the capital city at what is now Forum des Halles. Till the French Revolution, thieves and crooked merchants of the food chain were pilloried in stocks that slowly rotated by the market. The adjacent cemetery of Les Innocents was practically festive. In the 19th century elaborate cast iron Beaux Arts halls was built to house the plethora of foods and drinks and abundant consumption that fascinated Zola with its enormous vaults and covered passageways.

Eglise St. Eustache

Zola's novel elaborately describes the merchants and the fat, greasy mouths of the feasting Parisians, the underworld and the plenty in this belly of the city where digestion and indigestion closed in on the anorexic, famished and repulsed hero, Florent. (In fact I believe Paris' astrological sign is Virgo, who rules digestion.) Jacques recalls les Halles of the 1960's, a raucous colorful world of boisterous activity all night long, as the truckers brought in their goods, the grocers picked up their wares, the days and nights of incessant va et vient. Les forts des halles, the truckdrivers, were picturesque characters who would visit the prostitutes lined up along rue St. Denis as they waited to unload their goods. The commotion made Les Halles beloved to the bourgeoisie who dined there on soupe a l'oignon apres l'opera at Pied de Chochon or Chien qui Fume, both restaurants still there. But soup is now being served, Soupe a l'Eustache, where the cavernous St. Eustache feeds the hungry. Long lines of surprising kinds of faces wait for their soup alongside the genteel parks of Les Halles (even a dog run!). I had no idea all these Parisians needed an evening soup.

And now the belly seems to rumble underneath, where the RERs bring in banlieusards who hang out in the underground mall. On certain nights, at certain hours, the atmosphere bristles with danger, rebellious kids massing, police every few feet, staring each other down. And Parisians still mourn Le Ventre de Paris, which departed in 1971 from Paris' center, where a belly belongs.

Some Medici Beasts

 The other garden I frequent is the Jardin du Luxembourg, the beauty to Jardin des Plantes' beasts. Immaculate, silken lawns at all seasons, studded with faux Greek statues and the Queens of France in the anodyne style of the 19th c, pony rides, gardens planted every few months and unearthed to the waiting arms of the quartier's inhabitants, it is a highly ordered French garden. (Someone once said that France is a country of peasants who beat the land into submission.) The wonders of Jardin du Luxembourg are countless, including the Medici Fountain, a strange, dark corner, away from the otherwise relentless summer sun.

Built by Marie de Medicis, Henry IV's widow, it is of glowering darkened stone, though it was meant to invoke the sunny fountains of her ancestral Italy. The present fountain was largely rebuilt in the 19th c. Marie de Medicis herself was connected (distantly) with one of the beastliest of all episodes of Parisian history. I refer to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, said to have been ordered by her cousin Catherine. (For a fabulous rendering, see La Reine Margot after the Dumas novel, Isabel Adjani as Margot.)  As every French school child knows, that was when the persecuted Protestants of France had been invited to the wedding of the originally Protestant Henri IV as a gesture of brotherhood, only to be slaughtered in their sleep August 24, 1572. But that was not Marie's fault. Even her lack of intelligence may not have been her fault, but Henri IV, the most beloved of all French kings, lived in dread that he might be assassinated, for that would leave his cow-like wife (his words) on the throne. After he was assassinated, in fact, she did basically hand over the Treasury to her chambermaid and her notorious husband until Marie's son, Louis XIII, finally had them arrested.

Polyphemus

But enough about Marie. The fountain itself is alluring, especially to the ducks who have already begun to migrate back here. Unfortunately it tends to be littered with cellophane wrappers, though now there are beautiful gold fish coming out of hibernation just underneath them. The fountain depicts languid hunks of river gods, the dripping water looking ominous in the blackened stone, and an unfortunate husband of gigantic proportions coming upon his cheating wife, Galatea. If you look closely (and so much is shadow here, it is hard to see) at the cuckolded husband, you see that he has only one enormous eye in the center of his forehead--it is Polyphemus, the Cyclops. The tender erotic couple beneath its ominous gaze is of pure white, but everything else about the fountain is dark and supernatural.

A river god

The reverse side of the fountain (added later from another existing fountain) has another bestial scene, Leda and the swan, most erotically portrayed in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, but you won't see any of that here.

The ducks have begun to arrive--even in the stony shallow fountain at the Place de la Sorbonne. They sleep in the midst of tourists, their brown and brilliant green heads tucked in, devoted couples that will waddle side by side at least until the arrival of the brood. Then, as with some humans, the emerald green heads of the males will turn elsewhere.

Last summer we watched a poor brown mommy duck have a slow nervous breakdown in the Fontaine de Medicis. Many little ducklings--were they all hers?-- flapped around in chaos, endeavoring to swim back and forth across the basin of the fountain, squealing and circling frantically. The mommy was being driven to distraction. She would try to lead them, then despairing she would bounce out of the water, shake herself off and complain, duckwise. Every few minutes she would take off into the sky, leaving them to their own devices. She may have gone off to gossip with friends at the basin in front of the Palais du Luxembourg, built by Marie, whose greatness was only a question of marriage.

The Unappreciated Beasts

The beasts of the world (someone has predicted) that we have tamed, abused, caged, made to perform, or even loved will soon rebel, along with Gaia, and pick up and leave for their original habitats. (For the beast that is me, there's not far to go. My DNA can be traced back to Neolithic France.) We already hear about elephants killing their trainers---for good reason, undoubtedly, since baby elephants are routinely traumatized in order to make them trainable---and sea mammals leaping up to brutalize theirs. Lions have been removed from Bolivia's zoos and taken into sanctuary, and the wild horses that the US Bureau of Land Management cruelly rounds up (on their own dedicated territory) and starves to make room for cattle ranchers, they too are finally getting Congress' attention. Will our cats and dogs just take off one day for their continent of origin? I don't blame them.

Plus docile que l'homme, ...le chien s'instruit en peu de temps... comme il est dédaigneux chez les grands et rustre a la campagne... il donne des exemples de courage, de tempérance et de fidélité...

"Sweeter than man, the dog learns quickly... disdainful among aristocrats, rustic in the country, he is an example of courage, temperance and fidelity," wrote Buffon, the great French naturalist, in 1755.

He wrote that here in Paris, near the world's oldest menagerie of trapped beasts (1793) at Jardin des Plantes.  Its majestic front lawn stretches to gold-tipped wrought iron gates on the Quai d'Austerlitz, on which Buffon sits on his plump stone behind while pigeons roost fondly on his head. An alleyway of twisted tree trunks on winter's dusty earth runs along an iris and rose gardens where some goblin spirit eyes a young boy lasciviously--in stone. There are four museums of Natural History here, the most important next to old Buffon's maison, in which a long taxidermized procession from Noah's putative ark winds through the building. At the time I moved to Paris there was an exhibit on dragons from around the world.

I used to jog along parts of the zoo where huge dark swans shared my complaints against Paris, and sought me out for relief once when a mentally ill young person started to have a fit by their pen. Mountain sheep duke it out with their horns and panda bears roll around in bamboo tree houses--that's what you see without paying the entrance fee.

Gardeners, who appear to have been misplaced from some previous century plant exotic, spikey species and then uproot them every few months. A jog can circle alpine gardens and a plot that has been allowed to go to seed just to see what plants would come up. Then you circle up the "labyrinth", a little hill of spiraling hedges with a gazebo on top. Everything is geeky, labeled, scruffy, never quite tamed. That's what I like. On my morning jog I could see the grand apartments across from the gazebo lit warmly as children rushed to pick up their backpacks lying on grand pianos, all promising a world of happy Parisians. That I found a little depressing. But Jardin des Plantes itself is the earnest place where naturalism's great discoveries--except for Darwin's--were made, and before that, where Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon wrote:

Lorsque le sentiment délicat est exquis, lorsqu'il peut encore etre perfectionné par l'éducation, l'animal devient digne d'entrer en société avec l'homme. Le chien sait concourir a ses desseins, veiller a sa sureté, l'aider, le défendre, le flatter; il sait se concilier son maitre, le captiver...... il a toute la chaleur du sentiment; il a de plus que lui la fidélité, la constance dans ses affections...

"When the delicate sentiments are exquisite, when they can be perfected by education, the animal becomes worthy to enter into human society. The dog know how to contribute to (man's) designs, look over his safety, aid, defend, flatter; he knows how to assuage his master and captivate him... he has all the warmth of feeling and more faithfulness and constancy of affection."

A beast licks the martyr's feet, all that's left of the meal at Jardin des Plantes.

Can you blame the beasts we so take for granted for abandoning our wayward affections, and marching back home?

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.

Being Cornered in Paris

A friend has asked me about the title of this blog. What does it mean to be cornered in Paris?

According to Wikipedia:

Paris Syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (delusions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, etc.[5]

Twenty Japanese tourists are hospitalized each year with Paris syndrome. Jerusalem syndrome, in which people become possessed of religious obsessions which led a tourist to set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in 1969, accounts for 40 hospitalizations a year. Both are precipitated by the shock of the real vs. the myth.

France spends about a billion dollars a year to fight for her beautiful language, in Alliance Francaises, consulates and marketing. Paris is the most visited city in the world. A fervent japonaise, like une francaise, needs to experience the right thing in the right place at the right time The pressure is great.

I believe it is the distance of Paris' beauty, her cold rationality and lack of affect that causes the ardor of the suitor to become psychotic, like the chilly sado-masochism of Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour. Yes, the warmly lit cafés remind you of California or New York, but you have to bring your friends with you (see http://hubpages.com/hub/Being-American-While-In-Paris, Victoire being my nom de plume).

I have presented a few of the symptoms myself: depersonalization, derealization and anxiety. I could see them in others. An American friend, who had been seeing a Frenchman, presented the symptoms as they fought on the street, his body language cold and obdurate, her loose blonde American hair shaking over her open wound of a face. She was being drained of her personhood, it seemed from a distance. Remember, the solution to everything is simply to be French.

I had already gone through Phase I of mon amour de Paris, over 13 years. Year 14, my world was rocked by the effect of Paris on the relationship I had come here for. As for the long ("big", according to one therapist) story of our relationship, we have ended up in couples therapy, and are tiptoing around one another these days in a minuet that reflects infinitely in a Versailles halls of mirrors, as we offer the other a golden goblet. We dance on.

And how does one fare outside the challenging household?

Parisians are not interested in making new friends, since they already have their circles. That is, their friends from grade school. Unless, of course, it would raise their status to do so. Americans are not usually in that category.

Angel at Reims

But the stone streets do echo with a kind of companionship, in the sweet-faced saints outside Notre Dame, their blessings (too often replaced by Viollet le Duc) communicated in silence. Or the death mask of Beethoven that I greet in silent communion in Jardin des Plantes as I jog by listening to his music. Or the countless expats who attend Meetup groups in search of bonds.

Do I still have Paris syndrome? I had a few breakdowns, developed tinnitus, and then we began to travel the world.

Our spirits became light again.

French Crusades and American Patriots

My beautiful country shows promise of rising up against the extremist warriors of the religious right (whom they just elected into office) and their paymasters. The American people voted with their rage against injustice, hardship and the grand Equivocator, Obama. But now they see who got elected. The new junior Congressmen would: make miscarriages subject to criminal prosecution, allow state officials to abolish programs (education, welfare, conservation) without any procedural requirements, sell off utilities to the highest bidders--turn our country into post-glasnost Russia. Policy wonks are amazed. I am not. I have been studying the extreme right for awhile, research for a novel I'm writing. That right wing army whose latest incarnation is the Tea Party has roots in millennialism, survivalism, religious fundamentalism and fascinating revisionist readings of the Bible.  And they echo the Albigensian crusades, in the southwest of France.

That, after all, was a millennial age too, caught up in a proliferation of cults. Our version is equally militant and equally Biblical. It believes that

America has a covenant with the Lord. If she remains faithful to its edicts, her crops shall be plentiful, her people well fed, prolific and happy, her children obedient to the voice of their parents. But now she has faltered in her obligations and her cities lie corrupt, her waters and air are befouled and wantonness, crime and dissolution follow her people everywhere. As Satan and his allies are about to overwhelm the land, enter stage right the hero, Bible and Constitution in hand, to beat them back into the shadows.¹

Reenactment of the persecution of the Cathares

I wrote in an earlier post (Liberté en vélo) about the French crusades against the dissident Cathares, a religious group perhaps rooted in the early Gnostics, that became popular in the Languedoc in the 12th and 13th centuries. (The region is the Arriege, see my piece http://hubpages.com/hub/Another-South-of-France-The-Arriege) The war against their heretical beliefs, waged by Pope Innocent III, turned into a territorial conquest that crushed the Languedoc culture. During the brutal siege of Béziers in 1209, soldiers turned to the papal legate Arnauld Amalric, not knowing which were the heretics to be slaughtered. His response was:

Nece eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset.

Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His.

Tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand people were slaughtered.

Since then some US Marines, Green Berets, and Christian patriots have adopted that motto:

"Kill them all and let God sort them out!"

These words, against a skull and cross-bones, appear on bumper stickers, t-shirts, Nazi paraphernalia, the trinkets of the American religious warrior. Better the earth be destroyed in its entirety than duty to Race, God and Constitution be compromised, declared the Aryan World Congress. The day of judgment is not far off, the task urgent.

Beasts of 12th c. Languedoc (Vals)

America, wake up. Some of these people are now members of Congress.

1Aho, James A. The Politics of Righteousness, p. 3