Today I went to the cemetery. Its something I've been meaning to do since I arrived here in Paris. I brought a camera, expecting to make a journal entry on my blog with photographs.
The graveyard was huge. Tombstones were elaborate. I visited my Idols, generally, they were difficult to find. A writer's death is rarely glorious, its only sensible that their tombs wouldn't be either.
When looking for Man Ray's grave, one of a group of tourists who had spread out shouted, "I found it!" ecstatically. A bit of me cringed inside. Partially because of the voyeurism, partially because of the accent of American treasure hunts breaking the silence, but mostly for feeling so hypocritical.
I lingered, pacing through the rows of tombs, they loitered in front of his tomb. I didn't want to approach at the same time. I don't think that I could have enjoyed the pleasantries we might have shared if I'd gone over as a fellow tourist, camera in hand. What small talk of Man Ray could we exchange in front of his grave? Playing at the possibility of exchanging a smile or connecting on our foreignness seemed abominable.
I left soon afterwards. I needed a cigarette and I had a sour taste in my mouth. I felt somewhat disrespectful of the dead to smoke by their corpses. Maybe its the Canadian stigma towards smoking, but I would have felt as guilty as if I were to smoke around children.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Flowers in a graveyard.
Who brings fake flowers to remember a loved one? The old graveyards here are full of them. About half the flowers are synthetic. They are also filled with living flowers, and fauna, and moss, and old trees, and vines. Its not so simple to say that I find them tacky. They are tacky, but tact alone doesn't fill me with this sense of repulsion (in all cases). What hurts me most about fake flowers in an old graveyard is their false permanence. Like they lost the lesson that comes with losing a loved one. Life lives, life dies, life continues, death continues -- and nowhere is it more apparent than in a graveyard. The wilting flowers, the dried up leaves, are more beautiful than any colour fading plastic. Its not a question of aesthetics.
The colours in the flowers were also the most fantastic part of my excursion to visit my fallen idols. Letters on a slab of concrete marking the resting place of something I revere is hardly as beautiful as a single rose or daisy left by someone else who shares my sentiment.
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Sacre Coeur and "Cine, Ma Verité."
I got seriously lost today trying to find an area of town called Montmartre. I managed to walk all around it, in every direction. At one point I had walked so far in the wrong direction that I gave up on walking and took the nearest subway back to where I started in an attempt to try again.
At one point I ended up in a North African bazaar near to the Gare Château Rouge. Crowded streets, people vending corn from shopping carts that they'd retrofitted to work like a mobile grill.
Sacre-Coeur was grand. This is the first old basilica I've ever visited and been inside. Religious or not, it was breath taking, and not just because I'm an asthmatic who smokes and has a cold (and its at the top of a very large hill). Wandering through it, my eyes met with a gorgeous young woman and we shared a smile. In the church, you're not meant to speak, and even if we could, what do you say in this circumstance? To someone who most likely doesn't speak your language, and at place that is such a pilgrimage for Christians, many don't speak French either. That was it, a fleeting moment, and I was distracted from the grandeur of the architecture, statues, and stain glass. No longer able to concentrate on the sublime religious experience, I finished my stroll through and left. I'd seen most of it already at this point anyways.
After exiting the basilica, I sat on the front steps to watch buskers and wash down a baguette and Camembert with a beer that I'd brought along. I ended sitting there for an hour or more. When the sun finally broke through the hazy sky and I could see the shadows left by clouds hiding patches of the city. At this moment, I realized that I have my own bit of religion, cinema. I know, I know, cliché, whatever. But it was a different realization that I'd never had before, except for maybe once in New York. But living in Toronto, there are no Cinematic land marks. Of course you watch a movie, and you think, hey they're at so-and-so, but only because they chose a place in Toronto that the film makers thought they could pawn off as New York or Chicago, or any American city. Despite Toronto being filled with camera crews and actors, when you realize you're in the same coffee shop as so-and-so movie, it doesn't matter, its just a prop. But here, the whole city is cinematic. Even if its not the same land marker, you get cues from cinema. Watching the clouds part, and looking down on Paris, I feel like I know what Gérard is feeling in Paris Nous Appertienne when he is walking along the rooftop looking at the city. Its not a feeling that Paris belongs to you (as the title of the film, Paris Belongs to Us, suggests and the introductory quote opposes, Paris Belongs to No One) and in this moment you feel the film more intimately, you feel the city more intimately.
Walking back down the hill to a subway station, I run into a hotel that was the hotel that Antoine (Jean Pierre Leaud) worked at for a day or two as the doorman before he was fired and became a private detective in the film Stolen Kisses. On the metro back to my side of town, I realized that it was the same line that, again, Jean Pierre Leaud sat in (though this time playing Paul in Masculin/Feminin). I could see the scene unravel, a black man was shot over an argument concerning Charlie Parker and Bessie Smith, Paul sat there sheepishly - too shy to interfere or say anything and too curious to look away. Call me a fanboy, or a pretentious film nerd, whatever. I felt for a moment how I imagine people feel visiting the Sacre Coeur must feel, the mythology or the legend is brought closer to you. It stops being just an apparition.
In New York I had a similar experience getting out of the subway at Times Square. I don't give a shit about Times Square with its glitz and mile high billboards, this diatribe about religious experience isn't about the hype. When I got off of Times Square there is a wide marble walkway where I first saw the Rocksteady Crew break dance in Beatstreets.
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Mp3s
Serge Gainsbourg - Comic Strip
Feist - I Feel It All
The Velvet Underground & Nico - Femme Fatale
Francois Hardy - L'Amour Ne Dure Pas Toujours
Nina Simone - Love Me or Leave Me
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