PARIS 2011 - 2015 -

I am - Nursse. Je Suis - Infermier.

! No - clochar !  

Chantier Interdit Au Publique

! Ici - No - WC

PRIORITE ! - POLICE - ET - MILITAIRE -

France = PARIS

[Signage groping among charm-words.] At an impasse of the Seine walkway, which resumed on the other side of the Pont Royale, on the left bank, across from the Louvre, sat a two-room hovel, woven tightly of pedestrian partitions and tarp, cardboard and wooden pallets, its approach protected by two cordons of the same fencing and a generous helping of traffic cones. A narrow stair lead down from it to the grey, sluggish waters of the Seine.
  I met the owner. I was lovingly and ill-advisedly preparing to spend the night behind a heavy metal gangplank on the cardboard-soft cobbles diagonally across the river and the bridge from the shack. I had just seen some rats scurrying along the fake plage upstream, but I felt that they would scurry around me like the Seine around the avant-becs of the Pont. He warned me with a bicycle bell and approached with a flashlight, wearing a gendarmerie jacket, and said qu'est-ce que vous faites ici? but all trouble quickly passed. He was an affable, drunk, [out-of-work nurse] from Romania. He took officious pleasure in such things as shooing away drunken clubgoers from the pee-soaked hedges of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur or in giving directions.
  
 
  The Pont Royale was built between 1685 and 1689 during the reign of Louis XIV. It replaced a wooden bridge, damaged over and over again by floods, that had replaced, in 1632, a ferry. It was completed despite advisors' doubts à cause de la rapidité de la Seine qui, ici plus reserée en son lit et plus profond qu’ailleurs, y coule avec plus de violence, in the decorous explanation of one history. It was the second Paris bridge that never bore a dense load of houses. It gives onto the long vista of the Louvre, the museum-palace which, now a permanent feature of the city, [reached its present   in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Place du Carrousel, which was cleared of many close-pressed and varied buildings.]
  This new palace place was the scene of one of Baudelaire’s poems, Le Cygne, which contains the generous, anguished reveries set off in the poet by the memory of an escaped swan. Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie n'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie, et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. Memory is the private, oppressive-generative immovable in the midst of the city’s resistless change. La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel. [Burdened with his volatile memories, exiled in his native place, Baudelaire became  allegorical, sympathetic.] Devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime: je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous, comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime.
  The Louvre of our day no longer changes. It is kept on permanent display as a public immovable strictly opposed to the immovable that unexpectedly thrust itself on the solitary poet. A museum is not like memory.


  For three days in June of 1662 Louis XIV staged a great carrousel in the place, to which its name refers. The crowd of spectators is said to have numbered about two thousand. The king participated as commander of the Roman quadrille; the other quadrilles represented Persians, Turks, Indians, and Americans. The history of the word carrousel is contested, but the reference works in my cousin’s flat, where I was installed several days later, presented the following with straight faces.



Later the Nursse took up residence nearby. The pavilions
the colonnade and the feeble
barricade, are the dialectics of his choice, his achievement
of position. There is a wasp that lays in the bone of trees. The flexible
hollow spear, ovipositing, is the magic abdomen, the sharp tip
of the poem. The effort of centuries is a palatial agony. The effort
of the moment is an abdominal drill.

that among my multiple twilights may precipitate a subject

It was a home. Its chiminée was gathering kindling to itself; I was given to drink from a cup made of thin flowery ceramic and invited to browse the collection of candleholders, some of them painted by hand. I had been through rainclouds crossing the sea-windy land like individual dangerous beasts, and sheltered there, in a hook of the general labyrinth whose hedges and surfaces were in the resistless process of removing, one by one, the thick skins of my mind until any wall would transmit a static electricity of time. Later, another raincloud, more formidable still, was massing in the direction of the setting sun. I chose a hanger and a wagon of precarious hay.

Ian,
Barcelona, Barcelona. So appreciative of your ambassadorship these last few days. I had LEFT, was up in some town, had slept in the thorns across the street from a suburban bar in which I wrote in my journal Paddy Fermour style, but also, because of my characteristically slow pace, still within an easy, cheap train ride back to a different town, a new city, Canek's.

The day I was then leaving I went first to the great majestic palace museum, wandered among its skins for much longer than planned, the whole morning at least, (including other skins by Fortuny and so forth) blissful and feeling closer and closer to the saint (Patrick Leigh Fermour) and to Catalunya; then walked across town and after gulping some chickpeas went into the exhibit of photographs by Jacques Leonard, who was married to a gypsy from Montjuic, and took photographs within his large wonderful families there, Montjuic, one of my places, though my feet know only the slope above the port and the palace where you sent me.

Where I hope to go back in the next few days with Canek - the photograph exhibit I mean. He's been an angel to me, looking out for me and my backpack, has me installed currently in a magnificent building downtown on Banys Nous being squatted in by a passel of his street music brothers and sisters. Though last night one of the more unstable of this troupe woke me and kept me up, rummaging around in the rooms like a gigantic mouse, doing his laundry in the bathroom tub, things like that.

Yes, so my bicycle was stolen the second or third day here. I was in the library, el Gotic, reading about 1909, and came out into the sunlight and it was as though it had never been, this so familiar and dear machine that I had just dismembered a few days before for the bus up, and that I had worked on the bearings of in Saintes, and so forth, that had taken me across Roncevalles. I stumbled about, angrily drinking coffees and morosely wondering what Canek was doing. After a wet night on Montjuic I enlisted at a Hostel that Emily Harvey told me about, something of an upgrade, with a Henry Miller-obsessed finn to talk to, also a loser Englishman selling beers with the Pakistanis.

This isn't good reportage, its too disorganized. Hush. Since Canek Barcelona has expanded dramatically; I can go on down to the quay in front of La Barceloneta and work a way through the crowd that the band assembles, deadbeats and tourists and sane young men and women smoking weed and affably asking after my travels, talking about pruning apple trees, growing vegetables, making baskets, things like that. Tomorrow if all goes well we're to buy a shovel or something and go up to Bon Repos, to the terrace behind, and heft some stones around and begin working up a plot for a vegetable garden, me and Francois, Canek's old friend.

Hm, the beautiful women of Barcelona. A charming Alicia from Paris the other day at the quay gave me grapes, an orange, cookies, and the last quarter of her quart of orange juice, thrust into my hands as she was leaving. A Lucia opened the door - what a door. Inside is a warren of soi-disant artists, skillful guitarists, messy, tired folks and their clutter, notably an abundance of wheeled luggage, the better to carry street instruments in, as well as fragments of croissants, things like that, spread all over beautiful tiled floors in gigantic flats arranged around a wide shaft of light. The door is a palace door, eleven feet tall and six feet wide, of varnished wood, with iron lions encircled by the snake that swallows its own tail, I forget what it is called.

I don't quite know where the bicycle absence leaves me. I want to try to stay on here for as long as I can with conscience ingratiate myself; I may move to Canek's to get some sleep. Then there is this Jerome in France that gave me a five-minute ride in my hitchhiking days, near Souvingy, in a town of auspicious syllables: Gypcy, who is maybe thirty, and told me a week or so ago that he was still finishing his own house, moving in, and then would begin on someone else's, and that I could work for a while with him. I guess I would be thinking about coming home if I didn't have that work; and I may not have it, it may evaporate and never have been, unlike my bicycle, which evaporated even though it had been. I may use the work to get another bicycle and set off in another direction, don't know where.

On the other hand I do find myself thinking often of my dear parents in Quaker City and pruning apple trees. I write them letters important to me, and in the background a list seems to compile of projects I could engage in there while pruning apple trees and visiting them:  carving spoons, for example. Another week without hearing from this carpenter - hearing from him has become one of these arbitrary and fatal signposts, maybe.

I break this off according to the arbitrarily expiring time in pixily purgatory.

Much love
Willis