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X in Paris

Michael Brodsky

I arrive in Paris late one night and go to a hotel not far from the one I stayed at two years before. Why Paris. Paris is an exercise in despair, Paris is the workshop or rather the quarry whence I extract raw materials to be worked, later, into a coherence acceptable to what I perceive as the laws of my vocation. I note a few American girls being talked to by a young man who does not move his arms like an American. The American girl is unmistakable. She listens smugly. skeptical, half or three quarters of her attention already clawing toward an elsewhere, the something better just around the corner. The hotel clerk looks at me with a calm that contrasts starkly with the anguish I begin to unload. Before I turn on the light I am already resisting what I perceive of the room's contour. The next day I begin what I have, In part, come to Paris for. I have come to Paris to pursue what bears the configuration of a shameless activity. We will call it X. I need not specify, specification will only obstruct the elaboration of a network of relations, connections, to which X lends itself easily enough when unencumbered by, depopulated of, specific features, ubiquitous nuances. So unencumbered X becomes my foothold in, pretext for, thought, or rather thoughts, since my capacity to survive is dependent on their increase. X is the theater of my anguish. This means that this anguish is estranged in, displaced to, X. This means that once submitted to X, to the protocol of X, I undergo my anguish, my despair, only in the form of a perpetual conflict between resistance and surrender to X. The conflict breeds thoughts. In return for undergoing the full weight of my despair as a human animal in X--for railroading my despair to the domain of X--I acquire thoughts, thoughts about being. But thoughts about being come to me--indemnification is allowed me--only after I have shown myself willing to submit to collision after collision with the tenuous protocol of X. So indemnified, with thoughts, I can go on. I acquire thoughts, therefore I am. Acquire Is the key here. Very early the next morning I buy the weekly listing the significant events of the week. I feel I should visit the museums, attend the respectably important film and theater events. For whatever enrichment comes from X--of course I anticipate a future, retrospective enrichment but deep in the domain of X or even on the margin of that domain enrichment is inconceivable--is axiomatically illegitimate, frenetically disordered, far outside computability. I sit on a bench. For summer it is cold and drizzly. Parisians are on their way to work. I debate whether to have breakfast in a caf&ecaute;‚ or spend fourteen francs on breakfast in the hotel. It could very well turn out copious enough to permit my going without food well on into the late afternoon.
I am here, in Paris. For so long I have been anticipating this visit. But, a ravenous anticipation never took into account my own participation, inevitably, in the spectacle anticipated. I never considered what the reality would be once infiltrated with my concreteness, the concreteness of my warring needs and primordial sorrows, my waking odors and secretions. Anticipation of participation Is always delicious because it is always spared a preview of the participant's symptoms. I rise from the bench. Those benches at the edge of the wide pavement fill me with delight. Two wings separated by a partition. And there is always a handsome plane tree nearby, its roots put to rest beneath a perfectly circular grate.
     Having left wife and son on the small island where her family continues to spend its summer vacation I am on the verge of being overwhelmed by despair. Is this despair at, in, separation the cause of or the pretext for re-immersion in X. "Is this despair at, in... ," this is a sample of the kind of indemnifying thought I await.
     My son stood on shore with his mother and waved and waved and waved at the retreating prow. On the train from Nantes to Paris I found myself sitting across from a thin, middle-aged woman with a worried shrivelled face, smoking. She was not, contrary to my fears, In the least revolted by my nibbling surreptitiously and absolutely without appetite at the cheese sandwiches, grapefruit and pain au chocolat solicitously packed just before departure. As long as I could reassure myself about the accumulated tortures awaiting me upon return to New York--from job, coworkers, bosses, burglars, and from the stalemate which had long before joined forces with my vocation--I felt comfortable on ferry, bus and train. The inevitability of future pain was something solid to oppose to the partial obliterations inevitable once I placed myself in the hands of the city of light. On the bus to Nantes from Fromentine I found myself hungering after the anguish undergone two years previous, when I had left wife and son in Brive for the same destination in order to get a few days' headstart on our projected brief sojourn together before the tumult of Roissy. I found myself hungering fore recrudescence of that anguish because now, at a distance, it seemed airtight, secure, eminently enviable. Then it had been, doubtless, as massive and as clandestine as the version just about to spring but now there was no intrusion of a writhing physiognomy--no intrusion of a symptom-laden concreteness--to mar the contemplation of what, serene and devoutly to be wished, flashed forth the surety of its own concludedness replete. with beginning and middle in addition to end. This remembered anguish was nothing less than the only legitimate--the only conceivable--anguish. But I was incapable of clothing myself in such borrowed finery since I was clearly not the being of two years before. Somewhere in the space between the first paroxysm and this second taking its time about unfolding I had altered. Hearing a cat mewling in the back of the bus I felt myself on the verge of a thought. The thought told me it was not so much separation and departure and its aftermath that was about to torture me as the freshly intuited tension between the hunger to undergo present anguish as the exact facsimile of retroactively paradigmatic anguish past--or rather the hunger to undergo present being as anguish in some form, in other words in its only conceivable legitimate form, that of anguish already over and done with--AND the impossibility of thrashing past the barrier of an inurement, an evolution in the interval between present, past. The thought did not give up: It was not so much despair at separation that was about to be undergone as an agonizing confusion over the nature--name, rank and serial number--of what was at present unfolding or about to unfold. What was it. It certainly did not resemble, from where I sat, despair in its paradigmatic form. I played back the thought. The thought stated that it was not so much despair at separation that was being undergone . . . not so much despair at separation that was being undergone . . . not so much . . . hut this was absurd. But I was too happy with my acquisition to take issue with its content. The thought had spoken with authority. I knew without articulating that if the thought was to qualify as a precious acquisition, an affirmation of persistence in my own being, an encapsulated dramatic event, an undergoable convulsion, then it must embody the supersession of one state or affairs--the obvious, the incontrovertible--by another. The obvious state of affairs was simple anguish at being separated from those I loved. But what could that state of affitirs yield me but anguish. Could submission to that state or affains indemnify me in some way. In the plane of ihought it was possible to avenge myself on the state of affairs for the state of affairs. Only in the plane of thought. In the plane of thought the one, the only, state of affairs, in submitting to certain tricks of syntax, relinquished its preeminence, its incontrovertibility.
     The thought told me it was not anguish at separation that I was enduring but . . . Not A but B. In the plane of thought my indemnification for undergoing A was a thought--was the acquisition of a thought--in which the shelving, the denigration, the supersession of A was secured for all eternity. But only in the plane of thought for as I descended from the bus and struggled to remove my duffel bag, brown and green, stashed in the hold I felt myself being felled into permanent inconsolability by a particular slant of sun on the white wall of the gare.
     The next day, after the copious fourteen franc hotel breakfast, I take the metro. Having bought a carnet the night before I am sure to save a considerable amount of money. Two years before tickets were purchased only one by one. This tactic had denied any fixed duration to a sojourn scheduled to last the several days until my wife's arrival. This time I am accepting the fact of a fixed duration by adopting the rational maneuvers appropriate for making it most agreeable even though at every moment, or at every other moment, my state of mind implies immediate departure. By buying a carnet I eliminate the need for frequent transactions with ticketsellers under glass, I no longer count on those spasms of connectedness to postpone by obliteration. In spite of my grief I have succeeded in resolving the problem of whether I ought to make myself responsible for my own being, my own foul-smelling parcel of reality, or disseminate it among a host of curtly efficient functionaries. Yet at the same time I loathe this proof of a progress, an evolution, a . . . rehabilitation. Surrendering myself to X I move from one of its theaters of despair to another. Delivered up to X I am incapacitated for the observation of trees, cafe habitués, streets--all the official raw material whence my vocation, ostensibly at war with the descent into X, strengthens its sinews. I loathe myself cutting myself off from all this precious raw material. All down my peregrinations I can feel myself fighting in vain the disorder and deprivation suppurating from the wound of my thralldom. I am plunging far, further and further, from the legitimate site of acquisition. All is lost. Paris has never seemed darker, less yielding. Then a thought comes, not far from the Place Clichy. The thought tells me though I feel myself fighting against the ostensible chaos induced by thralldom to X I refuse to feel myself fighting, through X, via X, as X, armed with X, suffused with X, against the rigidly imprisoning edicts designating what is and what is not legitimate fodder for the vocation,--for being, in other words, since it is only through the vocation that I am at all--which I construe as emanating without pause from its every nook and cranny. This thought, in addition to being a bona fide acquisition to be opposed to the obliteration waiting at every crossroads, also awakens me to the possibility that in its way X embodies a fight, my fight, to be. It might be more than an embodied negativity, a fanged void which has somehow managed to usurp the ground of my real being. Yet as anything but an embodied negativity can it be useful tome, that is to say could it serve as a pretext for thought, thoughts. After all, a thought came, not far from the Place Clichy, on the wings only of a conspicuously failed fusion with X as a defiance of withered injunctions, received ideas.
     And why has the thought come. Why did the thought come then. What was the meaning--what is the meaning--of a thought . . . coming. Has the thought been sent to mask a painful truth (that X is and will always remain incompatible with the vocation's legitimate cravings) or as the only possible instrument for unrolling for my inspection an opposite equally painful truth. This quandary has itself the makings of a thought, that is to say an acquisition.
     Just before I redescend I tell myself thoughts will be impossible once I feel myself at one with X. Thoughts will exit only from the seams of a failed coincidence between me and X.
     Toward the middle of the afternoon I am approaching a saturation point. But I can never be sure when I might redescend in blind defiance of my own satiation. I am never sure how long I will be able to tolerate the sunlight. I have a beer, standing up at the counter, In a crowded café‚ on the Place Clichy and then, for no apparent reason, begin a descent of the Rue Clichy, buying and devouring en route two green apples from a small grocery less from hunger than as a tentative affirmation of renewed connectedness with the real world, the clean busy world beyond X. I devour them also to be rid of them as quickly as possible, for once purchased they are immediately impedimenta on the way to, on the way to, on the way back to X.
Reaching the grands boulevards I decide to eat in a self-service. Only when I am well into the meal do I realize how deeply Parisian self-services depress me. Outside it is greyer than it has been all day. I am abundantly overcome with fear of loved ones' loss. I believe that by entering a self-service I will be spared the humiliating confrontations inseparable from sitting down in even the lowliest bistro. But here, among these others equally dispossessed, humiliation has been supplanted by overwhelming grief and fear rendered all the more overwhelming because unmitigated by prickingly abject collision with restaurant chessmen. The sky becomes too grey. I surrender to X. Yet once surrendered I feel that I have only to wrench myself free of its coils to be spared every conceivable form of torment. I wait. The thought comes: Descent into X as a flight from torment is immediately transformed, descent achieved, into an impediment on the way back to clean and manly confrontation of those torments, which confrontation viewed wishfully, wistfully, from the depths of X is indistinguishable from nothing less than torment's end. The thought continues: it is the evasion of torment (excruciated separatedness from loved ones, from all of being) in the depths of X that is equivalent to, induces, torment. When viewed from the vantage of an impeding X separation is no longer characterizable as unappeasable torment. Saddled with the supplementary anguish induced in surrender to X I find myself saddled concomitantly with nostalgia for the torment, all those anguishes, masked behind lopsided allegiance to X, to the grammar of X. The virulence of these anguishes are not inherent: It stems from the virulence of X's obstruction of manly confrontation.
     I run out into the Boulevard St.-Denis. I find myself there where the pavement rises high above the thoroughfare. The next morning I again take breakfast In the hotel. Walking all down the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg I am invigorated, ecstatic over the renewal of an intimate relation with my favorite city, at the height of summer already on the verge of autumn's fragrant chill I am far from the craving to re-immerse myself in X. My slate is wiped clean. Purity runs through me all the way down to my bowels. But will this rehabilitatedness last, will I be able to wander in neighborhoods far from my signposts, the theater of my degradation. As a good tourist will I be able to contend with the upsurge of details that have nothing to do with X. I proceed down the Rue de Rivoli to the grands boulevards and upward to the Place de la Republique. Sitting in its park, beside the fountains and the mutilated-looking trees, I examine my map. I am comforted. The clouds overhead are comforting even though they are purposefully massed against the sun's emergence. A thought is imminent. I am about to be rearmed, to acquire an arm. A thought is on the way. A thought is coming. A thought enshrining the connectedness of X to other states of affairs is on its way. I take a deep breath. The thought's imminence allows me to think seriously, detachedly, of X. Is there, after all, so much difference between immersion in X and legitimate activity --what I am doing now, for example, sitting absolutely still and getting my bearings as the vehicles charge past. Reading my map, I begin to accept myself as the site of a skewed compatibility between X and all the legitimate and eminently acceptable activities that need never, X-like, cringe against the incursion of daylight. The thought arrives fully-formed: Turbulent anguish emerges not so much in thralldom to, immersion in, X as from the need to separate, to render it highly distinct and distinguishable from the sunny quotidian's respectable doings. Once again: Not A but B. Once again: Vengeance on straitjacketedness, fixedness, localizedness, in being, in my own particular form of being. The thought jostles me forward: Repressing its memory during those daylight or rare hours of night when I am allowed or forced to commingle with the legitimate particles of my chosen Vocation, I merely perpetuate X, nurture its infernal glamor and insure its recrudescence. Insofar as I assimilate it as a legitimate constituent of my being I rob X of some of its virulence. But so legitimated, I wonder, is it still X, does it still partake of the substance of X. That is, so devirulized, does it still qualify as a thought-producing machine. I am not sure, staring at my ragged map in the heart of the Place de la Republique, whether this last query is part of my thought or a reaction against it.
     The Quai de Jemappes is almost deserted, except for a tiny fish writhing its last in a net. After noting the footbridges along the canal I turn into a street, the Rue Bichat. It drizzles. When I emerge from my winding foray it is sunny once more. It is even sunnier and warmer in a little park off the Rue Boyer. A child passes through with its grandmother. I am sad but no longer tortured. There is something in this little park which soothes, maternalness intervenes at its most unthreatening.
     In a few minutes, by metro, I am steps away from the Luxembourg Gardens. I enter, sit down on an iron chair along one of the many paths. I think back to the dark drizzle infecting the Rue Bichat. With the sun blazing unequivocally now I am for a split second transported far from the site of misery. Tabulating the distance I have come, from drizzle to dazzle, in so short an interval thanks to the efficiency of the underground and the delirious mutability of the skies above, I am catapulted far from my origin in grief, helplessness, excruciated separatedness. The witnessed change from drizzle to dazzle suggests that my present fixedness, stratjacketedness, localizedness in gapless pain, will also change, end. Measuring how far I have come--from the Avenue Gambetta to the Boulevard St.-Michel--I am transported, I am the distance between these two quartiers, more, between two states of being, participating in both and in neither-- completely ... inconceivable, unlocalizable, therefore insusceptible to pain. The state, or rather the statelessness, does not last. All of a sudden I am prey to another incarnation of despair. Once again I find myself out on a limb without benefit of the tightrope that lured initially. Somehow the contrast between drizzle and luminosity, at first so bracing, so delightful, is now boding ill. The contrast is now simply a . . . detail. I look around. Trees, playgrounds, tennis courts, manege, pissoirs, little lac, all these details are lovely and ultimately disruptive. I have fallen back to being with a thud, the excruciation out of all proportion to the impact. I continue to look around, to stretch myself out on the rack of details.
     I am conscious that I see them now with two successive sights: first of pleasure and second of raging pain that their loveliness should be lavished now, under these circumstances. Details exist to torture my solitude, enhance my separatedness, contrast expressly with my penury. Still I go after them. I turn around. Outrageously, a man is sitting on the grass behind a bush eating American fast food. Another detail. Another twist of the knife. Encounter with this detail, with each and every, is a spasm of flight. Perceiving the detail I leap toward it leaping toward me. My anguish is obliterated for I am indistinguishable from the fused leap and a leap (timeless, spaceless) does not undergo, is never susceptible to, pain, my kind of pain. Going to greet the detail expatriates me, blissfully, out of being. But then, but then, colliding with the detail I am reminded of its context which is, always, always, the same context. I am rebounded back to the world, to the context of the world--the world as a totality of details all smelling of the same slogan. Life--details--goes on. I am separated from those I love, I am, they are, every moment prey to annihilation, but life goes on.
Sitting on the bench, at the very heart of the detail circus (a leaf falls), consists in fact of the incessant resurgence and decay of the pulsion to get up and go away, back to X, far from the excruciation induced by the omnipresence of details. Initially, they all strain toward me with the promise of the beginning of the end of pain, of separatedness, but then . . . Sitting on the bench is perpetually smothered flight from the bench. This is what sitting means. This is its concept. The part of me that will, at the drop of a hat, unfurl its allegiance to the vocation's legitimate enrichment, wants to remain, acquiring traditional raw materials--thoughts about trees, paths, ice cream vendors --tourist thoughts, broadened-horizon thoughts. The other part wants to run. Back to X. Away from the reminder that I am separated not only from my loveds but from all of being as a sum of details.
     It is dusk. Not only is the air cooler, windier, the park has thinned also. Dusk is . . . exquisite. Then why am I compelled to run from it. Once again I feel how X pulls me away from a suitable field for the expanding exercise of "vocational skills" but not how X, single-handedly, saves me from the excruciation latent in even the most peripheral immersion in that field's--dusk's--warm bath of crystalline beauty. Dusk is not kind to the solitary.
     I run toward the metro on the Boulevard Raspail. The tower in the middle distance buoys me up. It is exhilarating to be, once again, within minutes, on the other side of Paris. These shifts breed a kind of defiance, a sense of having shamelessly colluded against all others--the very laws of life--all who must condemn me for the feverish ignominy of my flight. As I am about to reach the glass doors just below street level saying, Excuse me, I hurry past someone who threatens to swerve into my path. I catch my tone. It is not, surprisingly, the tone of one run ragged by obsession. No, it is not the tone of one run ragged by obsession, it is much more . . . much more . . . Once again, a thought is on its way, I am propelled forward by what I am about to acquire. No, it is not the tone of . . . it is much more the tone of . . . not A but B. It is much more the tone of one who, with quiet heroism shelving his own preoccupations, hurries surefooted to the site of another's crying need. My tone is much more that of one about to intervene on behalf of what has absolutely no connection to his own picayune well-being. For a moment it is no longer I surrendered to X, to the protocol, to the grammar, of X, I am merely taking the part of one so surrendered. But without the least trace of condescension or reproach.

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