Lit window

It is 9 pm, and I am sitting on the tiny back porch (lucky to have it) meant for mops and buckets and brooms, and maybe a rag drying. O'm looking across to a very steep roof with a window set into it, two windows, actually, that I admire during the day because, small as they are they are full of green things climbing on the walls. It looks like a cosy place to live. But now the window that is set back into the small terrace is lit, a warm light, and I can see inside a wall of bookshelves and imagine someone sitting there reading, though all I can see is a lit corner with shelves full of books.

The picture I took is not very good: the street lights make streaks of white light.

I woke up, sometime in the night, and got up. I didn't know what time it was, or maybe some bells rang and I realised it was about 2 am, I don't remember. But there were voices coming the street below, resonating, because everything is stone, and the street is like a gully at the base of cliffs of buildings. The voices sounded like people talking in bed--an image from Larkin, and Bishop, I guess--slowly, quietly, with spaces between the talking, half talking half dreaming aloud, and then it stopped, and in a little while I looked out, and, sure enough, there was someone sleeping in the doorway of the church, but there was no sign of anyone else, and I went back to bed and fell asleep myself.

Paris, later

Almost 7:30 p.m. I walked over to the Centre Pompidou, via the Ile de la Cité. I thought I would go by the Flower Market and tell the gardener thank you again for the catalpa-weed he kindly let grow for me, all year, and gave me free, that I had planted and labelled it on my little back porch and that I might even find someone to water it when I am not here, so it will survive the summer heat.

But there was band music coming from the Place Louis Lepine, between the Prefecture de la Police and the marché aux fleurs (which had turned into a bird market for the day), and it was not resistible, not for me and not for a crowd of other people either. It is the Journée du Patrimoine, the day when monuments that are normally closed are open, and this was part of it: a concert by the Orchestre d'harmonie des gardiens de la paix, the Harmonic Orchestra of the Keepers of the Peace, aka, the police. Who'd have guessed. The youngish conductor in a band concert uniform, with braid, had a wicked smile, he bounced, just the right amount, he moved his fingers delicately, they were having a wonderful time, and we were too. It was hard to tear myself away.

And now I'm home again, but I stopped in at the church and caught part of a tour of the Delacroix chapel by a witty and dramatic young man who had stories about the Knights Templar I am going to have to do some research on, and now I'm making some tomato sauce for my spaghetti and there's some singing seeping out of the church.

Paris

God, how I hate getting up in the dark. But I did, after failing to persuade myself I could go back to sleep for an hour. It was 6 a.m. after all.  On a weekday there would have been people sounds in the street, but it is Sunday, and the people sounds were at 3 a.m. 

What is it about the dark, being awake in? 

Never mind. It is now 8:30, the sun is up, the air is crisp, too crisp, given that the heat won't be on in the building for another two weeks, and I am bathed and dressed and warmish, and I have a hot cup of tea, and it is unusually quiet and I'm going to do some reading and writing before the hymns start in the cavernous church across the street. 

Off Tomorrow

I'm sitting at the dining room table looking out at a sunny, tree-lined (dry) creek and a squirrel or two and thinking that in a day and a half I'll be sitting in Paris looking out at my other workspot view, which is the buttresses on the back side of a behemoth of a church. Instead of squirrels, pigeons, some of whom will probably have nested on the little porch off the kitchen, at once time a maid's repository of brooms and mops and burnt pots and pans (the burnt pots and pans, that's me, but it's probably in Zola too). Instead of cyclists, including families with children in those sorts of rickshaws they attach to their bikes for kids too small to have bikes of their own, and joggers, city life, shoppers, sweepers, garbage men whose den is across the street down some stairs in the sidewalk--under the church, in fact. Change is good, but damned if I like it. Inertia feels more natural.

Cloud Cover

Palo Alto is overcast. No solid blue, which is ok. But also, no interesting clouds, mare's tails, or cotton batting, sheep's wool. Just a dirty sheet of cloud overhead, weighing on everything, letting no light through. 

When I say I miss clouds, this is not what I mean. No. It reminds me of bad Paris cloud. Of San Francisco fog, even to drive you mad after a week or so, especially if you live near a fog horn. Boy, was I glad to get out of San Francisco back in the days we lived in the city, before we moved back to France.

There are people who love living in fog. Who wake up in the morning, look out and see fog, and feel like they are going to spend the day in a drift of down. Mostly they have grown up with it. I understand that: I grew up in rainy Vancouver and though, once, I thought I'd hate rain forever (it made my hair total frizz), I now love a little rain. A little--that's the key.

Michael Hofmann (again)

This book (Where Have You Been?) is really brilliant. There are a few essays, about people I've never or barely or never heard of, like Robert Walser. With any other critic I wouldn't bother, not knowing the writer. But Hofmann, it's still a delight. Like this phrase: "...the rough, oxygenated outdoorsiness and the sheepish punctilio...".

And this admission, to begin the essay: "It's not that writing about Walser can't be done, it can be done endlessly and beautifully, but it seems unlikely to accomplish anything much. He offers so much scope for true statement, insight, and original expression. You write your piece, make your comparisons, press your claims, and at the end of it all you look up and see Walser, looking not much like your likeness of him, only slightly battered for having been the object of your attentions."

It's criticism as real literature. My copy is from the library, but I keep thinking I need a copy to keep, if only it weren't so depressing to buy books one might never reread. Now there's one advantage of ebooks; they don't sit on shelves making you anxious.

More--

"He was short-tempered and high-maintenance...".

"In Zurich, I saw a street named after him, where he couldn't possibly have afforded to live...".

Transhumance

People keep asking me--as the time for departure approaches--what I'll do in Paris. And the answer, I realize, is pretty much what I do here, except that it'll be in Paris: work, walk, shop, gym...  the food will be better. I'm eager for cheese and real apples, not the plastic kind that could have grown in a mall.

See friends.

I've got tickets for Peter Brook's 'Battlefield' at the Bouffes du Nord, which, with Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil, is a theatre everyone should go to at least once. "Battlefield is based on the "Mahabaharata," which Brook already turned into a play, years ago--something that ran over 3 days and nights, if I recall, at the Festival d'Avignon one summer. It's on from September 15 to October 17th, directed by Peter Brook. It's going on tour, I think I saw--maybe on the website.