Seul sur Mars

as the French call The Martian, which I went to see yesterday afternoon, a sunny Sunday which I could have spent strolling or sitting in the park under coloured leaves with children screaming on the playground nearby, but I needed to take my mind off something unpleasant involving--never mind--and a movie full of adventure, that got a half-decent review from Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, seemed like a good way to do it. 

And indeed, it did the trick, despite some heaviness. The landscapes were disappointing: don't think Mars will be on my list of places to go for their scenic properties, except for the starry skies, but the plot, which darts between the astronaut left on Mars, the space ship, or whatever you call it, returning with the rest of the crew (one Latino, two beautiful but smart women, two others), and NASA HQ in Houston (diverse, but including some square-jawed, over-tall Caucasians in ties), is fun, with some tense and some weepy, heart-warming moments (message to Mom and Dad from the abandoned astronaut, the crew's near death-experience of a reunion off Mars, the Whole World's rejoicing on cable TV, in English and Mandarin, at the miraculous rescue).

Baudelaire

I've been translating Baudelaire—a mixture of the prose poems in Spleen and the poem-poems in Fleurs du Mal. I had a vague idea that there might be a book in a collection of the prose poems that had a versified twin. I’m no longer so sure about this, but I’m finding at least a couple of things fascinating: firstly, that all the types (widows, children, artisans, clowns, prostitutes and mistresses) still stroll Parisian streets and parks in modern dress. Spend an hour or two sitting in a chair, nose in and out of your book, in the Luxembourg and you will see Baudelaire's world go by. It strikes me that most of the people I see are universals, and that this wouldn't be true in California, which is too new. But it might be true in London, for instance, if only I knew London well enough? That the world of Dickens or Woolf goes about its business in modern dress?

Then there is the fairground scene in Baudelaire: a prose poem about an old saltimbanco, or showman. These old fairs still exist, seasonally, on the outskirts of Paris and in the city proper, in the Bois de Boulogne and the Tuileries, for example, at certain times of the year. They are a little like state fairs or the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) and CNE in Canada: bump-cars, games, agricultural produce, cotton candy. But a couple visits to Ikea-Avignon in the last two weeks also makes me think that there might be a poem there too, that absorbed into itself a lot of the old stereotypes.

In the Vaucluse, October 18th

We arrived here, under the Mont Ventoux, last Wednesday. The mistral was blowing, already at the TGV station in Avignon, even harder as we drove northeast towards the Dentelles de Montmirail and the Mont Ventoux. Grape vines turning colour, olive trees shimmering silver and covered with fruit—no worms this year, unlike last, so there will be a good crop, come Christmas, and lots of oil.

This morning our next door neighbour—the two houses have a common wall and both sit smack on the road on the way up to the village—banged on the door and Michel went down. Paul was excited and wanted him to put his shoes on and go next door. It turned out he’d killed another boar, with his team, hunting yesterday, Saturday, and he wanted to give Michel part of it. Poor Michel! He tried to refuse, but Paul was having none of it and so Michel spent the rest of the morning skinning and butchering a joint, and wondering how we’d ever eat it all. Freezer, we decided, let our foodie kids deal with it at Christmas. I chopped it into stew-sized pieces and put them in a big container with half a bottle of wine, herbs, onions and carrots. Maybe we’ll make ourselves a small pot of civet before the rest goes in the freezer, which normally we would unplug when we leave, but perhaps not, after all.

Away

We are going away tomorrow morning to the Vaucluse for two weeks. No internet, which is both frustrating and revealing. I miss it for quick checks of Wikipedia sorts of things while I'm working, or bringing up a poem I want to reread. I won't miss it for long as far as the ipad goes. It usually feels good to wean myself off that: the 24 hour news cycle and the ease of avoiding more "serious" reading by reading magazine articles online. The ipad is far too addictive.We can, and do, of course check email, by going to the little village library or the house of a friend or relative, but personally I don't very often. 

Had hoped to go and read in the park again this afternoon, but it is cold all of a sudden. So I was a flaneur for an hour or two, aimlessly peering in windows, thinking about how much good food there is to eat everywhere. Even the very ordinary, indeed rather grungy supermarket two blocks away on the Rue de Seine, is far more appetizing than the most luxurious Whole Foods store back in California. The cheeses! The butters! The fruit and vegetables!

What?

What have I been doing with myself? I ask myself, having just sat down--with my feet up, the only way to read and work--having washed and dressed and, with considerable satisfaction at having done something useful with visible results, stripped and changed the bed and started a white wash, anticipating with pleasure getting out the iron and ironing board, later, when the sheets are dry but not too dry; having taken a mug of tea out onto the little back porch overlooking a disorderly range of zinc roofs, and some doors that open onto thin air, and having read Neruda's "I'm explaining a few things":

                         I lived in a suburb,                                                                                                                                  a suburb of Madrid, with bells                                                                                                                and clocks and trees.

and thought I might start the day by translating it--Spanish looks pretty much like French, and if I did this more I might be able to have better conversations with my Salvadorean cleaning person, Amerika, back in California, who must truly think I am limited because in our almost ten years' association I still haven't advanced beyond the basics and body language; having made a pot of Verbena, with leaves from our neighbour, dried last fall; and, oh, I had some breakfast, seasoned with the news of mass shootings, various wars to the east of me, refugees arriving in Norway through Russia on bicycles that are immediately confiscated because they don't meet Norwegian safety standards:

                             and one morning all that was burning,                                                                                                  one morning the bonfires                                                                                                                        leapt out of the earth                                                                                                                              devouring human beings--                                                                                                                     

The sun is making zigzag shadows on the church. It is lighting my neighbour's little balcony full of geraniums and climbing plants one street over. The garbage collectors have returned to work. I hear them coming down our street.

Paris India

Last week I went to the Bouffes du Nord theater Saturday afternoon to see Part 3 of Peter Brook's 1985 film of the Mahabharata, the old Indian epic. It had been playing on all day--6 hours of film in 3 parts of which I caught the last, and stayed for the conversation with Peter Brook, who turned 90 recently, and some of his actors. Most  were familiar: they have been acting in his plays over the years. What was strange was that the 1985 film ended and then suddenly the same actors came out on "stage' (there's no stage, just "ground"), only 30 years older and in their street clothes. For a second I felt as if I'd experienced--in a flash, as we say--the passage of time. Then the mind does its tricks, and everything seems "normal," whatever that means. There were eight or ten old men sitting on the stage on kitchen chairs talking to the audience, answering questions. Seconds before they had been giants wielding swords in lavish costumes.

Yesterday I went back with friends to see Brook's new play, "Battlefield," based on the Mahabharata, but only an hour long and with four young actors and a musician. The theatre is in what has become Paris's Indian neighbourhood, so after we had dinner in an Indian restaurant in one of Paris's old passages, the ones Walter Benjamin writes about, though I don't think this one. And then, since we'd already flowed downhill from the theatre at La Chapelle we continued flowing downhill through Saturday night crowds to the Seine and home.

Institut du Monde Arabe

The bus (#63) came along, I jumped aboard and got off a few stops later at the Institut du Monde Arabe, hoping to find the great Bedoin tents I saw on the Place last year, but they were gone, so I visited an exhibit of Egyptian objects found at the bottom of the sea in the Mediterranean and climbed up to the spectacular 9th floor terrace, whose view of Paris would be hard to be, especially on a clear day like today. Drank a pot of mint tea and read a book I have to review. Stopped off in a lecture hall where four women were talking about feminism in the Arab world, then walked home along the Quai. The shady side of the Seine, unfortunately, but still a good walk. And now I'm starting to read Ferrante all over again, because I want something Italian to read, and it's here.

The sun comes and goes, and it is wise to take an umbrella. When there is sun it pours into the kitchen all morning and it's hard to go and get any work done. The clouds are magnificent, and ominous.

Yesterday I walked, almost ran, because I kept getting turned around and was afraid of being late, over towards the Invalides to meet a friend for lunch in a tea room, "Les Deux Abeilles," behind the Quai Branly museum, where she had been guiding some architects around the building all morning. We had a lot of catching up to do. We used to live across the street from one another.

And the day before yesterday I ended up in the southwest corner of the Luxembourg Garden, my usual spot by the orchard, near the sequoia. It was 5 pm or so, rain threatened, but I had a book to read, and there were people to watch and eavesdrop on, and a deep comfortable chair to sit on (on a nicer day they would have all been taken) and another straight chair to put my feet up on; and then all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an older man strike out across the lawn, which is strictly forbidden, and then a few seconds later, his wife came running after him, to bring him back to the gravel path. I looked around for the park guard--there is always one with a whistle nearby--and just as the wife caught up with her husband and put her hand on his shoulder and turned him back, the whistle blew, not too sharply, and the guard pursued them a few steps over the lawn, and then she stopped, and watched them--old Adam and Eve; and turned her attention to a pair of kids with a frisbee instead.

I think I've said before, other years, that I like these calm green swaths of lawn, like ponds, to look at. I like them better than if they were crowded with people, as would be the case in Canada or the U.S.--maybe in Britain too? They are peaceful, the emptiness, the shadows, the odd leaf, the flowers, are calm.