Rembrandt's Bathsheba

So sad ... she is so sad... I saw her at the Louvre tonight in the twilight.  Walked through a maze of small rooms to find her.  She is incredible, incredibly poignant, debilitatingly evocative.  Rembrandt's eye has been soft.  His compassion guided his hands.  He brought her up out of his love.  He pays witness to the powerlessness/injustice/inequity of the passivity of a recurrent event.  Do you see the letter she holds in her hand, tinged with blood?  Her eyes, look away without focus.  She is eternally weary, too overcome with inevitability to even lift her head, straighten her shoulders.  Her body absorbs the world and all its griefs.  Her posture bent with the weight of it.  She has all but given herself up to a fateful outcome.  She is a sacrificial lamb.  She concedes all, concedes life.  Cixous (1993) in Bathsheba or the Interior Bible creates a foil, an echo with to the Rembrandt that hangs on the wall opposite in the small salle in the Louvre ... its in the Richelieu wing, salle 31.  On one corner the beautiful and poignant, and tragic Bathsheba, and on the other ... the slaughtered ox... In my eyes, tonight, in the Autumn twilight of Paris, it seemed so clear ...

Les deux magots

Les Deux Magots, is an iconic cafe in the heart of St Germain.  I tried to imagine passing by while Sartre and De Beauvoir wrote their revolutionary philosophy.  Or to imagine sitting in there writing something marvellous.  Its curious, that this little cafe continues ... considering I had only just seen the stone under which Sartre's body was laid.  It continues, though its lost its je ne sais quoi ... a lot of people go there, a tourist bus stop.  It's a stop on the bucket list of must-see in Paris.  In all the faces in the cafe I could only see one person who had gone there with her whole being.  She was alone, plain, with the most marvellous interior landscape possible.  She shielded it from my eyes.  She wasn't a player.  As for me, I couldn't bear to go in, not even for a tiny expresso, I couldn't bring my whole being there with surging, jostling artificiality ...  Something which struck me later while crossing the Pont des Arts, was the irony that Les Deux Magots sits in the shadow of a grand and ancient church...St-Germain-des-Prés.  France's most ardent atheist wrote in the shadow of an icon of the church.  Its shade hovers over the Deux Magots like a chuppah, the palm of God.

Here lies ... Cimetière du Montparnasse

Taupe slab of granite.  Sparse.  Spare.  Gently curved is the headstone like the curve of a sony ericsson.  That disturbs me.  Someone left some hot pink anemones.  I think they were for her.  We leave a few smooth stones.  We note the stub of a candle someone also left behind.

Nothing is written on the headstone except names and dates.  So spartan.

Jean Paul Sartre

1905-1980

Simone de Beauvoir

1908-1986

So minimal that I am disrupted, incensed.  I want to scrawl "thank you" in large letters, in thick black paint by her name.  Its too bare and I owe a debt.  What can I leave there to signify that debt?  To pay it out.  Unless it comes to me as a gift ... from beyond... a beyond she didn't believe in ... hence the minimalist stone/tone.  Her epitaph in her volumes of historic significance.  One epitaph on every library's shelf.  Second Sex for example.  A fine epitaph.  What can I leave except two small stones? and would it matter?

"unhappy are the dead ... they die forever without reprieve" (H.C. Manna, p15).

Last days in Arcachon

I can hear the accordian coming out of the local tabac mid-Sunday morning, echoing down the Allee de la Chapelle.  At first we were strangers but each day we come for the tiny black expresso the greetings are warmer.  Smiles are brighter and more familiar.  Its the people who bring the ambiance, the glow, the aesthetic.  I'd rather ensconce myself in the humble Hotel St Christaud than the soul-less Hotel de Paris - what could I write there except long beige coloured monologues that don't touch the ground.  Here on the south west coast, old seaside town ... in the space of Autumn - (the tourist masses had all departed at the end of summer) I can write endlessly about Eurydice, Orpheus, Shulamith and H.C. of course who has always considered Arcachon magic for writing.  Though I didn't find her here - I don't know where she fits in between the boulangerie and the tabac perhaps, or in the bell tower of the Notre Dame, perched on the sculpture of the tail of the white whale in the bay.  Of course you could write here, especially about l'etoile de la Mer - Notre Dame - I imagine that is where she is ... on the corner of the roof of the Notre Dame.  The old beauty in stone, gazing over the Allee, down to the pier where the old men fish.  We are surrounded by beautiful old women and their dogs here.  We wouldn't know what's happened on the outside.  This place is a little French Shangrila.  Time stands still.

Arcachon - a tale of two old ladies and their lap dogs...

Actually, it is Eurydice that I am considering on the shores of the Bassin d'Arcachon.  And the burning question is "what's in a gaze?"...  Because gazes sear in the Song of Songs.  Remember how her gaze cast him down, made him beg "Look Away" (S7:2).  What happened in that moment?  Was it her gaze that dragged him down into mortality? ... or further - into the Elysian Fields to wander amongst lotus.

There is another Eurydice, Eurydice of Thebes.  She also goes down.  But it was not the result of the gaze.  Her's was the mourning of the dead son.  It was the words "he is dead" that brought her down.  She could not live with the words.  It was not a matter of sight, but a matter of words, semiology.

And two old ladies taking their evening tipple at the local tabac on the Allée de la Chapelle with their lap dogs in tow.  Two grandes dames 'in bloom' in the twilight.  There is no fraught gaze here.  There is peace, to cede without conceding.  No loss or deficit.

Celan: the Invisible

“Vinegrowers dig up/ the dark-houred clock/ deep upon deep // you read // the Invisible/ summons the wind,/into bounds// you read // the Open ones carry / the stone behind their eye / it knows you / come the Sabbath”   Celan's vinegrowers ... like Shulamith's labourers ... dark-houred clock - buried, like our destination, why dug up?  She digs it up ... or does she ... does she run instead into the arms of the night ... "it knows you" ... calls for you.  calls for me.  and yet she runs into the fiery sun.

Nietzsche's Pathos

"The deepest pathos is still aesthetic play"

Embers and silver ladles

Derrida, Anselm Kiefer and Paul Celan

Thinking poets, thinking-painters, artistic intellectuals, messiahs or prophets.

Il y a là cendre

Does he look forward or back?  Does he make a space or close it up forever?  The ember dies.  The cinder's spark quenched by floods.

Love is as strong as death
vehement as the grave
a radiant, flaming fire

What is left after the flames of love except cinders?  But what has burned up?  Of what are these embers a remainder?  We are left with its trace.  Is it death that is burned up by love or is it life.

Il y a là cendre

DH Lawrence

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Pablo Neruda

When I see the sea once more
will the sea have seen or not seen me ?

Why do the waves ask me
the same questions I ask them ?

And why do they strike the rock
with so much wasted passion ?

Don't they get tired of repeating
their declaration to the sand ?

"knockin' on heaven's door", roland boer

this is a delicious little book.

brilliantly and shockingly iconoclastic

perverse but also creative and revelatory

I revise that slightly in the section on the Song of Songs – it was perversely and stupidly excessive and self-revealingly self-indulgent, jaded, degrading, absurd, cynical, mercenary, machine-like, plastic, empty, soul-less, chauvanistic ... and reluctantly (for me) significantly valuable in spite of the author's apparent phallic insecurities and associated sexual ambivalence.

the inter-threading and weaving of post-modern theory, marxist theory, structuralist theory through 'odd-couples' (unique pairings between popular culture and hebrew bible icon) – with an aesthetically inspired semi-mythic-narrative (shades of 'Underbelly' and 'Children of Men') that ties together the delectable streams of the research like a bouquet garni.  

I am enriched and glad for

- the candour and the arrogance of the text (without which it would never have been captured)

- that routledge had the foresight to publish it

When I touched him my hand did not pass through

When I touched him my hand did not pass through.

Something is wrong.  Something is broken.

The ocean of the bed carries us on waves.  Conflicting currents.

I turn to you just as the current separates us and place my hand on your shoulder.  It is a desperate act.

But it is just a hand on a shoulder.

It used to go right through, my hand.  It used to pass through and then redistribute itself.  But my hand was stopped by your skin.  Just a hand on a shoulder.

It is a tragedy.  You probably don’t realize the grief I feel.  I can’t pass through you anymore.  I used to pass through you and hover in a delicious space.  A garden.  A peace beyond description.  But I am outside of you.  And no matter how hard I push I can’t find the way in again.  It used to be so simple.  All I had to do was touch your shoulder and I was there.

How will I bare this life on the outside.