Queen Jane and the Empire of Death

“So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in,” Rilke wrote of Paris. Everyone comes to Paris to die. I saw their graves growing out of mossy hills in Pere Lachaise, stone pressing up to stone. It smelled wet. Writers especially come to Paris to die. On a glass partition around Oscar Wilde’s enormous grave, I planted my mouth in a dingy cloud of lipstick kisses.

There is something selfish in these pilgrimages to the literary dead, or maybe just naïve. A grave, or even a site where someone lived, does not bring you closer to a writer or her work, just as eating madelines in bakeries does not actually retrieve lost time. Being in a graveyard does make a person want to kiss something, I guess. But encounters with the living of Paris are equally shallow: streaming beautiful bodies glimpsed only in fragments. Mentally I butted against them, their features compiled into a murky hermaphrodite.

…

One night outside the Moulin Rouge, Joshua and I wait to meet a friend of mine. We don’t go in; a show costs 200 Euros, and the tourists under flashing red windmill-lights give the scene a lurid Disney World vibe. A family exits a cab. I mean, an absurd, gay parody of a family: an older man, orange-tinted with swoopy white hair, dressed as if he’s come off a yacht; a younger man sporting oversized glasses and bow tie; and a very tall woman, or drag queen, with striking bones in her face. “They look like a Wes Anderson movie,” I say. We become greatly excited.

We wind up in a dive bar blanketed in old celebrity photos cut from magazines. The bartender stoops beside us, a slight, grayish man who I deem Our Lady of these flowers, of smoldering Vivien Lee and a toothy Brad Pitt. When I ask if he has whiskey, his wrinkles breaks into a puckish smile: “Yes… YEEEeeesss!” He giggles. He is very drunk.

Later, familiar riffs fill my ears – he’s put on my favorite album from the summer after college graduation, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. "You’re tired of yourself and all of your creations … Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” Like coins in river mud, that old life rises in burnished pieces. The bartender’s singing along, in words that aren’t actual words, and he stares at me. As if sealing a pact, we nod to each other.

…

“There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey.”

Rilke again. I read this in his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, two summers ago, between the air-conditioned cafes of Manhattan. I was hiding from beautiful young people. Joan Didion referred to New York as a place only for the very young; I wished then I had been much older, whole-er, my outlines calcified into one stable shape, my face into one face.

“Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something to be tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”

The multitude of faces in a city like New York, or Paris, all of them changing and desired and quickly forgotten, I sometimes resent as a symptom (or cause?) of consumer culture. Shopping for friends – their social world, an amnesiac and antic carousel. Do I pity myself? Very well then, I pity myself; so does Rilke at times, and being strange in strange places can make you do so.

…

You can tell what a culture values, they say, by a city’s tallest building, be it a church, a castle, a city hall, or a skyscraper. There is only one skyscraper in Paris, a black angular phallus lumped on the skyline. They can’t build any more, Joshua tells me (full of fun facts as ever), because the ground is too full of the dead.

The catacombs beneath Paris, which I was unable to see, have a disgusting history. By the 17^th century, the city’s earth overflowed with corpses, their putrid residue seeping into the water supply. Mass exhumations began in the latter part of the 18^th century; one description (it’s from Wikipedia, sorry) is particularly evocative: “From the eve of a consecration ceremony on the 7th April the same year [1788], behind a procession of chanting priests, began a parade of black-covered bone-laden horse-drawn wagons that continued for years to come.”

Now these skeletal remains, from millions of bodies, are arranged throughout the tunnels in massive, terrible, beautiful constructions – like here and here. Before the entrance is inscribed: “Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort” (Halt! This is the Empire of Death).  

I should end this. I love the idea of the catacombs, but to end here, at the Empire of Death's gate, feels too much like a morbid, moralizing Victorian novel: Here is where the carousel gets off; here the result of our vainglory; here the skyscrapers sink into pus. But I am no crow croaking doom, not yet.

So I’ll end here: the second floor of Shakespeare & Company bookstore. The room is walled with old books. There’s a picture of Walt Whitman, mistletoe hanging from a janky light fixture. Huge bouquets of flowers gather around the window, offerings to the longtime owner George Whitman, who died last month. From a bench you can sit and watch the river outside, and beyond it, Notre Dame.

The store, you might know, is another literary pilgrimage site, offering board to vagrant writers, and has been visited by Hemingway, Henry Miller, various Beats, and other assholes. But let’s not scrape for traces of the dead – we’ll leave the dead to themselves, and talk about pleasure.

Physical, unlike all others, is the pleasure of selecting one book at random from very many shelves. This is what happens: The day – in its clattering, inchoate, relentless noise – draws together in form of words. I chose a book of Vita Sackville-West stories. A plain hard-bound copy, heavy in the hand. Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour, it was called. I sat and read. Outside, the cathedral bells rang.

Cities in the very rich hours

Seen from a bridge over the Seine, the city of Paris extends in wide boulevards. Winter light slants on it in a gold smolder, early morning runs into evening. You may feel, as you look, that the city returns your interest, and opens orderly out for you.  

In order and distance, cities become like books of hours. You see the sweep of a day in stark perspective: plowed fields like lines of verse, peasants threshing, nobles riding. Just beyond, towers grow from the walls, stacked tight in their peculiar perpendicularity. All laid out for your looking. So a traveler, facing wind off the water and a breadth of streets, sees the city: an unbroken fruit.  

My brother Joshua, who accompanied me on this trip last month, told me that modern Paris was designed in the interest of crowd control. In wide streets, without winding alleys to duck down, the rabble can’t evade police so easily.  

And Paris turns you into rabble. Christmas Day, pouring into Notre Dame, you are a swarm of awed bodies between columns. Windows assault the eye in many-colored glass, humble you. They are meant to. Under impassive stone heads impossibly far, you see yourself prostrate and ridiculous: flung before the altar in filthy rags. Worship, the stone heads said. To God the heart must fly up.  

Or to gold. Herded from room to plush and mirrored room at Versailles, again you’re rabble. There is nothing there not gilded, garlanded, jewel-encrusted, crystal-faceted, plumed, painted, pregnant in abundance. Too much, a claustrophobia of splendor sends you reeling outside again. There, at least, there is the long canal, dull-colored trees in rows, air, stone. Your eye breathes again.  

I look now at a postcard I bought, a December scene from the Très Riches Heures book of hours. Hunters circle in a clearing. Their hounds descend on a boar, barely visible but for limp black legs, one tusk. The trees around are dark with burnished leaves. Towers behind them jut upward. I can’t stop looking at their colors, brilliant white stone, blue sky.  

They make me think of Chicago. That is, approaching Chicago from a distance. Its outlines rise sharply from flat miles of factories, stacked boxcars, dry grass along roads. Once, in high school, in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, we gasped: a building burning. But it was the sun, going down in the windows. 

Light in winter – always it comes, it seems, from within things. Some days I’d see it hit Michigan Avenue as I crossed the bridge past Grant Park, and one gold roof blazed. Wind sliced through my coat, but the city was before me, whole and knowable.  

One can see and call it knowing. Such is the illusion distance lends. In travel and in memory, it makes you smug. But if we were to do either – truly see or know, bend close enough – the world would swarm, flies on a fallen animal.