The Eternal Spirit of Paris

In Paris the living will speak to you, but the dead tell better stories. As you wander the rues and corridors of Paris it’s hard not to notice the spirits of the dead everywhere you go - from the museums where centuries of canvasses are still vibrating with the emotional life of the ghosts who painted them, to the crypts where the stony tombs of martyrs chill the very water in your eyes, to the butcher shops where all manner of mammal, fish and fowl have been disemboweled and then displayed so we might better envision them traveling into sauces of butter or wine. You see all this and it’s hard to come to any other conclusion: the spirits that inhabit Paris are dying to tell you the truth about the city and about yourself.

We all think we know Paris as the capital of gothic architecture and haute couture where cruel chefs whisk food into submission and gendarmes in pill box caps direct parades of indifferent lovers. But after a single week in Paris I return to tell you that I found it to be a city where the dead and what they have to say is a lot more interesting than the sight of any living mademoiselle walking arm-and-arm under the Eiffel Tower alongside her nicotine addled beau.

So consider this a short travelogue through the spirit world of Paris; a time-lapsed, eight hour tour where you’ll wander among ghost and so witness the City of Lights; a bit of sightseeing where the sites you’ll see not only represent those who have been gone for tens or hundreds or thousands of years, but where if you listen closely you might catch a few words from these dead who will nonetheless bring Paris to life.

9:00 a.m.
We begin walking from our hotel on the left bank and soon stumble upon a neighborhood boucherie. What we see behind the glass of this butcher shop stops us cold. A rabbit, completely there except for his skin and his organs, is posed in the window as if he is about to hop. I think this must be some sort of a joke and indeed it is – it’s a joke on the recently beheaded chickens and other gutless fowl arranged around the bunny, their legs splayed as if seducing him toward a last fling in the kitchen before dinner.

The Rabbit

“What just happened here? I’m cold and I don’t really understand what is meant by these chickens. Who was it that said a rabbit’s feet are lucky? As far as I can tell I’ve still got mine, and they haven’t done me a bit of good. Damn the French. Damn the cook. All is lost, and I am food.”

10:00 a.m.
Having lost our taste for rabbit, we scuttle down the boulevard toward the Cathedral of St. Germain. Finding the church, we enter across a tongue of marble worn smooth by two millennia of sinners and saints - and sure enough the mile high chapel is crawling with both. Within ten small steps we are greeted by the statue of Saint Anthony of Padua who has been fused to the stone wall behind him by fifteen centuries of candle smoke, his shadow gone white protecting him against a wall of soot. Anthony is holding tight to the Christ Child who he has not put down for over two thousand years

Saint Anthony

“Blessed be the man who can carry God in his arms forever. But, God, are you a heavy load. I can’t put you down and I don’t think I can hold you much longer. Hey you, you with the camera, can you help a brother out and carry the son of God for a while? At least long enough for his father to come back and take him home again.”

12:30 a.m.
We’ve stopped for lunch in a café, rounding the meal with glasses of red wine and cups of coffee, and now I must pee … badly. But peeing in Paris is a lost art, for the French do not believe in letting tourists use their bathrooms unless money first changes hands. I plead with shopkeepers and restaurant owners from the Ile de la Cité to Saint-Michel but they’d let me explode in a golden spray before allowing me to freely use the pissoir. At wits end, I blast into a tavern running past the glaring barkeep and instinctually tumbling down a set of back stairs at the bottom of which I find an ancient urinal oozing with the spirits of weaker American men who have died in this very spot not able to hold it a second longer.

Ghosts at the Urinal

“Abandon hope of urinating all ye who travel here; a pissoir is in sight but your bladder cannot hold out against the citizens of Paris. From the Gallic Wars to the Revolution, from World War II to the race riots of the new millennium, you will never pee freely in Paris as long as there are Frenchmen who are free.”

1:00 p.m.
Seeking out the better angels of this city, we go to the Musée d’Orsay where Monets hang side-by-side with Manets and Seurats, and Gauguins share the skylight with the odd Daumier. I see a crowd forming in a gallery up ahead and I make my way to it and through it, ending up against a wall and cheek-to-jowl with the absinth green face of van Gogh. The two of us stare back at the peering crowd - 20 deep and 15 wide - and then I look at Vincent, his head turned in three quarter profile.  I can see that his eyes are pleading and suspicious and he's not at all sure what has happened since he’s been gone.

Van Gogh

“I knew they would look at me, but I don’t know what they want. I’ve hidden the lost ear, but still they stare. Make them stop and I’ll paint you. Make them stop or I’ll cut off the other ear and put it in your hands.”

3:00 p.m.
Next stop is the Latin Quarter and the folio-filled inside of Shakespeare and Company. The walls here are made of books, and I kick over Kafka’s and Kerouac’s and King’s as I teeter through the trickling path between paperbacks on my way up the stairs to the second floor reading room where ten thousand books shelved over 90 years are offered to any reader with the stamina to read them here. Ginsberg and Faulkner sat here, Houdini stopped by once or twice searching for magic, and Hemmingway still argues from the shelves about the hacks of Paris who dare to call themselves writers.

Hemningway

(Musing on a new opening for a Moveable Feast)

”Then there was the bad writer. He would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against him or his cold prose would strip pages from the better books of the stacks. Run to the Café des Amateurs, you butcher; take your movable feast of stale ham and pulp bread and move it to the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard where it belongs.”

5:00 p.m.
The sun is setting over the Pantheon and as night falls this monument is our final stop. Forget the Pantheon’s two story frescos and the above ground tomb of Saint Genevieve, for my money it’s the secular heroes buried in the basement that bring Paris to life. The tombs of Zola and Hugo, Voltaire and Madame Curie - not to mention the two Louis (both Pasteur and Braille) - along with scores of others are all here as the sun dips and we curl down the spiral steps to hear them tip the lids of their coffins and whisper thoughts about eternity that tonight will serve as our bedtime story in the City of Lights.

The Cast of the Tombs

“Boooo … Oooooo … Did we scare you? We’ll, we’d have to admit there are times when we scare ourselves, lying here on stone like chickens on the butcher’s slab. But remember, Curie still glows with radiation after 75 years, Zola continues to shout for freedom, and Hugo and Voltaire may be decomposing, but people everywhere still read what they've composed.   The only real death is when you have been forgotten by the living. And miracle of miracles, you are here. You have come to us with your flowers and your fears, so what makes you think your own history is so unimportant that the people who love you now will not remember you when you are gone?”

__________

Bon Soir Paris. Bon Soir to those who journeyed with us. Bon Soir to fellow spirits everywhere.

Fly Away Home

A few thousands of miles of distance helps you to see your children’s lies a lot more clearly. Then again, an ocean churning between you also helps magnify what they would do to protect you and the home you’ve created for them. I report these findings while sitting in a hotel room in Paris connected to my children in America by a mere spray of electrons seeping through the semiconductors of a global phone.

I don't think that a father ever completely trusts his kids. Which is just another way of saying that a father never really trusts himself. When we leave our children alone without our supervision, we take with us the enormous fear and guilt of what we did when our parents left us alone. We remember how we lied to them when they went away on their vacations, and we remember how we might have nearly burned the life they built down around us as we tested the limits of our freedom. But we also remember how responsible we became in the absence of their policing, what we did to protect their trust, and how tenacious we became - as tenacious as dogs guarding the gates of a castle - when we realized we were in charge and had to take care of what they had trusted to us. It is that remembrance that gives us hope that our children will carry on famously, making the world a better place, after we're gone.

I know my children are lying to me while I’m away this week. Maybe it’s just a few little lies, but they are doing things they’d rather not tell me about and that I’m not sure I’d want to know about if they did. “Dad, we had a party with 40 or 50 of our closest friends and about midnight we thought it would be awesome to drag race down Main Street with your car.” Thanks, but I’d rather you kept that to yourself. “Dad, we took so many long hot showers that the water heater finally exploded and it flooded the basement; it’s alright though because we found the money you kept hidden and had it all taken care of.” Okay, Okay, just keep it to yourself. “Dad, my best friend had a tiny little problem with the police and we let her hide out in the attic for a few days - don’t worry, though, because when the police searched the house they didn’t find her.” Thanks kids, I’m so of proud you for helping a friend, but I don’t really want to know any more about it.

Do I really think my kids are doing any of these things? We’ll no, probably not. But they could be. God knows, I did.

At the same time, however, I know my three daughters would rip down an iron door or lift a car up off its axels if they felt that any harm was coming to us, our home or either of their sisters. I’ve already seen little traces of it on this trip away. The late night phone call we got from my middle daughter when the bank called our home to report suspicious activities on our credit card and she could not convince them to unblock it. The way the oldest is caring for her little sister: cooking for her, tenderly getting her hair in a bun for ballet class, making sure she is picked up from school on time each day and getting her to bed on time each night. The voice of my youngest when she asks us about each detail of our days here in Paris, eager to get us to see we should not worry about her so we can joyously relive what she clearly wants to be the best days of our lives. Yes, it is thrilling to see them carring for us and carrying on without us; it infuses me with the feeling that I have done my job.

So how do I reconcile the lies they might tell me? Well I look at it this way. If I never left them alone, they’d never have the chance to lie to me. And if they never lied, they would never learn the limits of their own freedom. It’s a simple equation really - lying equals learning, and the more you lie the more you learn about the truth.

On top of that, each time they lie to me it shows me that they still need me, if only a little. And, since I’m slowly becoming a selfish old crank who would keep my kids around me forever if I could, I like that they need me just a little bit more when I’m way from home then when I’m there. I really do like that.

Daddy bug, daddy bug

Fly away home

Your house is on fire

And your children are alone

They need you, they need you

Oh yes they do

So fly home from Paris

Cause you need them too

Dying to Be Happy

[Warning: the following should not be read by anyone who is afraid of flying. Likewise you probably don’t want to read this if you are superstitious or you somehow think you are going to live forever.]


Five days from now I will be on a 747 that will be bombed to bits over the Atlantic Ocean. My wife will be in the seat next to me and we will never make it to Paris to rediscover our love. The children we leave behind will become orphans. The possessions which created the outline of our living will get divided among our loved ones. What remains will be packed into boxes or given to others; we will have no need for these things now. Only the terrorist who took our lives and the lives of 419 others on the plane with us will not be surprised he was going to die. Likely he was the only one on the plane who was really willing to face death in the first place …

It’s astonishing what the news of a man boarding a plane on Christmas day with a bomb swaddled around him can cause me to fantasize about. One man and one plane out of the billions of men and millions of planes and suddenly my mind starts to circle the drain of eternity. I’m not saying that the recent news of a Nigerian terrorist slipping through a broken rat-trap of security to try and kill Americans over Detroit shouldn’t concern us. My wife and I are actually traveling to Paris in a few days and I for one don’t want to die with her and hundreds of others on the flight over there. But as I entertain the above daydream what I realize is how our aversion to death has made it such that the only time we tend to face it is in the form of some hideous cruelty. I mean, I don’t want to be the one to break the news, but – whether we die on an airplane or in a hospital bed - the odds are not in favor of any of us living forever.

Over the past century, we have slowly dialed up our fear of death until we’ve all but blotted out the idea that we are going to die. We consider it seriously only in the form of some accident that we weren’t planning on, and when we do think about it, we quickly find a way to pretend something can be done to prevent it. It’s a pact we make with those who govern and entertain us - those who sell to us and school us – they have all learned to misdirect us when it comes to death lest we not elect them or buy from them the next time around. Any other approach would be bad for business.

A terrorist gets on a plane with a bomb and our government and media gets busy brushing away our fear with the message that they’re not going to tolerate anything that could kill us. Meanwhile, millions of people are quietly dying each year from starvation, thousands are slipping away each week from cancer, and tens and hundreds are murdered every day in cities all over the world, all while we are blissfully texting each other on our cell phones and paying our endless mortgages. Even lightening kills more people every year than all the suicide bombings on all the continents – although we wouldn’t know this because we prefer to watch our bad weather on TV where it can’t hurt us.

It seems to me that as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, we had a much healthier attitude about dying. From what I saw, my grandparent’s generation lived much more intelligently then we do now, which is to say they lived like they were going to someday die. When death came to them they faced it as they had lived, with a practical attitude and a strong sense of humor. They lived as fully as possible to their very last day because they had lived every day as if it could be their last. About three weeks before my grandmother died I found her pulling weeds out of a garden with aching hands and lungs that were struggling for breath, and when I asked her why she thought she had to do this now she simply replied “because it has to be done.” For her, dying was like weeding a vegetable garden; you did it because it had to be done.

For those of you like me who find yourselves thinking about being killed in a mid air explosion and then desperately scrambling to replace that thought with some fluffy store-bought distraction or mindless piece of high-calorie entertainment, I have a suggestion that you might want to consider. Once a day, every day, think about dying. I don’t mean to say you should dwell on it, just realize that your days are numbered and then get on with what you can do about living more fully in the face of it. The truth is that our lives are only really made from the wispy illusions of the jobs and families and home that we create to convince ourselves that we are not alone, and what could possibly makes those things more immediate and more real than the reflection that some day they will all be gone.

On top of that, think of what not being afraid of death will do to the business of terrorism. Imagine if governments and the media kept reminding us that someday we would die, until we all finally accepted death and were no longer afraid of it. Nothing would stop terrorists from trying to kill us faster than knowing we were no longer afraid of dying. And then we would be in possession of the only thing terrorists really have that the rest of us don’t: the ability to accept and embrace our deaths.

When I get on that plane five days from now and it takes off into the sky, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take my wife’s hand and look out the window and try to remind myself that the world below me is not really my home. I’ve only just been passing through and leaving it as we just have is not so bad after all. The soft clouds are supporting me and, no matter what, the loveliness of my wife’s hand in mine is going to be there until the end of time.