Sunday afternoon
When I came across the drum corps, I didn’t realize it was carnival time. There were probably about thirty of them, with their different drums, dressed more or less the same. Coming upon it from our place, once enough of the people standing in front of you had filtered away, you had a great view of the drum corps leader who raised his hands to signal the upcoming shifts in rhythm. He would lift up his chin, often several times over in sync with the rhythm he was getting ready to modulate. He would lift up his eyes, too, and seemed almost as happily surprised as the rest of us listeners were once the crew got where he had been telling them to go. Then he would turn around, dancing with his own drum, making a grimace of pleasure. People watching them couldn’t help but be moved, often physically, letting it go into their hips or their heads. All of that rhythm illuminating all of our faces.
As we were walking away from it, T said exactly what was on my mind. I said, Qu’est-ce que j’adore ça, a drum corps, rhythm you can’t escape and that makes people giving themselves up to it so beautiful. T responded, Ca me donne envie de pleurer. The tears T named and that I felt welling up, too, come from being ravished at the sight of people's implication in that beauty, but also from the realization of all that we’re missing out on when we’re isolated in front of our various screens. And from finding what we were missing, by surprise, in the street.
“What’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ plenty of things missing…”
Thursday night at the movies: 35 Rhums
They’re on the way to a concert when her much beloved taxi breaks down. It’s pouring down rain as the four of them get out of the car to push it with a chorus of entirely understandable yet jovial screaming. They find a bar that’s open and go in for a drink. The bar owner’s son waits on them, telling them that it’s closing time and he can only serve them one drink. They leave, and the taxi-driver calls her colleague
The film’s story is about a love between a father and his daughter, and that is the pair we watch start the dance. Much of the beauty of the dancing, though, comes from the way who ends up dancing with whom, who breaks in on whose dance when, how the one lets go of the other is a choreography not only of their rhythm, but of the forms of their relations to one another. None of these relations are simple, but as they dance, everything becomes clear. They are stranded in the rain without transportation, and, instead of panicking, they allow themselves to be who they are, essentially in relation to one another. They make me want to be a part of us.
Saturday night: MoNA
Friday, our sex-buddy O came over with a big fat joint and we had a lot of fun, except for the unfortunate moment when the tilting world threw T for a curve and he scampered off for loud retching in the bathroom. So Saturday, we took it easy all day long. Our traditional morning-market forewent the traditional Saturday chicken, and we headed out for an Indian lunch. We followed it up with a stroll in the neighborhood, a coffee and some pinball, and an exhibit up the hill at this nifty little place called Le Plateau. N, of Romy Schneider fame from the last entry, had invited us to come for drinks at his studio on Friday, and saw right through T’s stutters when T explained we had other plans. N got to make fun of us for that on Saturday night. It so happened that we’d bought a big enough roast beef at market and I was raring to make a gratin. We had fresh green beans, too, so N and his beloved G came over for a meal. We invited Babar, who’d been on our mind and was on the other end of G’s cell as they walked in the door, at even more of the last minute. N’s cell phone had run out of batteries, so he hadn’t received our text message saying that we wanted to check out MoNA, a club night just down the street. As a result, they were all a little taken aback at the idea of going out. We’d also been talking about MoNA with S, who’s happily still around, and he came over after dinner and after thinking he was going to be able to see the YSL collection that’s been making headline news since then for showing that in spite the apparent dearth of it, there are some people in the world who have lots and lots of money to spend on famous people’s art. He and a friend had gone to the Grand Palais where the collection was on display for all to see before the auction started, had looked at the line, and S apparently decided it was time to join us and go dancing. In other words, we were porous and wanted to go out.
I haven’t danced that much in a long time. The porous we I was a part of is I think largely to thank for how easy it was for me to get going. Probably, too, the fact that for some reason I found myself at the threshold of the dance floor giving an archaeology of the term “queer” to G. French people of a certain ilk use the term, and fairly often these days, in English. Queerly enough, it ends up sounding like the French word for leather, cuir, especially when I use it because I like both so much. Translation takes time and effort, and I found myself explaining to G how “queer” got mobilized in the late 80’s and early 90’s, that it means weird, but has always had the undercurrent of sexual ambiguity. I explained how modernists like Woolf and James used the term in ways that we started to pay attention to back then, and that it’s sad to lose that genealogy when we use the term without translating it, really, in French. At some magical point, our conversation dwindled down and the rhythm picked us up. G and Babar left around 2, but T and S and I kept shaking our booty until 4. T invited S up, but S politely declined, saying he was a little pompette, which is a cute way of saying tipsy. So T and I stumbled upstairs, went at it until about 5 and slept late until the next day.
There's more than one way to show myself letting myself go.
the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face
the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself
grave visitations
what is it that calls to us?
why must we pray screaming?
why must not death be redefined?
we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms
and whirl on a pane of glass
an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree
the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women
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