Why am I writing this all down, dear reader? My answer is that I don’t want to conceal anything or be surreptitious. Instead, I want to reveal things—everyday myths, fables, and allegories—that might otherwise remain dormant behind the intense beauty of Paris. Recently, I watched the 1939 film made from Victor Hugo’s immortal classic “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” set at the end of the fifteenth century. The cast includes the English actor Charles Laughton as the kind, pitiable, but misunderstood Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of the Notre-Dame Cathedral, who saves Esmeralda (played by Maureen O’Hara), the Roma street dancer (or gypsy, as she refers to herself), who is framed for a murder. With her goat, Esmeralda charms everyone but feels that because of her race she has been denied security, happiness, a good home, and prosperity. The film asserts soberly that we are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb. The Middle Ages have come to a close, and France is ravaged by a hundred years of war, but there is hope among its citizens. Unfortunately, there is superstition, too, about a new form of expression and thought known as Gutenberg’s printing press, but King Louis XI is not superstitious. “Out there … all over France, in every city, there stand cathedrals like this one, triumphal monuments of the past … a book in stone,” he says, pointing to Notre-Dame. The King tells us that cathedrals are “the handwriting of the past,” but “the printing press is of our time.”
This theme of the new versus the old is a recurring one in the film, in which we are told, in verse, “The old can never last. / The new is claiming its place. / It’s foolish to cling to the past. / Believe in the future’s face.” I loved many things in the movie, like when a character says, “Being a poet I’m already a vagabond, and I can learn quickly to be a thief.” Later, he adds, “The poet doesn’t believe in force. I told you I could save you without force.” And I loved when the barely verbal Quasimodo, overcome with longing for pretty Esmeralda, says to an ugly cathedral gargoyle, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?” As usual, the book is darker than the film, and Esmeralda is not saved on her way to the gallows but hanged instead. After she is entombed, years later, a hunchbacked skeleton is found entangled with hers.
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Light penetrating the colored glass of cathedral windows was once thought to be God’s most beautiful presence among us. “I never realized until now how ugly I am because you are so beautiful,” Quasimodo (who was abandoned as an infant on the steps of Notre-Dame Cathedral) says mournfully to Esmeralda, who gives him a drink of water and a little pity. We have a devilish fascination with his ugliness—we shrink from it but want to look, too. I come to Paris, in part, because of its beauty. The call of life is too strong for me to resist, and this gives me a sense of emotional well-being, but is this an evolutionarily feeling? Does it help me to survive? “Beauty,” as a noun meaning “physical attractiveness,” comes from the early fourteenth century Anglo-French beute, and as a word connoting “a beautiful woman” it originates later in the century. “Beautician” is first recorded in American English in 1924 (in the Cleveland, Ohio, telephone directory). “Ugly,” as an adjective describing a “frightful or horrible” appearance, is older. It has a Scandinavian origin, probably from the Old Norse uggligr, meaning “dreadful, fearful.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s daring sonnet, “Pied Beauty,” he defines beauty as “all things counter, original, spare, strange,” which seems perfect, allowing us to praise chestnuts, cattle, trout, finches, and plotted fields.
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This morning I observed a beautiful, sleeping chipmunk. Animals—like humans—seek a safe, sheltered place to sleep. Deer make a bed out of unmowed grass, rodents burrow in the soil, and apes create a pallet of leaves. In Paris, I sleep alone on a thick foam mattress. Because my dreams are incoherent, I lose any sense of time or place. Often I fly. I have to get up during REM sleep to write down my dreams, or I forget them. My eyes twitch like a dreaming cat’s, but this does not seem to be connected to my dreams. My eyes move because the neurons that innervate my face muscles are not deactivated, as they are in the rest of my long body. Mysteriously, I always get plenty of REM sleep in Paris. Therefore, I write.
I wish I knew what my dreams were for. I wish I could define them. They seem to be a form of thought, or some kind of illusion of reality. Certainly, they are a source of intense emotion, so probably they protect me from what I really feel, which would be too painful to endure. In Paris, when I sleep late like a newborn baby, I say to myself, justifying my laziness, This is good for my brain and immune system. When I sleep, I roll over on my side and grab a big, soft French pillow. This is a sign that I’m dreaming, like paws and whiskers moving about on a cat, or a dog whining and rolling its eyes back behind closed lids. I hope that Paris will always be a stable place in terms of the quality and quantity of sleep. I think this is a compensation for the little, banal degradations of everyday life. Sleep is my idea of beauty, and I have tried to write about it in my poem “To Sleep”:
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Yesterday, I took a thermal photograph of my friend and translator, Claire Malroux. I was looking at her the way a creature would look at her in the night on a street in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, where she lives. Animals have thermal receptors in their eyes that enable them to detect heat sources from a distance. Seeing Claire like this reminded me of when I was sixteen and took opiates that were too strong for my young mind, so I lay in bed for three days like a foolish creature, in a coma. I find I do not want or need to see the heat sources of the people I love, as a serpent sees them. I do not have to see the way a barn owl, a rat, or a moth sees in the dark because of the special rods in their eyes. In the backs of my eyes, I have a bright tapestry of human blood vessels. That’s why they are red when I am photographed with a flashbulb. I do not want to lose this human dimension, even after my good strong chin is gone and I live like a gargoyle in a nursing home, smelling of urine, feces, and other secretions.
Because much of what I hope to achieve is still before me, I am always aspiring to to say something true in an atmosphere of beauty (beauty again!), connecting my inner and outer space. I think that as long as I have this inner dimension I will want to create something out of language to reveal what is there—in particular, the ghastly, insane, and cruel things around me. Perhaps poetry is a kind of thermal photography of man in the world.
* * *
Today a man was weeping next to me at the brasserie. He was young and drinking a Coke with a lemon slice bobbing in it. Every few minutes he wiped the tears from his cheeks and looked at me apologetically. He was wearing snug denim pants and his sideburns were neatly trimmed. Had he seen his future in the bar mirror, I wondered? Had his young body, by unfair election, been touched by the incurable virus that has touched so many in my lifetime? Did he need a doctor? I was not at all prepared to encounter him, like a figure from the Old Testament under olive trees, with the scent of rosemary or lavender in the air. He seemed to float somewhere between heaven and earth. Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, and Adam were somewhere in the distance, back behind him. In the mirror, the sunshine made strange, flame-like wing patterns. On his table top, a little bouquet of colorful posies made flames, too. He seemed super real to me, because there was nothing unreal about him or his sorrow. I wanted to speak to him but was afraid. We were both alone, and waiters hurried past, ignoring us. The young man had moist green eyes, like rough emeralds. Outside, in the square, a big scarred plane tree was shaking its branches. On the horizon, swollen clouds moved quickly. Nearby, on the pavement, a crow pushed its yellow beak into a seeping pink trash bag. I ordered a bowl of wild strawberries, which are in season, and took out my notebook and pen, because I didn’t know what else to do. Why do the gods make sport of playing with us? We are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb, I wrote down.
See more entries from Henri Cole’s ongoing Paris Diary.
Photographs courtesy of Henri Cole.
