Saying goodbye to France
Paris is depressed and neurotic, as it should be given recent events. If I hadn't known Paris before I wouldn't know how depressed, but I've known it before and it is. Cops are everywhere. Christine, Parisian, feels "trapped," a "prisoner" and wants to move to Sausalito (California) but won't, owning an apartment on Ile-St. Louis and another house in the city she's just inherited from her mother. She has a curious pride in her misery and a pulpit from which to broadcast it to American friends visiting from San Francisco. We've met Christine and her American boyfriend for dinner on July 4. When we finish our meal, she can't wait around to say goodbye. We assume she's hurried home to selfish sleep, to prepare for a brand-new day of privileged psychosis. But there's a bigger picture, a grander conflict-Christine's also something of a saint, helping old people as a private nurse 10 to 12 hours a day! Is she too tired from that exercise or too tired from her addiction to her personal anguish to stick around and say goodnight? It's impossible to say.
The small hotel where we stay is in the sixth arr. on an alley behind St.Sulpice. The ladies' high-heeled shoes sound like church bells on the cobblestones and the drunks quarrel at 4 a.m. It's Paris being Paris again; Christine's right, not even Parisians like Paris, only Americans prone to equating the imagination with Romanticism. When the hotel elevator conks out, we're trapped inside a dark Paris metaphor for an hour, waiting for the 'technician' to arrive. The hotel compensates by offering a bottle of chilled rose and two Heineken's. Nothing's quite working in Paris, not even romantic illusions. The waiters at Brasserie Lipp still wear black suits and serve decent food and wine with white linen napkins folded over their left forearms, but with the forlorn panache of bad actors on a flimsy stage-set not even they believe in, and the place is almost empty. Au revoir.
After the attack in Nice, I wean myself off the 'news,' making a resolution to study Chomsky's pronouncements on corporate media and its collusion with institutional power as soon as I return to the States.
By the time I reach Marseilles I have the words for what I'm thinking: that there are two types of propaganda: the type that discourages to defeat, and the type that encourages to enslave. We stay near Gare St.Charles, the train station, in a quarter filled with gypsies, Arabs, Africans, and the stray mass tourist. The city's on alert, though there's hardly a cop in sight. Street corners smell pissy. Children beg. Men sit around in bars, outdoor cafés, pizzerias, smoking, playing cards, drinking small coffees, cassis. On most of the small streets, as busy as they are, there's not a woman to be seen. The men seem deadly alive, or alive in their deadness, like they're waiting for something to happen but don't want it to. Some of them keep a small stack of cell phones on the table in front of them, leading an outsider to the conclusion that they're conducting multiple businesses, when it also appears they have all the time in the world to do very little at all. It's hot to me, but only Mediterranean warm to them; these men must be accustomed to heat, I think, knowing now after walking the streets of Marseilles for a mere two days that there are times you get so tired you don't have the energy to do anything for yourself anymore, other than just exist.
The museums are good in Marseilles, I'm glad I saw them; to be at port Vieux at sunset is to pay tribute to all of civilization, and le Corbusier's Unite'd Habitation–The Radiant City–is a concrete Utopian dream come true; anyone who believes there's no future must go there at once to be saved, making sure to walk all the way to the rooftop. It's spectacular: you can see all of Marseille, and le Corbusier built a wall short enough for the average man to see and high enough to make sure he wouldn't harm himself by falling.
Rimbaud, sick in Yemen, after years in Africa, sailed to Marseille and died in a hospital there in 1891.