Road Less Traveled

After being so annoyed at the overly-landscaped “Monet World” yesterday, I felt like I had to get some air.

By myself and with nobody’s permission, I simply left.

I walked about halfway through the town of Giverny, then turned north. I had a vague idea of climbing the hill which overlooks the town. It was chilly out, the sky slate-blue with patches of clear, and an intermittent sprinkle. It perfectly matched my ambivalent feelings and impulsive desire to escape.

The street wound past an elementary school and a deserted intersection, past a couple of the tall, narrow Normandy houses. The pavement ran in a cleft between the two hills north of the town, flowing like a stream back to Giverny behind me. I passed the town limits, and looked back. I could see across the valley. Steep roofs and little gardens populated the view. I then looked up the road.

I always want to know what’s past the next curve. I always want to look, until it’s time to turn back, until leaving can’t be put off anymore—because once I turn back, I hardly ever come the same way twice. There’s just too much else to see.

This time, I continued up the road, past a hayfield and the twisted trees on its crowning hill, past a road-curve warning sign, past the gated driveway into a hunting area. Tilting posts, French country road, distant hazy trees across the valley…and of course the mottled, mutable blue-gray sky lowering down on it all.

I walked past the curve the sign warned about. I stood looking at the next hairpin bend ahead, shrouded in green dimness from the dark overhanging trees. The mysterious road curved sharply to the left. Where did it go? What gloomy, lead-mullioned Normandy windows would it pass under, what clear woods and grass-covered hills would it bisect? I will never know. I looked at that curve and knew I would never see it again in this life. I would never walk up and past it. I would turn away, and go see other sights, other parts of this world. Because you have to make choices.

It’s what this trip to Europe is about. Having all kinds of things arrayed before me, and learning about myself by watching myself choose one over another.

What roads appeal to me, and which leave me angry and empty? Unlike in America, no one here is under any illusions that one can do it all. Here, it is understood that every choice closes a thousand paths, every discovery renders a million sights unseen. You can only do so much, and you’ll never see the vast majority of what’s out there.

That’s true for everyone in the world, but in America we deny it and make ourselves miserable, trying to go everywhere and do everything and please everybody. We’re afraid to decide and choose, to take a stance and let the rest fall away, because to make a decision is to acknowledge death. So we run around, aimlessly grabbing experiences, putting enormous pressure on ourselves to accomplish everything—because it staves off the knowledge that someday our activity will stop.

Here, it’s acknowledged. We die. Every choice must therefore be made with quality in mind, with squeezing every drop out of life, because we may not pass this particular way again. But conversely, there’s also this distaste for forcing anything or being pushy. You don’t get wine without pressing grapes, but you let them ripen first.

Here was as far as I should go on this street, lest I be late to supper before I could get back to town.

I turned away from the bend in the road and began to descend. A little way down, though, I spied a trail heading up the hill to my left, into the woods. Now, Robert Frost tributes aside, I couldn’t not follow that! Listening hard for any sounds of the property owners, I scrambled up the embankment and into the trees.

It was steep at first, but I pulled myself up with tree trunks. The trail went straight up through the brown leaves. I had to sit for a minute when I reached the top. Then I continued to a clearing, the grass and trees all strange and unfamiliar, surrounding me in a perfectly clear, alien silence. To the left the trees thinned out to grassy hillside and empty sky.

Stepping over that way, my senses alert for another human—hunter, landowner—I came out from the forest into the open air, the town spread below me. I could see tiny houses and treetops, the smoke from a bonfire, train tracks curving away to the distant hills, and the empty green and blue and gray rolling space of Northern France.

Gorgeous.

I stayed only a little while, and left when my gut said to. Down was easier than up, though more tricky. The clearing was growing dim, the tree trunks hard to find on the embankment. Finally I came again to the road.

I didn’t even look back towards the bend I’d never see—my need for adventure had been fulfilled, and the rustle of wind and dusky bird calls behind me only pushed me home.

Beauties

Well, here I am at Monet’s house in Giverny, having one of those “what’s wrong with me?” moments.

It started last night when my fellow classmates were agreeing with one of them about how she burned all her diaries to make a fresh start, and I was just quietly appalled. It continued this morning in the American Museum, when they were all dissing the painting that one of my professors had labeled “empty”, a painting that I thought was a visually interesting if slightly bland piece.

And at lunch today, we were discussing music, and the same professor asked two of the students to explain what he saw as “the two poles” of music today. He picked a hipster guy to give his opinion on indie music, and (facepalm) an African-American girl to talk about R & B. When they were finished, I kept trying to quietly interject that there were more poles than that, but nobody cared. So obviously we’ve got hipster crap and Nas. Wonderful.

And here I sit, in Monet’s garden, bored silly. Flowers. Woo. I thought this place was going to be beautiful—you know, Monet’s garden at Giverny. The epitome of beauty. It isn’t. It’s an old house full of rugs and semi-interesting Japanese prints. As for old houses, Monticello was far more fascinating. And I don’t like the stories I hear about Monet, that everyone else thinks are so crotchety-old-man cute, like that he’d pitch fits if the copper cooking pots weren’t hung up in perfect order in the kitchen.
He sounded like a fussy old man who needed everything just so, and was painfully obsessed with the flowers in his overcultivated garden.

I can’t believe I ever thought Monet gave a damn about nature. All I see here are plants bent and twisted into the shapes that men think they want, then roped off so that nobody but maintenance workers can get at them.

He wanted to get at the “truth” of nature? You don’t do that by growing a blackish-red rose and then hiding it from others. You don’t do that by diverting a stream, damming it into a mucky pond filled with rotten water lilies.

I think he was like most Western men—tearing up the living world in search of their mental conception of nature. I hate this place.

Distance & Resistance

I just broke down and downloaded Mozilla Firefox onto the ancient Dell computer provided for our use here in the great room of the farmhouse in Giverny, France.

It had been running some furiously outdated version of Netscape, which didn’t like typepad or .Mac . So now I can post and email for the first time in quite a few days, though I had been using the old browser to follow the Libby indictment on Americablog.com rather obsessively. Let’s hope that indictment was the warning shot across the bow, so to speak; and that Karl’s still in Fitzgerald’s sights.

So we, the students of Marchutz school, left Aix-en-Provence on the TGV last Thursday, bound for Paris and points beyond—specifically Giverny, a village 10 minutes from Vernon on the Seine, an hour by local train northwest of Paris. Claude Monet had his house and gardens here, where he worked on his “Waterlilies” and other pieces in the later part of his life.

This past Thursday we arrived at the village, a close, quaint place with beautiful Norman architecture and rose gardens in all the little yards. Our residence here is gorgeous. We each have our own bedroom, and pretty much the private run of the place, as our professors are staying in the neighboring house. There is a kitchen for us all, and a bathroom on each floor, as well as cable TV and high-speed internet. The kitchen is crammed with breakfast food and snacks, and lunch and dinner are provided by the Museum’s restaurant kitchen. In other words, it is first-class—just what I needed to help me get well.

Our program here is a sculpture workshop with Greg Wyatt, sculptor-in-residence at St. John the Divine in NYC. Quite the honor, apparently. To be honest, I’d rather have had materials provided, and just have his guidance as we created our own projects out of plaster or wax, instead of specific assignments given by him. I did enough “schoolwork” art projects last year in AFO, the last thing I need is some condescending, self-congratulatory teacher giving me some opaque, oh-so-clever assignment during what needs to be a period of intense self-analysis and personal decisionmaking.

I know, I know, he’s famous and has sculptures at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in D.C. and Shakespeare’s Garden in Stratford-upon-Avon, I’m not worthy to breathe his air or be in the same room with him. I know, I don’t deserve to be taught by him.

But one thing my upbringing taught me is to not be overawed by anyone, even the famous or the wealthy.

My personal code of values places utmost importance on who a person is as a person, their character, their style, their attitude–the work of art that they’ve made out of themselves. And I don’t like him, I am not like him, and I don’t want to be like him. I know that instinctively. It’s the exact opposite attitude I know the art world expects of me. One is supposed to pretend not to notice who the artist is as a person, and focus all attention instead on the works they produce. But in this, as in many other things, I have to hold to my own ethics. I’ve developed them consciously and they serve me well. He may have an enormous bronze eagle in front of the State Department building, but my antenna senses something grim, dark and undeveloped inside him. I can’t draw close.

Instead I wander the village. I collect pieces of wood and color them with oil pastels. I drink merlot and watch the greyish-blue tiedyed Norman sky. I read romance novels and pour myself into my diary. So much writing, after so many, many dry months—why does it feel like coming home, like coming back to myself after a long sojourn as another person? A tight, unhappy, anxious person, pushing away the past, fighting the present, scared of the future. She’s broken open, and myself is spilling out. You bet it’s breaking the containers and overflowing the channels that others set out.

And yes, I watch that collateral damage—undone schoolwork, unsent emails, dusty and discarded to-do lists—and know what consequences it could bring. But the world will never spiral twice through the exact same spot in the universe, and here I am, trying to grab all that I can before it spins away. Living deeply, recording thoroughly. What can I ever truly accomplish that is greater than that?

Our Trip To Giverny

In Giverny, France.

The TGV ride north, from Aix to Paris, was a revelation. I’ve ridden that route three times before:

—down with my mother in 2003, when the major issue was how to tell, from the French announcements, when we’d need to disembark in Avignon

—back up with her a week later, standing in the vestibule, due to the rail strike making seats impossible to acquire

—and once on this current visit to Europe, fresh from a week in Paris with my friend, nervous about Aix and squirming in my ill-fitting jeans

On this trip north, I had plenty of space and an iPod full of my favorite songs. The October morning sun was backlighting (and rendering all blue-gray and misty) the limestone cliffs and foothills of the Alps.

Later on it was the rich green center of France speeding past my window, with red tile roofs and vineyards, picturesque cows and steeples. We passed a sudden, hidden river, over which knelt an ancient stone bridge. Approaching Paris,  you could see the advent of autumn in the colored leaves, and vast flat plains of farmland.

We arrived at the Gare de Lyon, and took the Metro to Gare St Lazare. From there, a far more rickety train took us north into Normandy. On that ride, I began to compare the north of France to the south. We still passed beautiful old estate homes, parks, statues, forests. In Aix, all those things existed; but they were all so different. Weird golden houses you couldn’t imagine inhabiting, parks full of hooligans, cypress trees, glaring light.

In northern France, the structure is the same. Towns are laid out similarly, and they have the same kinds of cars, roads, sidewalk cafes. But there are vast differences. Instead of the fierce, chalky-blue Rhone, there is the cool, indigo-blue Seine. Instead of pointed cypresses, olive trees, and arid shrubs, Normandy has grand trees, dark wet bushes, damp squishy grass. The light up here is also different—lower and diffused, a shimmery sparkle. Provencal light is a bright, relentless shine.

There’s a quiet forthright richness to this place. I like it. It suits me better in my life right now.

We stay in an old converted barn, owned by the American Museum in Giverny, and rented out to groups of artists. There are four floors, and six bedrooms, one for each of us students. We all rushed to choose our favorite. There were no conflicts, and everyone got exactly the room most suited to them. Mine is on the second floor (third, for Americans), on the corner, with windows looking south and west. I can see the gardens and the sunset. An auspicious beginning to this trip to Giverny, and to the second half of this semester.

Breaking the Boredom Habit

Listening to “Bohemia” on my iPod, sitting on the antique bench in my apartment in southern France, under a full moon.

Five straight weeks of being sick. From migraines to atrocious cramps, relentlessly upset stomach, against a backdrop of constant respiratory infection, fatigue, and low-grade nausea. Either in Marseille tomorrow during our school-mandated visa physicals, or at the doctor Thursday, I’ll find out what’s wrong with me and fix it.

The worst aspect of the past month, besides the drama of two host families and an apartment search, has been the physical symptoms and how left out they’ve made me feel. Other students and teachers don’t seem to understand that I really don’t feel well, week after week. How quickly people’s patience runs out. I don’t know what it is either. But they need to stop acting like they’re the ones most inconvenienced.

I’ve barely been able to do any traveling at all, even around Aix. I figured on having a slower pace than most of the students. After all, I’ll be living here a year. Most of them are leaving for the States in two months to resume their respectable American lives, their study abroad experience an enjoyable anomaly. What I didn’t figure on was having to sit here while everyone else travels constantly. I didn’t figure on the envy I’d feel, listening to them discuss which train pass to buy. Every week, one set of friends or another heads to Milan, or Chamonix, or Prague.

While my closest buddies went to Oktoberfest in Germany, I sat at home, coughing my head off and drinking beer in my living room.

But things are changing. You know how it is when you feel sorry for yourself, and you can’t see changes coming? This little rut of house-nesting, of non-traveling self pity, is about to end. This semester is dividing itself into two halves: the first half, all about the novelty of Aix, setting up a cozy house, reading and exploring the town; and the second, upcoming half, with multiple trips and visits and critiques.

My friend will be here tomorrow night, for a four-day visit. After that, there’s three days until the Marchutz students head for Giverny, where Monet painted. That trip overlaps into fall break, which I’ve decided to spend in Berlin, so I’ll be leaving the group in Paris as they return to Aix, and instead catching a flight by myself to Germany.

Once I come back from that, it’s one week in Aix, and then we Marchutz and CAC kids get to go to Paris for five days. And between our return from Paris, and my winter month in Edinburgh, is only four weeks, one of them finals week.

So it’s true, this rut of hibernating and contemplating will soon be broken. Meanwhile, I’ll continue my amused minuet through the remainder of ‘05, one of the most evocative, necessary, life-direction-changing, French-market-basket-full-of-goodies years I’ve ever had, and try to lose the myopia.

Happy birthday, Oscar Wilde!

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

Comfort Zone Cafe

So here I am in my cafe..the one with Emile the waiter, with 2,80E Kir Mûre, the one on Place de l’Hotel de Ville—Brasserie de la Mairie. It was recommended to me on the first day of class. I tried it out, liked it for its convenience, friendliness and cheapness. Now everyone calls it “my” cafe.

People said I’d have “my” cafe in France, my patisserie, my bar, my boulangerie. I thought they were joking. I mean, in America, you don’t have “your” anything; no matter how often you’ve been to it, it’s still just an impersonal locale, a place to get things done. But here, you really do get to claim your spots and form bonds with your businesses.

It sits uneasily with my tendency to avoid comfort zones. I would rather be miserable all my life, and fail at everything I ever risked doing—than succeed and know, in my deepest ashamed heart, that I never really pushed it as far as it could go.

But I say that, and reflect:  pushed it how? Yes, I’m living in France…but I drink at “my” cafe, go to “my” bars, buy my food in the same shops where I get that familiar unsmiling nod. I may have spent last Thursday night chasing tequila shots with Guinness, ending up on a cute guy’s lap…but I went home alone, and watched a movie. Am I hiding from life?

It’s so strange, to live in such inescapably bombastically hardcore times, and know it, and be forced to spend my days on minutia—studying the slightest choice of lines in a painting, acquiring bread, playing whack-a-mole with various health symptoms. I know what’s going on in the world. But I’m so happy here, sipping my Kir as the Provencal air grows cold, typing my thoughts and listening to some odd world music on the cafe speakers.

I’m settled enough, finally, to not feel continuously exhausted, threatened, and in upheaval; but I know also that I can’t take anything for granted ici. I have my little don’t-fall-down-the-loft-stairs and don’t-spray-the-curtainess-bathtub routines down pretty well; but I’m not fooling myself. I know I’m always in danger of encountering an impossible or humiliating situation here. I like that. The likelihood is hight that, were it not so, I’d already be bitching about being bored.

The deeper I live, the farther from the rut of the normal, the more sharply profound, the wilder, the better.