{"id":13804,"date":"2015-11-15T10:41:46","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T14:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13804"},"modified":"2015-11-15T10:41:46","modified_gmt":"2015-11-15T14:41:46","slug":"the-days-after-the-paris-massacre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/the-days-after-the-paris-massacre\/","title":{"rendered":"The Days After (The Paris Massacre)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_5796\"<\/a>7:30. a.m. Paris. Right now a moveable disaster. Saturday dawn’s here but no noise outside, no one visible on the street under my window. As a writer I should have words. But none have come yet. Made coffee. Which brought to mind those pages from Mahmood Darwish’s “Memory of Forgetfulness,” where he describes making coffee as he wakes up in Beirut after a night of bombings. The coffee is growing cold as I hesitate, groping for words. I’ll drink the coffee now. Talk\/write later.<\/span><\/p>\n

9:30 a.m. Walked out & Paris streets are beginning to show signs of life, at least in my quarter, Saint Germain \/ Saint Sulpice. Parents with baby strollers, housewives with baguettes, a few tourists. But my healthfood store remains closed. Maybe this afternoon. I bought today’s “Lib\u00e9ration” at the news stand. Strange compulsion to see in print what you saw on TV all night. Need for archive, maybe. The newsstand on Place St Sulpice: the window behind which the lady who takes you money sits is framed by books. The first my eyes fell on was R\u00e9gis Debray’s “Eloge des fronti\u00e8res \/In Praise of Borders” \u2014 one of the many books by aging leftists-turned-reactionaries. Of course during the night President Hollande called for closing the borders. As if closing the borders could keep evil out or evil foreigners from escaping. As if evil was foreign, was always the other. Borders are what the trouble is (see my piece in the current Poetry Project Newsletter).<\/span><\/p>\n

With Lib\u00e9 in hand I couldn\u2019t resist that most French of morning transactions: I walked into the Caf\u00e9 de la Mairie, went up to the bar & ordered a caf\u00e9 allong\u00e9 and a croissant (first croisant in ages, as I don\u2019t eat those things made of white flour anymore, though this morning a symbolic gesture was in order). The caf\u00e9 was half-full, people reading the morning paper, but also books, correcting proofs or something, the usual daily traffic.It\u2019s colder today than it has been this warm November & so nobody was sitting outside. I nibbled at the croissant, left most on the counter, downed the coffee, had a quick, smilingly reassuring exchange with the barman and my usual backroom waiter, wished everyone a \u201cbonne journ\u00e9e,\u201d and came home.<\/span><\/p>\n

11:00 Accumulating face-book messages: \u201cbe safe. our prayers are with you.\u201d Well-meant unthinking: the killers muttered prayers as they pulled the trigger. Prayers & monotheisms are the roots of this evil. Prayer slashes thought\u2019s throat. & what we need right now is new & better thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n

2:30 p.m. Lunch time needed to be acknowledged. I went back to the Caf\u00e9 de la Mairie, ordered my usual noon-time omelet, asking if they had the \u201cpleurotes\u201dwhich they had had earlier in the week. Pleurotes are oyster mushrooms, though my request rhymed more with the homophone French meaning \u201cpleurs\u201d tears, cries, weeping. The waiter told me, no there were no pleurotes today but he could offer an omelet with \u201ctrompettes des morts, \u201c literally \u201ctrumpets of the dead\u201d \u2014 an edible mushroom we call \u201chorn of plenty,\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>also known as the black chanterelle, or black trumpet. I looked at the waiter with a bit of surprise & grimaced somewhat sarcastically something like, \u201cfits the day, no?\u201d He couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t want to pick up on the reference. I decided that, yes, this was the day for such an omelet & told him to bring it on. <\/span><\/p>\n

11 p.m. Time to turn the newsmedia off \u2014 the constant repetition of the same news bits is wearing out my patience. As I try to fall asleep I realize how odd my first FB message was: my immediate association of the Paris disaster went via Darwish\u2019s memoir to similar tragic events in Beirut in the 80s, i.e. thirty years ago. And didn\u2019t instantly link up to the blast in that same city 24 hours earlier, i.e. on Thursday night, that killed over forty people on a busy shopping street. Maybe that was because I was looking for words (that hadn\u2019t come yet) to speak to the Paris disaster, and words are found in books, and so naturally \u2014 or culturally? \u2014 my mind went to the best words I knew that had been written cocnerning a similar tragedy. <\/span><\/p>\n

11\/15\u00a0 <\/span>9 a.m. Just a quick listen to a news update upon waking up. Will try to keep the TV (& even the radio) down to a minimum today. Make coffee again, sip it while gathering in mind the expanding ring of places Paris has now joined: Beirut, Baghdad, Cairo, Garissa (Kenya), Tunis, Ankara, Madrid. Not to speak of the heart of the Mashreq, Iraq & Syria. <\/span><\/p>\n

The night had been eerily silent: below my window, the \u201crue de la soif\u201d as it is known, is on weekends filled with revelers and since the prohibition to smoke, there are constantly 100 or more smokers on the street \u00a0screaming, talking, shouting, singing, smoking all night long. \u00a0This past two nights, nothing, no noise, no revelers. When I looked down on the strret this morning I saw the sophisticated street-cleaning machina parked at one end, ready to do its job. A desultory one this morning: where usually thousands of cigarette butts\u00a0<\/span>make a raggedly carpet on the blacktop for any number of broken glasses and empty cans, there was nothing for the machine to pick up. As if the night had not happened.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unable as yet to turn back to the reading I was doing before the event, I start making notes. The impulse is to turn the TV on. Maybe something else has happened? Maybe they have found out something important? \u2014 On Sunday morning in the 60 minutes since I listened to the\u00a0news? Who am I kidding. I resist and turn to some much needed music: Hans Werner Henze’s\u00a0Winter Music<\/em>, his sonatas on Shakespearean characters, with David Tanenbaum on guitar.<\/p>\n

An hour later I went out for a much needed morning walk after too many hours cooped up in the flat, and an even more abstruse not to say absurd scene greeted me: a moveable crane stood in the middle of the street with a solitary worker on top of the laddered arm fixing christmas street-lights on the facades of the houses on both sides of the street. The horizontal strip was fixed but the various vertical lines with their small lights were all still dangling in messy bundles as if carelessly thrown over the horizontal holds. As if the worker or the city didn\u2019t have his or its heart in next month’s celebration\u00a0as yet \u2014 though, obviously, not even 128 deaths can stop the commercial capitalist vulture-machine known as christmas.<\/span><\/p>\n

The walk was bracing. Only once did I startle up, on my \u201cqui-vive\u201d as one is after events like those of the 13th, no matter how blas\u00e9 one thinks one is or can act. That happened as I saw a crowd gathered on the Boulevard Saint Germain near its intersection with the rue des Saint P\u00e8res, and two vehicles that looked like TV trucks next to them. Approaching, I realized that the Ukrainian church stood on the right and that the people were the attendees of Sunday morning mass. I wound my way through them, crossed the rue des Saint-P\u00e8res, passed the caf\u00e9 which I can never pass without thinking of the two poet friends I had a long afternoon conversation with \u00a0on that terrasse in 1985 \u2014 both gone now, namely Ted Joans and Joyce Mansour. I hang a left, cross the street and start on the way back \u2014 my mind suddenly turning toward poetry again, or if not poetry, then toward words, and the way they line themselves up, the work that takes. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

7:30. a.m. Paris. Right now a moveable disaster. Saturday dawn’s here but no noise outside, no one visible on the street under my window. As a writer I should have words. But none have...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13804"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13808,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13804\/revisions\/13808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}