Sweet Delight
04.10.2011
The theme of the day announces itself as we enter the Petit Palais:
I await my turn as Richard’s photography bag is scanned.
A woman pushes between us, and puts down her purse.
“Excuse me,” I say. “We’re together.”
She mumbles something in French, and elbows past.
A long line to buy tickets. I photograph the two busts of an African
couple with glowing eyes, one in a turban, gorgeous against the
marble wall. Richard finds a vent in the floor where cool air rises.
He’s always hot, a bull. One man at the counter and twenty people in line.
I listen to the man offer a tarif réduit[1] to the woman in front of
me. She doesn’t look senior enough, forty at the most. I see in his
eyes his intention to insult. He holds up his hand awkwardly, two
plastic caps—or condoms?—on finger and thumb. Two more
euros.
The exhibition’s downstairs. The ticket taker tears my ticket half
with the images of a duchesse and a tigresse.
“Ohh,” I exclaim. “I wanted them for collage.”
He looks puzzled. Tickets are for tearing.
We gaze at Blake’s poems and etchings of Dante and Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales, The Inferno and Paradiso, Songs of
Innocence and Experience. History is a perpetual fight between
tyranny and liberty, said Blake. That’s the struggle in all countries
and families. Some oppress. Some are oppressed. Some bolt for
freedom.
As a child, Blake saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic
wings bespangling every bough like stars." Later, he blasted
slavery, child labor, and the oppression of women. Some called
him crazy. Would that we all were crazy like Blake.
Look at his drawing of the Recording Angel! This is what it is to
be an artist: to write in the book of life one’s experience while
alive, rather than waiting to read it in the Book of Judgment after
death. Blake saw visions of the truth behind the veil.
One museum guard has a wooden leg. So naturally, he’s the one
they assign to move around from room to room. Like a noisily
clumping Ahab, making it hard to focus.
In the last room, a Jarmusch DVD plays. Johnny Depp tells an
American Indian named Nobody that his name is William Blake.
Nobody quotes Blake,
“Every night and every morn,
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.”
I see the dark-haired woman who was in front of me in line.
“You don’t look old enough for a reduced ticket,” I say in French.
She looks surprised. "No, I'm not."
“The ticket taker was rude.”
“Yes,” she concedes, “but what can I say? I’m a woman, and he is a man.”
“You could protest,” I say, thinking of Blake’s defense of women.
She shrugs, docile.
We emerge into the air, hop on the Métro. At the next stop, a group
of dark-haired young women gets on, and yells at each other.
One stands against a pole and sneezes twice, spraying Richard,
who sits right below her. Everywhere we go today, this leitmotif:
humans being animals, artists being angels.
[1] reduced rate (for senior citizens)
Chaucer, Dante, Jim Jarmusch, Paris, Petit Palais, William Blake, art, sexism in Paris Life
Reader Comments (12)
I'm so enjoying your entries -- Keep them coming you guys!
William Blake across from me sits here
insisting on whatever it is he insists on and a
great red cape opens up to show an illuminated city he says
is Jerusalem
Not quite the one over there in Palestine
but translucent walls and gates of light as only
Blake can envision
Even pinkish and silvery angels elongatedly
bending above it barely discernible in the
clouds and blowing on long glass trumpets
I look into the lively fire in his eyes those
limpid English blues of his and his
mild-mannered countenance and his almost
whispery elocution of these weighty matters in which
the whole cosmos is swept along in calamitous clouds
and he levels a look at me his right hand raised by his
face and says
“Behold the things we feared have come to pass
but the things we feared the most
may still be abated”
Black horses of smoke whinnying horribly and various
towers tumbling forward
I gaze through transparent Mr. Blake across
wispy ruins that run on for miles hoping he’s
right as usual
“Shall I sing you a song?” he says
I nod and he sings in a soft falsetto of things so
elementally near they become distant as if in a
play within a play in the mind
of the Divine upraised finger of light attesting to what among
all these phantasms is real
and of the graves of the terrestrially wronged
who open their stony mouths to
sing with one voice the sweet
mercy of God and their
ultimate rectification against all forms of
injustice including tyrannies theological
and while he continues singing I can
almost see the Holy One’s smile like buttery golden flakes
slowly descending over everything
Mr. Blake
your hat
the wide-brimmed felt pilgrim’s hat you
wore when you first came here
Your stick
with which you touch the stars Mr. Blake
all aglitter
and the tiny chanting flames you
leave in the air
______________________________________________________
5/26/2004 (from Underwater Galaxies, The Ecstatic Exchange, 2007)
Merci
Aren't you grateful for that terrific education? Exuberant Chaucer remains one of my favorite authors. I'm not surprised that you, as a musician, remember not just the lines, but the spelling, the musical sounds of his early English.
I'm glad that you're enjoying the journal.
Are you spending much time in your island cabin?
Love and gratitude,
Kaaren (& Richard)
This poem captures the essence of Blake--clearly you've read him closely and met him visionary to visionary. My favorite lines are:
"a/ great red cape opens up to show an illuminated city he says
is Jerusalem
Not quite the one over there in Palestine
but translucent walls and gates of light"
He is a kind of magician here who carries the vision of paradise within--or should I say, you, the poet, have come up with an ingenious metaphor which captures what Blake carried within himself.
Thank you for your poetic refrain to the song of Blake.
And thank you for your close attention.
Love,
Kaaren and Richard
What a charming thing to say! If ONLY we were more angelic. But, I'm afraid we are not. Still, we like imagining that we are artists, so thank you.
We are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in Paris in May. Would Barbara like to be on our Paris Play e-mail list? Let us know.
Love,
Kaaren (& Richard)
I really like your comment. You know how when you go to some great artistic event, you sometimes come away with some essential insight that the work itself gave you? That's what I felt was the essential nourishment of seeing this Blake exhibit. I wish, for your and Dawna's sakes, I hadn't taken out the passage about listening to Patti Smith's Blake song right there in the museum. Her music, My Blakean Year, was a part of the day, too. Thank you for your insightful reading of the post. An artist's reading!
Love,
Kaaren (& Richard)
The man. The mask.
Thanks for this sketch.
Reminds me of Tolstoi.
Bruce
Isn't that man in the mask humorous(, as well as intimidating)?
And Tolstoi, I wonder why. Does he come to a similar conclusion about humans being like animals, artists like angels?
Thank you for your appreciative comments, Bruce.
Love,
Kaaren
I've just been reading him again. Short Novels. The Raid, The Death of Ivan Ilytch, et al.
One cannot do better than Tolstoi.
Bruce
Dear Bruce,
Well, you certainly make me want to go back and read Tolstoy again.
And I will.
Thank you.
Love,
Kaaren & Richard