I remember the day like the sound of uninhabited sunrise.

My references were slipping.

Nobody could read me.

It was Paris.

I had returned, hoping to recover some of the alphabetical bond we had fashioned there.

Every building, every structure or object made of human hands or will or imagination, every sculpture posed along the Champs Elysées, seemed to me a structure of black-and-white projection.

Hanging on the mist.

Light and shade, nothing more.

It was the basic things of nature that held all the color I could generate within me.

The sky over the Eiffel Tower, though intensely overcast, was a garish cherry red.

The pigeons wandering everywhere at my feet, at the feet of us all, swooping sadly above us, were brilliant blue, as if they were hewn from lapis-lazuli, on the molecular level, and then given the same properties as any other bird would have.

Feathers, electromagnetic scoping capacities, nervous eyes.

Blue energy.

It was my curse to have to walk among these shadows, the ramparts of visual light, the verdure of trees, sometimes almost a magnesium verdure, due to the methodic alignment human hands and will and imagining had provided for them.

An obelisk solid grey, swirling with pink and angry fogs.

A lone cypress, not in its traditional habitat, struggling to show me its blue-emerald underskin.

I walked.

The landscape spoke to me, and I felt ashamed.

Ashamed that I should be allowing myself to believe in such grandiose, if useless visions.

Ashamed because it had not occurred to me sooner that I should seek counsel.

Shrink the spaces in my head, the rifts demarcating the differences between my world and the world at large.

Le Louvre, Le Cêntre Pompidou, Le Musée Picasso, all grains in one analogous assumption of light.

A master print.

Black-and-white.

Resin.

The map that is the world.

My dream.

My impotence.

My frustration at the emptiness of everything.

I sat for a demitasse of espresso, grey coffee, grey bar, grey afternoon.

Carmine, almost wine-dark, skyscape.

Solidity.

Emanations.

She was beyond every horizon.

And every horizon would invent and re-invent itself with its preferred meaning, ad infinitum.

Eccentricities aside, I was always in the center.

I discovered with a cold grey swallow of espresso, that I had been unaware of my own living of a life.

My life had been elsewhere.

Until then.

I would now live in a black-and-white world, and I would seek out the remnants of our natural origins, and I would use my rapport with these remnants to color the spaces of my grey world.

It was a holy day.

In the fog.

There were letters never written, sent by people who once had loved me, arriving on the mist.

I was home.

I was nowhere.

I was dreaming.

I would never wake.

All of these certainties, I knew, would evanesce with time's passage, and I'd be left with the same concrete sense of starvation, but I would be richer, and that was, in those moments, the ultimate comfort.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

REVISITING PARIS
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

Still Lifes Cover Page Home Page Aesthetics Cover Page Home Page Portada