Time is fun…

mardi, le 05 juin 2012

When you are having flies, as James Clarke once said.

Sometimes it feels like yesterday. Sometimes a lifetime ago. Sometimes I don’t remember it at all.

That day, Leonard Cohen reminds me, I just didn’t care what happened next. It looked like freedom but it felt like death. It was something in between, I guess. [I know now] it was closing time.

That day, you stepped into the setting sun and walked towards your loyal and adoring fans, bedecked in the finery of the Emperor’s new clothes. That day has been etched in my soul with blood, in my cheeks with tears, in my mind with disbelief.

You have asked me a few times since that day to forgive you. I often wonder what exactly you think you need forgiveness for. What is it that torments you from time to time that only I can take away? What, after all these years do you still want from me? I gave you so many reasons to love me, but nothing ever came of it.

You summed it up succinctly with your last plea for forgiveness: You emphasised that you sometimes seriously missed me, but that it was irrelevant. It was the perfect choice of words to describe how you viewed me, how you viewed our relationship.

Oh my love, my old, my sweet, my gentle love, I was as complicit as you. I resolutely believed your lies. I desperately clung to your emotional neglect. I thrived on the scraps of tenderness and kindness that fell to your feet while I was lying there. I stood naked in the irrelevance of it all. For all those years, there is nothing to forgive.

But this you know. I have told you so.

En tout cas, Jacques Brel me répétait sans cesse que tu aimais la vigne et le houblon, les villes du Nord, les laides de nuit, les fleuves profonds tu appelant au lit. [Et maintenant,] tu vois, je vous oubliais déjà… [parfois].

That day, however, you wrapped yourself in the silky smoothness of your newly woven cloth. That day, through the eyes of a terrified and distraught child, I realised you were stark naked. That day, for the first time, I saw you had no spine.

That day. Sometimes it feels like yesterday. Sometimes a lifetime ago. Sometimes I don’t remember it at all.

You have never asked me to forgive you for that day.

But this you also know. You stood in my doorway with a roll of art paper under your arm when I told you so.

It would appear that you haven’t yet grown a spine. So, now my forgiveness is mine to keep. There is nothing left for me to give to you except a reason to hate me so that we both can be free.

That day was exactly three years ago today.

Today I have the perfect relationship with you inside my head. Do not treat that with irrelevance. You don’t want to have to ask for my forgiveness for ruining that too. Oh my love, my old, my sweet, my gentle love. From year to year as all the seasons fall, I love you more you know, I love you … still.

The music: The relevant music is woven in the story. Besides, too many tunes are stark reminders of you.

The photograph: Galerie Bartoux is in an arcade off the Champs-Élysées and another one of those places I make a point of swinging past every time I am in Paris. The gallery always has the most incredible life-sized and larger sculptures on exhibit.

On my most recent trip to Paris, selected pieces of Bruno Catalano’s Les Voyageurs collection were being exhibited. His figures are always lacking mid sections, and seem to be eerily suspended in mid air. Each of his sculptures features somebody with a suitcase in hand, usually with an introspective or uncertain expression. The lack of midsection represents Catalano's invitation to viewers to simply fill in the blanks.

This particular ‘Missing Pieces’ sculpture reminded me ever so much of L’homme. Always with a suitcase in hand. Always ready for the quick escape. And funny that, as I noticed on that day exactly three years ago when the scales fell off my eyes, without a spine. Catalano would like me to fill in the blanks. For me, it is perfect exactly the way it is.