“Isolation,” Quasimodo says. “Disappointment. Regret. Disaffection. Rancour. Despair. Humiliation. Regret. Mostly regret…”
“Regret-based melancholy is the worst of all,” sighs Doctor Polanski. “It’s bottomless, fathomless, all-pervading, and can manifest itself in front of near-total strangers.”
He leans forward, adopts a mock-conspiratorial tone.
“Have you seen much of Esmeralda since the divorce?”
“Only in my nightmares,” says Quasimodo.
Afterwards there’s a downpour of aporia…
Media shitstorms, Instagram anxiety, suicide bombs…
His melancholy growing ever more noticeably pronounced…
Weeks later Quasimodo buys a table for the living room and spends several days lacquering it in silent tribute to his father, a man who never lacquered a table in his life. Listening to Django Reinhardt on Spotify, Quasimodo keeps one ear cocked like a dog in front of a fire. Additional time passing him here in the form of minutes, hours, possibly months…
“I’ve just heard Otis Redding sing ‘My Girl’,” Dahlia says. “And the weather conditions at the beginning of the song strike me as contradictory. Can you make sense of them?”
“I can,” says Quasimodo. “They make perfect sense.”
“Oh yes!” says Dahlia. “So they do!”
Dahlia is straddling him on a leopard-skin rug, fur tassels spinning on her breasts, a vivid jungle scene tattooed across her back.
“I have straddled other men,” Dahlia says.
“That’s not surprising,” Quasimodo says.
“Women too,” Dahlia says.
“That’s not surprising either,” Quasimodo says.
It’s mid-May now and Quasimodo is dressed head-to-toe in grey: grey Nike trainers, grey Levi’s, grey cashmere jumper; his iron-coloured pompadour listing to one side. After lunching at Les Assassins and seeing the latest
Jean-Luc Godard film, he returns to his new apartment. My new apartment is no longer new, he realises, inspecting the blood spatter speckling the wallpaper and carpet. Suddenly his phone chimes the opening bars of “La Bamba”. On the line: Dahlia, slightly exasperated, speaking from a multidisciplinary entropy installation at the Musée d’Art Moderne.
“This may sound twatty,” she says, “but you need to view the world the way an artist might. You’re making your real world as narrow as you make your imaginative world wide. That statement is actual bullshit, but it amuses me to say it. Anyway, I’ll leave you to your internet dating and casual sexual encounters. Have a good evening!”
“I won’t,” says Quasimodo.
Around 8:35pm Quasimodo doesn’t call his brother again. He reads The Lullaby of a Lover by George Gascoigne, finishes a bottle of Château Latour, then embarks upon the arduous, surprisingly bittersweet journey, part-memoir, part-metafiction, part-literary criticism, part-architectural monograph, part-psychological ghost story, back across to the other side of the room.
Three Pear-Shaped Pieces
Russell Persson
First
I’ve named all my name dropping for the night and by Christ it’s time for me to walk although another treat of cognac might help us all along.
There is no good sir. No welcome to the evening of the evening. But there my patrons the gentlemen the ladies they go and file out themselves back to their own good homes. A brief gentle walk home. But us here I say there is still no good sir. Just lamps out and the rest going out. Tamped.
Headed home I go and stumble south. The wooden handle of my hammer where it meets the metal head is worn smooth from where I hold it there inside my coat inside my pocket and believe I’m at the ready do believe me. Fucking scoundrels in the shrubs or hiding in the corners. Would as much to be the tack hammer your noggin wants. Headed south and from the Auberge it’s mostly downhill until we get us to the Seine. Cocked on evening whisky then it comes to me I’ve lived a certain life. Wouldn’t want this recall to run amiss and so let’s take it down. So take this message.
I regulate my life.
This is what I do and when: I rise in early morning. Three hours and five minutes after I become inspired and this goes on for one hour and twenty four minutes. And then I take a lunch. An excellent lunch who takes up no longer than four minutes of my day. For quite soon after I become on horseback to survey the grounds I’ve come to collect by now. I sweep an arm if you can notice me from where you are. Then this horse I’m off and back to being burdened by the muse who doesn’t let me ride. I come indoors to become profound inspired.
In the evening at 7:16 I sit to dinner served. Four minutes after is when I’m done with dinner and then I spend over one full hour on God knows what until we begin the night of symphonic readings out loud. Make of this what you will as of what you’ve made til now. For then I’m off to bed at the strike of 10:37 night. I sleep soundly unless the day is Tuesday which is when I awake with a start at 3:14 morning and again of this you can what of it would you will.
My food is white as in the whites of eggs and the inside of bread, coconuts, rice, the fat of dead animals, sugar, cotton salad, salt, turnips, shredded bones and certain fish who’ve been skinned.
When I breathe I breathe distinctly out with pleasure and when I walk I walk with my hands upon my ribs and I see well behind me and crane accordingly to the aft. I wouldn’t tell you how I sleep for it would be a true confound. But do let it be known my one eye remains open while the other rests, and so on. And my bed — I’ll save you all the time and not go further into what describes such an odd contraption no one would believe in either way but suffice it to say if it’ll do to tell let’s say a cavity has been cut who saves a room for my dear noggin thank you and good night.
Continue us to walk continue me to walk in due south absolutely.
The Pont Neuf an option this evening.
Though Jesus Christ what with all my cognac I might just with Saint Denis lug my head the half way home tonight to choose where I might rest this awful melon.
With my hands upon my ribs I walk and here and there reach into where in my pocket our night hammer sits. I worry some the handle where it meets the metal head where I lay upon the patina one more thin coat of hand oil or soot from where I’ve been it is the dust we pick up in the day when we’re looking elsewhere.
My stumble my amount I walk me home. The different routes and then the same ones and ones who wouldn’t tell the way I wend.
The farther from Montmarte I get. The farther from the Seine and from the Pont Neuf and again we come us up from that black river to the south and what comes with that. In night in time the smell of boiling cows and hides who must in their aroma set out to tell us this is no way to skin a cat. But home it is and I welcome me back to the slum I’ve kept and kept well hidden from them all.
Second
Well it was like he never thought it through, said the man who moves pianos to his wife. I’ve not seen a thing like it. Not in all the days I’ve been.
Soup? said the wife to the man who moves pianos.
The second christing floor, up two flights. We had her legs off this grand of course. No other way to get it up. And him all suited to the nines and dapper bringing up the legs like a boy carrying cord wood I swear, said the man who moves pianos to his wife.
The nut with the pince-nez? I thought he already had a grand up there, said the wife to the man who moves pianos.
Well I tell you he does. The first one we moved up there. It must have been years ago when we lugged that first one up. And then I thought well he must have gotten rid of the first one, but wouldn’t I know of a goddamn piano moved in Arcueil? Did he pull it apart and heave it out the window into the street I’m asking? The absolute shit of it all is that his first piano, the one I moved it must have been years ago, is still in his second floor room, right where we left it the first time. Nearly shat my britches. Right where we left it. So Alex, he’d gone ahead to scout the room and comes back down and says there’s alre
ady a grand in his one room and there’s no place else for another. So I go up to his room and he’s there and would you believe me if I told you on top of his head was a piece of fabric, a napkin, black, draped over his head like some kind of veil and he’s still as a board and he must have heard me stood there and he says, Good sir, I wear this for your protection, so I won’t know you’ve been in my house, and for mine, for I don’t prefer the sun. Now Alex, he never said a thing about a black napkin but you think he might have mentioned that little nugget so I stand there and I ask him where we’re supposed to put this loving piano we’ve got now half up his steps and he, get this, he lifts up just a corner of his napkin to see for himself and he points to where his piano is already and says, There. He says, There, just put it on top of this one – I’ve already cleaned it off for you and so there you go – just put it there.
You see, dear. Not only is he a piece of work, said the wife to the man who moves pianos, but so might you be a piece of work as well.
Third
1. A Way of Beginning
What I would like to do this evening is arrange my white collars in their good order of stiffness, from stiff to not, along the outside edge of my top cabinet – and curl this arrangement around if I must.
2. More of the Same
I don’t hear a soul in the hall so I can now go out to the Parc d’Ecole d’Arcueil. We will need some water for this evening and it is there we’ll find an excellent draught. We’ll bring two bottles and a bag.
3. Piece I
When I’m arranged or near arranged what calls me away is one lone mosquito, possibly desperate but more likely languid and hopeful, sent here I am sure of it by Freemasons who have no objectives of their own but to flounder the plans of others. I’ll find you dear buzzing bug. You can not be just a sound forever.
4. Piece II
He wants in, sometimes, that Claude. As if he’s uncommon. Though in what way is he not? Do we not all answer to the same muse? Whose his is mine, mine is his. Ungovernable and hidden only by what portion of the moon we choose to see.
5. Piece III
A banana becomes white when the pants are off. Almost I could say this goes for some other hobbies. Habits. I wrest the time to become in brief inspired. Oh, the notes come and some go and they come in dull flourish and they come full whittled to the bare unadorned without-pants amount of message I’ve been on the lookout on.
6. What’s More
I could have ended even earlier but I say the resolution hangs in air like the best gnat or noseeum. We go about this calmly.
7. Rehash
My slow waltz with you my dear my dear self. Me, the sea-bird’s nephew. The one who walks slowly with an air of attention, amusement and curiosity and at times inside it’s anything other. What stars might gather in their nosey gaze upon my walk I walk me home.
Mirabeau Passing
David Hayden
What is recalled flows over me under the bridge. The sun reaches through the water to my body, its softening tissue weighted below by dense knots of words that descend in a tangle from my mouth into my stomach and intestines. There are three heavy rings on each finger. My boots have long since slipped into the silt. If I turn to left and to right, I can see the faces of the Seine, their silent remembering, their smiles and other contortions.
Time returns as weight and motion: riverine and turbid, holding, shifting particles and pieces of the life above, their shit and coffee cups, all abundance. Navigation is not possible in time, no commerce is possible with its passage, clinging cannot save us, he said. Verbs dissolve in the river, giving its water a flavour we, its inhabitants, cannot identify.
In the day, passing drivers might not be able to bear looking at the river with its massive freight of feeling, stories and silences. We beneath are fluvial and constant, and know the permanence of the intolerable. The days, the journeys, the weeks, the journeys, the years, the journeys, the loves, the journeys, end here. We had children, or not, and we left the children, or the no-children, behind, in our real, in our possible, pasts. We reached out in love and were loved and unloved, and loved and unloved in turn. All that lasted did not last.
I stand on the bridge with you in another time and, later, without you. Down below was my future self. I call out to my past self, and to you where you stood looking down at the river, as it was, unable to see its life in other times.
When night arrives, the bells of some forgotten church bid us rise to the surface where we gaze through smoke into the stars, at their long, continuous arrival, embracing with relief the unmeaning. If we could be seen from the banks we might appear as outsized rotten blooms shivering in a silver garden.
We look up as two cops appear over the green lip of the bridge. One looks back briefly, his arm darts and arcs as he throws a cloth-wrapped something over our heads, that lands with a gulp, beyond sight and touch. Evidence reaches deeper, past knowing and naming, leaving us with the partialities from which we select to make our truths. Hope does violence to hope.
Walkers pass alone together, alone alone, together together, before passing altogether. The hour sounds. We gave each one a number, and the days, the months, the ages, names. The city was Paris. The city is Paris.
The faces of the Seine, the faces of the lost, we turn to each other, arms aloft and aloft, and we reach and link, and bridge from one bank to another, from one time to another, from one love to another: love that had passed away, and desire, the least of love. There is no return, no refrain, only passing, in the river beneath the bridge at Mirabeau.
Flowing, Slow, Violent — A Fantasy
Daniela Cascella
…courante, lente, violente. Courante, lente, violente. Courante, lente, violente. CouranteLenteViolente. In transparencies, limits of the limitless, madness of a sounding memory which busies itself among forbidden thoughts. Courante, lente, violente. Courante, lente, violente. Cour… Coeur… Coeur, my heart, I was sick. Sick to death with the long agony, sick of the stitches in my mouth, sick of waiting for words. I wanted to sing this like a catastrophe, or a kick in the eye. But words failed, senses were leaving me, facts of life of body of mind in transparencies, soon to vanish. First the dark. Then a long stretch of silence. Then the inhale, the deceiving pause in which all seems still. Then no voice. Then the reawakening. Then the words without reason, garbled signal. Then reason found in rhyme. Then the need to lose once again reason. Then the fall, blood, eyes still shut. Muted recollection of the previous night’s conversation after rehearsal —So what are you going to do? —In truth, I never cared much about Paris-as-literary-milieu, so what? —Ever dream of going back there? — Drea…? This is when I fell on the ground, from dread. I was so tired and bored with thinking of Paris, of singing of Paris, that I chose a more troublesome encounter. I had to put a rhyme into this. Inappropriate, I know, but no matter.
I’d be cautious with it, so the rhyme would slowly take over then burst, the rhyme and its violent echo, courante, lente, violente, the rhyme would burst the stitches, flowing, slow, violent, sighing one unto the other, courante, lente, violente sighing, and flowing, slow, violent was that summer evening of the fall, when my mouth started bleeding and it was blood from soul, and from seul, only blood of inkept sealed ensouled desire; blood, and aether. Dumbed, the torture began with words imagined from nerves and their outlines, their sounds. Having realized that writing the word “Paris” did not hold Paris, and “sing” certainly did not allow me to sing. It only kept singing in my ears, the word, unsure of the refrain, unsure which song it belonged to, other than the unspoken sealed ensouled inkept song of my stitched-up mouth and bleeding mind, soul, seul, alone. O the incantatory solitude!
So as I said, I was bored, had no words, no voice, had fallen on the carpet. What next? Bitter words, and that rhyme. Courante, lente, violente. Couldn’t scream, couldn’t sing all the clichéd love songs in Paris that I never quite heard but pretended to remember; the images of love songs I never had, the remnants of lov
e songs that never existed, of love that intermittently exists, exhaled they all hammered in my head, in the head of me, hammered, “love”, s’en va, goes by. And I sought a refrain, a formula which… SHALL WE GO? …how torturous the wait for the inner rhyme, torturous the voiceless gaps, between the very courante, the very lente, the very violente. Shall we go? Shall we go to the Palais-Royal, a-a-a-a-al. Go, I mean, in my mind, as in this room still I stay, je demeure, fallen, on the carpet. The Palais-Royal, only a pretext to think again of the book with the ruin in its title, that paragraph announcing the voices from the Palais-Royal in which it is written that the dead are books. But what is the point of all this if nobody hears, if I’m a ruin? If only I could take some deep resonance from these speechless lungs, blood-filled lungs, if only the sound could be deafening and dispel, dispel the idea of Paris, the idea of Paris like the idea of North, the recluse pianist’s broadcast from isolation, when he says that I’ve remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North has remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid… Something really does happen to most people who go into the North … they become, in effect, philosophers. What happens then to people who go to Paris — do they become writers? As if. Oh no. Sometimes they disappear.
This agony, lente, this wound that cuts through my neck to the ear, violente, all possible beginnings for a song, such as, [inaudible], or it could be, [inaudible], or it could echo, [inaudible], but my mouth is stitched. Teeth, teeth, teeth! Inevitable inaudible counter-bones to breaths of refraction. That evening when a bird came out of my bleeding mouth and took away my voice, I did my best to keep the plumage. On the carpet still I stay, je demeure, courante, lente, violente, that evening the mouth started bleeding and it was blood from the mind, then from the cut on the throat, blood of inkept desire, flooding, flowing, courante. It kept singing in my ears, I thought I had nothing to sing about Paris but the haunting of a recalled rhyme reveals what I had to say, otherwise what is held after hearing? This is when the inner singing begins. This is how, when I have no voice, the song begins. An uneasy rhyme, and wouldn’t it be easier if I was given a catchier one? The mind bends in the constraint of this sound, Paris, Paris, Parisis, De Villeparisis, Madame, that book had to make its appearance here somehow, if only as a fleeting hint, but those are the best ones, those hints that generate unexpected significant echoes, hear, Paris, Parisis, Isis, or, as someone better attuned to the city than me once wrote, remember we are dealing with the goddess Isis. Her forbidding veil is off and not for a long time replaced. She moves now in transparencies. …do not ask what she is smiling about. … If you do you must be prepared for other things to happen. How about the other voices? Oh those are smart. Very smart. They have seen a lot. Seduced, sung. But do not assume that because this voice is silenced or out of tune, it ceases to exist, to desire. So it rains, so it sings. Remember, it sings, not I. Remember the day I understood that the verb “to sing” does not sing, “to write” does not write, and “to bleed” does not bleed. And learned to trust words for what they are, how they sing. Courante, lente, violente, their shapes, if only I could sing their rhythm, river-rhythm, flow of words, flowing, slow, violent, and still I stay, je demeure, could the song become percussion, buzz then chant-like. It’s not the city that escapes me, I do, and the night is mighty chilly, I try to sing a little ditty, but all that comes out is a sigh. Or, a murmur. Perhaps the song should begin in the Musée Gustave Moreau, that dizzying accumulation of pictures, that painterly phantasmagoria where I once thought I heard the murmur of lost desire, perhaps the song should be a dizzying ditty and partially secret like those figures hidden under thick layers of paint, like myself in the city and the murmurs I heard that day, hidden layers of lost desire, as if trapped in a canvas. The song should be sung in the pitch of voice of someone stitched inside a dream of that top room with only slits on the wall, paintings hanging all around, and no doors. If from my lips some chords on Paris, if from my stitched lips some words on Paris. Once I pronounced them, and if I pronounced them I want to hear them over and over, while in my head I hear a sigh of lost desire. Lock all the fine rounded words in the room upstairs. Sing clipped beginnings of song with stitched lips. Despite the stitched lips, the rhyme, courante, lente, violente. And this is when I empty my mind from Paris, city of folly, empty for me. To empty my mind from constraints of Paris, from clichés of constraint such as to exhaust a place in Paris, oh no, not the Oulipoists, to exhume a place in Paris, to exhume a plaice in Paris, plaice, fish, soluble fish, oh no, not the Surrealists, plaice, palaice, palais, I need to go to the Palais Royal, in the book with the ruin it its title the palace is a conglomerate of frayed layers of history, will anyone exhume me from beneath these layers of history, no, not exhume, it’s exhaust. Exhale? I only I hear my constrained breath against teeth, teeth, teeth.
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