Orphic Paris

by Henri Cole

  I sat on a chair by her bedside. . . . Alice asked me questions about myself, about my life in America. She said that she thought I had been wise to go back there to live. She felt that she herself had been fortunate to live away from America before it became the most powerful country in the world, because she thought it would be difficult for anyone to live abroad and find fulfillment there if he were leaving behind the most powerful country in the world. I am naturally not so sure as she was about that. I asked whether Miss Stein had felt likewise, and Alice said, “Gertrude never left home in the same way I did. She was always at home through the language, but I was at home only through her.”

  Part X

  A MILD WINTER has prompted the vegetation of Paris to wake up early. Since February, plum, cherry, and almond trees have been blossoming in France, and the buds on the hazelnut trees are releasing grains of pollen into the wind. Has grim winter really ended?

  If the temperature is higher than twelve degrees Celsius, the bees become curious and depart their hives to gather pollen. It’s a signal that a new cycle is beginning. The drones bustle about in the hive, drawing on their reserves to feed the larvae. But what will happen if a cold snap comes? With so many hungry mouths to feed, will the reserves run out and the little colony die? A burst of life that comes too early can be hazardous for the bees. This sounds dark and theatrical, as if from a poem by Baudelaire, where the grit of life comes under the most meticulous pressure of language, and art results. Even though Baudelaire was wary of the lushness of nature (“I have always thought that there was in Nature, flourishing and reborn, something impudent and distressing”), I respect him for abandoning the decorum of the past.

  As a poet, I am a worker bee beside other workers who are metabolizing language, like nectar, into poetry. I try to do my work, even when this means invisibility. Like a worker bee, I take something raw and try to make something gold from it. At the flower market, when I buy sunflowers, I am followed home by giant, furry bumblebees, which are intoxicated by the sunflowers’ richly carpeted faces. Might they see me as one of their own?

  IN A HIVE, the queen’s single function is to lay lots of eggs. She is different from the other bees because of her size and splendor. And she is surrounded by fifty thousand worker bees, who have many different functions or careers.

  Among them are the cleaner, the nurse, the builder, the fanner, the sentinel, the gatherer, the undertaker, and the packer. The cleaner is responsible for the general upkeep of things. The nurse is occupied with the care of the larvae, which must be fed a thousand times. The builder constructs the beautiful honeycombs, which are fabricated from secreted wax—delicate, exhausting work. The fanner regulates the temperature of the hive, beating its wings constantly to air out the hive and dry the nectar. The sentinel protects the colony from its enemies, who desire to rob the reserves. You might say that the sentinel is like a poetry reviewer or critic. The gatherer hunts for nectar, pollen, and water. It makes between ten and a hundred journeys each day. Some bees become gatherers straightaway, but others never reach this high status. Flying at a mad speed, the gatherer exhausts itself quickly and dies after only four or five days. I think that some poets are gatherers, like Sylvia Plath. And the undertaker bees carry their dead brothers and sisters out of the hive.

  Finally, the packer bee sips up the nectar and regurgitates it and sips it up again, repeating the process over and over, adding saliva enzymes of its own, until the nectar is dehydrated and changed into honey to be stored in the hexagonal cells (stanzas?), which are covered over with fine wax, like a cork, for good conservation.

  Here at my desk, I resemble a packer bee, striving to put enough pressure on language to transform it into poetry, regurgitating my nectar again and again until honey is formed. I had a beloved teacher who said verse (a late Old English word) must

  reverse itself, and go around and around. In contrast, prose (a Latin word) proceeds and moves forward without repetition.

  NEAR THE END of her life, Sylvia Plath wrote a sequence of bee poems, and in a letter to her mother she said about them, “They will make my name.” Written in a single week in the autumn of 1962, when her marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes was breaking up, she placed them at the end of her important second book, Ariel, but two years later, when the book appeared after her death, Hughes revised this order, downgrading the bee poems to a less triumphant position in the collection.

  In another letter, Plath wrote, “I know nothing of bees,” though her father was Otto Plath, an entomologist who’d published a book titled Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934). When she was a little girl living on the North Shore of Boston, Plath’s father kept beehives. She was only eight when her mother had to tell her of his death, and she replied, “I’ll never speak to God again!” Many years later, when she was living in Devon, England, with her husband and two young children, she described in her journal a visit to a meeting of the Devon beekeepers:

  We were interested in starting a hive, so dumped the babies in bed and jumped in the car. . . . We felt very new & shy, I hugging my bare arms in the cool of the evening . . . everybody was holding a bee-hat, some with netting of nylon. . . . The men were lifting out rectangular yellow slides, crusted with bees, crawling, swarming. I felt prickles all over me, & itches. . . . They were looking for queen cells – – – long, pendulous, honey-colored cells from which the new queens would come. . . . I was aware of bees buzzing and stalling before my face. The veil seemed hallucinatory. . . . “Spirit of my dead father, protect me!” I arrogantly prayed.

  Plath’s bee sequence contains five poems that are unified by a cinquain (five-line) stanza pattern and a preoccupation with bees and beekeeping. The poems in Ariel have a harder, more abrupt freehand style than those in her first book, The Colossus. I don’t know which bee poem I like more, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (in which Plath puts her ear to the box and hears “furious Latin”) or “The Swarm” (in which the bees, a symbol of feminine energy, are shot at—“Pom! Pom!”—by the men in her village), because they all contain many original lines and images: “The white hive is snug as a virgin” and “I would say it was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby / Were there not such a din in it” and “The bees argue, in their black ball, / A flying hedgehog, all prickles.”

  When I was a poetry student in college, Plath’s poems were not a good influence on me. I was nineteen or twenty, and still learning that a poem isn’t just self-expression. But to a young man raised in a highly disciplined, military, Catholic household, she was like a blood jet. Still, almost forty years later, I admire this about her, especially when so much American poetry feels emotionally tepid and almost suburban. I believed then, and I still do, that a poem is organized violence. Like Baudelaire, Plath extended the boundaries of the lyric, taking the reader deeper into the shadows of her sorrow during the final weeks and months of her life. Even today, in certain quarters, she is trivialized and dishonored because of the confessional aspect of her poems.

  THE ANCIENT GREEKS associated lips anointed with honey with the gift of eloquence. Pindar, the ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes, was reportedly stung on his mouth by a bee when he was still a youth, and this became the explanation for his verses. Horace, the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus, likened himself in his odes to the bees on Mount Matinus, in Apulia, his birthplace, living off the dry hills and collecting thyme from flowers and shrubs. That the bees themselves made honey with their own bodies from the nectar was not generally accepted knowledge in classical times; instead, it was thought that the honey was gathered directly from flowers and that the bees added distinct flavors of their own.

  In France, bees, symbolizing immortality, were once an emblem of the sovereigns. Napoleon Bonaparte wore them embroidered into his regal garments and they ornamented many of his possessions. Surely the idea of kingdoms originates in nature with the bees. Surely the kingdom of poetry is not so different from that of a beehive.

  Some poets
are like the Brother Adam bees (named after the Benedictine monk who bred them) that are kept in a hive on the roof of the sacristy of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, on the Île de la Cité. They are productive, resistant to parasites, and gentler than most, soft and brown. Each day, these bees visit seven hundred flowers, helping the plants within three kilometers of the Gothic cathedral to realize themselves fully. Other poets, like me, are solitary creatures and more like the rougher bees in the wild, which are short tongued and carry their pollen snugly under their abdomens or attached firmly to their hind legs. Sometimes, when I hear bees buzzing, I think, “What else could love be but lots of buzzing, or hate?”

  Part XI

  WHY AM I WRITING all this down, dear reader? The answer is because I don’t want to conceal anything, or be surreptitious. Instead, I want to reveal something—everyday myths, fables, and allegories—that might otherwise remain dormant behind the intense beauty of Paris. Recently, I watched the 1939 film made from Victor Hugo’s immortal classic The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which is set at the end of the fifteenth century. The cast includes the English actor Charles Laughton as the kind, pitiable, but misunderstood Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer of the Notre-Dame Cathedral, who saves Esmeralda (played by Maureen O’Hara), the Roma street dancer (or Gypsy, as she refers to herself ), who is framed for a murder. With her goat, Esmeralda charms everyone but feels that because of her race she has been denied security, happiness, a good home, and prosperity. The film asserts soberly that we are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb. The Middle Ages have come to a close, and France is ravaged by a hundred years of war, but there is still hope among its citizens. Unfortunately, there is superstition, too, about a new form of expression and thought known as Gutenberg’s printing press, but, happily, King Louis XI is not superstitious. “Out there . . . all over France, in every city, there stand cathedrals like this one, triumphal monuments of the past . . . a book in stone,” he says, pointing to Notre-Dame. He tells us that cathedrals are “the handwriting of the past,” but “the printing press is of our time.”

  This theme of the new versus the old is a recurring one in the film, in which we are told, in verse: “The old can never last. / The new is claiming its place. / It’s foolish to cling to the past. / Believe in the future’s face.” I loved many things in the movie, like when a character says, “Being a poet I’m already a vagabond, and I can learn quickly to be a thief.” Later, he adds, “The poet doesn’t believe in force. I told you I could save you without force.” I was very moved when the barely verbal Quasimodo, overcome with longing for pretty Esmeralda, says to an ugly cathedral gargoyle, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?” As always, the book is darker than the film, and Esmeralda is not saved on her way to the gallows but hanged instead. She is entombed, and years later, a hunchbacked skeleton is found entangled with hers.

  LIGHT PENETRATING the colored glass of cathedral windows was once thought to be God’s most beautiful presence among us. “I never realized until now how ugly I am because you are so beautiful,” Quasimodo (who was abandoned as an infant on the steps of Notre-Dame) says mournfully to Esmeralda, who gives him a drink of water and a little pity. We have a devilish fascination with his ugliness—we shrink from it but want to look, too. I come to Paris, in part, because of its beauty. The call of life is too strong for me to resist, and this gives me a sense of emotional well-being, but is this an evolutionary feeling? Does it help me to survive? “Beauty,” as a noun meaning “physical attractiveness,” comes from the early fourteenth-century Anglo-French beute, and as a word connoting “a beautiful woman” it originates later in the century. “Beautician” is first recorded in American English in 1924 (in the Cleveland, Ohio, telephone directory). “Ugly,” as an adjective describing a “frightful or horrible” appearance, is older. It has a Scandinavian origin, probably from the Old Norse uggligr, meaning “dreadful, fearful.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s daring sonnet “Pied Beauty,” he defines beauty as “all things counter, original, spare, strange,” which seems perfect, allowing us to praise chestnuts, cattle, trout, finches, and plotted fields.

  THIS MORNING I OBSERVED a beautiful sleeping chipmunk. Animals—like humans—seek a safe, sheltered place to sleep. Deer make a bed out of unmown grass, rodents burrow in the soil, and apes create a pallet of leaves. In Paris, I sleep alone on a thick foam mattress. Because my dreams are incoherent, I lose any sense of time or place. Often I fly. I have to get up during REM sleep and write down my dreams, or I forget them. My eyes twitch like a dreaming cat’s, but this does not seem to be connected to my dreams. My eyes move because the neurons that innervate my face muscles are not deactivated, as they are in the rest of my long body. Mysteriously, I always get plenty of REM sleep in Paris. Therefore, I write.

  I wish I knew what my dreams were for. I wish I could define them. They seem to be a form of thought or some kind of illusion of reality. Certainly they are a source of intense emotion, so probably they protect me from what I really feel, which would be too painful to endure. In Paris, when I sleep late like a newborn baby, I say to myself, justifying my laziness, This is good for my brain and immune system. When I sleep, I roll over on my side and grab a big, soft feather pillow. This is a sign that I’m dreaming, like paws and whiskers moving about on a cat, or a dog whining and rolling its eyes back behind closed lids. I hope Paris will always be a stable place in terms of the quality and quantity of my sleep. I think this is a compensation for the little, banal degradations of everyday life. Sleep is, in part, my idea of beauty. I have tried to write about it in my poem “To Sleep”:

  Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand

  that stroked my brow, “Come along, child;

  stretch out your feet under the blanket.

  Darkness will give you back, unremembering.

  Do not be afraid.” So I put down my book

  and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,

  the autobiographical part of me, the am,

  snatched up to a different place, where I was

  no longer my body but something more—

  the compulsive, disorderly parts of me

  in a state of equalization, everything sliding off—

  war, suicide, love, poverty—as the rebellious,

  mortal I, I, I lay, like a beetle penetrating a rose,

  my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.

  YESTERDAY, I took a thermal photograph of my friend and translator Claire Malroux. I was looking at her the way a creature would look at her in the night on a street in the fifteenth arrondissement, where she lives. Animals have thermal receptors in their eyes that enable them to detect heat sources from a distance. Seeing Claire like this reminded me of when I was sixteen and took opiates that were too strong for my young mind, so I lay in bed for three days like a creature in a coma. I find I do not want or need to see the heat sources of the people I love, as a serpent sees them. I do not have to see the way a barn owl, a rat, or a moth sees in the dark because of the special rods in their eyes. In the backs of my eyes, I have a bright tapestry of human blood vessels. That’s why they are red when I am photographed with a flashbulb. I do not want to lose this human dimension, even after my good strong chin is gone and I live like a gargoyle in a nursing home, smelling of urine, feces, and other secretions.

  Because much of what I hope to achieve is still before me, I am always aspiring to say something true in an atmosphere of beauty (beauty again!), connecting my inner and outer space. I think that as long as I have this inner dimension I will want to create something out of language to reveal what is there—in particular, the ghastly, insane, and cruel things. Perhaps poetry is a kind of thermal photography of man in the world.

  TODAY A MAN was weeping next to me at the brasserie. He was young and drinking a Coke with a lemon slice bobbing in it. Every few minutes he wiped the tears from his cheeks and looked at me apologetically. He was wearing snug denim pants and his sideburns were neatly trimmed. Had he seen his f
uture in the bar mirror, I wondered? Had his young body, by unfair election, been touched by the incurable virus that has touched so many in my lifetime? Did he need a doctor? I was not at all prepared to encounter him, like a figure from the Old Testament under olive trees, with the scent of rosemary or lavender in the air. He seemed to float somewhere between heaven and earth. Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, and Adam were in the distance, back behind him. In the mirror, the sunshine made strange, flame-like wing patterns. On his table, a little bouquet of colorful posies made flames, too. He seemed super real to me, because there was nothing unreal about him or his sorrow. I wanted to speak to him but was afraid. We were both alone, and waiters hurried past, ignoring us. The young man had moist green eyes, like rough emeralds. Outside, in the square, a big scarred plane tree was shaking its branches. On the horizon, swollen clouds moved quickly. Nearby, on the pavement, a crow pushed its yellow beak into a seeping pink trash bag. I ordered a bowl of wild strawberries, which are in season, and took out my notebook and pen, because I didn’t know what else to do. Why do the gods make a sport of their play with us? We are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb, I wrote down.

  Part XII

  WHEN THE GERMAN POET Rilke arrived in Paris, in 1902, he was so unhappy that he wrote, “Sometimes I lean my head against the gate of the Luxembourg just to breathe in a little space, calmness, moonlight—but there, too, it’s the same leaden air, still heavy with the perfume of the too many flowers they have crowded into the borders. . . . The city is just too vast and overburdened with melancholy.” Rilke’s mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, advised the twenty-six-year-old that “you must choose one or the other, happiness or art.” But Rilke found Paris to be “bloated” with an “impatience to possess life immediately,” while he believed the real impulse of life was “calm, immense, elemental.” In this highly strung state, he considered Paris foreign, hostile, oppressive, febrile, and “close to death.” Rodin’s advice was to “work, nothing but work.”