Читать книгу Beyond Homer - Benjamin W. Farley - Страница 12

A delicate, translucent blue sky stretched across the morning horizon. I had awakened earlier than usual and had pulled back the curtains to peer out the windows. After so many gloomy and rainy days, it portended better weather. I glanced at my watch. It was 6:08, too early for breakfast down stairs. I shaved, showered and dressed and decided to catch a cup of coffee at the little news kiosk on the corner of the street just up from the pension. Its proprietor, a Greek, often managed a smile when he saw me coming. Usually, I didn’t visit his stand until mid-morning. We would banter for a few minutes. Afterwards, he would steam up his machine and serve my coffee.

“Ah! My American friend, a bit early today! The sky is très joli, isn’t it? You should be visiting my country. The smell of our coffee! The aroma of the beans! The odor of fresh baked loaves! Our cheeses and goat’s milk—all fit for the gods! What will it be?”

By now he knew, so I stood there until he served up his Peloponnesian version of mud-thick coffee, which I drank without sugar or cream.

“Remember. Sip it. Don’t gulp it.”

I paid and bought a copy of Le Miroir Français. I had not read Gibert’s paper’s columns for over a month now. I preferred Le Monde and the international edition of The Herald Tribune. Even then, I read them less than twice or three times a week. My own work consumed inordinate mental energy. What little free time remained, left practically none for papers. Reflecting on each day’s study, my findings, translations, writing, and walks claimed any residual vitality.

I sat on a bench near the metro entrance and turned to the editorial page. There was Gibert’s column. “De Gaulle’s Third Force and its Meaning for France.” I knew that de Gaulle had abandoned the presidency less than a year ago and that Gaullism, as it was called, was fast fading as a polestar for a post-de Gaulle France. But as I skimmed the article, it was clear that Gibert was still wed to the old General’s vision of France as a troisième pouvoir, a third independent power, between the British and Americans, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Block, on the other. He feared the thought that de Gaulle’s successors would surrender that objective, and that France would reel back into political weakness. I looked for the major thread of his piece:

We have lost our North African Empire, our prestige in Chad and in the Cameroon, our honor and pride at Dien Bien Phu. Who listens to us in London, Moscow, or Washington? Or takes us seriously even in Quebec? Or Cairo? Or Lebanon? Our voice has been silenced, our langue intermingled with the dialects of a hundred

alien tongues. Our cultural achievements but monuments to a grandeur that is passing away. Who comes to our shores now, to our treasures of art and history, but the curious, the profligate, the philistine? That is not the France of the future, or with a future, but with a vestige of decay.

Like it or not, France must interject herself again upon the Moulin Rouge of modernity. Fighting Cervantes’ windmills in rusting armor no longer charms the world. We must command a say in the political affairs of the globe, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, Palestine, and the Far East, if we are to reclaim our place in history as a people worthy of her past. Yes, that may require a military force, prepared to protect and enhance French interests and culture, wherever either faces risk. Yes, it means continued opposition to NATO, when NATO excludes our interests.

Yes, it means a courageous Non to American imperialism, when that imperialism imperils our own destiny and fate. De Gaulle sought to make us proud again. Yes, he made mistakes. He could be vain, pigheaded, and, yes, wrong. But in his heart of hearts, he was right. He was French. He was a nationalist, through and through. He tilted in the jousts of the greatest kings of the crown. Charlemagne, along with the Valois, the Bourbons, and Napoleon, would have understood his cause, embraced his zeal. No state is perfect; no king, emperor, or president is without fault. No nation of sovereign people has ever existed without revolutions, quarrels, and defeats. But how I despair to see our country become a stripped and silent mannequin in the shop windows of a decadent world, coming of age.

There was an advertisement at the bottom of the page for his forthcoming book; but no date of publication was mentioned. I turned to the arts and fashion section to see if Mme. Gibert had written anything. No, she hadn’t. But the paper announced Mme. Monique Gibert’s plans to conduct a guided tour of Fontainebleau, to include the chateau, its new furnishings, as well as a walk about the park. The date was the second Friday of May. One could reserve a seat on the tour bus by simply calling the number listed. The bus would leave from Sainte-Chapelle, promptly at eight that morning. I tore out the number, glanced through a few more articles, then dropped the paper in a nearby waste drum. I decided that I would sign up for this événement. Besides, Mme. Gibert had captivated my interest, and being in her presence again would be exciting and pleasurable. Her eyes had searched my own so invitingly, her glances at once flirtatious and monitorial, seductive and remonstrative. I would have to be prepared.Prepared or not for Mme. Gibert, I was unprepared for what erupted upon my return to the pension.

“Another robbery!” shrilled the French, red-haired woman, who had scolded her daughter the night before. “Will it be murder next?” she all but shouted in Madame Dufavre’s face.

“Please, Madame, control yourself. I have called the police. They will be here soon.”

I could have sworn I saw a man in the Madame’s apartment. He had slunk behind the door the instant I looked his way. He had been slipping into his coat, as if to depart. I knew what Angleterre would conclude.

“My jewelry, Francine’s, a watch, and my money—all, all are gone!”

“Ah, Professor Clarke, you are always so calm!” Dufavre addressed me, as if that mantra would bring solace to the woman.

“How does that help?” wailed the young French mother. “We shall have to move if it can’t be found.”

Dufavre looked away with grim intensity. Suddenly, Angleterre appeared with a torn pillow slip in her hands. “I found this on your balcony. It was caught on the inside window latch. Money and jewelry are still in it.” She handed it to Dufavre, to verify her discovery.

“That’s mine!” said the woman, snatching it from the proprietress’s hand. “Thank God! What a hell of a place! What a way to start the day! At least, the bastard dropped it!” She immediately looked inside to see if anything was missing.

The man in Dufavre’s apartment had still not come out. If he had been the thief, then how did he get off the balcony? Had he simply walked out through the woman’s room? No! The pillow slip got caught in the window. He must have exited that way. We heard a siren in the street. The gendarmes would soon be in the hall. I went back to the stairwell, climbed the steps to the fourth floor, and returned to my room. I would forego breakfast, study awhile, and take a walk. It was difficult, however, to concentrate on my work. Pascal was a thousand miles removed from my thoughts, as were Rousseau, Baudelaire, Descartes and Kant. Fighting distraction, I picked up a book of Rainer Rilke’s poems and began reading. Like Baudelaire, Rilke had a way of inserting his consciousness into the objects of his lyrical observations. He brought a whole other way of lifting his subjects into the reader’s awareness, and therefore of providing a shocking venue for an immediate self-consciousness and knowledge of the world. His way of knowing, his epistemological methodology, defied definition. Was it something I should use in my own book? It was more gestalt than logical, an all-at-once assault, a comprehension that revealed the truth, while concealing the miracle of how. Husserl attempted to “bracket the truth,” but the phenomenological character of Rilke’s approach inspired my interests. Nowhere was this more transparent than in his poem, “The Panther.” After consulting my German dictionary for words like allerkleinsten and angespannt, I translated his work as follows:

The Panther

From ever gazing through the endless bars

his sight, now dazed, has lost its focal power;

before him looms a thousand tedious bars;

behind him, a caged-in world retires.

The soft gait of his strong and supple stride

turns on the circle of the tightest point;

like a ballet dancer poised at center stage,

his mighty will stares back, stupefied.

Sometimes his pupils’ membranes blink

enough to let an image in;

it glides along his tense and quivering limbs

and dies unrecognized in his heart.

That kind of philosophy unnerved me. Yet it spoke the truth; it struck the limpid chords of my mind with somber reality. Yes! This is life. We know it in our head and in our soul. Life is dying in our hearts. Silent and stupefied, we gaze from our cage, like Rilke’s panther, our wills petrified. Our outer frame remains, but our limbs do not respond. Heidegger would label this way of knowing personal. His famous definition of Dasein, or of being, hinged on the realization that the beingness of being is always personal, mine, my own, and that it equally includes the future, my future, and all its possibilities. The Panther had no future, because he had no possibilities of choice, no place to step, save in his endless path behind the iron bars.

Such knowing requires rigorous self-analysis and unflinching self-consciousness. From this epistemological basis, Heidegger would go on to characterize human life as a troika of stringent facts: that our Dasein, or our beingness, occurs at a particular time and place, within the context of a particular culture, language, and history. He called this its facticity, which we must own and cannot deny. Second is existence. It entails the recognition that we are accountable for our lives and what we make of them. To that extent, moods of guilt and remorse are not our enemies, but our friends. They represent choices that have run amuck but which can be rectified. Lastly, comes fallenness, or forfeiture. If we do not seize upon our existence, take accountability for its past and future, and acknowledge the facticity of our time and place—that we are here and not somewhere else—then we will fall into inauthenticity and forfeit our Dasein. “The Panther” was Rilke’s symbol of fractured Dasein, long before Heidegger had taken up his pen.

It was all so clear on paper, in Heidegger’s books and mind. But how could I tell that to Madame Angleterre, or Madame Cueillier, the waitress, or Charlene, the dishwasher, or even Odette Dufavre? “Listen, all of you. Cast off your forfeiture! Come down, dear waitress from the servants’ floor; descend those steps, dishwasher girl; abandon that attic where you mold for a brighter world! And who will give you that brighter world? Why, of course, you and you alone! Yes! You, yourself. Who else did you think would give it to you?” Already their choices were compromised, their facticity defined by dishes and towels, by their failure to qualify for the école normale supérieure. Now they were faced with a thousand unyielding bars. Yet, Heidegger was right. At what point does the Panther’s blink stop sinking in its heart, forcing its fangs to bear and its lips to snarl? I walked to the windows and looked out again. A topaz sky beckoned me to come into the streets, to find reprieve from the madness of learned tomes, and to experience existence through my own feelings and moods, my own sensory preceptors and psychosphere.

Bright sunshine filled the Garden of Luxembourg’s aisles. Their flower beds and blossoming plants welcomed the radiant sun. A lemon hue bathed the refection pools and statues in languorous light. I wandered down past the central basin, where little boys skipped about the lake and watched their boats sail across the water. I found a bench in a quiet corner by the Medici Fountain. As I listened to its restful cascades, a chapel hymn from seminary days drifted through my mind:

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains.

I am seated with my Uncle Harry on his farmhouse porch. It is spring and the lone lilac bush in his front yard bows from the weight of clusters of scented purple blossoms. Honey bees fill the air with their hum. He rocks rhythmically to and fro. I have come to celebrate his eighty-third birthday. His tanned gnarled hands grip the rocker’s arms, his faded bib-overalls are too large for him, and the crown of his sweat-darkened Stetson is stained deep red from so many years of handling. The air is cool, and he wears a dark, green, flannel-lined denim jacket.

“I’m glad you seen the light,” he says. “We Clarkes was never meant to be religious. I told your Aunt Sally, you was making a huge mistake. Maybe we’re spiritual when it comes to the land, but never religious. At least, you’ve gotten out. What triggered it?”

“The whole experience, Uncle Harry. The wasted afternoons of pastoral calls, when nobody was at home, or wanted you around. Plus the dogma. I had to make my peace with it.

I’d rather be a pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,

or hear ole Triton blow his wreathed horn,

to quote the bard,

than Sunday after Sunday preach a Jesus

I couldn’t believe in any more.”

“I figured you’d come around in time.” He began rocking thoughtfully. “When I was young and still in the Navy, I messed around with a lot of whores. Maybe they wasn’t whores, and maybe not that many, but enough. I stayed drunk most of the time. One night, when I was half-sober, half-lit, I slipped into bed with this young girl. She had the most beautiful long hair I had ever seen. She had dyed it blonde, and it fell full length around her shoulders, and about her breasts. She was slender, almost frail, and wanted to please me, since I’d paid her upfront. ‘Let’s do it doggie,’ she said. She got on her knees and I got up against her back and placed my hands on her hips. Right there, under my palms, was two tattoos, linked by rose stems across her lumbars. On the right was the tattoo of an angel, with wings swooped back and bare feet as tan as the girl’s body. On the left, under my other hand, was a cross, with the bowed head of the Christ hanging down. For months after that, I couldn’t screw anymore. Then I met Sally and fell in love. After we married, I stopped drinking, went to church for a while, but felt more comfortable here, just rocking and day-dreaming and sometimes talking to myself. But I’ve never forgotten that girl, or her tattoos. And I finally figured out what they mean. I’ve tried to live by them and offer it to you.” He stopped rocking and looked at me. “There’s not a human life that ain’t salvageable, if it wants to be. That’s what they mean. Remember that, and you’ll treat people right. It’ll be the only religion you need.”