Hello from Paris!
Well, we had a little heat wave, followed by a return to wet and chilly autumn weather, which will probably be followed by another canicule, what with global climate change and all.
I, of course, picked the hottest day to take out the bike, go to the foresty Bois de Vincennes, get slightly lost, then find myself at the Hippodrome where they have harness-racing. Just across the street I was surprised to find the Marne river which was gorgeous and oddly pastoral.
Because Google map said there was a bike path you could follow all the way back into the city, I set off. And off, and off. Getting further from the Marne with every rotation of my wheels because at the place I entered the path, the river apparently shot off in a rather different trajectory and I missed some crucial turn.
I was almost glad. It became an adventure.
And so I went on. And found a couple of towns I had no idea were so close to Paris. And finally got to the Marne again as it merged with the Seine. And then rode down a bike path next to a highway into the really industrialized area of Bercy which in the shimmering heat reminded me of riding my bike when I was thirteen or fourteen in Louisville and I’d just… go places. Didn’t matter where. Just that I was in motion, powered by my own flesh. It even smelled nearly the same, the faint scent of a river, tarmac, exhaust brought to you on a breeze you create yourself.
Then, pedaling away on the riverside path guiding me into Paris, I had a sudden realization about what roads are. I mean, you’re on this thing you’ve never been on before, and you’re trusting it to take you where you want to go. But at the same time you chose it, it manages you. Shapes your trip, making you go this way and not that. All so easy that you’ll do as it bids. And I suddenly felt a low-key panic like a very mobile rat being tunneled into a kind of trap.
The feeling didn’t last, thank god. But it sent my brain back to Orwell and his essay, Politics and the English Language, which I quoted last week.
The part I thought about this time was about how ready-made phrases and language construct your thoughts for you:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
I paused for some water and to remind myself that I actually love bike paths. They are a matter of safety, and also comfort, though intellectually, as a writer, I try to embrace my pedestrian past in New York, where people are always wandering off here and there. Jay-walking. Climbing over obstacles. Sometimes forging a more direct path. Sometimes taking an alternative route just because it inspires them. Refusing roads. Refusing the markers that direct us.
Sometimes I refuse words, and cook, tinker, repair instead. It’s a different kind of language, though Walter Benjamin may disagree about the size of the gap between verbal language, and the language of things. I confess I’ve been reading his mystical essay On Language As Such, and on the Language of Man. I need to spend more time over it to understand because it’s even more dense and theological than the bible verse I used to quote to myself when I was a teenager and a believer, and felt you could conjure things with words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God…”
Language communicates the linguistic being of things. The clearest manifestation of this being, however, is language itself. The answer to the question “What does language communicate?” is therefore “All language communicates itself.” The language of this lamp, for example, does not communicate the lamp (for the mental being of the lamp, insofar as it is communicable, is by no means the lamp itself), but: the language-lamp in communication, the lamp in expression. For in language the situation is this: the linguistic being of all things is their language. . . . This proposition is untautological, for it means: that which in a mental entity is communicable is its language. . . . Or: the language of a mental entity is directly that which is communicable in it. What is communicable of a mental entity, in this it communicates itself. Which signifies: all language communicates itself. Or more precisely: all language communicate itself in itself; it is in the purest sense the “medium” of the communication.
I go back and forth. Language and action. The silence and stillness of refusal. Since the bike, I’ve been wondering about a third way, silence and motion.
Which this week brought me here.
That’s it for now.
Come back next time for a return to your regularly scheduled program on gender, sex, age and the media, plus whatever crosses my mind!
Always yours,