Newsletter 83: Tourist Edition
On the surfeit of Saint-Germains in Paris, plus thoughts on social change at the Museum of Hunting and Nature.
Hello from Paris!
A former neighbor of mine is in town, and every day we’ve been wearing out our shoe leather, or blown rubber, whatever sneakers are made of these days.
I am not a traditional tour guide. One whole day was dedicated to Saint Germains. We made a quick visit to the cemetery by the nearby Saint-Germain de Charonne church, followed by a bus ride to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood stopping by its recently renovated abbey church of the same name. After lunch, we made a visit to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois where the tolling bells set off a massacre of protestants, but also has a great chapel where I once had a conversation with Mary.
Almost every day features some trees. The first day we spent at my beloved Bois de Vincennes. “Look! A little forest! Right in Paris.” I left covered with mosquito bites. My pal was blessedly untouched. A day or two later was the Jardin de Plantes, the botanical garden, which has a wooded area, too. “Look! A very old plane tree! Look! An ancient cypress. Or, no, cedar, From Lebanon. Planted in 1734.” Saturday we admired the trees, among other things, at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.
Yesterday, we went to the Hunting and Nature Museum, which I absolutely adore. Le musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is a quirky little place concerned with “looking at the relationship between humans and animals across history.” (Here’s a virtual tour. The software’s a little clunky, but give it a go.)
The pleasure of it, in part, is its self-awareness as a museum whose job is to present a series of things to be looked at, objectified, interpreted, the usual relationship of humans to animals, and often that of colonizers to the colonized, of “civilized” to “primitives.”
Almost every room has its jokes, its shifts of context in which perhaps, animals get a chance to look back at the humans, or white Europeans find themselves exposed as curiosities in fake natural history scenes. In the gun room, displayed like any other weapon, is a rifle that looks like all the others until you remark that its barrel is bent in a right angle. Before that, in a cabinet of curiosities, among the aborted fetuses in jars, is what I think is a stuffed rabbit crammed into a vessel with yellow liquid. It stares back at us with glassy eyes.
An early room focused on deer, and the curator called attention to how the ideas we imposed on them had changed. There was a stuffed stag I think, paintings of hunts, a tapestry with deer imagery from the Middle Ages when they were seen as a stand-in for Christ, the antlers falling off every year then regrowing, a metaphor for the Resurrection. Their ten points, meanwhile, were a reflection of the ten laws, the ten commandments. I remember a painting or drawing showing one legend in which Christ on the cross appeared to a hunter in the antlers of a stag. That hunter went on to become St. Eustache. Now it makes sense to me why Leonora Hamill filmed a stag, named Chambord, in the Church of Saint-Eustache in Paris for her piece Furtherance.
At any rate, prodded by the curators, who, after going into depth about animal imagery in the Middle Ages, wrote that in the Renaissance humans began to think of nature as in the service of Man, and not as a revelation of the Divine, I began thinking about the interpretation of things, and how those ideological filters dramatically change. This brought to mind, Against Interpretation, the Susan Sontag essay which reflects on art and theory, and encourages us to try to see with eyes as naked and theory-free as possible.
It also got me thinking about the abortion fight in the U.S., and what that means at a moment when gender ideologues are busy imposing their own filters as they attempt to erase, not just the word, woman, but the actual material reality of our bodies as if female ones will quit bleeding, quit hogging pregnancy for themselves and popping out babies if militants just insist on it long enough.
I don’t mean to rain on the gender parade, but that’s a losing battle in the long term. The female body will persist in being what it is. Nevertheless, such ideas can have an impact, screw things up legally for females, derail the movement we need to protect our rights, make physical alterations for those with gender dysphoria not just a possibility but an obligation. In fact, far fewer people would have dysphoria if there weren’t so much social meaning assigned to bodies.
The thought crossed my mind that we’ve been doing it all wrong, or I have, this matter of social change, aiming for liberation or equality by way of identity politics which, when it comes down to it, is often about fighting over the meaning of bodies, asking for bodies to be reinterpreted, rather than demanding they not be interpreted at all. None of them. Because isn’t that in part what inspires racism, too, the interpretation of what skin color means? Strip away the interpretation of it, and all skin is just the exterior covering of our flesh which has a purpose, of course, but no greater meaning in itself.
Homophobia wouldn’t be a problem, either, if we hadn’t assigned meaning to certain kinds of bodies, and combinations of them, some of which were then forbidden to canoodle.
Isn’t misogyny, too, the attribution to female bodies in comparison to male ones, a lesser value, but also a greater terror suffused with ideas of contamination and dirt that must be contained and controlled at all costs? (I am not talking about denying how something functions, which means denying reality — a huge philosophical and anthropological shift far beyond identity politics.) There absolutely are differences in function between sexed bodies, not only in reproduction, but in size and strength, even the workings of our hearts and intestines. These are all important. They exist. Have implications for our lives, and for our health. But they don’t mean. We humans are the ones who impose meaning on difference, endlessly interpret, continually de- and re-contextualizing them.
For a minute, I sat on a bench staring at a giant stuffed polar bear and tried to imagine just being. Some religions encourage it. I wondered what would happen if, on a large scale, we tried to see without interpreting. Merely celebrate the thingness of the thing. It doesn’t seem possible. Animals, including humans, are programmed to recognize patterns, search them out, impose them even if they aren’t there. We look up at the sky and are practically required by our brains to interpret that cloud as dragon or rabbit or troll. Why not Mary?
The only thing that will save us is recognizing how meaning shifts, that it is somewhat arbitrary, conditioned by culture, not inevitable at all. And our eyes pollute everything we see. Sometimes with our fears. Sometimes our hopes. The meaning we assign to things today is not eternal or permanent. It’s a phase, a passing fancy. Even the greatest cathedrals crumble and burn. Perhaps the main difference between me and a tree is not a matter of biology, but that I am obscenely impatient, and continually move.
Lost: Urvashi Vaid
Urvashi Vaid died of cancer on May 14. If you don’t know about her you should. She’s was an extraordinary advocate for LGBT rights, wasn’t afraid to speak the word lesbian, or feminist, and also pushed the movement to do better for people of color and working class people. I really admired her for her human qualities. She was among the most generous, open, and kind people I’ve ever met.
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That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,