Weekend in Paris

A thousand curses upon the absentmindedness that caused me to leave my camera behind when I went for the weekend to Paris, surely one of the most picture-worthy cities I could possibly have visited....!  I am not used to thinking of myself as a scatterbrained person, but I fear that it is a tendency I am growing into.  It may be a mark of how much I have been traveling around this fall, but I seem to leave a trail of personal belongings everywhere I go.  Not only did I forget the aforementioned camera, but I believe I left my toothbrush and toothpaste at Aurélie's on Friday night--at least I didn't have them when I got to Paris!  If I go on like this, I will have to keep all my affairs attached to my wrist on a string....

But I digress.  The point of this posting is to catch up on my trip to Paris over the last three days, albeit without accompanying illustrations.  It is well and truly winter here, now, and I arrived in the city of lights just ahead of a weekend of snow that was supposed to hit Cosne.  It did not snow in Paris (except for a little dusting of car-hoods on Sunday night) but it was f***ing cold nonetheless.  I had moments when I feared that I would repeat the unfortunate frostbite incident of last winter, which I had no desire to do (believe me, you never want to look down again and discover that your toe is black!)  Fortunately, I did not spend enough time outside for that to happen, although I did wait for almost an hour in the lowering dusk on Saturday afternoon to go up into the towers of Notre Dame.  It was kind of grueling, and there were rather a lot of stairs when I finally got inside, but the view from the top was totally worth it, especially since you got to see the gargoyles up close and personal.  They are by and large refurbishments from the mid-nineteenth century, but they are modeled on statues dating from the cathedral's original construction in 12th through 14th century (these things were not built on an accelerated plan).  It is amazing, looking at these creatures, which were shaped like monstrous dogs and birds, and panthers, and even an elephant, to think about the world-view of medieval Europeans, which included the threats of diabolical presences such as these (as well as miracles, divine interventions, and unknowable supernatural occurrences) as part of the expected experience of everyday life.  It's also interesting to think about the statuary on the great cathedrals as being a teaching tool, instructing visitors who could not read or write about the biblical stories and the structure of the cosmos.  I was particularly struck by this when I was looking at the facades over the cathedral entrance, which was as close as I got to the inside of the church on this trip. After all that waiting to climb the tower, I could not face the idea of waiting in another line when I got down, so I had to put that on my list of things to do when I come back.

Of course, in two days I was only able to see the merest fraction of everything there is to visit in Paris.  I made it to the Musée Nationale du Moyen Age yesterday morning, which was a good intro to the museums of Paris--small enough that I could go through it in and hour and a half (although I was a little pressed for time at the end, and I could probably have spent more like 2 or 3 hours there), and I got to see the tapestry of the lady and the unicorn, which is superb.  You understand why it is so famous.  It's beautiful, and mysterious in a way (since the symbolism of the different figures is not totally clear).  It made me think of Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn.

This morning I made my final museum trip of the weekend to see a special exhibit at the Musée de l'Arte et de l'Histoire du Judaisme.  It had been recommended by a friend of the friend I went with, and I took her advice, although I had never heard of the artist, Felix Nussbaum, before.  I'm really glad I went, as it turns out.  Felix Nussbaum was a young man in the early 20th century, who tragically never had the chance to be more than a young man, since he died in Auschwitz in 1944, but he--amazingly, in the face of all the hardship he suffered--kept painting as long as he possibly could, all through the years of conflict and persecution, recording and transmogrifying the terrible things he witnessed into paintings that are incredibly powerful.  His work reminded me at different times of Picasso, Magritte, and Chagall, and it was definitely a product of the modernist era in which he lived, but it was also very personal (lots of self-portraits, a bit like Frieda Kahlo).  One of my favorites (which I wished I could have found a copy of), was one of his earlier works, one that seemed to be making a rejection of the traditional inheritance of western art, but also expressing an powerful and spooky imagination.  It was an image of the Colusium in Rome, isolated in a sort of a barren space, with nearby the figure of a man embracing a woman with her back to the viewer.  Her head was covered with a scarf and she was sort of see-though, although she threw a dark shadow, and the man's face, looking towards you, was haggard.  It was like he was trying to embrace a ghost.  Not all of Nussbaum's paintings were equally grim; his earlier work had flashes of this very lively dark humor, that got darker and darker and finally disappeared the farther into the '40s his paintings got.  By the end of the exhibit, the artworks were responding to such terrible things that they were difficult to look at.  Many of these things, it is important to see them, but the experience is not an easy one.  I was glad to have gone, though, and I think it's fortunate (and not at all guaranteed) that Nussbaum's paintings, which were only rediscovered in the 1970's, are still here for people to look at.