Coming to the Table

I was honored to give the faculty welcome at this year's Opening Convocation.

Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

Welcome, everyone. I come to you with an invitation from the generous and esteemed faculty members by my side, one that bespeaks the good will with which we seek to think and work with you; and one that I hope will sustain you during your four years here. I study the Middle Ages, so we’ll start there, but no worries, we’ll end up back here. Right around 1414, six hundred very full years ago, John, Duke of Berry, had a party. It was New Year’s Day, the traditional feast day for exchanging gifts in the Middle Ages, and he’d gathered his household around a huge feasting table for the occasion. The event is pictured in a lavish manuscript he had made, and the glorious January page of his Very Rich Hours shows us what we’ve come to expect of a medieval banquet scene: knights and attendants reveling, heraldic finery, fabulous tights, and a table groaning with tasty dishes. But, there is a strange apparition beneath, or rather, mingled within this feasting scene. Amidst all the pomp and circumstance, tiny golden letters etched in mid-air above the revelers’ heads hover to spell out the words “aproch, aproch.” Suspended within this busy, festive, at times confusing atmosphere is this quietly insistent invitation: “approach, approach.” Come to the table, sit with me, talk with me, let us be together and understand all this and more.

Tables are rather ordinary objects, but they do extraordinary things. They are by design level surfaces, usually of geometric shapes (squares, rectangles, and of course you can talk to King Arthur about a Round Table), and mostly made of sturdy no-nonsense material. Yet despite these standard measures, they create a series of transformative spaces, and I would even argue times, apart. They turn food into a meal; talking into conversation; gesture into ritual; and sitting into gathering. In the most unassuming way, they host relationships. There’s a desk in your dorm room right now, waiting to hold a treasured photograph of your roommate, an award that means the world to you, the biggest biochemistry or art history book either of you have ever seen, and the first of many (many) delivery bags from Marvin’s. There are dining tables where you’ll sit with someone that at one point you didn’t know but now look for; there’ll be makeshift tables where you’ll set down a dish you made from a home recipe to share with friends during one of our famous winter nights. And there are seminar tables (so many!) in your classrooms where students before you struggled and triumphed with difficult work, where tough questions were asked, where laughter burst out unexpectedly, and where ideas changed.

The professors here with me have prepared many tables for you. The upper reaches of Asbury hold some of the oldest tables at DePauw and your thoughts and contributions will join those of thousands before you, and herald yet more thousands to come. The Green Center has some of the newest, but the urge to make music that energizes the building has been a part of the human condition for millennia. The ones in Olin auditorium have a certain age, but they always make me like a member of some futuristic inter-stellar federation (a nice feeling actually). There are numerous tables for you to discover at DePauw, and each one is an invitation from a professor. Some will be more abstract than others: there are lab tables and there is the periodic table of the element; there are seminar tables and tables of content. Matter or metaphor, they call for you to gather around ideas and work hard to understand them. So accept them all; look at your schedule of classes as a series of invitations to the table. When you pull up your chair to a seminar table, you are entering into a magnificent conversation that engages you, your professor and your peers and radiates to wherever knowledge illuminates understanding.

You all, each and every one of you here today, brings something to the table: your experiences, your curiosities, your questions, and your differences. No one comes empty-handed; everyone has something to offer. Do so gladly; talk willingly. Listen to each other; strive towards the lines of poetry, equations, molecular models, dilemmas, paintings, marvels of botany, miracles of music, and models of social justice and struggle that your professors share with you. And let the table do its work: let it bring you closer together, and closer to knowledge that was only a faint outline before. Come to the table with every expectation of being transformed by what you will experience there.
           There’s a great deal going on today: you’re saying a few intense good-byes and more hellos than you can count. When you leave here, it will be to go with your First Year Seminar professor and peers to share a meal together – maybe not a medieval feast, but a first gathering, a first pulling up of chairs. It may be a while before you get a chance to rest. But when you do, I invite you to think ahead just briefly to the end of the semester, to the emotions and accomplishments of your sitting around a familiar table from home. Parents and caregivers, I invite you to think of that same moment, when this young person you love so very much returns to you and starts to tell you of what they now know. That will be a feast day. That will be a day to celebrate much. In the meantime, entering class of 2018, on behalf of the faculty of DePauw University, I warmly invite you to “approach, approach” and come to the table.

Make-Believe

Bonsai at the Jardin d'Acclimation

I've always loved that English term, "make-believe." I love its directness and its hope, maybe even its innocence. I don't know if there's an equivalent term in French ("prétendre" doesn't count, "faire croire" is a phrase like any other, it doesn't mean "make-believe"). These past two days, we've walked in the Paris of make-believe: Paris presenting itself as the backdrop for one fantasy, one world of make-believe, after another. It's not that the city shimmers away, it's that in becoming the backdrop it blurs the line between itself and the fantasy it frames. Within the 850+ acres of the Bois de Boulogne lies the Jardin d'Acclimation. For years, I had thought it was a series of greenhouses (acclimated garden!), but it turns out to be a magical wonderland for children. There are goats and peacocks and carousels and ropes courses and crêpes and deer and bunnies and roller coasters and swings and boats and you name it. There is even a Cedar of Lebanon (I had to come to Paris to see my first live Cedar of Lebanon - I now see that heralding that your lover has "legs like the cedars of Lebanon" is indeed a compliment, oh Song of Songs). There is also a pretty astounding outdoor bonsai garden and...

House of Kiso (and Oliver)

... a Japanese country house brought to France wood panel by wood panel in the early 19th century as a gift to a renowned anthropologist. Imagine that!!! It had been reassembled in the Jardin des Plantes in the 5th arrondissement in Paris and then in the 1990s it had been moved to the Jardin d'Acclimation. Oliver and Mac were fascinated by the wooden joints (no nails were used at all), and we noted the stones weighing the roof down as being exactly the same technique used in Swiss alpine houses. The Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin d'Acclimation share this strange heritage of putting other cultures on display: making their reality a wondrous (but dangerous) make-believe. We read a tucked away sign that stated that the last human exhibits at the Jardin des Plantes were in 1931 (!) featuring peoples from an island in the South Seas. Hard to read, hard to see in this place. Children may always delight, but they have been given very different things to delight in in the past one hundred years.

Dauberton and the aviary

It was Napoleon III who decided to make this part of the Bois de Boulogne an enormous children's park with a farm, an aviary, and (among many other things), a "pedagogical beehive" (la ruche pédagogique!). So we have his imperial vision, and love of the thriving bourgeoisie, to thank for this park. He gets mention in a plaque or two, but it's a scientist who gets a statue. I'd always known about the Censier-Dauberton metro station, but now, to see Dauberton himself stand before me: absolutely grand! He is framed by an exquisite garden and a huge stretch of the aviary which holds 200 birds. Peacocks and roosters prevail and we lingered a good while (pretty much all of us have a thing for roosters), but most kids run on to feed the bunnies. Because bunnies. In the midst of all this (and there is no French word for fun, children - to be discussed later), Dauberton's happy form, with an animal at his side, made sense. One can only hope that it comes alive at night once the visitors are all gone.

Because Bretons are always funny?

The last place we went to was an ersatz Breton seaside, complete with beach lawn chairs, water everywhere, and this delightful cut-out. Eleanor was so totally insulted at this display of Brittany that pictures with her in it are boring or full of scowls. Gotta stand by your principles, little one. This one with Mac fits the bill of vacation, and I must say that Oliver and Iris definitely rose to the occasion. Iris is super happy with the fact that she is making a crêpe and Oliver would love to play the bagpipe someday (truly). I know that we'll go back to Bois de Boulogne (that old hunting forest that is now an enormous park for the common people); definitely the Bois itself that stretches all around the Jardin. But the Jardin, too, because the make-believe here is very, very verdant and complex.

Le mec Mac

For those of you missing Mac le mec (Mac the dude), here is a picture of him right outside the Institut du Monde Arabe, that most glorious architecture, that statement of knowledge of research, that architecture that put an end to Orientalism. Except maybe not. The reason that Mac is standing with the Institut du Monde Arabe to his back is that the show "Orient Express," which invites visitors to walk through several luxury cars of the famous train, is so massively sold out that we could only get tickets for Friday. This apparently has been the best selling show of the Institut, and its love of velvet and crystal, wood paneling and embroidered pillows makes you wonder if this isn't make-believe. But one (certain ones) really did travel like this. One lucky make-believe person was even murdered in Agatha Christie's book, so we decided we needed to buy Murder on the Orient Express as soon as possible.

Le fun!

This decision led to a lovely long bus ride on the 67 for a stop at the Librarie Gourmande (all. cookbooks. all. the. time) (!!!) and then a somewhat lovely (got crowded) walk down through Place des Victoires to Rue de Rivoli for the English bookshop W.H. Smith (which, by the way, is a treasure-house: very comfy English setting, and then hundreds of books, multiple copies, a dream! and an answer to the anxiety about keeping our children in books while we're here). We walked through the gardens of the Palais Royal, and then through the permanent exhibition put up by Daniel Buren in the 1980s, which totally invites le Fun of kids, while adults walk rapidly through.

 Right before we got to W.H. Smith, we walked through the square where this glorious statue of Joan of Arc strides bravely forth. It played a major role in the opening scene of the 2010 film Adèle Blanc-Sec which made for a fantastic surprise for Oliver, who loves the movie. Paris can do that: it can pop out of what you thought was only make-believe and show you that it was all true all along. It takes these places and monuments and holds them up to a different light (midnight, not a soul in sight, a protagonist approaches), and then when you see them in the light of day, surrounded by dozens of people, somehow it becomes all the more magical for being recognized, for being real after all in movie you never wanted to leave, in a book you wanted to never end. W.H. Smith finished out our make-believe time, and the kids came out laden with books to take them yet other places. They read all the way home on the metro, and all the way through dinner, they'd still be reading now. There is a French phrase "la réalité dépasse la fiction" (reality overtaking fiction). We might have a more complicated loop here of reality overtaking fiction but taking on hues and shades of fiction in doing so. Whatever the dynamic, it was all worth it to see the expression on Oliver's face.

I don't know where sauces fall on the reality/fantasy spectrum. They're so good in France that I would have to lean towards make-believe, some fantasy world. In that we'll be eating in a lot (which is a joy in this home with a full kitchen) and in that we'll have rice quite often, I've decided to get to know sauces. I browsed, I researched, we went to the Librairie Gourmande in the 2nd and am now the proud of owner of Michel Roux (if that can possibly be his real name!!!)'s book on sauces. Glorious, complex, brilliant, almost always with a touch of butter at the very end to make them glow. I'm leaving tomorrow for a 5-day hiatus back in the States. It's every kind of weird and every kind of wonderful. I leave Mac and the kids with their feet planted firmly on French soil and multiple projects (and food!). I go with all my clothes now smelling of French laundry detergent, of my head full of what I'm eager to do here in terms of work (and play, le fun, discovery), my heart full of the friends I'll see when I'm home, and quite possibly, a book of sauces to read up on.

Gudea, King of Lagash, and Stillness

Gudea with a plan

Museums are often accused of stilling works of art: of stripping them of their environment and noise, ritual and performance. But in the case of the statues of Gudea (which were built for the quiet rooms of a temple around 2100 B.C.E., and were later buried for safekeeping or after an attack), the Louvre may actually be a louder place than he had ever bargained for. Visitors are frequent here and, even if they intend to walk through to the Law Code of Hammurabi, they are themselves stilled and stopped by this gallery full of Gudea statues, standing or sitting in poised silence. There is an inexplicably great Wikipedia page on the Gudea statues, and if you scroll down it, you'll see that all of his statues are largely held at the Louvre, with the British Museum and various museums in the United States dividing up the rest. The desire for statues of the Neo-Sumerian ruler whose robes flow with columns of cuneiform writing was ravenous and the West, as ever, helped itself.  I've been thinking a good deal all day about Karl Steel's excellent piece at In the Middle on, among other things, origins shared and origins jealously guarded. In that cuneiform is one of the oldest forms of writing, in that Mesopotamia is heralded as one of the oldest civilizations with writing and urban planning and complex administrative structures, it was taken up as an origin of the Western world by early Orientalists (Edward Said's Orientalism remains a great source for these twists and turns, and I hope to find more during this sabbatical's research). Appropriated origins; selective origins (for go up the stairs and around the corner to Khorsabad and its grand lamassus and then it's all about difference from Western "democratic" sensibilities - the kind of shift and Orientalism brilliantly critiqued by Zainab Bahrani, especially in "Assault and Abduction: the Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East" (Art History 1995). It's complicated, and we talked to the kids about this idea of writing as a particular kind of human origin. And then we talked mostly about rulers and images and how the body politic of the ruler can project certitude and re-assurance to his subjects. I'm still thinking about this, and I know that it will sound like a stretch in a few weeks, but for now, how a governing body presents and represents itself is very much on my mind (my heart) concerning Ferguson, MO. It's in the news all the time here, and the images just keep coming and the governing body in tanks, firing tear gas, aiming weapons, strong-arming citizens... there is no certitude or re-assurance there.

We started our Louvre visits in this gallery, with some of the earliest art the museum contains; an attempt (maybe precisely because of the mess of democracy that is happening right now in the States) to start some narrative of human invention for ourselves and the kids (also: good material for my politics of the museum course). Having gone to the Center of Adhesion (sorry, I love doing this - le Centre d'Adhésion =  Membership Services), we now have our family pass. We are ready. The family membership comes with a book that really stresses the "genies and demons" aspect of Mesopotamian art - not a word about cool, calm Gudea. We would have spent the majority of our time here, anyway, not necessarily out of protest. But we lodged a protest with the kids anyway. They heartily liked Gudea, were impressed by his diorite, loved the materials I pulled from Irene Winter's "Idols of the Kings" article (Journal of Ritual Studies 1992), and wanted to be close to him.

One thing I was surprised to learn from watching the kids was how, despite his smooth lines and easy curves, difficult Gudea is to draw. We'd simply asked them to find one Gudea statue that they thought was very effective in projecting the presence (could be political, ritual, urban or agricultural) of Gudea. Each kid chose a different one. Oliver took a long time, and realized the kind of genius move of the feet emerging from the framework of the robe - all carved in diorite with fluid lines and easy proportions. I don't even pause to think about the presence or absence of heads on statuary anymore, but of course the kids do. Iris chose the statue she did because it was complete, and had no writing at all. Oliver was fascinated by how the absence of a head did nothing to diminish the dignity and power of the statue.

Eleanor (and Mac it turns out!) worked on a statue of Ningir-su, Gudea's son. Smaller, of a different stone, and with the slightest variations in the face (a somewhat longer nose) but not a one in the gesture or stance. She couldn't believe how hard he was to draw, but she really liked doing it. I don't know if drawing is a kind of possession as well (like research and writing). Mac uses it to push observation: you notice more when you're trying to get it down. And the formal joys of Gudea are many: biceps, deltoids, smooth waist, elegant feet, settled face. The contrast between Gudea in his gallery and the 17th-19th century highly gestural sculptures in the courtyard below are perfect. Economy of form and resoluteness of stance can really help you do away with the histrionics of the dramatic diagonal. And so Gudea is still: a silent witness to himself and to his enduring presence. He is, after all, still here.

P.S. Something else spoke for Gudea to me this time. These enormous scroll columns, which are filled with cuneiform. They tell the tale of the building of the temple. Gudea had the idea, and the god Enlil gave him the means and creativity of execution. The best part: these two textual proclamations were part of the building foundation of the temple. I have other images of ceremonial nails in ceramic as well - also with cuneiform, also making writing the seal to architecture. Another kind of certitude, another kind of calm. I'm not going to romance ritual over militarism (Gudea's time is long gone), but I can mourn the loss of re-assurance when I see it persist here. Today, what Gudea is re-assuring his public about remains open.

Restoration/Renovation (Chartres encore)

Once and future vaults

With all the galavanting about to Brittany and then Chartres, we've had a slower-paced couple of days. (Saturday market; then Mac took off to see Kumbh Mela (click on "bande-annonce" for the trailer), the incredible documentary film based on the once-every-12-years pilgrimage that happens at the confluence of three rivers (two actual, one mythical) and then met up with a graduate student for coffee - lots to go on there!; and last night, Oliver and I plunged back into La Défense to see Guardians of the Galaxy which was really pretty good - the best part being in an enormous, fully packed screening room with so many French cinéphiles who laughed and cheered, and realizing (again) that American movies are insanely grandiose and fully entertaining). All this to say that this clears a little bit of room to jot down some notes on the work at Chartres. And ask questions of fellow medieval art historians. Briefly put, the restorations are so extensive as to defy the term.  I have walked into more cathedrals bedecked by scaffolding than I can recount, but there's much more than that going on here. This shot of the westernmost vaults gives you a first sensation of the radicality of the restoration (the Passion window is at the "top" of the photograph and you're seeing scaffolding at the "bottom"). What had been the color of stone, of ancient geological provenance and 13th-century manipulation, is now plastered over and white-washed.



Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres : immersion... by culture-gouv

 The 12 minute video from the restoration web site reveals much. It's super quiet with no monologue or dialogue, but I found myself exclaiming out loud while watching it. I understand (at 4:45m) injecting fissures in the columns with something binding, but the wholesale plastering of all the columns? Is what's going on as of 9:10m ok? Are those medieval designs? Are they 19th century designs? Reading the excellent PDFs of the restoration reports, it's clear that there's a lot of the 18th century (when the eastern end and choir underwent work) and the 19th (specifically the keystone painting of the chapel of Notre-Dame du Pilier on the north side near the transept). The restoration of the marble work in the choir is pretty intense - the colors are really, shall we say, bright. Ok, garish, to me. And the white-washed columns just make no sense. Yes, there's that marvelous quote from a letter written by Kipling (fascinating choice if you ask me) at the head of the restoration website, but is this medieval Chartres? Maybe it's not meant to be. Maybe it's meant to be medieval, 18th and 19th century Chartres.

Why does a photograph taken on playful iPhone settings
 look more like the Chartres I think I know?

What am I holding on to here? Why would a 21st-century viewer be so disoriented about a 13th-century site to which she has access primarily through the 19th and 20th centuries, as to get a sense of "wrong," of something "off"? Mac took this terrific photograph of southern transept statues by playing with settings on the iPhone. I saw this and realized, "This is the Chartres I'm missing." The Chartres that really spoke stone, that displayed its age (good Lord, am I an antiquarian all of a sudden?). Why am I begrudging the cathedral its restoration? I like the medieval-modern conversation. It's good to know that a site is alive with people's creativity and care, it's amazing that the French government is putting 13 million euros ($17.42 million into the cathedral). And yet, here I sit completely reliving my disorientation even as I write this. I think very much of Janet Marquardt's brilliant work with the aesthetic created for Romanesque Art (almost single-handedly) by the monks behind the Zodiaque book series, specifically in their decision to have the books illustrated with a particular type of photography (it gets complicated, that photographic style itself is kind of high modernist, but it absolutely anchors Romanesque architecture and sculpture in a hue of heavy, stony grays). ALL THE MORE EXCITEMENT for her book, Zodiaque: Making Medieval Modern, 1951-2001, due out next year from Penn State Press.

Funnily enough, the stained glass restoration feels absolutely like a restoration - like a return to the 13th century (as if I could possibly truly know what that was like!). What is happening that I feel so absolutely not the same way about the stone of the cathedral? What would Adolf Katzenellebogen say? (For the north transept is completely restored and those sculptures shine so, so brightly). This is no longer the Chartres of Henry Adams. Am I really going to align myself with those guys? Am I going to say, "this is no longer my Chartres?" What on earth would that mean? As if the cathedral could belong to someone. Well, lest we get into issues of patrimoine and possession (ever since the French Revolution, church properties belong to the government, and it is my understanding that the Catholic Church leases them - in perpetuity, but still), I'm going to stop here. The Chartres whose every stone and sculpture, and whose every pane of glass I studied for months and months twenty years ago is transforming before my eyes. The point, of course, is not simply to dichotomize this metamorphosis into "good," or "bad" - the point will be to live and teach this new Chartres, but I don't yet have the terms.

Assumption Day at Chartres

Getting ready

Once a year at Chartres, the Virgin Mary steps out. It is Assumption Day, a feast day (and national holiday in France) to celebrate her elevation by angels into heaven and here, in this small town in central France whose cathedral stands massive and monumental all other days of the year, it occasions an outpouring of human devotion and care that seeks to meet the divine mercy and kindness accorded to her. Her presence in this statue marks both the long medieval tradition of the Black Madonna (enshrouded in Druidic lore by early modern historians of Chartres) and the 19th-century resurgence of Catholic devotion (this statue of dark pear wood was made in 1837 to replace the medieval one destroyed by the Revolution in 1792). It heralds her reach from the crypt of the cathedral to the buildings and inhabitants of the town to the crops that surround it. Her bier, seen here in the narthex of the nuns' chapel just before the procession, is decorated with daisies and lilies and fire bursts of blades of the wheat the bedecks the entire Beauce region.

The officiants

She is well-attended in every way, and there are officiants and capes and white gloves and microphones and an order of things. In many ways, the affair is as splendid (the flowers! the blue velvet! the singing!), as it is quiet (the songs all ask for mercy and protection, heads are bowed, the procession is slow). There is little room for innovation, but always a desire for improvement. I had attended the Assumption Day celebrations at Chartres twenty years ago during my dissertation research year, and the images from that experience (slides hard-won by guesswork) have nurtured my teaching of Gothic art ever since. This time, my iPhone alone was able to do all sorts of good work. This time, I brought my family. And everything was the same, and everything was different. The procession route, for one thing, had changed radically, and now, instead of starting in the Cathedral, the statue of Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre waited in a nearby convent for her walk around town. Nuns surrounded the Virgin's statue and men carried her, and waved the censer that perfumed the air all around.

The Veil (Sancta Camisia)

The Virgin's presence is diffused. She is restored in her statue, but has always been present in her relic. The tunic that Mary wore while giving birth to Christ had been the prized relic of Chartres since Charles the Bald made a gift of it in 876. In 1792, it was rent into four pieces, one of which remains (the other three parts lying in wait for a pot-boiler novel to be written). It is on display most days in a 19th-century reliquary in the eastern chapel, but on Assumption Day is it placed into a portable reliquary to be brought out. The veneration of relics in France's age of secular empiricism creates a spectrum from pious fervor to out-dated naïveté, inhabited more or less comfortably by spectators. In a ceremonial switch from the last time I saw this procession, the relic preceded the statue, textiled transcendence leading the way for wooden resurgence.

In town

Nods to mysticism have reshaped the event. Shifts in the procession route meant that the Virgin never passed by commercial sites. Where previously, I had photographed her in front of the Kookaï fashion store and signs for the train station, now she ambled among residential streets and the park at the east end of the cathedral, never once framed by the mundane. The greater liturgical mysticism has a resonance in the popular religion that emerges in the souvenir shops around the cathedral, a high/low cultural dynamic that has been in existence since the Middle Ages. The merchants of Chartres (a savvy and responsive bunch ever since their representation in the stained glass of the cathedral) now sell many more mystical healing wares: herbals and traditional medicine books, crystals and incense, divination cards (adorned with saints!) - all bolstered (initiated?) by the great paved labyrinth in the middle of the nave. Whose authenticity is this? The labyrinth was uncovered (intellectually by the great work of Dan Connolly on mapping and virtual pilgrimage, and physically by Americans (of all people) seeking New Age connections) in the past twenty years, never entirely to the pleasure of the Church (it is just too available to said New Age explorations, it is a form and tradition of the Middle Ages that has a marvelous difficulty being integrated into modern liturgy). It is now covered by chairs, which is a pity, but then, the entire interior is being restored. The restoration (I would argue renovation) of the cathedral will be another post - they are massive and extensive and completely change the character of the place. Chartres is not still by any means.

If you'll be taking any of my Gothic art courses or the caves to cathedral survey, you'll be seeing this 15-second video. I was up on the gate (art historian in action!) and caught this wonderful moment in which the procession makes the final turn back into the cathedral itself. I love the profile of the statue, this form of the Sedes Sapientiae that positions Mary as the Throne of Wisdom to a blessing Christ, and has been the emblem of Mary's care since at least the twelfth century (scroll down Alison Stone's wonderfully intertwined essay to see 12th-century examples of the statue). I loved this last second before her re-entry into the lithic depths of the cathedral where she will be still for an entire other year, this last moment in the world of people before she once again joins her company of saints, this last glimpse for all gathered of an embodiment of mercy that this world still craves.

Return to Paris

Walked another series of familiar walks today - wanted to see moss and rivulets and trees and watch the kids remember, too. They've developed our favorite park quite a bit: the pétanque rectangle where the kids used to play Charging Knights now has a playground in it; the old tree that we used to say housed some gruff spirit of the forest now has a panel next to it with buttons you can push (for French or English) that makes it talk and tell you its tale of being an oak long before this was a park (and yes, he's kind of gruff about it). This little place continues to grow and shift. The town is now transitioning from its summer tourism to getting ready for the Pardon on September 8. The community web page for it is rather understated, but the event usually draws around 20,000 people and this year promises to be just as grand. Our dear friend is the choir director and we're plotting making it there just for the day as the music alone will be spectacular. It would be pretty tremendous for both of our work: Mac because he teaches Jules Breton (scroll down Breton's page for his spectacular painting Le Pardon à Kergoat, which is in Quimper) and me because it's a ritual that's been going on since 808 (or so the legend of the finding of the statue of Mary in brambles goes - it's definitely been happening for hundreds of years). Pardons are fascinating for so many reasons (penance, love of Mary, music), including their interweaving in the landscape. We'll be getting a version of this tomorrow as we head to Chartres to witness and record the Assumption Day procession (really looking forward to being "out here" with you tomorrow night!).

Assumption Day (the day upon which Mary was assumed up into heaven by angels) is a "jour férié" - a national holiday. Trains, buses, businesses - many things will be on an altered schedule and many people will make a "pont," a bridge to a three-day week-end because it falls on Friday this year. It already started altering things in Brittany and the bus I thought we could take from Josselin to Rennes to catch our train was listed in the fine print as not running just on August 14 - the only day it didn't run, I try to take it. Thankfully, David in his generous good humor, got us to our train and I watched the kids go in and out of their thoughts of Brittany and Paris. Whatever thoughts you have, when you take the plunge back into the city, there you are. It's an enormous social contract, a city of 2.2 million people - and I'm trying follow and thinking a lot of the breakdown of it all in Ferguson, MO. The French news has quite a bit on it (more than CNN which is just weird) and is reporting it according to facts known, all of which are horrid. The peace of Brittany, the bustle of Paris, the distance of the States - it's a series of irreconcilables that a train ride can let you jostle together for a while. The kids read, talked, and we all ate delicious sandwiches from David. Then the train arrived, they hopped off, grabbed their Metro passes and put on their Metro faces and home we went. And it felt like home, turning the last key in the lock and opening the door. And it takes going away and being overwhelmed to realize that we're creating one here.

Korrigans Now and Then

You truly never know where Brittany is going to take you next. We started the day by... making jam! I was the photographer, the girls stirred many things, and David was the orchestrator. Ten (!) jars of nectarine jams later, we were set - accomplished and completely enveloped in the sweetest scent there ever was. We wafted forth into the forest thusly, making our way to Monteneuf, treasured site and unexpected pleasure. In the summers, the place really comes alive with programming well beyond the neolithic megaliths that for its center. And so, we picked up our map and followed the korrigan (elf) Ozégan on his adventures through the forest. I have dozens and dozens of photographs, so we'll have to see if these two can tell a tale. The kids put on elf ears to better hear the sounds of the forest (and they swore it worked, that they heard more tiny insects and creatures with these on. I have an awesome one of Mac with these on - most excellent.

The trail is a couple of kilometers long and dotted with one incredible site after another. The korrigan villages were the best - miniature scale inhabitations strung within and between trees: suspended platforms and swings and ladders and little stones leading to fissures in tree trunks. And the kids were invited to add on, to build more little houses and spaces for the korrigans. The rain came and went, with each departure leaving wisps of steam as the sun shone brightly into the forest, making elven shapes and sounds as leaves rustled to shake off their water. It was utterly fantastic: Lord of the Rings meets nature hike; Avatar gone Celtic. All three kids built little houses, all with fantastic fern coverings (the fern grows and grows here, 4 feet tall and plentiful, ready to be interwoven into complex roofs. The 19th-century stories of Brittany interwove the Celtic korrigans with the megaliths: they were the ones to understand the huge stones, to nimbly scale their heights and wisely keep their secrets. Why change the story in the 21st century? The trail circled around dormant stones, the great majority of the 420-plus stones of Monteneuf - why not awaken them with child's play?

The 42 standing megaliths are still a 2km drive away. They stand apart, with a precise pedagogical space and mission. This is, might as well claim it, probably my favorite site in Brittany. Inland megaliths, in some kind of parallel or communication or exchange with the coastal arrangements of Carnac. We took students here during the January 2013 "Legend and Landscape" Winter Term trip - students dragged a stone and raised it, got muddy, persevered. This time it was sunny (then rainy, then sunny again), and I tried a funky "chrome" setting on my camera - it looks like a colorized postcard, I love it. This site has always interested me so much. I would love to write about it someday, especially in its medieval chapter. Now we know that there are over 420 stones in the alignment (most of them in farmers' fields, the original set-up lost forever), but until the fire that started exposing them in 1989, there were only three standing stones. Paleo-botany revealed that the stones had been put down around the year 1000 - that's the medieval chapter I'd love to uncover. Putting down megaliths is difficult (as difficult?) work - a tremendous effort, it seems in response to a tremendous force or pull of the stones. There may be nothing more than the paleo-botany to tell the tale (though there are plenty of decrees in England and France from the period banning gathering at stones and trees), but I would like to keep going with it, see where it takes me. I bought the archaeological report right before the office closed and felt lucky.

And then to come home to David and supper and stories, and to see all of the pictures and find a place for the stalk that Oliver interlaced with flowers and fern until it eventually became a shaman stick. To realize that these stories, these korrigans, have a lightness of touch that allows them to escape the exactitudes of history and the precisions of literature. That they never quite let go of the forest, nor it of them, and that with a few twists of ferns and curves of branches the stories can start again, each structure adding another layer, another possibility of the forest coming alive after we've left it. To wonder at what is conjuring what. To feel the good fortune to enter into these stories and spaces and emerge from them to share them with a friend who really hears them.  That, that is a gift from many sources.

Return redux - Brittany

The moss, the trees, all of it

It's really just pictures tonight, because the wonder of night and deep happiness have made us eager for bed and rest. To come back is now so thick with memory, so present in so many ways all at once, that I really do understand that phrase about one's heart swelling with emotion. There is love and loss, and deep yearning, and a familiar that goes to the slightest beloved detail. Our love for this place and for our friend in it expands evermore - there is this feeling of great good fortune in being able to return unto such a place and into such a friendship; and there is this feeling of anticipation. Whatever it might mean to be curious about the familiar, that is what we are. Maybe (late at night, well fed, glad), that is one of the ways of understanding love: a curiosity, a joyful eagerness to know, about the familiar.

And still, there are many things to get to know. Eleanor has been reading the France Horrible History for her French History (we thought we'd start there before Michelet) and has really gotten into two topics: Olivier de Clisson (nicknamed the Butcher, all around early 15th-century badass) and the Cathars (she has a bone to pick with the medieval Church about the whole matter). We kept it a surprise for her, but Olivier de Clisson is buried (within a pretty fantastic tomb) right here in Josselin at Notre-Dame du Roncier (translated I just found out as Our Lady of the Brambles). So here is Eleanor peering down at her cranky, bellicose knight, across 600 years of history. Tomorrow Brittany awaits again, as it does, with an insistent calm in the face of our perpetual joy.

Bridges, Surfaces, and Eggs

In our attempts to acculturate ourselves to Parisian life, we are doing as the Parisians do: leaving Paris! We leave early tomorrow morning for Brittany to reunite with our beloved family friend and breathe the Breton air and all its possibilities. In the meantime, the latest, posted from your friendly neighborhood corner café.

August 8 - Urbanism/Cosmopolitanism/Japonism

That the sushi place down the street is Halal certified is telling – whether of our neighborhood, of Paris, of France itself, I’m not sure; but it’s certainly its own kind of wonderful and it helped us make our final point about Japonisme at the end of our Impressionism/ Urbanism explorations.  We spent most of our time at the Musée d’Orsay in front of the two paintings of the Japanese bridge in Monet’s garden. Inexplicably (and I should dig harder to find out the story), the swimming pool in our town in Indiana has a tori at the front door, and the “clean line” look of it made sense to the kids in relation to that smooth arc of Monet’s bridge. Mac said that Monet himself had it built, and then we mused on why: the opening of Japan to the West, as the phrase goes; the market created for all things Japanese; the fascination the Impressionists had with the flatness of Japanese woodblock prints (perspective must die! art is in what is directly seen! flatness is the aesthetic of the immediate!); the aesthetic of a pristine exotic and all its accompanying assumptions about how European culture might be rejuvenated through its appropriations of other cultures (one way of putting colonialism). That’s a lot for two long arcs of paint – but Mac pointed out the Japanese irises in the next painting, and it all started to connect (the fabrics, the fans, the flowers, this vision). Both Oliver and Iris chose Giverny paintings to discuss; Eleanor chose a winter, urban Caillebotte scene (snow on rooftops, steely grey everything) – she liked the thick paint; and so Mac scared all of us by talking about how hard white is to make and how they added lead to it in the 19^th century. Art fright!

link to the exhibition

 One of my sabbatical projects is to work on a politics of the museum course (to be titled “Politics of the Museum: history, ethnicity, nation” or “History of the Museum: politics, ethnicity, nation” – haven’t decided how far back I’m going to go: “politics” would focus more on contemporary displays; “history” would have us thinking through the Wunderkammers). I had thought about studying the Quai Branly museum very closely and seeking out its various theses, but boy, has it ever reached out instead. All over Paris are ads for its big show “Tiki Pop” about how those crazy Americans appropriated Polynesian culture into their drinking culture, fashion, and goodness knows what else. What I can’t tell from the posters (and this is telling) is whether or not there’s a critique there or just this weird reveling. I remember being stunned a few years ago as I slowly realized that a show devoted to Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales was actually quite nostalgic about French colonialism and its exotic mysteries, perpetuating both. You don’t. need. a. hookah. for a show about Victor Hugo’s poetry. But there it was, with a little rug and stool. And many paintings of sleepy unclad women and young boys from Tunisia and Algeria. One of the points of the course will be to develop a critical stance about the twist that post-colonialism has taken towards a neo-colonialism (basically, other means of exploitation than direct colonialism). And also to study those earlier moments of appropriation (do I go to the Crusades? to the Roman empire?). Today made me think a great deal about the exportation of the natural world, of flowers and trees transplanted, giraffes in exile in Paris zoos. And about the tipping points/the intersecting lines of colonialism, appropriation, cosmopolitanism, and an urban internationalism that pushes at Europe itself. At some point, sushi came to Courbevoie, and at another, it was Halal certified. In the meantime, I keep going back to what Iris said as we pulled away from the Japanese bridge paintings: “There’s this idea that nature is calm, because it’s not rushed like the city; but actually it’s full of stuff happening – like Japan in France.”

August 9 - Surfaces

 To write a love letter to Jacques Tati is to write a love letter to Paris, and there are plenty (beautiful examples) of those already around. Seeing the digitally re-mastered version of Playtime in Paris itself, though, makes me want to, yes, play with at least one of his big ideas from the film. Surfaces: transparencies and reflections abound in the movie, constantly pivoting virtual and real communication – the kids were a little dizzied by it, loving the movie almost as a ride; Mac noticed a new connection (the winner of the boxing match on the television everyone’s watching at night is announced on a newspaper front page the next morning); and I let myself get a little dizzy thinking about the surface moves from celluloid to digital. That’s the tenderness of the film for me: its caress of surfaces – sleek, modern ones (gleaming, smooth, and long); rough, traditional ones (textured, disruptive, and unpredictable); even aural ones: insistent electronics, precise human footsteps, muffled human voices, hip jazz and traditional Parisian street song. Old Paris (old humanity?) is directly beneath the surface of New Paris (we moderns), just waiting to bubble up and make everything human again. We noticed this time that the gesture that brings the whole modern restaurant crashing down around itself is Monsieur Hulot reaching up into the decorations for an apple (!) that a lady desired (!!). I could over-interpret everything and talk about how human desires will bring any pristine Eden down, but I wouldn’t want to do that. Living near La Défense (18^th-century military garrison (thus the name) turned, as of the 1970s, into a constant experiment (with mixed results) of the city of the future) proves instructive here. Daily, we move from our brick houses and café neighborhood to the unrelenting expanses of steel and glass and back into an entire city that insists upon the human scale. Paris has sequestered its modernist architecture to an emblem on its fringe. In the center (and everywhere else) modern life prevails in its pace and ambitions, in its practicalities and conveniences, but not in steel and height.

 And so the other surfaces of the day become layers of experience. The cheeses at the market, pungent and legendary (when did France begin its epic climb towards its 450+ kinds of cheese that DeGaulle presented as the most logical way to explain the unruliness of the country he was trying to restore to order?); the meats and fish and produce all presented and talked over every Wednesday and Saturday in our neighborhood – these days, the market a mere pantomime of what it will be once Parisian get back from their August vacations. It was with these that we began our day, and with these that we ended them (dinner of baguette, cheeses, terrine de lapin, and tomatoes) – ancient textures, messy.

Marie de Medici started this little garden on what were then (1616) the marshy banks of the Seine. It was kept up in various ways and then finished in “Haussmanian” style – rough-hewn steps (of poured concrete carved to look like wood - !!) that you see here, a waterfall, a pond (filled with carp to Iris’s delight) and a bridge made of thick branches (of poured concrete carved to look like thick branches – I never get over that: it’s all over the Buttes Chaumont, too). It’s at the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s street, right before the Cours de Reine and now known as the Garden of Nouvelle France: Jacques Cartier (who left from Saint-Mâlo (the Breton connection!) to claim what is today Canada for France) looks sternly out onto the Seine from his bust atop a column, seeing a New France in a Modern World, while hankering for cheese.

August 10 – Not for the Faint of Heart

 Those of you who know me and my love of aspic will want to shudder and turn away. For I have found my hero! My joy! My egg in aspic!!! Poached, mind you, then lovingly wrapped in a slice of ham, garnished with a delicate tomato, and suspended in delicious aspic. The Swiss love to top little finger sandwiches in aspic (so that the little garnishes are held in place just so), but this poached egg in aspic was a stratospheric other level. Purchased yesterday at the market, eaten at lunch, and then reminisced about at today’s lunch.  So, it’s lovely enough to look at. But then look what happens when you cut into it.

 Wondrous! The egg is so perfectly poached that the yolk still runs richly when cut. A healthy chunk of baguette can rise to the occasion of sopping things up, and you have one happy Anne. I may have lost all but one or two readers at this point, but if you’re with me, isn’t this marvelous? The care and craft of suspending a poached egg in aspic is not lost on me. It is revered and admired, its brilliance and delight proclaimed.