Undeterred by any "Dérangement Collectif" - we press on

Let the Paris-schooling begin!

The internet will be out until August 14 (!!!) due to a collective derangement on the line. It's August, most Parisians are gone, and so a ton of infrastructure works gets done, renovations are begun, and other massive overhauls are undertaken. We are going to persevere by repairing to cafés (one must carry on, you know) and I will write briefer things. The past few days are recapped below - because no, I don't want to forget a single day of any of this. Yesterday (for I am writing in the morning at our local café) was our first day of Paris-schooling in the streets. We've been reading the terrific book Charlotte in Paris by Joan MacPhail Knight, given to us by our dear friend Julia. All the kids read the same section, but each one has a different essay to write in response to the section, and then different assignment connected to it. So, for example yesterday, Charlotte goes to Gare Saint-Lazare, because monsieur Monet painted it (and her father is friends with him) and so Oliver's assignment was to determine the Metro route for how to get there (his essay asked him to consider the intersection of urbanism and Impressionism). He did a great job leading the way from our house to the train station, and then Mac took over with a commentary about the station, its importance in the 19th century, and why Monet (and so many other Parisians) would be so fascinated by it. The shot here is of Mac showing the kids Monet's painting of the train station (either the painting at the Art Institute in Chicago or the one right here at Musée d'Orsay - Monet of course painted several) at the spot whence he painted it. We then went to the Jardin Luxembourg (Oliver figured out we could get there without any changes on the Metro - always a bonus) and romped about. A swing by the English-speaking bookshop restored us in books (this is going to be a problem, keeping the children in books - I need to figure out if I can download books on a nook or Kindle from here - otherwise, we'll just keep buying books!) (which is ok, too) and then we headed home to goat cheese and pancetta pizza. Oui, la vie est belle. I'm going to go home now (avec croissants) and Mac will supervise the kids' home schooling while I go work on things medieval upstairs. His library (German art history library in Paris) doesn't even open until September, and the BN has limited services (not that limited, but enough that I can justify not throwing myself into it right away) in August. So we'll probably work at home for now. Libraries later.

Ok - if you want to know about the past few days, here they are. They're mostly a record for me, in the name of not forgetting.
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And so, little recuperations from the past days when the neighborhood underwent a “collective derangement” (“dérangement collectif”) in its internet service. I’ve always loved those old journals (or the annals of old!) when it’s just one line that says it all: “rain” or “the Huns.”

August 3

It’s still grand being around the Eiffel Tower, trying to decipher the name of the all the engineering greats Eiffel had displayed for all eternity/to see on the lower support ring of the Tower. The girls went up with our dear friends, and the rest of us waited below in what became a little circle of people waiting for loved ones. A bus ride to Notre-Dame was like one back through time and I must say that the medieval line moved faster than the modern one. Less at stake perhaps. But Notre-Dame looks so clean now, resplendent in its 19^th-century self. Viollet-le-Duc would be happy. It meant a lot to take our friends there. Parting was sweet sorrow too soon, but as I watch it pour rain now, I feel that Paris smiled on us big time.

August 4

This was our first day to explore Courbevoie: we’d been walking the immediate neighborhood, but in this city of 80,000 (!!!) attached directly to Paris, there was more to explore. So, buses of course. And soon, a park still housing both the Swedish&Norwegian as well as the Indian palaces from the 1867 World’s Fair. The Swedish & Norwegian palace is now a terrific (free!) little museum and we chatted with the lonely art historian at the front desk. The Indian palace is available by appointment only, but oh yes we will. On our way home, we discovered a Breton crêperie, so all is well. Also, we discovered the term “dérangement collectif,” which, with each passing day without internet, is becoming more metaphysical.

August 5

When the Orange internet provider customer service line gets jammed with calls in France you get a message that says “Because so many of you are calling, the wait would be too long. Good-bye.” And then the line hangs up on you. Brilliant! No endless musak, just circling helplessness. So off we went to open a bank account. On the way, we stopped at the SNCF Boutique (yes, it’s called that) and made nice with the wonderful man there who got us a cool reduction card we don’t understand, but which (through Iris - !) gets us 25-50% off of all of our travels. We booked tickets for Brittany (bliss) and Chartres (Assumption Day) and merrily went on our way. The sordid tale of the bank is too stupid to tell. Changes in American banking laws require that we now provide not just our usual passports and proof of living here to open a bank account, but also a W-9 and a utility bill from our home in the U.S. notarized by the American Embassy here in Paris. This last part just cannot be right, but I assure you it is. We will return to visit the imminently capable and stunningly beautiful woman who helped us and see what happens. On verra. Hovered over the first load of laundry today – success.

August 6

The kids insisted on starting school alongside their friends in Indiana today. This was the first time for any of us and we were all pretty excited. So it breaks down like this: an hour of math, an hour of English, a half an hour of social studies/history, and a half an hour of science (the latter two heavily supplemented by the afternoon’s activities, as is whatever literature we’re reading for English) – all of this in rotation. The kids fell into the rotation idea really well, and we had the timing pretty much right so that they had little breaks. While the kids work, we’re there for consult and so we’re using the time to read articles (i.e. not write – that time we’ll be forging out for each other as things settle in). Then lunch at home, then the city! Save that it was pouring rain, so we opted for a movie instead – our beloved Petit Nicolas in Les Vacances de Petit Nicolas. Seeing a movie at La Défense is truly its own blog post. So suffice it to say that the kids laughed, we did, too, and that coming home was lovely.

You Never Know

Les Nymphées (Water Lilies) by Monet 1914-1926

Another beautiful day spent with our wonderful friends, a day in which the city gave back in all sorts of unexpected ways.So here, three utterly disconnected surprises. I won't have a picture of my own because they are strictly not allowed, but the Water Lilies by Monet at the Orangerie caught me off guard. Completely overwhelming, relentless, and self-reflective (you go to the other room and it changes your perception of the first rooms' paintings). The image above gives you a sense of the pristine, continuous space. You can start to think about the colors and shapes morphing from one enormous canvas to another. And then Mac tells us that Monet gave the paintings to the French nation as a gift when he was done with them, in response to the nation's sufferings in WWI. That stayed with me the entire time: the gesture, the scale of it and the war, how it might relate. I did start thinking of a visual "In Flanders Field" experience. The kids were intrigued, wanted to know more, but also to claim their favorite spots, their favorite surfaces of paint.

For real

There are days like this (when Paris gives of itself in unexpected ways) in which the city almost seems disconnected from itself. While we marveled and lunched and saw the Sainte Chapelle and went to the gallery of Extinct Animals and walked and walked, there was a protest of what's happening in Israel at Place de la République. It hasn't made any of the American news that I've seen, and actually only a few hundred (1100) protesters showed up. The part that fascinates me is that the protest had been banned. Free speech is not an excuse/safeguard around here. As far as I've been able to read, it was small but with clashes with police.  And it was right as I was thinking about all of this that our friend saw the beach volleyball in front of the Hotel de Ville. Yes, I will repeat that: beach volleyball in front of the Hotel de Ville. Lest you find the government devoid of fun. There's always something cool going on in front of that place (city hall) - ice skating in the winter, and now I know: beach volleyball in the summer.

And then this. As we were leaving our table at Chartier (it hasn't changed a bit in the twenty years since I started going: my friend ordered spaghetti and was told that only children eat spaghetti and that she'd have to choose something else. !!! She had the roasted chicken), I saw Oliver's drawing on the paper table cover. "The mighty dragon and his horde." But look at the dragon and look at the horde. (And mmmm, is that some sauce from his steak au poivre?) Oliver's drawings are so much fun - especially of late in the details (in this one, I really love the flies). Dear little dragon - I hope that the knight doesn't despoil your treasure. The knight doesn't look too impressed or enthusiastic (although he'd be a fool to pass up the sunglasses). The business of the horde made me realize that we'd been eating for a couple of hours - that rhythms of adult discussion and kid drawings were re-emerging. That there would continue to be surprises.

Napoléon

It happens every time I've gone to Napoleon's Tomb, and I think that today was my third time. Not so many times, but a powerful experience each time. I start out in the Tomb just thinking it's ridiculous: why should this man whose "humble" wish was that his ashes be buried "amongst be people' have such a megalomaniacal tomb? What's with burying his generals past present and future all around him in the upper part of the chapel? Dear friends are in town and they are here to see it and so we are. Everyone must have their own reasons for coming to see the Great Man - mine is to read and understand more about the things he instituted (and the low relief panels all around the circle of the lower tomb area are all dedicated to his endeavors). One year, it was his institutionalization of public education; another it was his reconciliation of the Catholic church within The State.  This year, it was the Cour des Comptes which is, to the best of my understanding, a means of holding the government accountable for public monies. I think of our current 1%, of lack of regulation, and I start to wonder how a mind like his would perceive hot messes that are countries today and fix them up. Having endured all sorts of small absurdities at the hands on ticket booths and directions, I am deeply appreciative of Napoleon's plans for a pervasive rationality. The metric system, his law code, putting numbers on houses... all of these are small every day things, that he blended and extracted into his greater systems. And so I think what I think when I'm here, which is that, really, he should have gotten a  bigger monument. It's patently absurd (monuments don't get bigger than this), but it's something I wish for every time. Maybe a monument that celebrates how the government shall create a separate entity to ensure that the government is spending the people's money with good will and good intent.  That would be some monument.

"Vous êtes joignable"

Happy arrival

Here is Eleanor perching on the front stoop of our house in Courbevoie (still on the Metro line but definitely a marvelous world apart from Paris). She is delighted, and we are amazed: at the garden and the ivy and the roominess and our lovely landlady and the wooden staircase and the story that houses like this one were built for the engineers and their families of the Suez Canal. All of the usual travel indignities have been endured and in my remaining minutes of consciousness I just want to feel lucky and revel in a new French phrase I learned today. My dissertation research year was 20 (twen-ty) years ago and while monuments aspiring to transcendental importance haven't changed, the set-up of quotidian life absolutely has. I've never lived in a neighborhood like Courbevoie, either - let's be more specific. I've never lived within walking distance of La Défense. The kids were downright heroic in this shiny, ginormous (there is no more critical term) distopia that I will be posting many images of eventually because it's utterly fascinating. We went to see and take care of a few things (Metro passes, maybe a cell phone). An Orange kiosk was right there so we jumped in and were set up with cell phones (flip phones are still the best options for the those (like us - urgh) whose iPhones rejected any SIM card not put there by the manufacturer. My happiness at having these (basically) walkie talkies through which Mac and I could communicate in the city was clearly visible, and the excellent guy helping us smiled and said "Oh oui! C'est bien. Maintenant, vous êtes joignable."  I am JOINABLE. You can join me. I am able to be joined. I absolutely love this phrase - contemporary, utterly clear, a distinct layer from past experiences living here.

True transcendence?

 But then again, maybe there are more transcendental entities around me than a day of jetlag and tooling around a new neighborhood and La Défense would allow me to realize. A trip to the nearby FranPrix yielded these two powers. I keep talking to the kids about the "persistence of matter" (because of all the medievalist work being done there, and my own fascination with the persistence of natural matter in artistic form) and the kids found some "very persistent" (Oliver) cheeses indeed. The Morbier is an old friend that you can often find in the States. But few cheeses are as angry to see you as a Pont l'Evêque. And yet it is a rich and loyal cheese whose stench brought tears to my eyes for both sentimental and chemical reasons. So here we are, starting five months together, this first day rendering us joinable to this new place, joining the unrelenting modernity of La Défense with the unyielding tradition of stinky cheese. Tati plays with this idea of Paris new and old a lot in Playtime. Now we'll give it a go.

And so, oui

The 16th document of the 18 to be provided for a long-stay visa to France is proof of applicant children's enrollment in a French school. Like all of the documents needed, this one is presented as non-negotiable and absolute - a tone struck especially clearly with the FAQs, to which every single answer is no (as though all questions were simply attempts shirk obligations). And so I've been anxious about our submission of our local principals' letters detailing the kids' long-distance education plan while we live in Paris from August to December. By all internet accounts, French culture (and certainly the French educational system) looks down on what they call "l'école en famille" (family schooling), what we call here "home schooling." It is seen as a breach of the social contract that is education (we could go all the way back to Rousseau if we wanted to) and into which the French government and thus society has invested so much. And I profoundly admire that social contract, I marvel at its reach and federalism (the entire country shares textbooks and curricula - the much-debated Common Core of the United States is a mere dance step in the complex ballet of the French academic system - grade levels? non, non, non: CP, CE1, CE2 and then change it all around, but every French kid that makes it that far will know all of the intricacies of what it means). But since school doesn't begin until almost mid-September, and since there will be two weeks of vacation and strikes and travel, I don't see the kids having enough time to gain traction with the French language. I do (but don't want to) see them, with their little legs dangling beneath their desk arranged in a neat row of like desks, while Paris teems and calls and thrives outside. Let's be clear: I am ambivalent about this. I worry about the lack of socializing and friendship (knowing we'll rely more heavily on expat communities at first because they're friendlier in a short amount of time), and, well, I worry about turning my back on Another Great Social Program that France has poured its energies into. At the same time, I see this as the opportunity of a lifetime: to let my knowledge of the city (earned and treasured in a 1989-90 study year, a 1993-4 dissertation research year, and then all of the wonderful brief visits) be guided by my children's curiosity. To show them every last thing I ever marveled at. To share this city absolutely with them and find out what seizes their imagination. To go off the pedagogical grid (as far as the Swiss Virgo inside will let me) and teach and learn tremendously differently. All this to say, there was a lot at stake in not supplying the requested documentation of number 16.

Airplanes in chapel! (Arts et Métiers)

And then the French government said "yes" - or, uh, "oui" of course. Unflummoxed by the strange request, no doubt chalking up our misguided freedom to our being foreigners, the French government has granted all of us visas and we are good to go. We leave in two weeks and the summer's academic work will continue right up until the last minute. It's a heady time (revisions, book review, a collaborative project proposal, a deep desire to get a new article started), but now most of my afternoons working around the house frame insistent daydreaming about all that we might do together. Certainly we'll all work at home in the mornings, and then Mac and I will split the day (or the week, depending on how things go) to work in the Bibliothèque Nationale or any number of super specialized libraries. After lunch, out we'll go into Paris, France. When we read Le Petit Prince (bilingually!), can we also read Wind, Sand and Stars? Can we go to the Musée des Arts et Métiers and look at the planes hanging from the chapel vaulting? the engines ensconced in individual chapels? Yes! Yes, I do believe we can! Will there be invitations to consider what Rembrandt's Bathsheba is thinking? Oh yes. Will we ask about Benjamin Franklin's endeavors in Paris, France? Well, most of them. Do I mourn the departure of two of Paris's cooler museums, le Musée National du Sport (to Nice) and le Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (where I used to go listen to recordings of breton and other dialects made by Claude Lévi-Strauss students and played back in stilled and strange dioramas) (to Marseille)? Very much. But there will be other and new places - and the serendipity of exhibitions and happenings and the sequential thinking skills and thrills it takes just to use the Metro.

Room of Endangered or Extinct Species

So I'll be posting out here about this aspect of the experience. About home-schooling in Paris, France; Paris-schooling?; about the resources and challenges of it (my never having done it, my now studiously approaching mathematics which I used to love and kind of can't wait to see operative again, my only pedagogy really being curiosity); and about some of these crazy ideas for shared endeavors (that we'd all read the same book, all study the history of the same park, each find an animal to champion in the Salle des Espèces Menacées et des Espèces Disparues - Room of Endangered or Extinct Species). This absolutely lucky, unprecedented, unique, suspended five months that will have nothing and everything to do with our lives in Indiana.

"Cathedral Thinking" - on collectivity

Feininger, Cathedral of the Future, 1919.

I have been writing a review of Medieval Modern; Art Out of Time by Alexander Nagel and have thus been thinking a good deal about meetings of the minds across temporal divides, and (because it is summer, and I am grateful for the time to actually really think with all of the wonderful people past and present engaged in this endeavor of searching and researching and writing) meetings of the minds in general. This book, for me, joins the great work of Bruce Holsinger's Premodern Condition and Amy Knight Powell's Depositions in opening up period boundaries and exploring, as Nagel says it so well, "a dizzying pattern of recursions" (273). The image I have here, which also graces the cover of Nagel's book, makes me marvel at how the Middle Ages became a time whence future time could be thought, indeed, envisioned. It also makes me wonder about the process of separating form and content in the radically secular Bauhaus's embrace of religious architectural process. And it unnerves me to think how easily (in the early 20th century. Today?) an image of a cathedral (an oppressive image to so many) could become a utopic image. There are many ways to think of the inheritances and legacies of the Middle Ages, complex and multivalent as they are, and I'd like to think for just a little bit on how collective rethinking can be a reshaping of the period - as well as how the collective we have come to call the Middle Ages shapes us, we who have never been just modern.

Exploded diagram by Leonardo da Vinci

How a collective comes together (to build a cathedral, a barn, a school of thought, a discipline) is itself a process of assemblage that can be treasured by memory/history and loved in language, all the while never being fully understood or predictable. Karl Steel and Jonathan Hsy have recently shared fantastic collectivities - click here for one including a "superfluity of nuns" and here for another celebrating a "fellowship of Tolkienists." Angie Bennett Segler wrote a declaration of "radical hospitality" that, along with the post from Eileen Joy that she cites, has been inspiring me all summer. Mary Kate Hurley invites feedback (literally! you can do so until July 10!) on "Creating Alternative Communities" in an age and within an academic institution that does a whole of individuating and isolating. And the Material Collective gladdens to new writers keeping (to me) that most wondrous of collectives, that between art and humans, decidedly "strange." I gather all of these collectives in my thoughts and on this page now in a luxurious (and kind of wonderfully disorienting) moment of self-awareness, typing away in the quiet of my building in the middle of my town ensconced in corn fields in Indiana. As the Material Collective had voiced during the "Impossible Words" session at Kalamazoo, "a collective cannot see itself in its totality." For some reason, right now, it's very thrilling to me to think of so many people in such disparate places striving in so many different ways towards/with things medieval. I think of Ian Bogost's discussion of exploded diagrams in Alien Phenomenology - all of the medievalist collectivities I've listed here (and many and any others) are themselves parts apart, but also take this thing called the Middle Ages apart. The cathedral need not loom so large. The medieval period sits in the perpetual potential of the exploded diagram we constantly redraw for it.

And so to end (quickly because, summer, pool, children) by asking the reverse. If modern shapes the medieval, how does the medieval shape the modern? Nagel, Holsinger, and Powell are asking exactly this question. Jeffrey Cohen asked it of the medieval eco-criticism panel at Kalamazoo this year in asking after points of contact between modern theorists and medieval ones (and ideas and scenarios and images). I find that I asked the question in my review of Caroline Walker Bynum's Christian Materiality and Mary Carruther's The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages at Different Visions. I guess that I'll end with that today:

Many of the revelations of agency and materiality being developed in contemporary theory were active in the Middle Ages, and medievalists have much to share with modern thinkers struggling through the economic, ethical, and social problems of inert materiality and deadened physicality.

I was prompted to write this entry, I realize now, not so much because of the review that is being written, but because of the collectivities that I find myself reading with and within. I feel boundless gratitude for them, and the friendship and momentum and meaning they generously offer. And so, an effort at the first draft of a book review has become a love letter. Thus it goes. 

Breathing with Hildegard

Pearl Jellyfish at the Shedd Aquarium, Chicago

When we read excerpts of Hildegard of Bingen's 12th century medico-mystical/mystico-medical work Causae et Curae in my "Gender and Identity in Medieval Art" class this spring, my students prized being invited by her words to think about their bodies as complex, integrated, pulsing and purposeful systems. The nose as an organ of wisdom (sapientiae) cracked us up, and then we settled into thinking about smell and taste and discernment of good from bad. The idea of the cosmos as a giant stomach seemed, well, unpoetic, until we started thinking of the drive of hunger, of one thing feeding (into) the energy of another. But the one that we spent the most time talking about, the one that we actually wanted (could) experience together was her claim for our lungs.

• The heart is the seat of all knowledge, the liver is the seat of the feelings, the lungs are like veins in the leaf of understanding. - Causae et Curae (translated as Holistic Healing by M Pawlik, Liturgical Press, 1994, p. 38).

Our humble, weird, fragile, unnoticed lungs! Granted the noble quality of rationalitas! Breathing as understanding! But as we heard a student's sharp intake of breath before she said "Oh!" in recognition, we started, yes, to understand. A long, slow exhale through pursed lips (the realization that you're overwhelmed, granting to yourself that you're tired); a sigh that slowly caves your body in (the sympathy you have for the demise before you); the disruptive impatience of a sighing student (demise of the classroom, surely); how much breath it takes to laugh (again, sympathy came up); the huge, greedy gulps of breath reclaiming consciousness after a nightmare (your breath letting you recognize that you're awake, that it's ok); the terror (and damage to the brain and its cognition if it continues) of not being able to breathe; the way breathing slows and regularizes when you're reading (slipping almost entirely out of your awareness of it); the deep breath you take before going on stage/being tested (resolution, understanding what you're facing/up against). Some of these are culturally specific (I love how French produces "Oui!" with a sharp intake of breath), some of them are not (is sighing trans-cultural?). And then, of course, those modes of thought, of powerful concentration, that valorize and study breath - we came up with two: yoga and giving birth (a pretty interesting pair, actually). So yes, yes we realized, breathing is understanding. It is a rational mode. It is also a sympathetic mode (and you can consider all of the times we breathe with someone: in sleep, in laughter, in sighing).

Alexander in a Diving Bell, The Met

At Kalamazoo this year, Karen Overbey shared/generously gave a brilliant meditation of "Breathing" as an Impossible Word. Thinking about Alexander the Great's ambitions to breathe underwater (searching led me to this beautiful Indian manuscript image from the late 16th century, in which the water swirls around Alexander's diving bell as it is being lowered), Karen asked after our own breathing, our own consciousness of something we do unconsciously. Answering that call took our bodies and our trust, as we touched the one standing next to us (and were touched by the same), so as to feel each other breathing. Fragile, poignant, ordinary, deep, momentary every time.  So yes, when we breathe, we participate in this great "leaf of understanding." That's (still) much harder to fully understand. It's more Hildegard and less modern: more her cosmological scale, her deeply integrated universe - that breathing courses (carries nutrients through, as veins do within a leaf) this larger floating thing, this leaf of understanding.

Why does she keep showing jellyfish?

But maybe our breathing and our understanding is all interconnected. The air we breathe is completely shared within this planet, gusts and winds moving it along (as Steve Mentz made me realize in his fantastic postmedieval essay on "Air"), redistributing it, bringing the increasingly complex chemical plumes we project along, redistributing those. It's the two-dimensionality of the leaf of understanding that defies my understanding - but maybe I need to think more three-dimensionally about leaves: enter their thickness and complexity. Consider entire systems that breathe. When we were at the special "Jellies" exhibit at the Shedd Aquarium this week, my daughter marveled at a tank full of them. "Look at them all breathing together!" she said (to be corrected by her much more precise, more scientific sister who explained about the absence of lungs, heart, brain even (though we all loved the idea of a "neural net" instead of a brain)). The movement of a jellyfish can look like an image of breathing - to me, that partly explains why almost any jellyfish exhibit I've seen (my fair share) has New Age music piped in, and glowing blues and greens backlighting the tanks (red for the deeply poisonous ones, of course). Jellyfish indeed do not have lungs, but they might look like lungs breathing because they absorb the oxygen they need through their entire body. Their entire body is a breathing surface. Entering almost any idea for me begins with an etymology - and so "lung": a solid Old English, proto-Germanic, Norse word simply meaning "light" - as in "not heavy" (as in "floats to the top when boiled unlike the other organs" - shudder). Our own lightness of being within, connecting us instantly to greater currents. But then, the very different word, "poumon" (the French word for lung) - of course it's from the Latin, pulmo. And if you keep reading the entry in the Latin dictionary, you understand (with a delighted intake of breath) that our linguistic net turns out to be as interconnected as our breathing. For pulmo marinus (ah!) means jellyfish.