Visiting Paris, or, A Short Meditation on Death [Eleanor Goodman]

Right around the time of my last birthday, I started to think seriously about death. I spent the next several months writing and ruminating on the emotional fallout. I was reminded of that time last week, in Paris sleeping on a narrow mattress on the floor of an apartment belonging to a stranger. Although that could be the set-up for a salacious crime novel, Paul, a friend of my traveling companion Heinrich, turned out to be very gracious even though we were constantly in the way. His entire apartment is smaller than the kitchen of a place I once had in Ohio, and costs four times as much. Of course, my apartment was down the street from a Giant Eagle and a Jiffy Lube, whereas Paul lives three minutes from a bakery that sells golden-crusted baguettes and a rich flakey pain au chocolat that grandmothers fight in line for. 

It wasn’t sleeping on the chilly floor that reminded me of death. Nor was it the fact that as a cheese-hating, light drinking, cream-avoiding slender-budgeted vegetarian, all of traditional French cuisine was pretty much off the table. No, what reminded me of death was my visit with Heinrich to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the most eerie and beautiful cemetery I’ve ever seen. Instead of rows of flat tombstones, Père-Lachaise has the feel of a quiet village of tree-lined lanes and diminutive houses with arched doors and latticed windows.

Each little neighborhood in the cemetery had its own character. Only the omnipresent sense of decay—cobwebs, blackened stone, copper lattice turning green, occasional shoots of maples growing out of roofs—indicated something amiss.  Or rather, not amiss. What was striking about the cemetery was how natural it seemed, a village for the dead, wandered by the living. The return to the earth, weeds and trees taking their toll on the monuments of man, and our muted observation of it all. It was reassuring, that beauty comes from disintegration, that I could suddenly feel death as a kind of rejoining. Among the names of the dead, the sepulchres and stones, so solid and yet losing themselves to the rain, the almost-unimaginable was less overwhelming. It brought me back to a poem I wrote on that terrible, illuminating birthday.

Piety

They will die, the ones you
love best
from murder        face-eating cancer
a throttled heart       no matter

the others you save
in imaginary heroisms
as though each broken fall
of someone else’s father

or every wish
of health extending
into loss like a vine
bearing nothing

is a stay against it

is a comfort to anyone
but yourself
                        at our end
there is this sickness

we call hope
and further there is nothing
between beauty and terror
nothing half-living has

over death                        and yet
the illicit thump
of every wasted heartbeat
the love of strangers

who will also die
on streets you’ve never seen
of wounds you couldn’t heal—
their luminescent eyes in the wreckage.

Comments

[Stacey]

What a strange and wonderful place, the cemetery. I'd never heard of it. And a haunting lovely poem too. Thank you.

[DL]

That's a beautiful photo you took in Pere Lachaise. Does this meditation alter your understanding of that mysterious line of W. Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty"?

[Eleanor Goodman]

Thanks for the kind remarks, David and Stacey. I love Stevens' "Sunday Morning", but the poem on this topic that speaks to me most is Rilke's first Duino Elegy: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us." That sense of awe, for me, is the impulse behind art. I felt that same mix of intense aesthetic pleasure and fear in Pere Lachaise. I think Stevens is pointing to the fact that despite our desire for it, there is no "imperishable bliss", only a fleeting sense of joy, and such is a given life. Death, by providing the door through which beauty comes and goes, is both a looming horror and a solace.