As news of the of the Friday, November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris spread, a friend wrote me that she “was heart broken”. Another wrote, “Those crazy bastards!”.
I was inclined to agree with the characterization, but the sentiment perplexed me. How could some crazy bastards break a heart?
I have since been de-perplexed.
Looking back, the break began, with an eentsy teensy tear in the fabric, on Tuesday, November 17th. It was then I saw for the first time the infantry! patrol! passing through the Square du Salamandre. Automatic weapons unslung and safeties OFF, helmeted, with semi-crouched point man, radio guy and wary rear guard, six boys pass through, attentively scanning roofs, scrutinizing windows and doorways. Pre-school kids, also boys, are running between, around them, oblivious, laughing, yelling their heads off.
From benches here and there, mothers watch the puppyish brouhaha. They nod, call Bonjour!, smile, wave timidly at the patrol … They are maybe trying to make these smooth-faced agents of War feel grown up? I can’t not smile: does experience make these good women fear the uniformed ones might suddenly decide to join the littler ones? Better safe then sorry!
In the evening, I go to the movies. There is a full-enough house and I have no trouble sniggering at Crazy Amy.
On Wednesday, November 18th, at five in the morning, I wake in pre-dawn vagueness, sleep fled for the day.
I get up and go quietly to the the living room. I like to console myself with the bored drone of the radio when I wake early like this. I snap it on.
I become an unwilling, astonished long-distance witness to machine gun rattle, rocket whoosh and high-explosive whoomp. Waco-Texas-style, the police and army are in a firefight with armed religious fanatics in the center of the near-north suburb of St. Denis, near the renowned Basilique de Saint Denis, the most luminous Gothic church in the whole wide world.
I go back to Karine. At my touch, she turns over, opens her wide eyes, takes my hand and puts it to her cheek. She was already awake.
The sound and fury at Saint Denis keeps pounding out of the radio.
I think of Ed Sheeran’s line in “Tenerife Sea”:
We are surrounded by all of these lies/
And people who talk too much.
I would like to fly away from here. But where can we go, really?
I think of Macbeth. Macbeth is a crazy bastard just like these: murdering because he’s feeling powerless and blaming a woman he loves in more ways than he can admit for the poor results he achieves.
I tend to forget the would-be King’s misogynist grievance because Sam Johnson’s version of the play makes him a Christian doing himself an evil by way of a woman’s temptation thus encouraging good. But, as my personal, unchristian, edition of the Wadsworth (Ohio) Shakespeare clearly shows, Macbeth was a just another sad jerk-off with a serious internal girlie-problem:
(Macbeth enters) Baron de Tracy: Poor player, thou,
That strut’st and fret’st thine hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: thou, a tale
Told by an Imbecile, full of sound and fury,
Signifying Nothing.
-
Macbeth Act V1/2, Scene 2.75, lines 2380 - 85
Because what the Bard has said must be so, this terrible stuff in Paris, this murder by crazy bastards with unresolved Oedipals, will never, can never, could never ever ever break my heart …
Karine murmurs, “Ne te plombe pas, mon Tracy.” – Literally, Don’t weigh yourself down.
She’s asking me to have a light heart. She has had some trouble keeping her own heart un-plombed these past few days, so she hopes mine might puff in enough buoyancy for us both.
I consider the flecks of pearl grey beneath the sharp blue of her eyes. These are pieces of Humpty-Dumpty, these submerged flecks. These are unrepairable shards of every shipwreck, ever.
I feel really very sad, sad enough that my heart might fall down to the ground. But it’s Karine as sad that makes me sad, not the crimes of some crazy bastards. And it’s not Karine either will break my heart. That one, I think, can only be me.
I recognize that Karine’s heart is breaking as she looks at me. I wish I could stop it happening, but I can not. Even whispering sweet words, even holding her tight, even killing the crazy bastards and bringing back their heads on a pike, even all that, or more, won’t stop the breaking of her heart.
Against Karine’s cheek, my hand is warm. That’s all.
I am listening hard to Waco-at-Saint-Denis. I am listening to the ineffable nada of political murder. I am reminded of Timothy McVeigh’s grand anti-government protest by massacre of toddlers with a bomb made of shit-substitute. I am reminded of kamikaze Mohammed Atta wearing 25 pair of underpants to protect himself from sexual aggression in the afterlife. I am reminded that crazy bastards yelling God is Great murdered 130 young Parisians because they were having a good time and hated nobody.
A man whose woman, the love of his life, the mother of his son, was shot down while enjoying a glass of wine, has suggested this: live free, live gaily, make liberty your legacy.
Yes.
We are two weeks on, on a long-shadowed Friday, November 27th. People are finishing burying their children, their parents, their spouses, friends and friends of friends.
My heart is burdened but not brittle, not chained down by the hurt inflicted here-below.
So. Look at me. Here you are. Here am I. This is what I know as of now. This is what I feel. There’s a nice tune. Shall we dance?
Karine and I are together, getting on a full tram, going to an anarchist circus show at La Villette. The Compagnie XY do the directing, as well as the dancing, together. The libretto says the performance is possible only “if there is always somebody there to catch you.”
The Compagnie’s latest production, Il n’est pas encore minuit (Not yet midnight), it turns out, is a diabolic dancing ball, a crazy Madison. All 22 of the troupe’s men and women spin, fly lightly lightly into the air, corkscrew into each another’s arms, break suddenly in and out of rudderless conflict, slip in and out of elegant synchronicity. Even flubs are flawlessly executed.
As I applaud à tout rompre, my heart feels light enough to share with all the intimate strangers whose hearts have been broken by loss and grief.
Though life can be saddened by secret or public grief and made hard by luck, frustration or mistakes, I think it is basically a sort of Cosmic Delight. Getting through it comes down to, first, to learning to live within the beat of your own heart. Getting through it with bravery and aplomb means learning to live within the beat of one another’s hearts, like these XY acrobats who catch each other even when they miss the trick. “Doing it alone you go quicker,” says the guy who epilogues the show, “Doing it together you go farther.”
With that, Karine and I file out of the Big Top.
We walk quietly together into the night, toward the Porte de Pantin, over the canal d’Ourcq, down a long stretch of cobblestones. We turn into the restaurant at the Grand Hall. The warmth of dim light, good music and the smell of food drifts over us while we are opening our coats to show the guards we aren’t wearing suicide vests.
Karine goes for powder. I stand alone, waiting. I am just twisting my head to see if I’ve missed any attractive women …
My heart breaks.
Like crockery in the kitchen, just like that: one moment I’m a whole vessel, I hope, full of strawberries & cream, and the next, I’m a pool of slops. In the dreamy second that follows the crash, the world is silent. The silence seems emptiness and the emptiness seems black, black as bitter smoke from a burnt offering of old tires.
I slap both hands down on the table and blow hard, expelling a demon, feel a tear roll out of my eye. There’s a wary fear in me that I’ve never had before. The fear tells me that nothing will ever be the same. This is heart break.
I shall go on, yes. But without that ease that I had grown used to and, having grown used to, had come to believe was the essence of this, the Life I love so dear. My lies and those of others, the foma and gonfalons, as Kurt Vonnegut styled them, now sound different in my ears, taste different in my mouth. This is heart break.
Heart break is the principle form of human tragedy.
Life operates in the expectative while you and I live in the ever-present. When Life and living it collide, as they do when crazy bastards turn the place topsy turvy, Life, after a decent interval, reminds you that you really, honest, never do go home again, even when you think you’ve just stepped out for cigarettes.
I hope Karine comes back quickly.
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