Just so you know. I am tapping this into my cellphone into a mail to myself from a beat-up easy chair, near the piano, next to the WC, at the Bal perdu, my favorite bistro.
As my Mexican pork-roll-size digits tap clumsily away, the keyboard, confused, abused and hopeless, keeps switching between French, German & English.
Odd sense anomalies bloom from spellchecker fractals.
A gang of workers in orange vests and hard-hats is scraping trowels over granite paving stones, tamping down, then smoothing, a sandy, pale mortar between each of hundreds of foot-long pre-set blocks.
It’s a hell of a racket. But it looks good.
The barman, who’s standing just outside the barroom, to smoke, suddenly hollers across the green safety fence, “Les amis, c’est très très beau ce que vous faites!
He’s a nice guy, Nicholas, handsome in his white apron and black pants, dishcloth dashingly laid over his shoulder… He’s right, too. Les amis in question, on all fours, pause to sit up on their knees, to smile, to wave.
The new square, I think, is proof that good workmanship is alive, well and an everyday affair – to hell with the aging grumblers. It will embellish our lives and, with luck, enhance the Bal perdu’s business and the city’s tax base.
It comes to me that the dust, detours and noise will have generated a truly universal success.
As most things are and must necessarily be, it may be imaginary, but it seems to me that the announcers on BFM, the business-oriented radio, have been taking a positively universal-success tone since the election of Emmanuel Macron and his Chambre sans qualités. Not un-coincidentally, I’m playing here on both on the historical Chambre bleu horizon, the post-Great War Chamber of Deputies which united to make sure German pips squeaked at Versailles and on Robert Musil’s premonitory Man without qualities.
I started to say to Jocaste, “Ahh, God, you can expect a hot Fall of debilitating ‘resistance’ to break out when everybody is back from the country … Jojo! How I hate riding a bike!”
Several months of shivering fear and trembling as I woofed and weft through frozen columns of exasperated drivers during the transport strikes that broke out over Alain Juppé’s efforts at some piddling economic reform put me off bikes forever…
Jocaste is a former best friend of Karine, my ex-inamorata.
“It suddenly occurs to me, Jojo,” I continue, “The culture paradigm has (already) shifted.”
I shift in my own seat. It all comes, as if in a dream.
All the usual levers, buttons, bells and whistles of politics were entirely re-purposed, probably sometime last Fall, when François Hollande’s habit of hemming and hawing led him to accidentally announce he would not run again… Before he could correct himself, the producer whispered that Julie Gayet had just called to say that, unexpectedly, she would be free for supper after all…
Hollande’s inclination to infatuation is thus shown to be an instrument of Fate (Destin, Schicksal), as well as infinitely touching in a man of his age and condition.
… Of course … “Jocaste,” I cry, slapping my forehead. Why didn’t I see it for the proof of transmogrification it actually was?
From the very beginning, Emmanuel Macron somehow had the tacit support of the whole French establishment, as well as of most
people, left, right or center… It seemed that the rest of the candidates were shadow-boxing with each other and their shadow-supporters for no more than the exercise. And, now, if the legislative elections show one thing, it’s that “seemed” was “were” as far as the traditional parties went: even the National Front yahoos, usually able to slouch vigorously toward Jerusalem at any time, never found the energy to make a respectable show. Now they never will again.
I realize I don’t really think the BFM announcers are celebrating some sort of new American-style liberal economic order or a new, clever,
France is a country that has had a reputation since before 1789 for sudden, radical, political transformation. Why not in our lifetimes?Commander of the Faithful of their own generation, I tell Jocaste. France’s people, even business people, even liberals, generally abhor economic liberalism. They suspect, correctly, that it gives a bit too much slack to the moneygrubbing jerk section of society. And, too, and this is a truth widely acknowledged, that no sane person can ever truly celebrate the rise to power of somebody other than oneself. So any particularly lusty Macron cheering – is lusty cheering for any winning candidate at any time – is likely advancement-seeking hypocrisy.
The changeover to digital technologies, for instance, happened overnight: one day nobody had ever heard of a PC - Pardon? Un quoi? – and, the next, everybody was debating the proper French name for “email” – Mais, oui, il faut m’en envoyer un courriel, ahh, vois-tu? Un courrier électronique.
Unlike in the States, where your Faster Than Light cruiser is likely to incorporate an army-surplus Willys truck axle in the paradoxal landing mechanism and a reconditioned crank telephone in the strange-particle simulator, things in the Gallic-shrugging disposition have a less-patchwork, more-seamless air.
For instance, if you are able, look up east then west from the inscrutable thereness of the Mitterand Pyramid of the Louvre and you shall see that all the “triumphal” arches fit together as if they had all been built each quite mindful of the other.
The law of the Continuum of Cultural Imagination, developed right here, right now, at the moment I wave my hand for another pint, assures us, Jocaste and I, that they have been.
Non. I do not care, Mes-sieurs-dames, what your Madame Eleanor Beardsley’s matter-of-faction en dit, or will, say, of it.
BFM’s announcers are jubilating – even unbeknownst to themselves – not a political transformation or régime change or even better economic prospects, but transmogrification to a future as yet unexplored state.
“That’s to say, Jojo,” I whisper, hoarse, “Transmigration of cultural imagination into a new vessel of which nobody has yet read the instruction manual (***and nor will they***).”
I feel the slightest shiver of dismay as Jocaste puts her hand over mine: I feel her caress without motion.
“Fall will tell us what’s what, Jocaste,” I say. “Meantime, can you order again? I’ve got to make a call. Be right back. Break out the tanning lotion, while you’re at it, won’t you?” Haha.
Karine isn’t answering. Hasn’t.
Cigar. Cigar. Only a Cigar.
But maybe it’s only because she’s not home.
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