I think I came to France …
On my last full day in France, I went for one last walk on the Voie Verte, with Kelly Riviere, my collaborator, who translated and today performed my museum piece. I promised her that, contrary to its reputation, Normandy had been beautifully sunny during my stay, and as we set out, this seemed to hold true. We saw ducklings in a stream, a father fishing with his small son, families on bicycles. It was only when we turned around that we noticed the lowering darkening sky, and no sooner had we said, “Oh dear it’s going to rain,” then it began to rain. The rain came in the form of hail, icy fragments that melted on contact and soaked us by the time we’d reached the village again. But as you can see from the photo above, we appear to have a similar sense of adventure.
A few hours later, we’d dried off and readied ourselves for the performance at the museum. As planned, at the start of the piece, I positioned a chair and sat in it, laptop open, as if preparing to write about the paintings before me — the first paintings discussed in the piece. I was quite close to the paintings, and I sat looking at them as the room behind me began to fill. And fill. And fill. I realized, without turning around, that the small gathering we had expected was not small at all. Kelly began. And the crowd followed her and stayed with her — with us — for the entire time, as we moved through the museum. This was quite remarkable given the limitations of the space, and the size of the paintings or etchings, many quite small, which meant people were standing and listening to Kelly describe and illuminate a painting they could not see.
It was a moving experience, and unlike any I’ve ever had or expect to have again. And that sums up this whole trip, I think. This whole wholly embracing and embraced trip into what seems to be another world. One in which I’ve been opened, again, to the beauty of possibility, and the possibility of beauty.
It’s funny, but throughout the trip I kept saying to myself, “I think I came to France to …” and filling in the blank with something different. I think I came to France to write. I think I came to France to be alone and listen to myself. I think I came to France to appreciate art (hello, Paris!). And now, I think I came to France to discover the magic of collaboration. But I think it must be for all of these reasons. I needed to be here for awhile, longer than seemed reasonable when I was chalking out those columns on the board at home. But here we are, in the last day of the last column, all still standing.
I’m excited to be going home. I can’t wait to see those beautiful faces again. But I think — no, I’m certain — that whatever comes next will be better because I’ve been here. And I hope to come back again soon.
xo, Carrie
Under the influence
I suppose I should know better than to blog under the influence of extreme emotion or wine, or, much worse, both, but here goes.
I am “home” from a truly wonderful evening that completely focused on and celebrated Invisible sous the lumiere, as Girl Runner must be called while I am in France. It was a truly remarkable evening. I can’t believe it, actually. Nearly three hours, all focused on Girl Runner. The first performer (above) was actually a writer, not an actress, a young woman who has already published novels herself and who is also a runner: she memorized at least half an hour of text directly from the novel and performed it — embodying Aggie at different times in Aggie’s life. After her performance, which was very moving, the same woman did a short lecture on sports and literature, and the book. This was followed by a second performance, a reading from the book performed by a male actor, who showed us a whole different aspect of Aggie’s character — her humour. The audience was really laughing. I started to think that I’d written not a novel but a play! When his reading of the text was done, it was my turn on stage for an interview, with a warm reception from the audience.
After all of this, there was a dinner for the artists. During which I had some wine along with the meal. And I’m only “home” now, and it’s after midnight.
I feel like I’ve seen something that I won’t forget, and also that’s changed my view of what I can do and imagine. Being in France has shown me Aganetha as I never saw her before, but it has also shown me something about my own writing that I hadn’t appreciated, somehow. I don’t know how to describe it. All I can say is that it’s amazing to feel such energy and to be in such a different creative space. This trip has been a complete gift. Full stop.
Tomorrow is the performance of my museum piece. And on Monday I come home. But meanwhile, here I am, floating.
xo, Carrie
Paris wandering
I had lunch at the Cafe de Flore, which is next to Les Deux Magots and across the street from the Brasserie Lipp, all famous French literary landmarks. The waiter, when asked, said that I was sitting exactly where Simone de Beauvoir would sit when she came to the cafe. Now, he may say this to everyone who asks, granted, but I’m not picky. And it was a good spot. I could see the whole cafe.
I am returning by train to Louviers soon, to finish my work there. But today, I had nothing on my schedule. So after breakfast (two croissants, jam, camomile tea, served discreetly in the “library” at the appointed hour), I walked. I walked and walked and walked, marvelling at how open the city is, how inviting. How it has been arranged to feed the public — anyone who comes — with beauty.
I sat on a bench beside the Eiffel Tower, having stumbled onto the quiet side, and here is what I wrote.
Sit on a bench. Sit and look at the tower built for a World Fair in 1889. Two birds fly directly toward you and flit past your head. Green buds on trees newly popping open. What shall you do, but look? And sit. And rest in the strange power of human-made beauty — a thing that has no practical purpose, really. I finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic last night, and she writes that what she loves about her work (as a writer) is that it is NOT essential. And therefore it is play. It expresses the same thing that this Eiffel Tower does and these buildings of enormous beauty and power — and the portraits at the museum in Louviers. It says: we are here to be joyful, too.
A man stops and touches the blooms on a flowering bush, of pale yellow, a middle-aged man with sunglasses and a paunch, stops and touches the blooms. All of this beauty freely available, maintained over generations, open to the public, open to anyone who can get here, like me, and sit on a bench and look.
Maybe art exists because we want to create, we humans. Maybe I should stop wishing I were someone with a practical essential career, and rejoice instead that my gift, such as it is, is a gift. That what I have been stumbling toward all these years is an expression of thanks. Thanks to this world for letting me in, letting me live and breathe and love and feel the overwhelming desire to express what catches inside me.
Elizabeth Gilbert is absolutely right. My work is not essential. I’m not saving anyone’s life or changing the world here. I’m just playing. And my God, how good it is to have the freedom, the safety, the permission, maybe even the calling, to play.
I like how Gilbert describes itching at a tiny curiosity and how it grew, for her, into a book. Maybe I need to scratch more points of curiosity: research, study, fill the arid patches in my mind with knowledge, and see what connections get made, see what stories grow. I think Gilbert’s book may have given me a template, a guide, for how to continue doing this with real purpose. It isn’t all about the writing. It’s also about collecting knowledge and experience and material in order to transform it into something that can’t be seen in advance. No guarantees.
But that’s okay. Risk is not so scary when all I’m risking is time and effort poured into something that pleases me. Forget selfishness, or stop fretting about it. Do I wish the people who built this tower had dug wells instead? Do I wish that Mavis Gallant had become a nurse instead of moving to Paris to write stories? No!
Can you accept yourself unconditionally for who you are right now? I’ve been saying this to myself and it is a powerful powerful medicine — or incantation. It is powerful good.
Maybe I came to Paris to see what beauty means. That it is bigger than its human creators; that I just need to do my work. Does your writing love you? Elizabeth Gilbert asked, and Yes, I declare that it does! Look at the gifts it’s given me: I wrote a book and it brought me to Paris! I must admit that when it comes to gift-giving, I prefer to give than to receive. Sometimes, often, I’m resistant, wary, guilty, almost afraid of being given gifts — like I must repay what’s given or fall into debt. It is probably a desire to control: a gift, after all, is something over which the receiver has no control. A gift is a gift. And I see I’ve been mistaken and blind all this time. I’ve been thinking I need to repay my debts by helping others, serving, being useful … when all I really need to do is say thank you.
xo, Carrie
PS Forgive any typos: written and posted in a very short amount of time, as I am rushing to get the train back to Louviers. Goodbye, Paris!
I am in Paris!
And this is where I’m staying, courtesy of my publisher, Gallimard, and I see that they also publish Elena Ferrante so I’m feeling rather fan-girlish just for being here, so close to brilliance.
That’s really I have to say just for now. I’m in Paris!
I have an interview at France inter this afternoon (like France’s CBC radio, I think), followed by an event this evening at the Maison de la Poesie, and then tomorrow I will be wandering around like a tourist taking photos of places I feel like I’ve seen before — but I haven’t! This is my first time in Paris. The streets are like mazes of similar looking buildings, like this (below), but I’ll figure it out.
xo, Carrie
Settle in, it’s a long post
If I were to write a blog post today, I would reflect on the past five days of utter solitude, days during which I rarely spoke out loud; there were several days when I spoke to no one in English. I read, I noodled, I listened to podcasts and surfed the news, emailed Kevin, ate pretty good food, kept to a reasonably regular routine, wrote and edited the museum piece, and went for several runs and many more walks.
I was not bored.
I was not even particularly lonely, except for the morning when I woke up with a raging bladder infection. Good thing I carry antibiotics with me in case of such an occurrence. Yes, that morning I was lonely and in pain and felt far from home and prone to worst-case-scenario thinking, but even that morning, I understood that I was self-sufficient and knowledgeable enough to cope with the unexpected crisis.
During these five days of solitude, I haven’t been lonely, I haven’t been bored, and I haven’t been restless either, not restless of mind or body. The body has taken care of itself. I’ve gone for long walks, and finally on Sunday felt a twinge of anxiety that whispered — you need to sweat! So I went for a run, and ran and ran and ran on the beautiful trail, discovering only afterward that I’d gone nearly 9 km, the longest and least painful run in many many months. Today, I ran again, pushing even further as I could feel my body beginning to trust that it would be okay: nearly 11 km. How joyous it is to run without pain; I’ve been injured for so long that I’d forgotten the joy of pushing against the ordinary discomforts and limitations of a body being asked to run — breath, heart, muscles, endurance. Running with a chronic injury you feel all these limitations, but you feel also a terrible dread that springs from pain from a different source, pain that whispers, Are you doing yourself damage?
For the month of March, my theme was health. This month, it would seem natural to name my theme: travel. But strangely, I think instead it’s: paying attention. The theme has arisen because I am travelling, and also because I am alone. What I’ve been paying attention to are my own interests, whims, rhythms, appetites, and desires. How often in a person’s daily life does an opportunity like this present itself? I’ve fantasized over the years about going on writing retreats in the middle of nowhere, and someone told me about a retreat where you do yoga and ride horses (not at the same time) that sounded fabulous, and a couple of years ago my mom did a silent retreat that intrigued me. But the risks seemed too great (the risk of it being a waste troubled me), especially given the heavy load of responsibility I’d be leaving on Kevin’s shoulders while away. So I never pursued these ideas.
I didn’t pursue this trip, either. It just landed in my lap, and because it was work-related, I said yes.
I thought I was saying yes, in part, to a writing retreat. I was excited to see what I would make with all this free time. (And I’ve made something interesting and specific related to the Museum’s exhibit, but it belongs here, and will stay here.) Why am I not writing my new novel? I thought, as the week went on. I tried, but the words felt dead. Yet the words, here, in my daily meditations and on my blog, these words felt alive. They interested me. And so I’ve been writing after all, just not the material I’d pencilled into the schedule.
Something else happened as the week went on. I stopped panicking about what I was not doing. I stopped worrying about what I should be doing. I started paying attention to what I wanted to do.
I wanted to read. So I’ve been reading: a David Sedaris essay collection (which has a story set in Normandy, as it happens); Ali Smith’s brilliant novel How to be both that somehow merges the world of a 15th century painter with a British teenager from the now, and weirdly also happens to be a book about sitting and looking at paintings, which I did not know when I chose it for this trip; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, on black bodies in Amercian history and the present, which challenged me, moved me to tears, and has inspired me to think differently about Dreamers and Dreams (and he’s going to be in Rouen THIS SATURDAY at the same bookstore where I had an event on Thursday, and I must figure out how to go, because, honestly, how is that even possible?); and now I’m trucking through Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert.
I wanted to write. So I’ve been writing. Mostly things like this. Scraps. Ephemera.
I wanted to rest. So I’ve been resting.
Most of all, it seems, I’ve been resting my mind.
It’s taken exactly 13 days of rest to recognize that I may already be writing what I’m supposed to be writing. I am writing what has come to me, which is all we can ever do, when we’re trying to make something out of what we love and believe.
Maybe, just maybe, I’ve been anxiously searching for purpose down dead ends, without seeing what is open before me. Wide open, like that field at the end of our street when I was a child in Managua, with its dusty path and matted grass and garbage and crumbling concrete walls — the place my mind travelled to when I wrote the phrase: open before me.
I will probably never be content, exactly, with what I’ve made. But maybe, just maybe, I can be content with what I’m doing.
xo, Carrie
P.S. Just thought of my word of the year: PEACE. Yes.