The Cruellest Month

T.S. Eliot had it all wrong, you mutter indignantly. April is not the cruellest month: at least, not in Paris. It is August.

Your favourite bakery/pastry shop shuts down; actually, all your favourite bakeries shut down. Most restaurants – good, bad and gourmet – are of a similar mind, except the ones in the heart of the tourist’s trajectory. The grocer follows suit.

The local bank begins to implement “summer hours”. So does the neighbourhood pharmacy – if you are lucky enough to have one that remains open all through the month.

Machines at the laundrette are out of order and there is nobody to come and repair them.

Technically, all these essential services are supposed to follow a rota system that would leave at least one open at any time of the month in every neighbourhood; but this policy seems to have met the fate of most technical manuals — at the bottom of tottering piles.

Buses and metros decide to ply at almost half the usual frequency — during peak hours.

News bulletins are filled with chartbusters from 1949 for want of current material. And when news there is, it is usually a litany of gory murders, kidnappings and arson in every other village in the country leading you to wonder if you should flee to safer environs, like atop the Anak Krakatoa.

All your doctors take off on vacation and the locum gets the heebie-jeebies at the thought of a disorder he can’t spell. Worse still, the doctor’s stand-in secretary has just stepped out from another dimension (possibly the one harbouring socks vanished by washing machines): she announces that since she cannot identify you on her database, you cannot possibly exist. Would you like an appointment on November 30^th, she enquires.

The Internet/telephony service-provider you hired for the office at a very steep price responds to a crisis from his deckchair in Croatia: oh, it is a hardware problem, he confirms, impossible to solve long-distance. Could we wait until the 27^th of August?

If the house agent has also taken off for a month – along with the concierge and every other housing union representative – leaving only the Great Grey Spirit of the Seine to come to your aid when domestic calamities like possessed plumbing or crashing range hoods seize the day, there is strong immediate threat to continued sanity.

Then, as the rant – usually made to another, fervently nodding Parisian – reaches fevered pitch, you stop abruptly as the other interjects, almost despite himself, “But it is so nice to see the city almost deserted, isn’t it?” Deserted? A fly on the wall might ask. Deserted, with hordes of tourists from every cardinal point thronging the city, for once transforming Paris overnight into a polyglot capital where you are almost as likely to trip over tendrils of Japanese, Bangla and Flemish as run into thickets of French? But, yes, deserted. Because Paris without Parisians – however populated it may be with denizens of other climes – feels deserted. Gorgeously shorn of our collective high-octane irascibility, of the unrelenting sense of hurtling through time towards yet another deadline and of the need to withdraw into oneself lest you tread on an inch of someone else’s space.

A strange thing happens to the remaining Parisians, the ones who choose to spend August here. Whether from indigence or ill health or indolence or overwork is immaterial: you opted to remain here, and the consequences will be palpable.

You expand: take up more space on earth. Breathe outwards. Smile enviously, later indulgently, at tourists. Drop the near permanent half-scowl or the equally mandatory blank gaze donned in the metro and the street. Dare to ask your formidable postman if he enjoyed his vacation. Stop at Gare du Nord to watch a newlywed Japanese couple have their photo session in front of Thalys trains coming from Cologne, Amsterdam and Brussels. You respond to the casual speculation of a fellow Parisian – also unused to this strange new skin of voyeur and flaneur – on why that couple would celebrate their new life at a railway station. You catch yourself saying softly, because it is a place where journeys begin, refuting her unconvinced suggestion – a last-ditch attempt to retrieve the Parisian cynic’s garb – that it must be a photo shoot for an ad campaign. No, you respond, they are too jubilant for that, too indifferent to perfection.

And despite all the attendant discomforts and dangers of absent bakers, plumbers, pharmacists, electricians and doctors; despite exasperation at unreliable metros, a part of you is content and grateful. Deeply grateful to generations of workers and activists and politicians who – against the received wisdom of the day (and of today) – fought long and hard to make compulsory paid holidays a reality for the entire working population. Content to live in a corner of the world where the right to leisure is recognised and defended for all sections of society, although the murmurs against it, especially in the corporate sector, are crescendoing along with complaints that this kind of image diminishes the country’s credibility in the international arena. It may not behove Parisians to be overtly appreciative of their benefits, but, in this, you just cannot keep the carapace on.

You wake early, and watch the sky shed layers of night, patch by uneven patch. You recognize day shivering inside, still a little tender, and you feel something close to kinship? You are resigned about the weather, not unhappily so. Facebook statuses are no longer a tirade about the cold. Instead you post a lost and found notice in the hope that the prodigal will come home. Lost: a summer. Prematurely born, small but sprightly. Blithe and noisy. Blue, white and green with a few streaks of amber. Finder will be well rewarded.

Yes, Paris in August can be a rare and wonderful beast. More faun than unicorn, though: it tries you and teases you and then, in small and imperceptible ways, transforms you.

More on that later: you still need to scour the city for an electrician.

Through the Looking Glass

June-July have a certain solidness about them, usually, that is quite comforting. There’s travel on the cards, usually to new destinations; the weather, while predictably unpredictable, still fits into a certain graph (I mean, you are never snowed in!), oscillating between a throbbing, fevered heat and unremitting rain and, sometimes, touching Gräfenberg spots of liquid sunshine and endless skies.

It tends to be a tough time at work because the theatre/performance season is ending and there are mere weeks left to scramble for co-producers and book tours and find extra funding. It is often the “Oh, I want an elephant on stage” moment when your dearly cherished artist can spring surprises on you, surprises of the 150 000-euro variety. Electric. That’s how it feels. Yet, with a lovely undercurrent of anticipation: the team put up with extra pressure because in a few weeks, we won’t see each other again (well, not for another two to three weeks), and, for once, travel will not involve looking after other people’s visas and ensuring they have functional alarms or vegan/halaal/no-carb meals on transcontinental flights. Besides, that piece with the “elephant on stage” – you know it has all the potential to be extraordinary, the artist is passionate about it, and his vision becomes yours.

That’s usually: this year, time slipped on some sunshine and slush, and regained its footing a little gracelessly – with one foot in the past and another in the future. And place, after having smirked at that little rough-and-tumble, crumbled at the edges, had its midsection vaporised and then reappeared with some grafted parts. Served it right for being so superior. But, what about me?

I went off the radar. Not just the blog-radar (very new, still unfamiliar: prose!) but the writing radar. And tried to figure some of it out. What else do you do when time and place feel like primeval ooze … oh, not because they are savage or fearsome but because they were porous and phantasmagorical and shapeshift with a panache even Mystique would envy.

I. The Red Queen

One evening, Paris – after eleven years of being more home than any spot on the globe, despite (or because of - scary thought, that!) the inordinate boisterousness, the strikes, the elusive plumbers and the lack of saffron-flavoured rasmalai* – turned stranger. No, actually, it mutated into a scarily recognisable celluloid borough, straight from Thomas Harris.

I got stalked.

Of course it is fatuous to imagine that one lives in a haven of peace and sanity when statistics clearly declare otherwise, when newspapers and radio stations shout out with graphic precision the levels of violence and perversion rising each day. Not just in distant, deserted hamlets or behind the postcard-pretty copses. But just here - in a neighbouring district, or on a street you frequent. And, yes, to people like you and me. Without “provocation”. Without notice too.

But it tends to be too dramatic, too – well, cinematic – to believe in. Unlike being mugged or accosted by drunks or desperate drug-addicts – all of which we navigate in a metropolis with enough regularity to acknowledge and beware. But stalked. Huh-huh. I guess that is just that tiny bit beyond our ceilings of imagination. Until it happens.

There’s something inexpressibly eerie about being the focus of concentrated attention. Venomous, unblinking attention. Maybe because you are looking madness in the eye, maybe the instinctive knowledge that rules of rationality don’t operate for the stalker, or the brain going on overdrive, looking for all options of escape. Tube exits, street corners, shops with twin doors, cabs. In, out. Up, down. The mental running, even as you force yourself to maintain a steady pace. The running out of options.

There is the memory of hate: steady, unswerving hate that is directed at you. Random hate. Its aftertaste lingers. Like malaria, I suspect it won’t leave: it can rise up when you least expect, in places you felt thoughtlessly secure before. I look over my shoulder now. In supermarkets. On the street. In restaurants. And I can finally grasp why espousing the right-wing security overdrive must be such a temptation.

This is still my city. But I can see how swiftly it can morph into another being. Like everything else, you could say.

II. White kNight

There is this land called safe. Oh, this safe is on another continent, an intangible one, unconnected to stalkers or muggers or snarling immigration officials or stamping, jostling crowds in buses on rush hour. For two entire decades, the first two ones of my life, it was the El Dorado I had sought. By my late teens, after eighteen times in surgery, the place I felt safest was hospital, so, with infallible adolescent optimism, I thought: wouldn’t it be just dandy if I could chose a career that would unfold within the hospital premises? Anything – occupational therapist, counsellor, babysitter, hair dresser for chronic patients – would be fine, preferably, with accommodation on campus.

My surgeon blanched when I shared that insight with him. Maybe the Buddha’s father had done the same. He muttered something to the effect that life would be unhealthily lopsided, which sounded totally illogical to me: life had always been lopsided and unhealthy: this might actually even things out a bit. Empower me to volitionally enter a place I’d dreaded the first 16 years of my life and that I considered a refuge since, so alien did the outside world seem then.

It must have been just after the time they wheeled me into the wrong operation theatre (my roommate, born with a limp, was to have her left leg extended; I had to have an oesophageal dilation) that I decided that hmmmm, no, hypothetical safety was not a priority anymore as my very real leg took precedence, and while I didn’t – and don’t – enjoy being just an inch or two away from midgetism, surgically lengthening my limbs had never been a desired solution. My roommate arrived at a similar conclusion about having endoscopes and balloon dilators thrust down her chest, incidentally.

It’s an odd thing, safety. We find it in the funniest of places and times. The last time it arrived and belatedly settled down for the night, just before daybreak, was during a really bad bout of spasms, far away, in a city where I have not really had a medical safety net after kindergarten. It was a bad episode, the kind where breathing, staying halfway-conscious becomes such an effort that letting go – choking, throwing up, blacking out – looks deceptively attractive, even if some tiny watchman on a rampart of the brain knows otherwise. The kind where all medication seems held up somewhere else, maybe in some other dimension, quite indifferent and ineffectual, like a stage manager I’d once met in a Mediterranean theatre who kept extending his broom over the same square foot of stage, and flicking it from time to time. Why are you even here, I’d wanted to ask him, and it was what I kept screaming inside my head to the vast quantity of chemicals in my system.

Yes, odd, then, that a steady, unswerving gaze can keep you alive when nothing else is working. That a pair of hands can coax breath back.  That a voice can tether you to an earlier, and later, world with some semblance of normality. That even in the midst of brain-numbing pain, knowing someone is there – even if there is little he can do other than prevent you from knocking your head on the wall – and breathing with you, actually retrieves sanity. Pain can quite literally drive you out of your mind.

The saddest, oddest thing, though, is just how incapable I am of finding the right words to say just what it meant to be safe. Momentary as it was. Thank you would be so inadequate. How do you thank a part of yourself, almost your lungs or thought? Would you say, thank you, dear breath? Or attempt to explain it doesn't matter that the safety wasn’t physical or real since it removed none of the dysfunction; what matters is it was immediate, vital, with the meaning the French give to the latter word: literally, generating life. How do I say that in the worst moments to come, I will go back and hold that fleeting sense of safety, of rootedness, in the palm of my hand. And when life ends, even though that safety won’t be there, its memory will. There is no bigger gift you could give me.

III. The Hatter

On a flight from Delhi to Trivandrum, I slipped out of my 38-year-old skin and the confines of Indigo’s gelid aircraft (whose attendants are doing a fine job in saving the planet by scrimping on heating) to meet my 13-year-old self in Shillong, a much-loved city in my childhood, the only place – out of roughly a dozen – I wanted to put down roots and live forever. It was a time when forever was a believable notion, much like Narnia a few years earlier.

The time machine that powered this journey was Anjum Hasan’s remarkable collection, Street on the Hill, which I had been gifted a few days before. I read it on the five-hour flight. And then reread it, poem after poem. Over and above the precision and quiet, very quiet, beauty of the poems, what struck me most was their fidelity to a specific, usually indescribable, time and place; their ability to capture a certain wabi-sabi with just a throwaway phrase, which wasn't throwaway at all, but poised and agile: balletic.

Anjum Hasan returned part of my childhood: the best bit, the Shillong years, with the noodles and music shops and the "hills in our blood" and the oak doors and the endless array of windows with white veils and awakenings – and, most of all, one of my favourite schools. I do not know whether the school she refers to in some of her poems, in particular, in Coming of Age in a Convent School, is actually the one I went to, or if there were other schools in Shillong that experienced similar, perhaps parallel realities but the resemblances with names and memories were startling. Much of that evocative, effortlessly memorable poem sang to me. I remembered the sex education class with the films in the library that she weaves into the poem. I remembered also Sister Monica, whose verve and forthrightness had been such an impetus. And the end, the end of the poem, marking the advent of adolescence, made me smile through the icicles in my teeth; it was the only thing which had irked me about that lovely convent, after a lifetime of attending co-ed schools and growing up with a handful of male cousins constantly around the house:

“This is the year I realize there are only,

only women in the entire school building,

and am astonished at the thought.”

* there is a much longer list of "becauses" for Paris being home, which one day - when I can keep it short, simple and coherent - will be divulged on this blog. Walking across the Villette at midnight in summer is one of them, perhaps the most inexplicable one.

Save the arts

Meanwhile, there are initiatives that have spring up to defend the arts, to spread awareness among people about the need to support art education and outreach programmes, to demystify a popular right-wing rant that the arts are nothing but a drain on tax-payers' money.


This video on False Economy, for instance: http://vimeo.com/21480990 which explains simple facts about public debt and debt management.


The website Lost Arts which fellow-blogger Swarup B.R. on One for the Road shared with me. Lost Arts catalogues "all the projects, events, initiatives, performances and organisations" lost to the UK due to reduced funding between now and 2015. It makes for a chilling read.


My personal favourite is this ludic and convincing film made by David Shrigley for Save the Arts. I love the way David Shrigley uses the familiar and identifiable device of a parent-child conversation and a working day environment to explain some lamentably hidden aspects of the benefits of art - in terms that someone who is not in the field nor directly affected can connect to. In terms that would make sense to an accountant, or a finance ministry official (I am deploying caricatures this time!)


Save the Arts is a campaign launched by Turning Point, a consortium of more than 2000 arts organisations and artists from all over the UK. They are encouraging people to sign a petition to be sent to the British Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The petition points out "it has taken 50 years to create a vibrant arts culture in Britain that is the envy of the world and appeals to the government not to slash arts funding and risk destroying this long-term achievement and the social and economic benefits it brings to all."


And some images which are worth a few thousand words:
The Angel of the North - as a symbol of arts tomorrow (Cornelia Parker)
and
Mark Wallinger's Reckless


Hmmmm, I need to see what is happening in France. I've been in and out of the country for too long!

Odds and ends ... some frightening ends

Back home after a whirlwind trip to Amsterdam for Het Ballet Nationale’s double bill featuring two full-length pieces – Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Labyrinth and David Dawson’s timelapse/ (Mnemosyne) – as well as for reunions, production meetings galore and one writing session – all packed into roughly forty hours.

The premiere went off splendidly, with hardly any technical glitches (and dancers cheerfully tackling the few that happened in their stride, so if I hadn't seen the dress rehearsal I would not even have guessed). I won’t dwell much on the pieces themselves though Labyrinth still plays on in my mind, over and over again, nocturnal, luminous and elemental in so many ways. It was a storyteller’s delight with fables and parables woven in and out, but– exceptionally for Cherkaoui – without even a shadow of text. This piece was also striking in its use of ensembles – it was heartwarming to see the corps de ballet given such prominence. But I cannot claim any objectivity here.

Timelapse/(Mnemosyne) was more in the purely balletic vein, but all electronic thunder and lightning (most of it psychedelic) and special effects refracting the spirit of Greek myths through very snazzy dance-club sets. I staggered out like a habitual wallflower after her first night on the disco floor, head spinning a little from the onslaught of sound and lights, the choreography and performance – admirable as they both were – unfortunately being relegated to second place by the excess of other elements.  

What prompted this post, however, were neither the performances themselves nor the joys and woes of racing around a deluged Amsterdam nor the unspeakably divine chocolates at Puccini (reserved for another post, another day), nor the refurbished Thalys interiors (Eurostar, could you please borrow a page out of the former’s book?). This post  was triggered by the announcement on the funding cuts in arts by the Dutch government.

The U.K. saw much consternation earlier in the year after the Arts Councils decisions were announced. In France, structural subsidies for performing arts have been decreasing to favour an event-driven programming. In Italy, the mood has been one of despair for some time now, though they are resisting valiantly.

The petition launched in the Netherlands explains it far better than I could: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/performingarts/

As the post title says, there are ends in view. There is change in the air, a change that is being made in the name of larger interest and economy, but those are really debatable points. Larger interest is a term that shields many abuses and omissions. In Europe we are very fortunate to have funding for arts – there are many parts of the world where not only is there no funding, but artists and art professionals have to struggle to present their work, and are even in danger of their lives. But no civilization has advanced by suppressing or discouraging artistic expression. Funding of art is such a sign of social and cultural progress – one obtained after much struggle and reflection. Reneging on cultural policy might make sense in a short-term, profit-and-loss approach – just as cutting down on social security seems to make sense to more and more governments – but a society deprived of non-commercial art is a frightening prospect.

One day soon, then, the plush Muziektheater might only play host to conventions or a 500-euro-per-head gig. One day soon, there might be nobody to support Candoco Dance Company  in its mission of bringing together able-bodied and disabled dancers, of giving them a stage to share their strengths and weaknesses with us. No place to tour Rachid Ouramdane's and Gregory Maqoma's coruscating explorations on colonists rewriting our memories and our tongues.  No audience, then, for Pina Bausch’s colossal, savagely beautiful Rite of Spring.

It might be sooner than we think.

I Am The Wind by Jon Fosse/Patrice Chéreau. Of you and me, life and death

A few stray thoughts about the play I Am The Wind, which I saw last week and found very, very compelling. Luckily, I hadn't read any of those scathing, superior reactions in English newspapers beforehand or I might have screamed in pain during the performance. After I came home, quite in the grip of those powerful, poignant performances, and a staging and text I found hauntingly effective, I decided to check the earlier reviews (by default, all from the English press since the world premiere had been at the Young Vic and the French ones would only come out later in the week, during the Théâtre de la Ville run). They were almost unfailingly severe, coming down on all the elements I had loved most about the piece. Even The Guardian's reviewer was half-apologetic about liking it (but he did accord it four stars, hurrah!), "whatever it may mean, there is no denying the production's visual bravura." Michael Billington's review

That was one of the rare exceptions, by the way.

Why did they have to be so, so derisive about the writing? Call me an ingenue but I liked it. Like is an anaemic word, it does not reflect the sea of emotions the piece stirs up. I was shaken by the writing (and that includes the translation by Simon Stephens) and Richard Peduzzi's set design (entirely at the service of the story, no vain grandiloquence here) and the staging. The actors, Tom Brooke and Jack Laskey as The One and The Other, were tremendous. Their words and delivery, hesitant in one, urgent in the other, and the archetypes they portrayed, stayed in my head for days. But actors - like many other artistes - are seldom tremendous all by themselves, they seek direction. And Patrice Chéreau is an outstanding actors' director. Think Intimacy with its excoriating performances, think Son Frère (His Brother) with the microscopic examination of the descent into helplessness, the struggle with the pretzel called fraternity. But few of these reviews accorded him any credit for directing the actors.

Great art gives you clues into the labyrinth of one's own universe, and this one did, vastly different though mine is from the sea-raft-anchor reality of the Northern hemisphere Fosse inhabits. The elliptical beast that is time moves with no feet, in unending, repeated orbit.  Perhaps I needed another friend's thoughts on the piece to reveal why Laskey and Brooke felt like such familiar figures. They could be life and death in us. Action and curious despair. Nurture and abandon. The lure of the lightness there will be in an end and a fear of the weight of living. The need for words. The damnable need for words, words, words when they never really signify that thing. That thing you need, that thing you dread....

Only a week later, the landscape has changed considerable. The French media, in the usual magic mirror trick that the two cultures/medias (British/French) indulge in, are more than positive: they are almost reverential. Okay, that's just an aside. What anyone else, expert or otherwise, thought of the piece does not change the impact it had on me: one of illumination. Northern Lights.

Of Jo Shapcott and Mutability

One of the poetry collections that invaded my head for the longest time ever this year (with a rearguard action still going on) was Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability. Here is a link to Hairless, read by the poet:

Hairless - from Poetry Archives