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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


03.02.23


For whatever reason—a phrase, I think, in Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities—I was reminded of a wet September afternoon in The Bombadier, a pub in Paris, diagonally across from the Panthéon, where the French bury their most illustrious dead. Near the bones of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie, we idled for ages over our pints, waiting for a break in the rain, chatting about who knows what, stories of our misspent youth, I think, the moral of which was always that youth is wasted on the young.

Just across the road was a church, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, mixing Gothic and Renaissance styles, an edifice devoted to the splendid accretion of ages. In front of its massive violet doors, two teenage girls hung out, one lying with her head in the other’s lap, chatting and laughing in their haven of stone and flesh, beyond the reach of rain and worldly concerns; the moral obviously did not apply here.

Time passed slowly, in sips of beer and infinitesimal changes of light. Nevertheless it passed. The girls embraced before parting ways. Then celebrants of St. Genevieve, the city’s patron saint, assembled: folk in Renaissance dress made speeches, blew horns, danced, dispersed.

Finally the rain let up, and we ourselves left, walking to the Musée du Cluny to visit a set of medieval tapestries devoted to the six senses and crowded with flowers, orange trees, pines, monkeys, dogs, and rabbits, all framing the same protagonists: a woman, a unicorn. In one tapestry, the woman showed the unicorn its reflection in a small hand-held mirror.

In hindsight, I could have stayed for the rest of my life in that nook in the pub, among the ancient textiles in that dark gallery: waystations between the past and the near future, in a present from which the past was not damned by regrettable actions, nor the future already compromised, land-mined with catastrophe. The sixth sense: “À mon seul désir” (“To my only desire”) which might mean love or understanding.




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