The Blush

Rachel Kendall

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7th June

The first thing you notice about Paris is the dog shit. Its bitter perfume rises in the quivering heat and soaks into your nostrils like a rare sweet thing. It is pasted along the pavements where footprints leave their mark, and it is curled round the trees that line the streets. Golden yellow in the sun or red-brown in the glistening rain. Make of these curious monuments what you will. Here the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower in the gutter, there the curved white dome of the Sacré-Coeur and here is the Seine trickling down towards your feet.

We have arrived. Two days ago. I am overwhelmed, ecstatic. In my imagination this was an artistic Utopia. It is such a huge thing for me, being here, living out this dream. I've had many dreams, which have included the writing and publication of various vagaries, and the setting forth to new lands. But this, this sojourn to Paris, is something I feel I have been working up to. My life up to this point, lived once and relived in every one of my journals, has been to travel to this (mental and physical) plane, both here and in the novel.

I know things were at such a pace before as to slow down my every thought, motion, feeling. Losing track of what was and is and was not. The instability of my existence. I know, I remember waking, taking a shower that morning, pressing the flat of my palm against the soft skin of my stomach and wondering if the damage were long-term. Realising how my hair had grown and I hadn't noticed as though I'd been wearing a hat for the previous two months. Wretchedness, sickness, becoming invisible, or a shadow, a less than amoebic being. The after-effect of too many pills, waiting around in the hospital, curled up on green padded chairs, trying to sleep in utero between crushing white walls and good-looking doctors in blue. The questions barked at me so I felt like I was in a TV show: What did you take? How many? Did you leave a note? Lock all the doors? Were you alone? Did you want to kill yourself? Would you do it again? How would you do it? Hanging, burning, drowning, cutting? Where would you do it? Do you have a specific place in mind? The nurses staring at my dilated pupils, one bigger than the other as always. Z hiding all the pills in the flat. It's a far off story now but it's what brought me here. How could I tell them then that I was tired of questioning the why's? That the only significant thing was my desire to feel again, to become? That I couldn't write a single word and how could they understand? That when I was in my teens my journal was my salvation and now, I couldn't even write in there, my mind too confused or my pen too heavy or the pages too clean. To not write was to not live. To not live was to not write. How can you write if nothing moves you? There must be expectation, emotion and metamorphosis in order to write about the world. Without this my consciousness was buried.

But now I am here and I am so alive I can barely turn my head without seeing the future. My goals, my hopes. They are no longer cement-heavy at the bottom of a lake. They are in my hands. They are my honesty.

I remember lying in bed one morning, the alarm clock long silent and lateness closing its hands around me, pulling the sheets up to my chin with their warmth and comfort. A seminal longing in my gut for change, away from the sodden Manchester streets, away from solace in the pub every Friday after work. I want to go to Paris I said to Z. Fine, we'll go for a weekend, a week if you like in summer. Looking at him, I want to live there for a while, a week is not enough. So let's do it, he said. As though it were that easy. And it was. That was two years ago. Here are my savings, here is my bank loan.

I have chosen Paris because it is special to me, because of what has gone before and what will come after, who has graced its cobbled streets and who will walk them tomorrow. It is a continuation from past to present, with little regard for the failed lives. The giants have been here and left huge footprints in which the rest of us crowd and snuggle before finding our own places and leaving our own smaller prints. In a word it is hope, for the artist, for the bohemian, for the politically robust.

And now I have begun to write. I started the novel last night but it's going to be difficult, juxtaposing it with reality, its own sense of realism threatening to over-reach mine. Or, perhaps, an inability to write as freely as this. I don't want it to be stilted or fake. I've decided to call it The Blush as it is coy of emotion and tied to an uncontrolled collection of feelings, something which gives itself away, or eats of itself. It is acting in a way where the result is known beforehand but its torturous simplicity does not stop the act from taking place. Just as I have always acted from a purely emotional standpoint, so will the novel, with all links to its genesis denied. It will be a work of fiction, and also something I have to morph myself into, to feel the things the girl, Maria, will feel as I play God to her small life. It's also based on solid matter, set in Paris, the street names, buildings, all real and a reflection of what Z and I experience. The personal also. The emotions must be real. The sense of awe, of jealousy, hatred, pride, passion must be felt to the very marrow by all who read it, by me who must sweat and starve to write it. It's possibly stepping into the fantastic as far as aims go, but I've always aimed high.

A novel has to encompass the external world. As well as this, the writer must lend an extension of his psyche. But just as important, and all too easily forgotten, is the fact of the reader. Every work of creation is made for appreciation by an audience, even if that audience is solely the creator. There is a space to fill. The child seeks an audience as he manifests into a clown, the lover seeks her audience as she sulks to show his lack of attention, the storyteller is nothing without his audience and God the ultimate creator is even less. The audience consists of reaction and the artist must be able to feel this reaction before creation can take place. He must be a trinity of himself, the writer and the reader. I don't think it takes genius to do this. I think any writer could have the ability to bring this to the fore as fertile ground.

The heat from a withering sun and a lack of sleep have made me woozy. And sketchy nights have produced dreams of violent propensities, Shakespearean murders and troubled genuflexions, dreams of arguments between Z and me. But it doesn't matter, just the heat flexing my mind. We have three months here, time to sleep later. I can kick back and relax, do or don't, it's all the same. Today we will go to the park, where we spent an hour last night, being gnawed at by an excitable puppy who took a fancy to my wrists. We will lie in the sun and hopefully be inspired.

I will work on this today, with the grass beneath my feet. The Parc des buttes Chaumont is just across the road from our apartment on Rue Manin. It is expansive and like the city itself is many-tiered, level over level over level. There are concrete steps and grassy knolls which lead down to the lake as the central point. As Paris itself began as Lutetia at the Île de la Cité and spanned out, so the park's focus is the lake and its web reaches up and out to the observatory tower from where you can see over Belleville, and down to the railway tracks at the bottom. Butte means hill, makes sense. And although the locals allow their dogs to defecate all over the pavement, there are toilets pour les chiens in the park; little woodchip niches surrounding posts to piss at. Better even than the holes in the floor some French eateries still offer for the humans!


8th June

It is 2pm and I've not long been up. I am waiting for Z who is tired and more than a little grumpy. I leave him to it, used as I am to this waking symphony of the neanderthal. He moves from bedroom to kitchen to shower, usually in an aura of dark grey when he is like this, infecting everyone around him with his silent, suffocating fury. He will not speak unless something necessitates it, a short sharp question or a bark to a trifle thing. I know he will do the opposite of anything I suggest, like an infant who's just learned the significance of disobedience, so I keep my opinions to myself and ignore him as it means I can work without interruption. He will be better when he has nicotine swimming through his veins, his head, in front of his eyes, on his tongue...

The six-foot window is open wide, wilting plants nod in the heat. I sit at the table with the laptop open in front of me, my white vest top barely covering me and I don't care if the strap should slip down and expose my breast. My body cries out that I am alive. She is impatient. Our reflection shines back at us from the next apartment block, eight floors, many-windowed, more window boxes housing beautiful gaudy-coloured living flowers, making ours want to weep. This could be the perfect voyeuristic set-up. We couldn't have hoped for a better apartment. Both practically and aesthetically it is perfect. Not so big but bigger than most. A hybrid of gaudy kitsch and African art. In the living and dining area a red sofa-bed is large and luxurious, a cabinet holds the all-important stereo, a red Moroccan lamp provides a warm pink (and romantic, should we want it) light and a Chinese chest as the centre piece is the most beautiful of coffee tables. The adjoining kitchen is large and clean, with an espresso machine but no kettle. Tea does not play such a large part on the drinks menu in France. From here you can step through to the bathroom, white and clean with a washing machine in the corner. Another door from the hallway leads to the bedroom which houses simply a double bed, a wardrobe and a bookcase. And beneath a short flight of wooden steps, an ornamental wash stand and a wooden divider. Up the steps is an extra room, a red sofa-bed strewn with cushions, an ornamental wooden African chair, a makeshift table of logs and bricks, orange-rust walls and a ceiling so low you can barely sit cross-legged on the floor without banging your head. I could lie in there and write, dream of exotic places, harems and urchins running round and round and round, or a macabre setting, the tomb pre-death, a crushing white sky, dark orange walls to cave in and break bones. This would be the perfect opium den, in another time.

The landlady is an avid reader and has adorned the shelves in the bedroom with an assortment of books. All French of course, but that doesn't take away the impressiveness. Books that I have read and would like to have read, Colette, Sade, Henry Miller, Laclos, Nabokov, Süskind. Perhaps I will attempt to read one of them, improve my French. After three months I hope to be a little more fluent anyway, to be slimmer, to be tanned, to be healthy. I have left the sleeping pills at home, will try to give up smoking, will eat salads. Already I have turned a shade darker, and my scars have gone to luminous pink.


9th June

The brightest aureole of purest sunlight stretching itself through every fissure between every branch of wood and bone and into every salty pore can only be seen as a pathetic attempt at highlighting the violent and miserable deaths that linger in the Père-Lachaise Cimetiere. A close-knit community if ever there was one, a small city of tombs that rise towards the sky like a series of sentry boxes. And surely the dead must shake the moss from their hair and heave their hollow bones up at night for the slightest attempt at reanimation. Winding cobbled lanes weave around these homes, the upright and the horizontal slabs of stone, the statues that follow the trespassing public with their stone eyes, hands sealed together in prayer or raised to Heaven in mock repentance. Z and I walked through those lanes arm in arm like a wedding couple walking down a shaded aisle. I should have worn black and my beautiful poet groom could have swept the dead leaves off a crumbling tomb with one hand and lain me down on it with the other. To embrace me violently without regret.

Père-Lachaise is not to be compared to the other cemeteries where the rich and famous bought their plots. I tried and failed. Montparnasse is quasi traditional, the crumbling tombstones rasping alongside newly erected boxes with bright stained glass through which the sunlight creates prisms. Many of these lamented dead are artists more recently deceased and whose graves show the living reality of theirs or their artistic friends' work. There are various sculptures of glass and brass, a huge black-eyed fly, a majestic centaur, and other shapes and textures which would be altogether at home in a brightly lit artist's studio. Not so at Père-Lachaise whose gloom is the founding velvet floor on which all graves fester in the morass.

We found Proust. His grave, sheer black with gold lettering, is newly erected as the last tombstone was crumbling away to dust. Significantly worn away by time as his written volumes themselves tried to undo. Colette, the simple black tomb strewn with a few flowers; Morrison's of course, a single rose, a handwritten letter to him lying white and solitary, and the graffiti proclaiming him The Man, a poet, a god, and the little white lies that say he will live forever; Oscar Wilde's lipstick-covered statuette, its penis stolen and a lipstick pink mouth leaving its mark on the remaining stump; Modigliani who died in agony from meningitis and his lover Jeanne Herbuterne who committed suicide days after his death; Jean Pezon the lion tamer whose grave shows him riding the lion that ate him; the wall against which the last troops of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot, and the man who ordered the execution, Adolphe Thiers, buried not too far away... The twin graves of Heloise and Abelard. I'm not romantic but their story has its reasons for living on. The philosophy teacher and his pupil, their love affair and subsequent condemnation by her uncle, their forced separation and the love letters that kept them together. Unrequited love - it always makes for a good story.

You feel like you shouldn't be there. It's not like walking through somebody's garden. It's wading through a necromantic knowledge we will never have. We write about death, talk about it and paint it as though we have this insight, as though through the pineal we can see into the furthest future, that which swipes the flesh for its angels and leaves the human body to decay and rot to the black and putrid conscience beneath, and for the chosen few, the heavenly light which transports the soul to wherever is open. We don't see, we don't know. There are visions, for a few, there are voices, but these tell an individual truth, rather than a public knowledge. Even those who have been closer than others only know the pull of it, the strength of it. They don't know the feel of complete surrender to its grasp. And so it fascinates us. The taboo of the body found floating in the lake, the myth of continuous hair and nail growth after death, the fear of pain and degradation. So we visit the cemeteries, we gasp at unearthed bones and the wrinkled skin of the preserved, incorruptible bodies in the cold catacombs of ancient churches.

Our imagination grows to suit, to encapsulate everything we can never experience. It is the artist who transforms the collective imagination into something physical. The painter creates angels, the writer describes pain, the musician pours his fears into his music and amplifies it a hundredfold for the rest of the world to hear. And it is not just death we strive to understand. We can portray another life which we will never know. Individually we can strive to be someone else through a section of words, the transmogrification of our own feelings welded onto the skin of another. We all want to be, to live that life that is not our own. Even the novel I hope to write is focused on a kind of life I haven't lived, a cruel life, of vicious and painful intentions. Can I really get into a mind like that without divine intervention?


11th June

Paris is ripe like a troubled adolescent. She's a dog, dirty and self-deprecating and she wants to be something so big because her reputation demands it. She's always been pretty hospitable to me but now I'm here for longer I can see through her façade. So charged is she that her tantrums, after a sulky torpor, result in spectacular storms that light up the sky, and then she is calm and pleasant until the circle is full and she is back to chasing her tail. She craves perfection yet doesn't quite reach it and the glamour she samples leaves her ugly and swollen. Her sweet cherry nectarine odours that follow you down the street with an image of water beaded on glossy skin, soon melt into the smell of piss in the corners of stairwells; the perfume lingering from pretty pretty shops to tempt you with a piece of beautiful is overcome by the aroma of warm dog shit and even the lush smells of the croques monsieur and the crêpe chocolat are forgotten as the rubbish truck rolls past, leaving the scent of decomposing vegetables in its wake. There is something beneath her skin, something diseased. Even the people who animate her streets are a combination of magazine perfect and urchin tough. The bra-less girls with tight jeans and kitten heels who walk with the sway of sex appeal and the beggars who sit outside Gap, who refuse to make eye contact, who smile because only they know the punch line. These people are silent and know more about the reach of the Paris whip than most.

But another thing Paris freely presents is the architecture, the gardens, the sculptures, the cemeteries. Everything, in fact, around here spells attention to detail, touched by the hands of a labourer who loves what he sees and sees what he loves. Art isn't just in the galleries and the gothic churches, it is in the design of the simplest building, the colours of the houses, the detail in every bridge, the planning of the city so that every street leads the eye to something shiny coherent at the end. Even the metro stations are designed from an aesthetic viewpoint, some shining copper like the Arts et Métiers, with portholes like the inside of a ship, others like the Louvre stop house antique-looking furniture in glass casing. Even the graffiti seems to reflect an eye for the divine. It's a city built for the sybarite. No ascetics here. These people love their luxury and it shows in the walls that contain them.

It has been humid with a blanket warmth that drives sleep to the bottom of the Seine and makes me think at night that the bed is actually sweating more than I am, clinging as it does to my limbs. So I wake early, shower, put my pyjamas back on so as not to wake Z with my rummaging, and I sit and write. I have begun The Blush but that is for later. This is for now. We have resumed our old patterns of work. Sort of. Z stays up late to compose new songs and I get up early to work on the novel. Though I have tended to listen to music through the head phones and hold the journal close to my heart at this time, rather than do the work he expects. This is the time for off-loading, excising the nuances and shades that are likely to turn to something big if they are not expended. Just as the music that I hear through the headphones offers more intricate sounds and breathable spaces than when played through speakers, so this time allows for small excursions to parts of the psyche I can't reach when distracted.

It's a simple thing, surely. Everyone wants it, people dream about it, women cry over it and the arts are saturated with it. So why can't I quite work it out? Being with someone - the soul mate, the life partner, the spouse - the disregard of all others for that special someone who holds you in their mind when their open arms are too far away. Z and I have been snapping at each other like fighting fish. The small things, affected by the swaddling heat and a weariness, become monumental and we have to bite our tongues sometimes before we sink our teeth into each other. Four years is a long time. I wonder if it's usual to want to change the routine one has created around an identity. If we were a different couple, a four-legged animal that acted differently, I would not be thinking like this now. If I had not learnt what hurts him, what drives him, what he finds acceptable and to what he is indifferent, I could ask for so much more. Shit, Z is my rock but sometimes I wish he'd break down a little, let rustle a little sand from that broad back, which makes me feel so safe at night when I wrap my arms around it. If only he'd surprise me, if I could only tell him I want things that he would be shocked at. I love his strength, his reasoning, his sensibilities, his loyalty, his unwavering honesty. This morning as he lay close to me, his arm warm across my stomach and the black hairs like another skin, he started to drift back off into sleep and as he did so his arm started to twitch. Not like a grand mal, but tiny little movements, his little finger, his arm, his thumb in turns pulsing like so many electric currents sparking off inside his body and I felt so close to him them, like feeling his heart beat, or his breath on my neck. His very life which he has given over to me so freely. And then at other times I crave my independence. So many clashing thoughts, temperaments I wish he didn't have to see, and he has always listened in his distant way and been steady.

And it's not as though anything has changed. Did I expect it to? Did I really think the heat would arouse some exotic dynamic for sex I didn't know I had? No, I don't think so. I was just hoping. And still it worries me. My performances leave me cold. I could win an award for my playful nestling into his desires, his fantasies. I play my roles well, wear the underwear he likes, the stockings he bought. Yes, I am mistress of the boudoir in this consciousness. One touch and he's kicking off the bed covers to be nearer, to be inside. And so my body responds as his fingers find what they are looking for, and my legs spread wider of their own accord and I could look up into space and watch my body from above as it writhes and rides, pressing his torso between my thighs and licking the sweat from his throat. If only I enjoyed it as he does. If only I could surf and lose myself to another as I do to myself when the night is thick and Z is elsewhere. Will I never let myself go enough to give witness to what I am capable of? I could reel off a thousand fantasies and absorb him into me, without ever reaching that climax that says I am a whole woman now, just as he is a whole man. The yin and yang without the consummation. Maybe I will never achieve that state of bliss, that nirvana with him that patterns the 3-d shape of any relationship.

I am being stupid, washing myself with a kind of self-pity and I hate that. I feel like I'm in a dream where you know what's happening and you know who you are but you can't quite see it. I know who or what I am but it's foggy and it changes as from one identity to the next; from one animal form to the next, from a reptile to a bird and every time I morph I have to relearn how to live.


[To continue...]

© Rachel Kendall 2008

image Rachel Kendall is editor of Sein und Werden and has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including Nemonymous, Connections, Thieves Jargon, 3:AM, Straight from the Fridge, Cherry Bleeds, Darkness Rising 5 and others. She lives in Manchester, UK, with a man and a mannequin and a small collection of late animals. You can read an interview with her on Dogmatika here.