May 10, 2003 Nantes
C. on the phone to a colleague, consulting about a brewing scandal. I am into stage two of my new plan to take back my time, recording the day. Yesterday, I did manage to write for two hours. I reworked the beginning of the novel and it seems, of course, hopeless. Each invention of a new thing cascades new complexities in arriving at what must come later--in effect, calling into question the necessity of certain ends. It is the kind of struggle that can only be resolved on the page. How I wish I had never occupied myself with writing short fiction, learning the inflections that arrive at neat (or not so neat) metaphors.

C. has passed to talking about meeting her interlocutor at the market tomorrow. A final word of advice and she'll hang up. The sentences that wave off new topics in conversation. Mais, au même temps, ça va. Donc, tu vas avoir du monde, hein?

Yesterday, her favorite uncle died. I know the following facts about him: 1) he fought with the resistance, joining them after being called to the prefecture, as a prelude to being deported to Germany as forced labor. He was famous in his town for having jumped out the window and running off into the woods instead; 2) He made his living selling pastis to cafés all over France and drove a car that was painted with the logo of his brand; 3) that he once parked the brightly painted car near the Loire without first setting the brake. Shortly thereafter, residents downstream were treated to a free floating commercial.

Ah, she has just mentioned N.R.'s name. N. who looks after what we would call foster children in the United States. Her job frequently has to do with children sent to France from other countries without anyone to accompany them or to welcome them on the other side. Judging from the conversation, she has just received some negative news about the job in La Boule she interviewed for last month. C. has not mentioned her uncle, although I know it has been on her mind. We sat in beautiful sunlight in the family A.'s garden yesterday and I thought of this fellow I had never met but had very much wanted to.

Language is so supple. This quality comes from the fact that, in using language, we often ask ourselves how can we round off our expressions, how can we complete them, how can we stop. C. can somehow embody two emotions, sadness at her uncle's passing and concern over N.'s administrative hassling. Which is more supple? Language or emotion? Or are they the same thing?

But memory is not so supple. It's brittle as the brain where it lives. Maybe fifteen minutes passed between my last paragraph and this one. The link I sought to make above is almost gone. I still have the feeling, however, that I can reach it, grab it down to the page. We'll see. It had to do with the tension between current conditions and necessary ends and knowability.

The drama implied by the phone call was one of consolation. C. had to console N. and reassure her that things would turn out okay in the end. The end of that conversation was knowable. The fact that C. didn't mention her uncle's death to an intimate friend means it was certainly on her mind. (I can feel myself making a hash of this as I write, such admission in itself distracting the reader from what I want to say, but not the current condition of what's in my brain). It seems to me that the fact C. suppressed this information must inform the course of her conversation.

This change in her conversation is a mediation between the necessary and dramatic end of an advice-seeking conversation with a friend (advice, of course) and ever-changing current conditions. (I'm thinking of Heraclitus's river at the moment, am certainly mediating what goes onto the page by means of my crippled and confused understanding of philosophy and the melancholy that itself inspires in me). The novel, then, is the tension between how I feel at the many moments of writing and revising (hence Heraclitus) and the end I have foreseen.

This end, however, is not as supple as I would have wanted, is still beneath the maximum power of the language available to me on my best days. Between the beginning of the above paragraph and this one, C. called me to lunch. "Hurry," she said, "I'm about to have a migraine." The funeral is on Monday. We won't be going, but I will think again of a garishly-painted Citroën down the Loire past astonished onlookers.

Small progress into THE FUGITIVE. Continuing with the tension of my situation and the characters high in my throat. "Un Abécédaire Fugitif" wouldn't be a horrible title for the article in Maisonnueve. If only D. would answer his e-mail.

May 11, 2003 Nantes
Another pleasant, light evening in France. Chez C.B. That said, hers was a sick household a week ago. I sat on the sofa and thought of how the human instinct to avoid the plague cities and sick rooms long after the danger has passed. The whole family looks as if it has lost weight.

The most disgusting dish in the world. P. said it was rotten eggs in the South Pacific and it wasn't bad. C.G. said she would never be able to set foot in Mongolia, owing to a story she had heard about hospitality and half-cooked entrails. Tête de veau was proposed but nobody, not even me, bit. I had started it all by saying Andouillette, that I couldn't finish one. Little L. walked everywhere with a plastic bowl on her head and invited us to "eat" the rice within. When I did so with my hands she immediately suggested a spoon. (It was so much harder to pretend with a spoon, as I could no longer let the rice run through my fingers as it was "consumed"). C.B., Little L.'s mother, was committed to putting the rice or whatever to her lips and opening her mouth. Who knew what blew in when she did?

We ate sardines which P. had considerately (and improbably) cut into fillets. He explained to C. how there were three kinds of sardine eaters in the world, while D. complained that the fillets would be harder to cook with the grill setup that he had, that they would have to be marinated first. The three types are those who like the meat bitter and cook the fish uncleaned, those (C.) who like the fish whole fearing undercooking, and the fillet eaters. We would all have the chance to become preferers of fillets that evening, thanks to P.'s half hour with the fillet knife.

Managed perhaps only an hour of work on the novel. I read almost nothing of THE FUGITIVE. It bears so perfectly on everything I see and hear, Proust that is, not my own work.

May 12, 2003 Nantes
I often have the feeling that, when I wake in the morning, I will be five years older, or if not five years, that I will have attained significant age in advance of mine. Perhaps this is a statement of happiness and my latent fear comes from a satisfaction with the way things are.

I am far from the family both in body and spirit and feel insulated from their struggles. My mother waits patiently for my father to come home so they can pack the house and leave a state she has made no secret of despising, my father is once again in Portugal, my sister's toxic attitudes continue.

Although some change is expected in the last case for, as the cliché goes, "A baby changes everything, " which is true insofar as adding to one's household always does (rendering the cliché somewhat of an understatement) or because of bourgeois insistence that all clichés must need have some truth about them. The kind of false wisdom about life that powers Nora Ephron's assaults on public entertainment and goodwill.

Am not ready for the feigned interest and dippy optimism of the States. If an event, like a birth or a wedding is "natural" I don't understand the insistence that either event be celebrated as a celestial happening, complete with all the trappings the garden variety split-level emperor can muster. How many couples did I see in Chicago whose offspring amounted to little other than another excuse for material excess or were, in their way, announcements that such couples had simply run out their list of things to acquire? Chicago children so often had to lend new necessity to wayward lives. Farmer mentality of the Midwest. Grateful to be spending my time in Boston.

Back to sleep. The first dream I can remember being completely in French. Always a scholastic or bureaucratic setting when it comes through in phrases, but this was a whole lecture, start to finish complete with snotty asides to my classmates. At some point the Minister of Education (not Luc Ferry, but C.'s mother) came by to beam approvingly at our class.

I would have dreamt longer, but there is no position that will accommodate my back any longer. Over the past year, I've become accustomed to a pain that stiffens me and slows my descent into all chairs, save the little African one in the corner of our living room. I feel very much older for it. I cannot fundamentally believe that my body is in this state. Nor do I feel I can do anything about it. This feeling dovetails with my normal feelings of belatedness and lost, well, precociousness for want of a better word. This vagary a defeat of the mind in the way that chairs and beds now defeat my back. Presiding over my own decay. I crack if I roll over in bed too quickly.

Letters from Chicago, admonishing me to write to someone once a friend who has dropped me since I moved to France. Letters from a strangely affective writer in California. Something about her scent is so persuasive.

Lotte and potatoes for dinner. The air is so clean here. When the sun goes down we hear the cats begin to skirmish. C. scared the hell out of my by bursting through the door without knocking.

Such moonlight on the apple tree.

May 13, 2003 Nantes
I saw an absolutely wonderful film called LE COSTUME with C., C.B., V., and B. Four French girls and me watching three Crimean lads, very anarchic coming-of-age. Haven't seen anything so violently antibourgeois since Buñeul.

Went to Le Point Bar for drinks afterward. How my French no longer fades out promptly at eleven o'clock, but according to my level of interest. Which means that, if I grow bored, I miss any change of subject and have to struggle my way back in.

May 14, 2003 Nantes
Slept in very late this morning, as C. is on strike. Woke to, first C.'s mother calling to tell her about her uncle's burial next week. He is, it seems, to be buried with full military honors, complete with a playing of "La Chante des résistants" and a flag-draped casket. As soon as she hung up the phone rang again. C. imagined that it was her mother calling back, having forgotten something. Instead it was Mme A. reminding her that the wake for a barely remembered ex student, was to be held that afternoon.

C. debated for a while before deciding to go. She came back some two hours later, a little shaken as the casket had been left open. J'ai pesné elle portait une masque, she said after commenting how white the corpse was. J'ai en marre de cette ville, she said while standing in the kitchen and looking out into the garden. C'est rien que des mortes et médéocraties à Ancenis, I answered and made her laugh.

It seems to me credible that people die when the seasons change, lacking the strength to accommodate any further change in environment. Thomas Lynch's prolonged apology for the funeral trade owes its existence to the same sort of insidious credibility that infects all discussion about death. A credible idea itself, but I lack the strength to pursue it any further. Do not want to renew my pretension to the ranks of American artists who devote themselves to demolishing sentimentalities in American life. Remember how an ex-girlfriend's great uncle asked to be removed from the hospital, went home to his flower garden, and promptly died among the flower beds. That's returning for you.

May 15, 2003 Nantes
Woke up this morning with dried blood in my ear. Something bit me or I heard a sharp whisper. Again a tense night between us. I want things to settle down, want to settle down, but there are a few things I want to settle first, make sure they are not simply the product of stress or imperfect French.

Had a quiet dinner at a middle eastern place on Rue du Château. There was another language assistant at another table. He didn't recognize me. Before that we took the tram up to see IL EST PLUS FACILE POUR UN CHAMEAU.... Bourgeois couple in their Jaguar singing "L'Internationale." Woman confesses to the priest, after being asked her sin, Je suis riche. Très, très riche. Visions of both my sister and D.U.

That sadness that lives in the treetops. We walked up the promenade to Place Louis VI. Sole statue of a monarch still standing in public. I don't really know what I'm saying, or what I'm asking. Recording this here is not an effort to recuperate something knowable from the moment. She is good and kind and slightly lazy like me and too beholden to the system to even try to find a way around it.

My bum's perversity in letting things slide, knowing in all likelihood I will still be alive come what may, trusting most in those situations that set the counters back to zero, because once the numbers start rolling things become much more complex indeed. No confirmation of my position next year at the site where promised. Time is getting short.

May 16, 2003 Nantes
Dreamed of a trip to Russia. Went up into mountains like the Rockies and my guide showed me four small, round, stony graves. For some reason I went and stood on one. This dream the product of the book about Mongolia I read in Gigéan, news footage of mass graves in Iraq, and listening to the Red Army choir's rendition of "L'Internationale." What are the influences of the dreamer dreaming my life, I wonder?

Am now in the bathtub, listening to the cat whine in the garden. It's just after midnight. C. has gone to console a friend who is having a hard night.

Went to close the shutters just as a couple was walking their dog by the window. The woman was Asian and we said bon soir to each other in that precise way foreigners have when speaking French. Can hear neighborhood sounds out on the big street and it distresses me to find that, after a year, I cannot name it.

The extended present in which we live is so long. Saw a photo of J. today. Long hair and the same scruffy beard I saw him wearing two years ago--when I read his letters, it is the twenty-two year-old J. I see in my mind's eye. The power of the extended present, the increasingly rich, accruing present to disorient is what provokes my fear of waking up twenty years older. I suppose it shall feel that way in twenty years.

Future reader, does this provoke any melancholy in you? Are you younger than me now and do you think differently already? Please, in honor of my spirit, speak your answer aloud now. I will listen if you can. What a strange mix in me, to miss life so much while still young. As it always has been. It always seemed the past would be hard to bear, but it is the future that loses its ineffability and resolves into a weight--for what will I be made to bear even a year hence? Such a question hobbles every line I put down. It is no time to be going back to the United States.

The cat, at least, has given up crying for whatever reasons he might have.

Partisan's Lament
(a semiliteral translation)

The Germans came/
Demanded our surrender/
But I couldn't do it/
And took up arms again.

Nobody asked me /
Where I'm from or where I'm going/
Those of you who know/
Erase my passage.

I've changed my name a hundred times/
Lost my wife and children/
But I've so many friends/
I have all of France.

An old man hid us/
in his hayloft for a night/
The enemy found out and took him/
No surprise he's dead.

Yesterday we were three/
Now there's only me/
Circling in a prison of borders.

The wind blows over the graves/
Liberty will return/
We'll be forgotten/
We'll go back into the shadows.

Complainte du partisan

Les Allemands étaient chez moi
On m'a dit résigne toi
Mais je n'ai pas pu
Et j'ai repris mon arme.

Personne ne m'a demandé
D'où je viens et où je vais
Vous qui le savez
Effacez mon passage.

J'ai changé cent fois de nom
J'ai perdu femme et enfants
Mais j'ai tant d'amis
Et j'ai la France entière.

Un vieil homme dans un grenier
Pour la nuit nous a cachés
L¹ennemi l'a su (Les Allemands l'ont pris)
Il est mort sans surprise.

Hier encore nous étions trois
Il ne reste plus que moi
Et je tourne en rond
Dans la prison des frontières.

Le vent souffle sur les tombes
La liberté reviendra
On nous oubliera
Nous rentrerons dans l'ombre