City of Light: the first of many posts

[smokingboot]

I will never get this entry right. There's so much I want to remember, too much to record.

It has been the most amazing week. Some time ago, larians decided I needed a treat for my birthday. He remembered me saying that I had seen Cairo and Venice, Kathmandu and San Francisco, but the nearest I had been to Paris was the ringroad outside it. So last week, I met the giant next door.

As an example of that famous Parisian unfriendliness reserved for les anglais (and expected to be extra vehement after all that Olympics business) our landlady was waiting to greet us with a bottle of Saint Emilion Grand Cru 2003, 'because it is your birthday...' apparently, though the wine will taste good whenever, it will be at its best 3 years from now. It sits in our wine rack, waiting. Join me in 2008, and help me drink it!

I now recount my hols, for myself more than for any readers. This will take a couple of posts, and is really of little interest to others. Strange that I should need so many words for Paris, when Scotland needed so few; But I find Paris is Idea and Scotland is Awe. Idea we can speak of forever, but who can speak of Awe?


Then we wandered out and met some local musicians in a bar; it takes a lot to convince me that a decent cover of 'Born to be Wild' is possible with no more help than vocals, guitar and oboe, but the presence of much talent (and even more wine) managed it. They busked, people pranced or slumped in their seats, and gave; the lead singer's girl-friend undulated like a drunken cobra, and their toddler daughter kept the money in a cowboy hat bigger than her entire head. Of course, we all exchanged numbers and info on scraps of paper even now lost in the depths of my handbag. Unlikely that we would keep in touch; what is there to say, by the light of day? But what a fine night!




I actually don't know how to describe this. We were fortunate enough to be there on Sunday morning during a service, and I do not think I have ever seen any combination of... no, this will not capture it. I am doing it a disservice by trying to describe it. But still, I do my best.

For me, the divine always shows itself in Nature, and seldom in the doings of men, because men are at best weak, and at worst...but let us not consider the worst that men can be. So no, show me the sunset over Findhorn beach and I may see the Divine. Show me the sky and the light and the stars and the sun, and yes, I will see it there. But show me the aspirations of Man, and I am not touched, though I may think such creations beautiful. Until Notre-Dame.

In Notre-Dame the combination was perfect; the dimness illumined by candles, the high arches, the rose windows changing the light, exquisite, man's beauty made incandescent by architecture, by light and by music. The choir linked everything; I lit a candle for Jeanne D'Arc, alone and betrayed, her statue praying upwards in rapture. Man in unison in treachery; truly horrible. Yet, though St Denis still holds his place (and his head ) at the front of Notre Dame, she is the country's saint, Jean La Pucelle; the mob is a destroyer, and yet the choir is a perfect union of human harmonies. Do they reach the divine?

Does the same power I feel in presence over the sea and sky, come down to meet human beings in the act of creation, in the act of beauty, of devotion and love? The service continued, and a letter from the monseigneur/archbishop/whatever, of Notre Dame to his Westminster counterpart, was read out in English; a message of support after the London bombings. Even my pragmatic larians was touched by so kind, so powerful an act. Music and light and beauty together are sublime. Where these things illumine compassion is sanctity; it is godly whether there is a god to appreciate it or not.

I wrote a character for a freeform once, based on my childish Hugo inspired ideas of this place, and much as I love my creation, how misshapen, how ill-hewn! And yet now I see his shadow on the rough granite, captured by humanity and music. I would not change him much but still... when I was a child, I saw as a child, I thought as a child...

There is so much more to everything we do.

I am not yet grown. But I have grown a little.