Bouge de là!

As usual, I'm pretty sure no one reads this anymore, but I've been having some homesickness for France and I feel like this is an appropriate place to put it.

I just finished a book called "We All Went to Paris," which is about all sorts of Americans who spent time in Paris between 1776 and 1971--from Benjamin Franklin to Gertrude Stein to Cole Porter...etc etc etc. It's taken me a while to finish it because the book itself isn't all that well written. Also, I sometimes had a hard time getting into it because it focuses on a lot of "classic" authors that I've never or hardly read, like Hemingway and Stein, or painters that I don't much care for, like Gertrude Stein. But there are some real gems in this book, some great stories, and some beautiful memories of Paris that brought on some crazy nostalgia.

In the epilogue of the book, there is a quote from Faulkner, who said,

"Maybe, Steve, Paris is the grab bag for us because it skirts the irrational, yet seems to find now and then the potential for genius in embryonic shape...All right, it also has for us a high falutin' esoteric reputation, and you can escape there getting entangled, sure, entangled, in moral alternatives. We're such black Calvinistic bastards at home. In the end you may get a belly-full of it, Paris...but you always want to go back. It leaves you spooked with a world of invisible presences. We go there hunting some damn evocative quality, maybe we come back and feel that only the unrealized parts of our lies seem perfect...That's what keeps Paris green for us. It's something we are sure is there only we ourselves never fully realize it."

This really touches how I feel about France...Lyon much more than Paris, but France in general. It's like this thing that exists forever inside me that, despite the fact that there were things that drove me crazy there, moments when all I wanted was to go home, I will always, somewhere within me, wish I were there. I will forever idealize France, and I know that it will never live up to my expectations, but it will always draw me back...with a strength I'm not sure I believe in. But there it is.

Almost daily, the urge strikes me to put aside everything and go back. Run away, go on an adventure, find myself, relive the beauty of a nigh-time walk across the bridge from Perrache to my apartment.

Sometimes I am trying to escape something. I'm living in this house, which my mom worked really hard in, and that I really like and am SO blessed to have. It needs some work, but it's cozy. It's very adult. Very settled. And sometimes I want to run screaming from it. Whenever I feel like I'm losing control of my life, which happens more than I'd like to admit, I think, "this wouldn't be happening if I were living in France," or "at least when I was there I had an excuse for feeling helpless."

Then, I live in house my grandparents lived in, the house my mom grew up in, the house I--in many ways--grew up in, the house my grandfather practically died in. It's unreal that my bedroom was his bedroom, I cook on the same stove he cooked in, I drink the wine he collected and knew so much about (and that I know so little about). I'm trying to make it mine, but the terrifying adult reality of that combined with the ghost of loss is sometimes too much for me to bear. I ran away to France once--it sheltered me, to a certain extent--why not try it again?

But at the same time, this house provides me with so many opportunities. lately I've gotten into this thing called CouchSurfing, where people can email you and stay at your house when visiting, and if you are traveling you can search for people to stay with. We've had a lot of different people stay at our house, all wonderfully unique experiences. Something I've noticed is that most of the people that have stayed with us seem to be on some crazy journey. There was Cesar, who is walking all over the world; the Finding Fiction guys, a band on tour playing out of their red van; Harris, a cool guy riding his motorcycle around the west; Ke, who is escaping his own ghosts by jumping out of planes in all the states he visits. When I meet them, I realize, why am I here? Why do I have a 3-bedroom house and a huge set of silverware and a bunch of furniture? Why aren't I living out of my car, seeing new things, jumping out of planes? Or living out of a backpack, riding trains to new places, buying fresh baguettes and fresh fruit along the way? Here are all these people with great stories about the places they've visited and the people that they've met...and my adventure stories are growing stale...pictures of me with short hair reminding me how long it's been since I've had an adventure, been somewhere new, gotten lost.

Other times, it's just nostalgia. I have so many memories of my life during those 10 months that I really cling to. Whenever I look at pictures, reread entries from this blog, think of a story that I feel like I've probably told too many times, or realize just how long I've been back, I just want to be there. I don't want to remember, fond as those memories are, I want to be there. I want to touch the old stone of the bridge while I look up the Rhône. I want to bite into a warm baguette from the bakery down the street from my apartment. I want to get drunk and dance at the Sirius and ride a Velo'v home at 2 in the morning. The things that were part of my everyday life that felt so special...a feeling I rarely have anymore.

Was life really SO different there? There was drama, there was homework, there were bills to pay, there were all the things we have to do all the time...things we can never really escape no matter how far we go, but I remember feeling a special kind of happiness that is lost on me now. Maybe it's that I appreciated it more because I knew it was fleeting. I knew I would have to pack up and leave, so every day was a new adventure, a memory to be made, a story to write home about.

But why isn't life like that all the time? I mean, really, it's all temporary. Maybe in a year I'll go back to school somewhere new and miss New Mexico again. Maybe I'll get an apartment and miss having a big living room that allows me to invite all my friends over to hang out. Lord knows that, no matter what, my life wont be the same in a year. So why don't I ever get that feeling anymore? That feeling of contentment, of loving the world around me just as it is, of appreciating the food that I'm eating like it's really something special...even when it's just a salad or pasta or a sandwich. The burst of excitement when someone stops to ask me directions or talks to me in class about really crappy pop music.

It seems really fatalistic to say things like this. I mean, it's not like there's no happiness in my life. I have great friends, I can see my grandma whenever I want, I just bought a bunch of paint for my house, I got a job working with high school students that I'm really excited about. But, it's always different, I have fresh roasted green chile in the fridge, I'm looking forward to making eggs benedict with wonderful people in the morning. But, as we do, I want more...I want those moments that I feel have been left far behind. And I can only just grasp at them, their residue left in a photo or a postcard or a memory. I suppose I'm haunted by Faulkner's "invisible presences."

Hah. It figures that, as I try to finish this up, Grand Corps Malade (whose song, "Vu de Ma Fenêtre," is the namesake of this blog) comes on my iTunes with a song called "Rétroviseur." The chorus goes like this:

J’ai le souvenir tenace, et la mémoire tonique.
De ces temps pas si lointains, de cette époque magique
J’sais pas si c’est normal, on peut trouver ça tragique

Putain j’ai pas 30 ans, et je suis déjà nostalgique.

Over the course of the song, he lists all these memories about his youth and how great everything was. In the chorus, he basically says that he has such strong memories of this time that really wasn't that long ago, but, shit, he's not even 30 and he's already all nostalgic.

Putain, j'ai pas 23 ans et je suis déjà nostalgique.

(messes up the rhythm, but putain, that's how I feel)