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French
Poetry
today |
Discovering Americaby Jean-Michel MAULPOIXTranslated into American English from the original French by Catherine Wieder
JFK Airport
Counters. Customs formalities. Scrambles of trolleys. Heaps of suitcases and cardboard boxes. Yellow jam of taxis, smoky exhausts of buses. JFK is America's bottleneck. First image, just before Manhattan : a huge cemetery lined with factory chimneys. Such a metropolis of risen stones reproduces in miniature the town so close. Here the dead sleep, standing. Or rather, New York never goes to bed. From the top of the Empire State, one evening, when a snow storm is falling, skyscrapers become ice cubes in a glass of whisky. This city resounding like an electric guitar flows in a booze light. Let me sum up : America is a
ceaseless noise of sirens, a frantic flashing of snowy
adverts, a taste of chemical sweets, an indecypherable smell
of old carpets, a reek of burnt fat, of glue, of sugar,
popcorn, deodorant, cookies, burnt coffee and air
conditioning. 23rd Street
I dine with a bowl of Andalusian soup, lit with a white candle only, in a tiled hostel on 23rd Street. New York is that burning candle while snow is falling. On the counter, people speak Spanish. Even if the paella seems a little too sweet, tonight I have the feeling of being in Seville. Always this weird impression of leaving, and then finding again a new America almost as if it were, rather than a single country, some kind of of transit zone, a zone of care and an oppressive thought wherefrom it was important to be able to free oneself regularly. I stay in Leo House. A place as I like it where you don't need to unpack, a Christian boarding house kept by rough women looking like girl guides. One would believe they are almost without a real body clad as they are in ignorance or contempt for any sensuousness : no kind of physical love has ever knocked their rough edges. They smile maternally but with an air of authority. Their 5$ breakfast is a treat of fruit cakes and orange marmelades. The bedroom is old fashioned, on the blink, yet modern and functional. The heating and hot water pipes haven't disappeared within the walls, they run, intertwine, branch, adorned with magnificent bronze handles and remind whoever may have forgotten it - as the huge electric lamp-posts in the streets and along the roads do &endash; that material well-being was once a token of conquest on that land. May be such is the very definition of America : modern antiques, a memory of pipes, of citerns and chrome trucks. In order to trigger my
imagination of the energy of the American population, my pal
Marc had said : « this town is an electric battery
». He didn't know how right he was for whenever my
fingers come close to a door handle or a switch, I
sparkle. Roofs
and basements Citerns, aerials and turrets erected everywhere on the roofs. Invisible to the pedestrian, another city is almost hung over the buildings. To what looks are the carved colonnades of the 12th storey of that skyscraper intended ? May be to the gods ? Unless they are erected there to grant the sky the supports it lacks ? Smoke don't surge from chimneys but from the ground shivering from the subway. They let one imagine another empire made of pipes and machines where troglodytes armed with guns live. One doesn't go down without some kind of apprehension into those dim and dirty galleries supported with mines girders. America carries its hell in itself : the half world of a life reduced to the brutishness of what's useful and elementary. The most powerful country is also the most primitive one. They say America is but a
surface, but it digs deep and rises high. It's a complicated
business of fronts, of monstrous roofs and smoky
basements. Virtual
nuptials On the plane taking me to San Francisco, TV on board shows a report entitled « Discovery » dealing with the first virtual wedding. The young fiancés (a couple of Asians) and the priest wear head- and ear-phones connected to a computer. The guests follow on their screens the show of their reciprocal vows in a Medieval background drawn from synthesis images. Drawn by four white horses, a barouche brings both betrothed one to the other. The bride is a wearing a princess dress, her groom has a blue velvet doublet. I check the meaning of a
sentence I had copied a week earlier from Le Monde : «
John Kennedy had promised the moon, Bill Clinton offers
cyberspace. The key to the XXIst century is no longer the
rocket but the tandem modem-computer . » Golden
Gate San Francisco : Last stop in America. Everybody down. In order to visit, to settle or to die. Oddly hanging from the coast, the site is slopy, complex, wild and magical. Such a city outward bound towards the end of the world has nothing to do with Los Angeles' absolute triteness where salvation lies only in some kind of prose roused by the rhythm of traffic. Frisco has the slow lure of a poem. A well-tempered lyrical octosyllable, raised to the American power. It induces to strolling and entails amazement. One would like to disappear in it spraying oneself after having worn out all the saps of life. The Golden gate plays on the lyre in the fog in order to call to itself all those who have reached the end of their dream. They will throw themselves down from this mythical bridge of a dried blood color. The golden gate gapes a little in order to allow the furtive encounter between the real and the absolute and to convince life to topple into death. America is first on the world ranks for belief in the immortality of the soul. In the North Café, unruffled girls play billiards, smoking Winston cigarettes. They wear bunches and leather. Just a few yards away, traffic never stops neither does sorrow at night at the corner of Eddy St. and Leavenworth where drug-addicts, whores and homelesses share acres of pavement to trade their destitution. Sitting on the asphalt close to
her empty caddy, in which her life wealths are wrapped in
plastic bags, a lonely black woman, wearing a pink jacket, a
paper-cup in her hand, a straw between her lips, stares at
America in front of her as if it were a far away,
unattainable and painful thought. Reality
show I am, you are, he is, we are Democracy Ö Channel 25 broadcasts live all day long, debates and interviews from the major institutional places. Live politics. The show, as we check it once more, is that America needs and must always face itself in order to safeguard its coherence. This morning the screen displays : Assaults, weapons and crime &endash; House judiciary subcommittee. In a Congress room, men speak to each other, move, seem to wait in the hulabaloo that a work session should start. It lasts ages. The spectator himself takes part to the disorder of this wait. He becomes thus introduced into the most prosaic reality of democratic life. Then speeches begin : a state prosecutor, a D.A., a representativeÖ Law becomes a reality show, like the rest, for this is America too : a way to hold together the several parts of that huge body threatened by both smoke and obesity, by sexism and the several kinds of offence. This country means of subsistence is guaranteed by three cohesion principles : show biz, the $ and the flag. The strong beats of American life are those when they gather and meet : a basket- or a football match, a base-ball finals or the Convention of a political party. TV blesses and broadcasts those nuptials. Turned on all day and night, it comments the macrocosm to the microcosm. It protects the sanctity of home life : the family cell feels comforted by the image and the voice of this big vague and rustling thing called America. Unbearable solitude and fear without this pilot light comforting it and anaesthetizing it. A unity of thought, of
sociability and of calculation, the $ is both at the same
time a quantifiable power and a concrete one which is earned
and saved in little bits. A star and a stone. In France, the
5Fr note doesn't exist any longer. Here, it becomes the
ideal unity. One likes to pile it little by little in thick
bundles, or as a kind token, just casually, i.e. folded
lengthwise. The $ gesticulates, piles up, hoards up. Save
money. All for money. Supermen I love « cobs » shows. In order to restore to favour the image of the police, which has been severely worn out by the latests riots in Los Angeles, they broadcast reports showing its everyday work : tonight they devote a quarter of an hour to rescue a lost cow. Cowboys have grown old. Tuesday 19th, Channel 2 : preparations for Pdt Nixon's funeral. 5.10 p.m. the body is conveyed. In this country, even the dead fly once more to find their way to the grave. Thursday night, Channel 9 : Mexican serial. In the superpelicula Frontera sur, EROE is written on the black T.shirt of the heroes, who are crawling in a jungle, with a grenade in one hand, a machine-gun in the other, a shining dagger between their teeths, chasing bad cocaïne dealers who kidnapped the democrat representative's daughter. The Schwartzhoneyguerre of the jungle show a strange clashing mixture of US features and Mexican mustache. In order to be saved, under mangroves in full bloom, they meet nymphets wearing white T.shirts very briskly tight on the silicone of their pink lungs. Sunday morning, Channel 11 : in
a film in which he plays the part of a dashing officer who
prides himself to be learned in literature, Robert Redford
says this very final phrase : « A country made of
icecream ». Snow
storm Heading for Boston under a snow storm on board a United Express Jetstream 41 with only thirty seats. My first propeller plane. The wide open cockpit lets one see the comforting shoulder of a pilot and his right headphone. The blond hostess, very kindly gathers the coats, the jackets and hand luggage she packs in a closet in front of the aircraft. Ö We are waiting on the runway. Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. Snow drifts increase. All of a sudden there's a terrible hullabaloo : a torrent is overflowing on the windows which seems to be smoking. Standing high on a nacelle, a man wearing a yellow boiler suit throws on the old crate boiling water to defrost its wings. False start : everybody down again. Unhappy love affair for this white runway. Ö « Take the line please . » The sky has become a little clearer. The tiny plane is running on the tarmac and comes close enough as to scoff at an Indian line of huge shipping company aircrafts that are being sluiced down by the karsher : Northwest, Continental, American Airlines, Carnival Airlines, Air Canada, US air, Pacific beach jet express, Airborne express, Kiwi, Federal express Ö Quantity, variety, two categories presently sufficient to ponder upon America. Ö The small plane
extricated itself from the snow. It now surfs on the foam,
happy as a mosquitoe, it practices some kind of celestial
sky. Its elegant navy engine runs smoothly on a light
azure. The
gold digger Last stop over. Boston Logan. 7. Red table, red seat. Low fat cookies and 100% apple juice. The throat and the skin of my face thoroughly dried up by air conditioning and tobacco. This is how I spend my life in airports. Motionlessness, constraint and exhaustion are the props of any departure. Watching time rather than space. To go out and smoke where other people come in. What is the weariness of a man whose heart is fallow. He has something in him of a gold digger Ö What could he discover when fleeing ? If America opens the world wide, nothing can fill it but red coke and cigarette cartons. It acknowledges everything's void, it drives one to dive into it, exasperates desire and leaves the heart in a state of emptiness. Immediate boarding. Such a country after all is but a runway. It heralds only one signal : there's no other way : Leave ! |
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