5

As I look at it again, the above reminds me of a production of King Lear.  Trees are amazing things; wiry strange moving shapes sticking into rock.  I'm glad this one has a little help.

Today I was alone with sleeplessness and the almost finished novel.  I overstayed my welcome at a cafe where I sat for a few hours doing video chat.  I was amazed at the employees at the French post office, how energetic they were, buzzing out from behind their desks, quickly and efficiently doing things for patrons.  I once again was struck by indecision in front of an array of pastries.  And every time I'm on of the public bikes (Velibs) zipping around the city, I'm half taking in the sights and watching for hazards and half mentally singing the praises of the Paris city government for being so amazing.  It's ridiculous, of course.  I know next to nothing about the Paris city government, except that they've implemented (I think it was them, anyway) this amazing Velib program and the mayor (I think he's still mayor) is a two-term socialist gay man.

Gertrude Stein, I think about a lot here.  I spied through curtains at her old house (it was a living room.)  I thought of the French, related to her writing, what are the French, what do they look like, what is their fame like?  It would be fun to have a compendium of descriptions of all the races of human beings that have come and gone.  Like the Gauls or the Huns or I wish the Homos and the Neanderthals had posed naked for each other in cave figure drawing classes.  Some of that chronicle of human categories now defunct would be very sad, but at the level of abstraction, it would be interesting.  Maybe part of reminding us how fleeting big important seemingly permanent things (like a group of people called the French) are, how abstract they really are.  I was thinking in this regard about the big American news today, which is that we might be pulled whining out of our regression by a judiciary who could uphold the right of all adult citizens in a democracy to make the same kind of contracts with each other as other adult citizens of the same democracy are entitled to make.  Gay marriage (maybe) again legal in California.  America, once the standard-bearer of the notion of free rational choice over the inertia of history and the state, now teetering towards something we might call the third world in that regard, behind Argentina, Canada, and a host of other nations in terms of where people might want to go if they want their personal sexual and legal decisions left up to them and not the state.  Can we imagine the American economy will thrive if we've given up on seeing what newness and variety we can create in human relations and culture, if we've decided to disallow people from loving and investigating the mysteries in their souls?  America would have to become a dull factory nation, not one where people can imagine, design, and propose.

It's much friendlier to think that America, too, can be a land of expressive trees, freed by new tools (sorry Neanderthals, you never knew what it was like to live in a world of mass-produced rectangular tree carcasses) to build more complex, interesting shapes.  If resting in a park on a nice summer afternoon, wouldn't you rather the people around you be fulfilled, supported explorers, intriguing in their internally nuanced attractions, delights, and understandings, than repressed, angry multiple choice boxes attempting to fit into binaries, obsessed with being units of social utility whose actual utility is now, again, and probably forever, in question?

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And now a throwback to summer '01: