I See Dead People
by Richard Oxman
*Les morts ne parlent pas*. Dead men tell no tales, they say. But they do. The women too.
Les morts?
They are… the many left leaders. And their followers. There are many walking dead. Spreading dirt… over serious matters. Others shed light on the grave.
Sylvie and I have decided to walk among the dead, tread seven feet under Gay Paree. To glean from the graves, the ashes… the remains, what the residue of the left denies us. Choosing history in marble and stone over granitic hysterics.
*The Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise* [1a] –I’ve been told time and time again– is “the grandest address in Paris.” Such intriguing residents. [1b] Ooo Lalah. On a green hill, quite distant from the *grands boulevards*, one finds the most visited cemetery in the world. Our new home.
Or, rather, one of several. Two others being *Cimetiere du Montparnasse* and *Cimetiere de Montmarte*.
I will not go over dead ground anymore. I will leave the lifeless *Movement* to itself. [2a] And be a real guide [2b] for you, if you will, in the *Underground of Truth*.
As Alistair Horne says, [3a] “for non-necrophiliacs, and even if you can remain unmoved by the stories of the legion of French notables tucked away beneath its bizarrely picturesque slabs, in an increasingly frantic city, Pere Lachaise still offers a sanctuary of peace from which you can get….” He goes on. There’s much one can get from the grounds there. And Montparnasse and Monmartre contain… different pleasures. [3b] They’re by no means the same.
Just like leftist one is not like leftist two is not like leftist three. Strikes are for some only. And those come in various shades. And so on. Different moulds for different molders.
The French Underground catacombing is right up our Francophile alley. At present. The question is… what road is being carved out for you? By you.
And speaking of carving, a sculptor who visited yesterday pointed out that gangster-types who ran the cemetery his dad was buried in… wouldn’t let him place one of his works as a headstone. “Granite only,” they told him. “Move your marble out of here,” they added. It begs the question of who’s lost what marbles, oui?
Son can’t lighten the gravity of his grief? There are union rules? Material rules? Oh, granite lasts *many* hundreds of years? That’s a… reason? That’s what he was told.
Pssst. You can’t make the beautiful sculpture he creates… out of granite. Granite is meant for another mentality; one not interested in molding. Just like it’s one kind of mind that takes to vast expanses of grass (that must be fertilized, mowed and traversed)… between gravestones. And quite another that laps up inching in and around the crevices of Montmartre mysteries, no grass to speak of.
One is either among relatives or not. Blood or not. Not clotting the blood of twenty million frogs in animal experimentation, or doing so. Like what was done in ‘75 in the U.S.
I know they’re cruel in Europe too; *frogs* have been known to torture frogs. And Algerians. [4a]
But where is *your* family? Can it be found here? I don’t think the beauty is *hid* in this American boneyard. One shouldn’t look to be at home in a George Romero film. [4b]
It’s easy enough for a silly puppy like Kevin Costner to mouth something like “Build it, and they will come!” as a character in a baseball flick. [5a] That’s different than going to “God’s Little Acre” and expecting people to meet you there for fun and profit… and enlightenment. [5b]
But that’s where and how we have to go now. That’s *how* we are going to go eventually. All of us, as you know.
I once did a summer stock role in a Parkway Playhouse performance of “You Can’t Take It With You.” At age twenty in North Carolina that year… I believed the sentiment of the title.
But the fact is –and it is a fact to me– that you *can* take much with you. Not the French Can-Can memories, nor the American can-do attitude… nor canned leftist tripe (courtesy of a wacky worldwide, *progressive* cancer). Not a single long paragraph from a single self-appointed radical *leader*.
Yet you will be able to take part of me with you. Promise. You should use me now with that in mind.
Without trying to make use of granatoid, humanoid humanitarianism in the process.
Mold by soul only. [6]
_Undead Notes_:
[1a] Forgive the absence of accents, etc. always, please!
[1b] Step on the paths of Montparnasse –in any direction– and you’ll see magnetic, recognizable names. In the eastern section I visited last time out –just from the top of my head– Mauriac, Maupassant, Brancusi, Citroen, Dreyfus are all present. On the right, as one proceeds to the cenotaph inside the circle in the center is Poincare… Beckett… Brassai… Gainsbourg… and moving beyond the cenotaph… Tristan Tzara… Man Ray… Durkheim… Baudelaire…. In the direction of the Edgar Quinet entrance one passes Belmondo, Seberg, Duras and General Raspail. The grave de Beauvoir shares with Sartre is just to the left of the entrance. Nijinsky, Degas, Berlioz, Truffaut, Zola, Jouvet, Stendahl, and Heine stand out from my Montmartre memory. In Pere Lachaise *Le Coin de Martyrs* blends with the route where Socialists and Communists marched together for the first time, and set the seal on the *Front Populaire* that was slated to have such a potent influence on France’s performance in Hitler’s Blitzkreig of 1940. And it all runs –the associations, the images, etc.–like a river … through …past Wilde, Signoret, Montand, Corot, Jim Morrison, Chopin, de Nerval, Piaf, de Balzac, Moliere, Hugo, Delacroix, Proust and Heloise & Abelard… in such a torrent… that I cannot but have my head swim… in delicious dementia… randomly remembering the tip of its iceberg dimensions.
[2a] Robin of Denver makes a good case for not totally rejecting the potential for having an impact on these shores…along traditional lines. One of the very sweetest of my readers keeping in touch, she wrote to me recently to let me know that the proposal in my “Play Ball” piece was not being completely ignored. That she was, in fact, very active, for one, in pushing the DV,D plan; he snail mail missive came replete with wonderfully worded cards, etc., designed to appeal to a broad swath of the population. A very admirable, ambitious attempt to implement a humble idea of mine. I am absolutely indebted to her for such efforts. And I urge anyone who wants to connect with a “ground level mover and shaker” to contact her for details. She’s got terrific ideas, and Step Two… to take advantage of them… calls for readers to dialogue with her at symphony@prodigy.net. It goes without saying, I trust, that I look forward to being kept abreast of developments. Gordon at oateshallmovement@yahoo.com is another person who would very much welcome contact; I believe he wants to get to know other readers, bond effectively over mutual interests.
[2b] You provide the job description, if you like.
[3a] He is cited also in today’s Alternative Dates entry.
[3b] Whereas Pere Lachaise, for example, has unparalleled views, some of its “bizarrely picturesqued slabs” contrast markedly with the ordinary graves of Montmartre –still in the majority– which are sometimes decorated with beautiful allegorical sculptures. As Jeanloup Sieff notes, in the “Weeping Widows” chapter of Time Out’s _Book of Paris Walks_, “Their lack of pomp and pretension makes it easier to feel that you are communing with the dead.”
[4a] Nevertheless, I’d be interested in what folks think of the “Vive La France” piece. This is not by way of digging up Cockburn’s corpse, by the way… for stomping, resuscitation… or any such thing. I got a colleague of his on the phone yesterday, inquiring about that 14% T-shirt (subject of my Cockburn Cockamamie piece)… acting innocently, asking *why* they were putting it on the market. To make a long, funny story short for now, she said a) she hadn’t read the whole article, but b) the shirt idea represented the thrust of the article…and c) (after being *schmoozed* to do so) noted “It’s for people who feel the New York Times doesn’t tell the truth.” Thank goodness someone’s done something about that.
[4b] Like *Night of the Living Dead*.
[5a] *Field of Dreams*.
[5b] It will be what we do for right livelihood.
[6] All else is “death warmed over,” as my mom used to say.
