Paris, after being with Syrians and Palestinians

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

I sit by the Seine on a chilly day with a blue sky and languid clouds overhead. I love my new coat, a motley blue and black fuzzy thing, wrapped around me. The river runs grey.

If I do not write today, it feels I may never again. It has been months since I have written as I have sunk deeper and deeper into a vast well of being without expressing that I feared and resisted, even as I knew I, somehow, chose it. I was – wasn’t I? – meant to achieve something with my life, to be not only a contender but at least in the semi-finals.

Instead, I am coming to terms with . . . being. Only that. Not achieving, not defining. It is a state not subject to interpretations, comparisons, or judgements. Out of it something discernible is starting slowly to bloom. It has no relationship to what I expected of myself or how I defined myself. Whether it is a result of a lessening of faculties or a gaining of new ones I have no idea, and I hardly care.

It is a sensuous state that is not actually sexual. Sex? What is sex? Will it ever return to my life? Do I wish its disturbances?

The issue that slightly rankles is not being anyone’s #1. That is different in nature than lying in bed with someone, being held, having dinners together, deciding together which movie to watch. It is having some one person who knows, more or less, where you are and what you are thinking, though I don’t believe anyone knows what someone else is thinking fully, which may be a good thing. Thinking is over-rated.

I lied to you. I am not by the Seine, not yet anyway. I am in an apartment a couple blocks from the Seine with intents to go to the Seine. I described the sky accurately though, and I do love my new coat. See, you believed I was by the Seine even though I wasn’t.

My little deception is nothing like the terrors (damn that word, so sick of it) happening to the women from Syria I was with the last week of August. We were in Turkey. I was one of a team of people giving leadership training and trauma healing to Syrian women in Gazientep, which has hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in it and seems to be the site of the Syrian government in exile. We presented more than 20 male leaders, including the Prime Minister of the government in exile and the President of the National Coalition, with a statement and plan on protection of civilians and we told them they needed the help of women. We brought all these male leaders together in one room for the first time. Everyone needs the help of women to get things done, including other women.

Those women have more to deal with than small lies and the picayune problems afflicting a woman with a new coat and a warm apartment a couple blocks from the Seine. These women had family members murdered because of the work they did and they choose to continue. These women have lost husbands, brothers, fathers, and cousins if not to barrel bombs, snipers, bombs, gas, and drones, then to the irreconcilable differences of being on different sides of the multi-faceted divides.

I wonder if the pharmacy is open Mondays. I need to replace my LeClerc compact (color: Ivoire) that I got a year ago.

I have a new Facebook friend who chastises herself for feeling great pain over her losses when so many people in the world are suffering such larger losses. I don’t know her but I like her and assured her, pulling up remnants of wisdom from that which remains and seems so far away as to be up from my big toes, that a loss is a loss and the Syrian women know this, too. They equated the death of one team member’s brother as a teenager to a car accident to their own losses. They cried together.

I’m reading “My Promised Land” by Ari Shavit. It was recommended to me over and over when it came out a couple years ago. Now I’m reading it, safely ensconced in the 6^th arrondisement, after having spent last week in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It takes a Jew to tell Jews that Jews have and do perpetrate terrors (damn that word). They did it deliberately and calculatingly in the claiming of Israel and they do it today in Palestine. Mass slaughter then and picking people off daily now, one by one, in the West Bank. Gaza is excluded from the ping here and ping there death. Gazans are, instead, cyclically slaughtered in mass.

Right! I have to remember to call my grand-daughter who, due to a decision by her mother when she was 12, is Jewish. Today is her 7th birthday.

I had my first up close and personal experience with tear gas 10 days ago – my god, was it just over a week ago? – in Beit Jala alongside Bethlehem. Israeli soldiers were on all the rooftops waiting for our quiet walking protest of 150 or so people to approach their police tape. Not touch it, just get within 10 feet of it. No conversations, no give and take, no telling the marchers to back off. We were instantly bombarded with tear gas, front, back, center, and sides. The intent wasn’t to disperse, it was to punish us for holding any thought that civility and rationality would have any influence on where they build the wall, that nonviolence had a chance against an establishment determined to divide Beit Jala and to appropriate parts of it. Land grabbing is as routine as chewing gum. Take over Palestinian villages that existed for hundreds of years through generation after generation? Did it in 1948, doing it now.

The inside skinny on tear gas is that it is worst than you imagine. Well, worse than I imagined. There was the moment when I thought my lungs would implode and I would die. Then there was the moment when I realized my lungs were not going to implode, nor would I have permanent eye damage and the skin on my face probably would not peel off – all while running uphill for two blocks with a younger male colleague pulling me along, and the fuck moment when I realized the canister in front of me and rolling towards me was going to explode at my feet just as I reached it.

It’s unfortunate the Picasso exhibit at the Grand Palais doesn’t open until the 22nd. I know some more cerebral art critics pay little attention, but, give me a break, the man was a god. An annoying human maybe, but a god. Gods tend to be annoying.

So Germany is leading the welcoming of Syrian refugees to their country. Isn’t that amazing? Has the middle of the human populace attitudinal bell curve in Europe shifted enough so people in some nations can gather together and act as humanitarians? Our hearts thump louder at the possibility even as I am among those getting pissed as hell at the wealthy Arab states who allow in zero Syrian refugees even as Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon stretch and stretch and care.

And the US? When did such a large portion of our populace, and our representatives, become stingy? What, we’re afraid people who are better educated and more resourceful will come in and help our economy and standard of living?

I need more protein. Not eating four legged creatures and finding fowl less and less appealing . . . the health food store at Place de Furstenberg should have tofu, or a protein powder. Ah, there’s Yen and that incredible thing they do with tofu where they make it taste like . . . well, nothing else I know, but so delicious.

I have the right to mourn my losses. Friends have died, few close relatives remain, my ex-husbands are forgettable, my beauty requires good sleep and good hair days, my body weakens, the avalanche of words is sometimes a dry bed creek. I am no one’s #1. It is the bane of almost every incredible woman I know over 65. Not all of us, but most of us. If we have not already come to terms with living alone and dying without having rocked the world, we need to do it now. Otherwise, all realization of existing beauty now and in the future is lost – not only our own beauty, but that of being here in what, on the best days and even most of the worst, is an incomprehensible miracle despite the killing and slaughter and madness and, yes, terrors.

Today’s grey Seine

I need to go out.

Will I think of the Syrian women and weep by the Seine? Has this writing released the damned flood? What will become of us all?

Paris has survived terrors.

I wonder if that place that gives Thai massages is still open on rue Christine.

Air France Made Me Cry

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Reader Notice: Any lament about being stuck in Paris is, by definition, ridiculous. I know that.This is about being stuck away from people you love.

Air France made me cry. Not sob, not bawl my eyes out, but real tears, real “I can’t cope” tears. Since I long ago learned that “I can’t cope” tears have no traction in my world – maybe in others, but not in mine, never have – the tears stopped at the point where I said aloud, “Well, that’s really going to help, Patricia.”

Insomnia is no respecter of borders and sleeping only between 5:00 am and 9:00 am probably had something to do with my fragility, as did a desire to get home and hug my grandchildren, to dedicate my life to them as the most viable thing I’ve got going.

Yes, this is a somewhat hollow lament – I am in Paris, after all! – but loneliness is not ever hollow. I have a psychiatrist friend who was in the teams that “treated” Vietnamese boat people decades ago. She said they wanted to talk about the same things everyone else wants to talk about. Not the war, not loss of home, but the intricacies of love and caring and insecurities. Why should I be immune?

So when the email notice came from Air France canceling my flight 24 hours before scheduled takeoff, I was already flirting with self-pity. It was complex and went on and on about booking options and financial transactions, and it was in French without an English “click” button.

Now, I had known for two weeks that the Air France pilots were on a “soft” strike with some flights cancelled, which is why I kept checking to see that my flight was still on schedule. It was, up to that moment. I had packed.

Action time! Call the telephone number, get a real operator, tell her or him everything, get a new booking, and arrange a straight financial exchange. The first two tries didn’t get through at all and the third time I got the “Thank you for your patience, we will be with you shortly” recording – for 30 minutes, which is when I hung up at $1 per minute.

But had I been sitting around, helpless and waiting? No! I had been online in the race with phantom leagues of people who were also rebooking as fast as they could.

Stick with Air France rather than try in foreign languages to manage the finances. The strike is scheduled to be over in two days. Five seats left on the Wednesday flight, work fast, get that information in, choose a seat, click to confirm. Now!

. . . oh, oh . . . an air message. There is a technical difficulty and my reservation cannot be confirmed. Of course, there’s a technical difficulty! There are 500 plus people from my plane alone who are rebooking. No way those five seats will be left next time I try.

This is when being alone, being sleep deprived, and wanting your grandchildren to run to you with their arms open come together in a special way that creates a stinging sensation in your tear ducts.

It’s not about reservations and flights. It’s about being connected to others. It’s about being in the human family. It’s about being loved and giving love, being embraced and embracing, celebrating each other, and having someone bring you coffee while you’re trying to get home.

I made my own coffee and went back to try online again. My speakerphone was still saying “Thank you for your patience, we will be with you shortly.” But this time when I pulled up my reservation to change it, it said I was confirmed on a flight in two days. My earlier attempt had gone through.

I shut off my cell phone, dressed in black like Johnny Cash, told myself I was one tough cookie, and I went out to lunch – a poached egg over thin-sliced gently steamed peppers and corn for the first course and wild mushroom risotto for the second course.

I can cope for two more days.

Fighting with Perfection in Paris

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

(Hang in there, this blog all comes together eventually. Plus there are photos of lovers, redheads, and dogs at the end. See example to left.)

Fighting with Perfection in Paris

Perfection does a hatchet job on Good. She’s a diva that tolerates no supporting cast, and She has been riding roughshod over my ability to write a blog since I arrived in Paris 12 days ago.

In addition to not writing blogs, I have not been to two of my neighborhood restaurants, Laduree and Mariage Freres. They are my usual haunts and I believed they were essential to my settling into the City of Lights.

I have been taking long walks and hundreds of photographs with a focus on lovers, redheads, dogs, children, art, and the homeless that I post on Facebook every day, but no writing.

What is going on?

Let me tell you as best I understand.

For one thing the Israeli killing of 2100 Gazans and then claiming more land in the West Bank ad nauseum not only depressed me but has shown me definitively that there are people who are not only far more expert on the subject than I am but who write much better. (Un-huh, I know Israelis were targeted by Gazans firing missiles and that 50 some Israelis were killed – all except six in the military – but this blog is not about politics and I’m not in the mood to equate 50 some Israelis to 2100 Gazans and call it a draw.)

For another, I have been taken over by an internal son et lumiere show in which a cacophony of characters bide with each other for the spotlight. Inside me is a mélange of languid sexy women wearing silk lavender, clowns in cone hats with red pom-poms on top, the child I was on the farm in Iowa, an overly-sensitive female who is subject to Stendhal Syndrome, and a hawk-eyed hunter-photographer who preys on and captures the innards of innocent people.

Over it all sits the Perfectionist Judge (she’s a female, dammit!) who says that if I write something it has to have a deep and meaningful impact in addition to good grammar. Otherwise, it isn’t worth bothering with and clutters the landscape.

Also, I’m in an apartment I once co-owned with a husband we don’t need to mention except that I don’t want you to think I could ever have bought an apartment in Paris on my own. The apartment is exactly as I left it except the floor-to-ceiling silk curtains are shredding on the window side and there is a humidor on the desk and new sheets on the bed – oh, and an updated master bathroom. This is a special kind of déjà vu made possible by the new owner.

Thus, a sonne et lumiere and cast of characters goes with me through the streets, into the cafes, across Luxembourg Gardens, and into the Louvre to view 17^th and 18^th century French paintings. It is a pleasant but timeless experience that is not very solid, wobbly even. Writing a blog requires concrete sentences in real time.

However a deep and impactful truth (at least for me) has finally taken form. I believe that having our moorings loosened and our time sense scrambled – and losing people, gaining people, and experiencing our self as multiple people is imperative to becoming more aware of the miracle that we are here at all. We cannot know more until we give up old beliefs that we know what is what. We need to be tumbled.

Often this happens by trauma. Breakage and loss undo our world, and in undoing our world they make us look again, experience again, change. We are forced to be flexible.

We are forced to be flexible in what we thought was existence – large and small – and who we are in it. It is easiest to do this if we accept the unmooring and the cast of interior personalities and float.

The Perfection Judge says, “This is not adequate. It’s too airy-fairy. You need to say something helpful when our world is in such crisis.”

You see, the Perfection Judge tolerates that I post photographs of redheads and lovers on Facebook, but she wants my blogs to have more depth, which means the only way I can write is to stand up to Her and say, “Half-ass and mediocre are just fine, thank you, anyway.”

Even so, I will now make an attempt at depth, or perhaps just at loosening your moorings: There are as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on planet earth. Odds are beyond all reckoning that we are not the only thinking creatures in infinity.

We don’t know much of anything but we experience that we exist. That is a place to start.

Two days ago I bought a work of art titled “Paradise Lost.” (See photo. Xavier Somers, Flemish, is the artist.)

In the beginning were Adam and Eve and they discovered the pleasurable things that men and women can do together. Behold, Eve laid an egg in the nest of temporal life and free will. Alongside it in the nest is the devoured apple of self-knowledge. The beginning was the awareness that we existed. It might not be much, but it is a start.

Everything my knowledge and experience tell me is that bliss is the natural state and it is humans who f**k it up. We all know the second part of that sentence. I believe the first part is true also. We “fell” out of grace into self-knowledge. It was the only way to know we are here. Now the task is to climb back up and join self-awareness with bliss. (. . . which raises all sort of questions such as which came first the bird or the egg.)

In “Paradise Lost” the golden male has a large key that inserts in the keyhole of the golden female. It joins them into one creature, a larger egg with legs. I’m just letting you know that without further comment.

And this Adam and Eve devoured the apple. Of course! If we’re going for self-awareness, we need to get as much as possible.

And the nest is made of barbed wire. And so it is. Look around.

And because our self-awareness is still so miniscule, such a grain of sand in infinity, we harm each other and call it justified and self-protection and rational.

And I look around this apartment where loss has occurred and where beauty and blessing pour in the windows, and I cart my mélange of characters around with me and tell the Perfection Judge, “Bugger off.”

I say, “Bugger off. You, Perfection, are the scourge, thinking you know what is right or good. You, who wants life in perfect grammar and manners and brilliance. Look around, Perfection, next to the lovers are the homeless. Look, Perfection, look well, and tell me that you have a right to judge. We rejected you when we began to become aware and to care for all that fails your false standards. Bugger off.”

Photos of Parisians below, being their essential selves, even when dogs:

KISSES: photos included

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

This blog is about kisses, the kind usually done in private . . . or in Paris in public. This is my third draft on this subject, and I’m going with it no matter where it goes.

The first place it is going is that kisses are better than wine. Great kisses, that is, are better than great wine. The opposite is also true, bad kisses tend towards the vinegar-esque.

The second place it is going is that great kisses may or may not be sexual but they are always sensual, just as good sex must be sensual (a personal observation) while sensuality may or may not be sexual.

The third place is it going is to confront the innate problem of writing a blog about kisses. If I only write a paean to, and attempted deconstruction of, mind-blowing kisses, . . . well, not everyone has the requisite partner(s) or relationship(s) for such kisses, and I don’t want to set people up for lamentations or a sense of missing out.

So, instead of focusing on kisses per se, which may or may not be within your reach, let’s look at the overall context of sexual vs. sensual – their differences, overlap, and nuances – because, while transmission of sexual energy usually requires two or more for full ignition, sensuality requires only one person in heightened awareness and receptivity.

No physical partner is needed for you to experience the pleasures of sensuality even while any emotion or response brought on by the creations – music, art, fashion, food, writing – of another human means in some sense that another person is present even if their body isn’t. It’s simply a factor of unaligned time and space.

couple kisses

Further: sensual enjoyment is your birthright. You came into the world equipped as a sensual being. Look at a baby’s goofy smile when a finger is lightly traced down its belly. That is sensuality, as in experiencing the senses of touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste.

Relishing, savoring, being immersed in, swooning over, salivating, feeling the back of your head zoom into space, having your knees give way, knowing there is no other color red in the world like the one you’re looking at right now, knowing no musical segue ever before was so sweet, being lost in Now and giving up your identity to Wholeness . . . yup, that’s what a great kiss feels like, but . . . oh, sorry, I wasn’t going to go there.

Sexuality might be embedded in sensuality, but sexuality urges you towards a completion, to a release. It is a grabbing and claiming, an escape from the mundane.

Sensuality gathers you in its arms and takes you into the knowing of More. It reveals the exquisiteness that a moment before had been camouflaged as mundane.

Sexuality takes you away from washing the dishes. Sensuality reminds you of the feel of china, the smell of good food, and the comfort of warm water.

At its fullest, sensuality ushers you into an ecstatic love inside and outside of yourself by going through the senses of your body and mind. Sex may have love as a component, but sensuality reveals the streaming love that has always been there, timeless without boundaries. Sensuality is the powerful play between you and beauty where you yield in order to expand beyond identity and ego instead of being a power play between people striving for dominance and control in the dynamics of sex.

Sensuality without sexuality is leagues ahead of sexuality without sensuality. They don’t occupy the same planet, even though sensuality that includes sexuality is what premier cru kisses are made of . . . oh, I wasn’t going to go there.

Well, yes, let’s actually go there. I have all these photos of people kissing in Paris I want to share.

About kisses:

Each kiss is unique even when it is a pile up of the same old same old between two people. It is always a communication, even when sometimes, sadly, it is a “kiss off.” Kisses cannot avoid communicating even though most are half-felt, half-given, half-received, and half-registered.

There are kisses we give to children and babies, the elderly, long-time friends, and pets. These kisses ask for nothing, and we give them because we feel safe enough to express our affection and tenderness. Message given, message received. Bonding has been done. Nice.

But what I am mulling over these days are kisses between people who are discovering each other, who need to figure out, confirm, or explore a sexual or highly affectionate relationship.

Here is where we need to become more fluent. We need to learn the language of kisses, the accents and dialects, the give and take, daring, shyness, boldness, yielding, claiming, and whispers louder than shouts. This language demands trust. Kisses cannot be fluent in sensuality without trust.

The kiss To be sure, sex can occur without trust, but exquisite sensuality cannot. This is why mature adults, those of us not prone to random sex, paid partners, swapping, sending Instagrams of our private parts, or seeking younger bodies to make us feel potent, want meaningful relationships based on honesty and trust. We know the difference between sexual and sensual and that sexuality without sensuality is too much like puberty. To be avoided.

Trust requires knowing we are loved and cherished, and we become instinctively less interested over time if our partner wears us down by neglect, or being a workaholic or other addict, or being unable to engage in things that have meaning to us. And why do I suddenly remember an ex-husband’s wish that we linger in the uncomfortable chairs after dinner so we could bond over his explaining international finance to me? I mean, I would have become an expert in euros and renminbi if there had been reciprocity, but . . . oops, I probably shouldn’t go there either.

Back to sensuality, because that is the prize, that is the goal, that is the birthright, that is the joy, that is the expansion that is yours. I believe the closest we can come to knowing god is through truly experiencing life through our senses; and I believe that when two or more come together in His name (i.e. in love and sensuality), there He is also.

Okay, I really stepped into it because I don’t believe in a sentient entity keeping score beyond interstellar space even though I do believe in my parking angel – and I probably should have said “goddess” anyway. That is, I believe in the tendency of energies to solve problems in harmonic ways. I believe peace wants a chance. I believe synchronicity happens every second. I believe health wants to happen. I believe there are morphic fields of knowing and evolving and sharing of our collective minds.

And I believe kissing is a master art and only those who approach it in adoration can taste its full beauty.

And I believe the potential for sensual joy surrounds us at all times. It is music, it is taste, it is birdsong, it is morning sun, it is dance, it is cascading into laughter, it is a wet rock in the sand, it is dirty dishes. It is opening our senses and being fully alive. It is where we partner, as two or more gathered, in ecstasy with Now.

PARIS NOTES #7: It’s time to leave Paris

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

It is time to leave Paris. I was ill and confined for three days, but now recovered enough to function but not play. My timing is off. My photos of dogs consist only of their tails and hind sides as they trundle or scamper away. My photos of kisses are taken after the fact. My photos of children are uninspired. (The earlier photos will soon be posted in my blog in the Photos section.)

So, I am packing, and making runs to buy books and macaroons (chocolate mainly), and children’s hats as gifts.

Losing my edge as a photographer, I look not for the exact moment that epitomizes something but at the full array of people and faces in front of me, and discover that men are looking at me. Men alone, men with other men, men with women. It may be the wan ethereal paleness of three days of coughing, or my younger Jeanne Moreau slightly baggy eyes. I look in mirrors and window reflection and see nothing different even as I feel different. Have I become unaggressive without the camera or vulnerable, and so tap into male care-taking energies? It’s slightly unnerving.

Two nights ago my friend Ruth and I went to the National Opera House (Palais Garnier) to see Ballet de l’Opera. She had gotten tickets for one of the red velvet (or were those walls carpeted?) loges that emits the smell of every longing and conquest and devastation and brilliance that ever occurred inside it or on that magnificent stage in 140 years. I saw modern dance that seared my eyes and brain with brilliance and passion: choreographers Saburo Teshigawara, Jiri Kylian and Trisha Brown. The color and sound, and silence, and integration of Gregorian chanters and photographs and videos enhanced that dancers were moving in ways that people cannot move, and expressing the undecipherable secrets of life and death, their bodies calligraphy. And I only had one coughing fit the entire time. Yeah, I was that person others wished would have stayed home under the covers.

So it was a good ending, except that it is not where I am going to end. I am going to end with this photo of a young man at the restaurant where I had lunch yesterday. Art is alive here if you combine looking with seeing.

This was the one really good photo of the day. Tell me, is he Raphaelite or Durer-esque?

Au revoir.

PARIS NOTES #6: Playing Chess with Yourself: empathy training

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

The good thing about playing chess with yourself is the two sides are evenly matched. The bad thing is you know what the other side is thinking. It becomes an ultimate game of one-upmanship, to outthink the person who is outthinking you as you outthink them. This can go on like mirrors opposite each other where images go into infinity.

It also means you cannot ambush the other side, there are no calculated surprise attacks, and that winning is, more than usual, the result of making few, essentially no, mistakes.

It also means that every time you win, you lose; and every time you lose, you win. This is superior empathy training.

Nonetheless you do – or I do – sometimes choose sides. When black mauled white a couple games back, I found the game distasteful. A bully was on the move and not about to stop until all royalty of its so-called enemy were dead on the field. There was no finesse, only slaughter. It took me a couple days to return to the board.

And I couldn’t help but rejoice when black was clearly winning an earlier game. Check. Check. Check. Check. But when black couldn’t achieve checkmate, he confidently used a turn not to check again but to bring another piece in for the kill. In the space of one free move, the white queen zoomed the length of the board, put the black king in check, and sealed the deal on the next move with the aid of a lone white knight. For 15 minutes black had controlled everything. In 15 seconds white won the game. I knew from the beginning that the white queen was intrepid, and I liked that.

My maternal grandfather played chess 80 years ago by mail with people he didn’t know. My paternal grandfather was the checker champion of Cerro Gordo county, Iowa. It runs in the family. Conniving, pouncing, strategizing, foiling. I own up. It has nothing to do with building peace or inclusive dialogue. It’s not a win-win, but I feel the tickles in my brain, and adversaries who demand respect from each other thrill me.

And I like that the queen is so powerful while the king can hardly move and tends to cower.

I also like when an overlooked pawn steps forth to upend an entire game. “I can take you, queen.” “I can checkmate you, king.” “You didn’t see me coming, did you? Well, here I am.”

I’m not actually that good, and I play only when I’m in Paris, which may be once a year for a couple weeks. There is a chessboard set up in the apartment where I stay and that I used to own. It is a chessboard I bought, and as this apartment has a convoluted story of joy and beauty and love and grief, betrayal, and loss, so do chess games have stories. Some leave me breathless as a queen fights to hang on or a bishop risks his life or a castle frets to break from the corner.

Each piece has a personality. Call it projection, or call it observation, I don’t care:

Kings – lazy, pompous, scared

Queens – determined, capable, calculating

Bishops – graceful in their oblique ways, a little sneaky coming in from the side

Knights – awkward in their armor, wanting to be valiant, often treading too far out

Castles – like all walls and parapets, less powerful than they look

Pawns – secure in their little selves, knowing they may be sacrificed, but up for the game.

Knowing the intelligence of a chess piece and being inside the game, especially when you play against yourself, builds empathy. It is a holistic exercise that resonates with the stories of your life, and the stories of others. It gets you past that only your reality is real. It forces you to be human by having to drink from the winners’ and the losers’ cup at the same time. It makes us want to be good to others.

A game a short while back ended with both kings forced out of hiding, facing each other mid-field with no protection. They hardly knew what to do. They were two King Lear’s who believed they were all-powerful now stumbling to their ends with no one to hear their whimpering. It was a tragedy of hubris. I could not take sides in this. I could only witness, and remember the story of why the apartment was no longer mine, nor even of my own King Lear.

When you don’t have empathy, you are cut off from the rest of humanity. If you do not feel what others experience, you are alone inside your version of your story. It becomes your reality and can stale quickly. You lose the richness of life, its flavors and gifts. You’re in a fairytale with no feedback or changes of scenery. “And lived happily ever after” becomes a jail.

Empathy is epic. Furthermore, it is non-fiction.

. . .

Chess games in the Luxembourg Gardens, where timers are used, and audiences second-guess you. Perhaps here it is more a blood sport than empathy.

PARIS NOTES #5 – “The Hare with Amber Eyes” or Anti-Semitism in the Neighborhood

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

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It is not the first thing you see when standing across from 81 rue Monceau, but you see it soon enough – the two faces of the Theater of Life, the tragic and the happy, in stone, mid-way up the elegant 5-story façade. Look more closely and you’ll see that Happiness is younger, innocent perhaps, while Tragedy is older, watchful, wary.

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The house was the mansion of the Ephrussi family. Like the Rothschilds and other fabulously wealthy Jewish families, they had equally wealthy powerful brothers, cousins, uncles, and aunts, in Vienna and London from the end of the 1800’s up to World War II.

Rue Monceau was central to the neighborhood of the newly wealthy Parisian Jews. Well, newly wealthy in European capitals anyway. The Ephrussi were doing very well indeed in St. Petersburg and Odessa from where they had a virtual monopoly on Russian grain trade.

The Camondo family, in an even larger mansion at 63 rue Monceau, arrived massively rich as bankers from outside of Istanbul since the Ottoman Empire. Yesterday I visited this mansion, now the Musee Nissim de Camondo. (More below on that, with photos.)

And the Rothschilds had everything needed for the five sons to branch across Europe with funds from the patriarch Mayer, banker to the royal court of Free Frankfurt. The Ephrussi followed suit, establishing their own banks. Each family collected art. Charles Ephrussi, the youngest son of Leon, the first Ephrussi to come to Paris (1871), was exempt from working in banking or anywhere else that made money. It was always clear he was the arty one.

It was Charles who bought the 264 Japanese netsuke central to “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” written by Edmund De Waal, grandson of Elizabeth Ephrussi of the Vienna branch and inheritor of this exquisite collection that bizarrely survived the ravages of war and anti-Semitism. Charles was primary source-material for Charles Swann in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Charles, an eminent art historian and critic, also collected vast numbers of paintings and supported Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other Impressionists. The family benefitted from this mode of assimilation in a culture where anti-Semitism, like a virus, was biding its time. Even our favorite Impressionists could turn. Renoir, who painted Charles into “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (the man in the back in the top hat), said, given a slight grudge, that Charles collected “only Jew art,” meaning it had gold highlights in it. So much for his soft edges and round women.

The book left me emotionally bruised by anti-Semitism in a way I have not experienced in some time. I am not Jewish, but I have married and loved Jews consistently, and my daughter and grandchildren are Jewish.

What has more formed my current feelings, however, are my connections of the past 12 years in Israel and in Palestine as the founder of Peace X Peace and editor-photographer of the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian women,” which has gone to every UN ambassador, every US Congressperson, and thousands more people working for healthy peaceful cultures.

Over time my frustration with the Israeli government and policies has grown into anger.

It is difficult not to be angry if you check your facts and believe in truth. But this book brought me back viscerally to how it feels when no matter what good you do or how wealthy or powerful you are, or how long you have been in a place, and how assimilated you feel you are that some people will continue to think of you and condemn you as a scourge, as dirty, as vile, as rapacious.

And it showed me, with the blow-by-blow devastation of the Ephrussi family in Vienna, how monsters can evade your house almost overnight and leave you only with the clothes on your back. How your treasures can be inventoried and carried away, how the only fight you have left is figuring out how to get out of your chosen nation before you, like the treasures, are shipped away.

The book is exquisite, it is terrifying. I recommend it.

Yesterday I saw the faces of Tragedy and Happiness on the face of a mansion. I think, despite the family’s assimilation, wealth, and titles, they knew their history well.

For now I will spare you my thoughts on the current effects and wounds of that history.

Just to acknowledge its truth and burden is enough for one day.

. . .

Yesterday I also spent hours inside the Musee Nissim de Camondo. This sumptuous mansion was built by Moise Camondo in 1911. When his only son Nissim died in 1917 as an aviator on World War I, Moise decided to bequest the mansion and magnificent art, furniture, silver, and china to Les Arts Decoratifs of Paris.

The photos do not show the mansion in its full magnificence as the Impressionist paintings, most well known, are in the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, and elsewhere.

Moise died in 1935. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren died in concentration camps.

PARIS NOTES #4: The Male Nude or An Exhibition of Muscle

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

You’re not allowed to take photographs inside Musee d’Orsay, my favorite museum in Paris. Yes, other people, more sophisticated perhaps, may go to smaller specialized museums, the Guimet Museum of Asian Art, the Rodin, or La Musee Nissim de Camondo, for example. And the Louvre is filled with tourists and the occasional connoisseur checking out this masterpiece or that red on black vase depicting a chariot race from 400 BC.

But for me, it’s the d’Orsay, and today was my first return in three years. The catalyst was the grand exhibition of male nudes now on view, specifically “The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day.” And there he was!

Strange how muscle-bound males are not all that exciting. Neither are the perils of barely clad saints such as Sebastian, a favorite subject with those arrows stuck in his chest and buttocks. Just what angle were the archers shooting from?

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Achilles, with or without an arrow in his ankle, wassimilarly a model of muscular repose, and Prometheus, even with the vulture eating his kidney, seemed to have the world under control. Why not with those abs and biceps?

Hiding behind a half-wall, I snapped the portrait of Prometheus (1868) by Gustave Moreau before the guard caught me. (Moreau has his own little museum to be visited in the next few days as I hear he shocked his peers by hallucinatory. Let’s see.)

Hermes was slightly more charming, youth that he is with that cute little hat, as was John the Baptist as a boy, radiating faith. It made me think about how people believe the religion they are taught until they are old enough to accept that not only do their parents lie but maybe their culture also, and maybe the story is too large for only one version.

It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that naked men could be portrayed as what I’m used to, skinnier and prone to listing this way or that. It happened with the advent of photography and self portraits. And people such as Francis Bacon who threw red and yellow paint around like wounds of existential angst.

Yet, the heroic vision of the male body as muscle remained. Think of the photos of Mapplethope for one.

So there I was, a woman trying to find the men within the bodies. It was difficult to do. I think it is sometimes difficult for men also.

Leaving I saw a young man, fully clothed, kissing a young woman. I whipped out my iphone and took a photo before the guard charged. He did, but I had seen love unmuscle-bound, and I liked it, and I understood it, and I got the photo.

PARIS NOTES #3: Art as GOD

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

Art is not God Unique in France. It is but one god in the panoply of Olympians, along with children, food, wine, great shoes and scarves, élan, and the ability to make sex elegant wherever.

I will avoid here the demons of politics, taxes, unemployment, price of apartments, immigration, and other pesky things that perturb the sangfroid public (national cool). They exist, mais oui, but I have seen more outrageously wonderful clothes than ever before here. Even the tourists have upped their style quotient. They got the memo.

Oh, I forgot the dogs. The French love dogs, but you already knew that. They love dogs of all sizes, but most dogs are small so they fit inside small apartments. So far I’ve only seen one large dog. In from the suburbs?

Back to art.

Now, October 24-27, is FIAC, the annual international fair where the major galleries handling contemporary works come from the great art centers—Paris, New York, Zurich, and Berlin mainly—to exhibit across the heart of Paris, indoors and out.

Yesterday, I walked from the apartment in the 6th arrondissement to the Louvre and then the length of gardens to the Tuileries (literally through statues) to the Grand Palais where I wandered, stunned. The “selfie” of me in front of the mirrored insect cage tells all.

Three hours later I emerged, having passed on going to the balconies that contained the second half of the exposition. Walking back along the Seine, through a drizzle under a leopard-patterned umbrella, I was dazed. Everything always is a possibility for exploration, for breaking through to freedom, to playing one’s lute strings, for dancing with the panoply of gods.

Enjoy this small taste of the art and people inside the Grand Palais:

PARIS NOTES #2: Ode to Older Men or The Glass Ball

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

In my last blog I said that old men with remorse were as common as corn in Iowa and that an old man without remorse was a rare and precious being, or too stupid to know his mistakes or too scared to acknowledge them. I woke on my fourth day in Paris prepared to write of street musicians and art and cathedral bells, but feel first the need to put more nuance on what I said.

I never said most old men should feel remorse, but I do say that most do feel remorse, and most of those have reason to. Note: I’m speaking of Western men, they are my vast field of experience.

Look around. Who are the saddest, old men or old women? Is it the majority of old men or old women who giggle, hug, and twinkle? Yesterday I was on Skype with my 96-year-old mother and when I told her I loved her, she said “I’m glad I kept you.” Try beating that.

My life contains older men who do laugh, hug, make jokes, and twinkle, who lived, and live, with integrity and empathy. Those qualities, along with great storytelling, burnished their being. They glow. I’m writing this blog so they know I see.

My life can be played as an organ, the kind in each of the cathedrals surrounding me in the 6th arrondissement. Want precious rare old men, male peers? Pull out that stop and the music broadens with divine older men. Want children zipping by as highlights? Pull out that stop and little people in bright colors run by holding hands and zooming toy airplanes.

Want the solo sounds of a lute curling upward? Pull out the stop for a younger man.

Want serenity? Pull out the stop for silence dressed as a younger man who controls a glass globe, precarious life, translucent, on his fingertips. Have him in front of the cathedral at rue Bonaparte and blvd. Saint Germain across from where Hemingway, always old and young, wrote at the restaurant Les Deux Magots.

Want transcendence? Watch the glass ball and know that reaching old age without breakage requires concentration, the light touch, recognizing what is precious, discarding what is not.

Traveling Light

my fierce freedom

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