The Double Refuge 🇲🇽 Señor Locke
The Floating World
As I wander through the upper floors of the Guimet Museum of Asian Art, I tell myself that I can put aside my identity and become one with the drifting beauty I see — the golden skies and the clouds of mystical floating. I indulge that part of me that looks out to the open sea, forgetting that my feet are on the salty planks.
What does it matter what I once thought? The moment is now, not then. All those philosophies that I once held — Christian, Hindu, Daoist, Agnostic — let them drift onto the canvas of gold on Lacquer Peak, shifting from cloud to cloud with the floating immortals of the upper floors …
I remember the places I’ve seen and the people I've been, and say good-bye. And yet I know, having listened to the Beatles and the Tralfamadorians, that goodbye and hello are interchangeable and continuous. All the things that impressed themselves upon me make me who I am. Can I really let them go, and merge into the infinite?
Having spent the last month in Paris, my mind naturally shifts backward to the time my family lived there in 1975-6. This is my own personal version of the Fifth Republic, my own mille feuille slice of la belle France. It’s where I went to school at the École Active Bilingue, where I learned to appreciate Shakespeare, and where I first learned to think, drink, and fly amid the opulent streets in 1975,
and where, forty years later I wandered the streets of Saint Michel again, and strolled up the stairs into the Collège de France, where I listened to Egyptologists and Assyriologists, the scholars of Memphis and Akkad standing in front of rooms of people reading along in hieratic and cuneiform.
I think back to these wonderful French schools that taught me the decadence of Baudelaire and the wonder of Babylon, and to all the stupid and incandescent things I did under the auspices of liquids, chemicals, and smoke …
Can I let these memories have their moment at Macbeth's table, and disappear? Can I let the impressions of the past fall like stylus marks into a gravestone of cuneiform, like a cracked line of ancient cipher on the Code of Hammurabi. Or will they just be rediscovered, deciphered, and understood once more?
Can I be like gold leaf on an obelisk deep in the Valley of Kings, having worn itself so thin that all that’s left of it is lost among the sand? Can I even go so far as to imagine that I once laboured to build a pyramid?
And that I took a boat and journeyed deep into the Hall of Maat?
Maybe I’ll make that journey some day. Or maybe I’ll end up as a speck of nothing, so small that a mite might swallow me by mistake as it crawls over a tiny boulder in the mighty sand dunes of the Sahara …
Can I let the fragments of a life half-lived (there was so much I didn't see and so many people I could have been) become the dots in a pointillist painting?
All those molecules that reconstitute my self in every moment, can they move me forward, down the steps and out the front door, leaving the audio guide, to pick up once again that piece of someone's identity that I called my self?
I walk out into rainy Place d'Iéna, with the rain blasting the streets, the heavens dropping bright water from high in the atmosphere
up the darkening street toward l'Étoile, where I find a cafe and write about the self, the one that Camus says is nothing but water flowing through our fingers
when the rain stops and the lights turn green
