Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke
The Floating World
(The Guimet Museum, Place d'Iéna, & l’Étoile)
What does it matter what you once thought? The moment is now, not then. All those philosophies (Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Agnostic) that you once held, albeit lightly, watch them go. Let them drift onto the canvas of gold on Lacquer Peak, shifting from cloud to cloud with the floating immortals on the upper floor of the Guimet Museum
Remember the places you've seen and the people you've been, and say good-bye.
Let your mind shift backward in time, to your own personal version of the Fifth Republic, your mille feuille slice of la belle France, to the École Active Bilingue where you learned to appreciate Shakespeare, and where you first learned to think, and to drink, and to fly amid the opulent streets in 1975,
and where, forty years later you wandered the streets of Saint Michel again, and strolled up the stairs into the Collège de France, where you listened to Egyptologists and Assyriologists, the scholars of Memphis and Akkad standing in front of rooms of people reading along in hieratic and cuneiform.
Think back to these wonderful French schools that taught you the decadence of Baudelaire and the wonder of Babylon, and to all the stupid and incandescent things done under the auspices of liquids, chemicals, and smoke
Let these memories have their moment at Macbeth's table, and disappear. 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 like gold leaf onto an obelisk deep in the Valley of Kings
that has worn itself so thin that all that’s left of it is lost among the sand.
But don’t, whatever else you do, pretend that you ever laboured to build a pyramid
or took a boat and journeyed deep into the Hall of Maat
for in fifty years you’ll be a speck of nothing, so small that a mite might swallow it by mistake
as it crawls over a tiny boulder in the mighty sand dunes of the Sahara
Let the fragments of a life half-lived (there was so much you didn't see and so many people you could have been) become the dots in a pointillist painting
All those molecules that reconstitute your self in every moment, let them move you forward, down the steps and out the front door, leaving the audio guide, and picking up that piece of someone's identity that you call your self
and 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 you find a cafe and try to write about your self, the one that Camus says is nothing but water flowing through your fingers
when the rain stops and the lights turn green
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Next: 🦖 At the Wild & Fog: A 19th Century Dinosaur
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