Tuesday, June 10, 2008

everybody knows that everybody dies



made the move to hotel eugenie in the latin quarter today. it is on a little street called rue st. andre des arts -- just a short walk to notre dame, and the nearest corner is this street called git le couer, which anthony informed me was the site of the former beat hotel. there are two or three hotels on it now, and a funky little record store that i passed the other day on the way to doing something else. i might get back there, i hope.

anyway, the hotel room is small but neat, and there's a bathtub, quelle surprise. we're on the second floor, which is really the third floor, with a view of the sky and the street below.

when we arrived our room was almost ready. the desk clerk arranged our airport return ride via a supershuttle sort of thing that costs a lot less than the cab ride did. plus, it's dealt with already -- no fretting at the last minute. i'm sure they're getting a cut of the deal, but it's good for everyone.

so we got organized and went off to the famous cemetery pere-lachaise. we're both still having feet issues, so we decided not to try to see every famous dead person in the place. we did amble around quite a bit -- the place seems to go on forever, and it is just packed with tombs and crypts and suchlike. people stacked on top of each other, literally. definitely not the way i want to spend eternity.

a lot of the tombs have ceramic flowers on them, some have little built-in planters with roses or geraniums, and others had fresh flowers on top. after a while, it feels a little bit heartbreaking. i mean, it's a mere fraction of all the people who have ever died in the history of humanity. not even a drop in the bucket. and yet there are so many graves. some of them are very basic, just big slabs of stone with names and relationships. sometimes they have framed photos on top, which was a little bit eerie. but some of these tombs are very elaborate and gothic. apparently it was a thing to try to outdo your peers, even in death. every once in a while, the tall, narrow crypt would have an iron gate slightly ajar, like someone inside decided to go for a walk. i did see a grave marked lupo, which is the name of one of mick farren's vampires. i guess a travelin' bloodsucker needs a few cribs scattered around.

anyway. we saw the grave of french writer colette. and heloise & abelard, the famous doomed lovers. theirs was a very elaborate monument, with two stone figures lying next to each other atop a slab in a tall square pavilion. but it was fenced off and covered in scaffolding, so you couldn't get too close. a few dessicated roses were scattered on the ground inside the fence, as though people had tried to toss them onto the tomb but fallen short. poetic, somehow.

then of course we went off to find the thing that most people in the cemetery had come to see. obligatory crappy shot of jim morrison's grave:



in fact, pere-lachaise was essentially deserted until we came to the final resting place of the doors' lead singer/poet. it was hard to get a good picture b/c (a) there were so many people crowded around it, and (b) it is actually sorta wedged behind a crypt -- not an optimal picture-taking sitch. among the many people there paying quiet homage (no pouring out of alcohol or wild hippie dancing or anything) were two young teen girls sharing an ipod (one headphone b/w each) that you just know was playing the doors. they wore cute contemporary outfits and leaned together against a nearby stone, their faces concentrating, tilting their weight on the outsides of their ballet-flat-clad feet.

after jim we walked another little ways, then sat on a bench and had a quick picnic of cheese and bread. the day was lovely -- it's now so warm that the squirrel is complaining it's too hot. but i'm much happier. the cemetery has lots of trees and is actually pretty peaceful. this was a beautiful vista:



dunno who you have to be to get the eternal park-front view. but it's nice:



we did some more walking, even though we had to go veeerrrry slloooooowwwwwly b/c of our achin' feet. we saw the grave of raft of the medusa painter gericault -- a blackish-green stone with a bas-relief of the famous work (although he's not the only one to make a version of that historical event). a sad tombstone of a little boy and his dog. various other tragedies. and then we finally found oscar wilde's grave. it stands out b/c it looks a lot different than almost anything else in the place (at least, anything else that i saw). for one thing, it's covered in lipstick kisses:



anthony told me about the tradition of kissing the grave with bright lipstick on, but i forgot mine that day. merde. oh, well.

by then we were pretty much done with dead people, so we ambled out the gates and found our way back. returning to our hood, we sat at a cafe called le fenelon for a while and drank wine. deb wrote postcards, and i wrote in my journal. the euro cup is going on, so after a while someone at the bar dropped a big long cable tv hookup down from an upstairs room to hook up to a tv inside the bar. i just sat and watched the bustling street and the world go by. after the parade of the dead, it was rather a relief to be back among the living.

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