Dead Beckett
There are 1,200 trees in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. Underneath one of them were three pebbles, two used metro tickets and a frayed plastic flower, placed carefully on the marble slab of Samuel Beckett’s grave. Not far away the grave of John Paul Satre and Simone De Beauvoir was covered in hand-written notes, pebbles and more used metro tickets.
The pebbles I could understand, I have seen the cairn of Ailil, a stone each for those that care, but the metro tickets… perhaps a token of the pilgrimage. And what small transcient mysteries, secret idiocies, incantations or prayers were contained within those notes? And why? Why write those notes.
I sat on a bench in the shade of a maple remembering a hangover in the Louvre; dragging it from salon to gallery past so much priceless art it all seemed worthless. I recalled in particular crashing through a crowd of Nikon-wielding Japanese to behold the Venus de Milo, armless and helpless before the yowling mob, my only thought, did the Turks really break her arms off in a fight with French sailors.
Near the bench where I sat was buried the man who found that Venus, arms outstretched to goats in the backyard of a Greek peasant. Jules Dumont D’Urville was a man of accomplishments. He spoke eight languages, travelled to the South Pole, south seas and South Island, had a sea named after him, as well as a couple of islands and a cape, and died, in the first ever French rail disaster, along with his entire family. That was in 1842, 18 years after Montparnasse opened.
I wondered how many goats where in the peasants goat pen and did they wee on the Venus de Milo.
I do not know if Porfirio Diaz spoke many languages, but given that Mexico is a country of hundreds, it wold be nice to think he did. The former president was born in Oaxaca and is credited with saying: “Poor Mexico, so far from god, so close to the United States.” I have been to Oaxaca. I wondered, if like me, Diaz preferred the dust on the roads to Hierve el Agua to the poodle shit on the Boulevards.
On that bench beneath the maple, I saw a smiling cross-eyed boy leaning a shotgun against a thatched-hut as his father menaced us for a toll. I had hitched a ride with two French lads into the mountains of Oaxaca and the ragged family had changed the road signs for a local beauty spot to divert tourists into their village. The French argued with the ragged family over the equivalent of a euro while I gazed from the car window out over the mountainside covered in mescal stills, patches of maize and maguey.
Diaz died in Paris while the Mexican Revolution was still in its full blood. He went in for assassinating his opponents. Chapour Bakhtiar on the other hand, was assassinated. Former prime minister of the Shah, he was of the ‘too little too late’ variety, and the reforms of his 36 days in office did nothing to stop Khomeini finishing the job. He was murdered in 1991 by Iranian agents; his throat cut and his bodyguards bumped off. Born to the Zagros Mountains, buried in Montparnasse.
A close neighbouring corpse of Beckett’s is the documentary film maker, Joris Ivens. In 1931 he went to Russia to film the building of the city of Magnitogorsk by forced labourers. His film, Song of Heroes, depicts them as ‘volunteers’. Ivens later referred to them as ‘weed’. Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo also shares the plot. A formative fellow by all accounts all I know about him was he was once arrested and charged with the “intellectual instigation” of a riot. He must have been alright.
I wondered what he would have made of Ivens.
Poet and whoremonger, Charles Baudelaire shares a grave with his stepfather near the wall of the cemetery. Jacques Aupick, former ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, would, I felt, not have appreciated the pokemon keyring, notes, pebbles and metro tickets covering his grave in honour of his dissolute stepson. They did not get on.
I recalled that it was Baudelaire who had said: “Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.” He obviously never worked in a basement office. He also said something about all love ending up as a fat, greedy baby sucking on a breast. And I do not think he was a cat lover given his views on Wagner: “I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the pains of glass with its claws.”
An open note lay on the grave. It read in English: “Just thanks.”
I wondered did Jacques Aupick like cats.
Beckett’s grave had less Metro tickets and pebbles than the rest, and no notes. I wondered where the notes went. Were they dumped in the bin or were they kept in a giant pile somewhere for an artist of the future to put on the Wall of the Tate and call art? I imagined some hoary North African night watchman of the cemetery grounds pouring over them in a porter cabin to while away the time.
Sometime ago I went to see a selection of short plays by Beckett. Rough for Theatre I & Neither, Rockaby and something else. A woman in the third row unwrapped a sweet and it seemed to take forever. Afterwards, I heard French people complain about the symetry of the performance and a woman with big blue cube earrings complained to the ushers that the plays were too short. Outside in the night a woman told her friend that she had seen the performance done “with European actors two years ago. You simply can’t beat it with European actors! The difference! Irish actors are just not the same.”
Beckett had a wicked sense of humour.
I was thinking about teeth and sex when a group of Italians approached Satre’s grave. He wrote that he had no more interest in sex than he had in brushing his teeth. I felt there were two ways to look at that. The Italians rummaged in their pockets and bags to produce pens and scraps of paper. Notes were written, folded and deposited on the grave. As they moved off another group of Italians came toward the grave.
They immediately began reading all the notes. Tossing through them in handfuls as if looking for the lost receipt of an expensive mistake. I exist, I thought to myself.
It was time to leave the bench, the cemetery and Paris. In a dead city, spend the day with the dead, but my companion had indulged me, sharing as she does my father’s view that we’ll all spend enough time in graveyards. She was walking toward the gate.
“So, you’ve seen dead Beckett,” she said.
“I have indeed,” I said looking after the Italians.
admin @ September 19, 2008