Three Colors (Five Things, 16/12/20)
1. The statues were still blindfolded in Place de la République last night. A few weeks ago at one of the protests, demonstrators climbed the enormous monument to the French Revolution, Marianne, and blindfolded her three handmaidens of Liberty, Fraternity and Justice. They placed political signs in their laps, decrying the proposed laws to forbid the filming of French police, and painted streaks of red coming down from underneath their black blindfolds. They wrote black-lettered graffiti across the statue’s pedestal, which is so often augmented in this way by political sentiment, it’s been called the most defaced monument in Paris. Every night, unrest or no unrest, Marianne and her three handmaidens are lit by saturated flood lights of red, then blue, and then red again, as if to symbolize the waves of revolution that have washed over this place. The signs and graffiti are gone now. The blood and blindfolds remain.
2. Last night I bought blue and red pigment from a Moroccan bicycle vendor in the Marais. I couldn’t help myself. His cart was a trap designed specially for people like myself, with baskets of raw frankincense, amber, dried pomegranate flowers, and sandalwood bark. Fragrant smoke rose from a terracotta burner. He gave me, for free, a small clay pot of aker fassi—a traditional lip stain worn by North African women. You wet the dried surface with your finger and then apply it to your lips. All of the ones he had were more brown than red, as if this experience had indeed been intended for the teenage version of myself, in the late 1990s, when I used to mix brown eyeliner with whatever lipstick I put on. He claimed that the blue was pure indigo, the same kind used by the Tuareg people, and that the red was made from crushed poppies. He smeared them in bright streaks on the side of his own hand.
3. The flowering mimosas have come into season again, and the fluffy yellow bouquets are arranged outside florists shops amidst the fir garlands and the Christmas wreaths; golden clouds on feathery green branches that smell of honey. They come from the Mediterranean here, but they remind me of early spring in California. We always called them acacias, an invasive ornamental that escaped from captivity. They would begin blooming in February, or even in January some years. I always liked picking bouquets of their branches, a sunny sign that warmer days were not far off. They still strike me as hopeful in that way, like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds.
4. I have nowhere to go this holiday season. No parties and not even any restaurants or people to visit. But I bought a cheap black dress anyway, a loose long sleeved thing with metallic gold spots embroidered all over, like something out of Klimt. It made me think of Renaissance paintings of Danaë, mother of Perseus, locked in the black of her tower with the golden rain of Zeus’s visit coming down through the skylight. I guess I’ll wear it at the market, at the doctor’s, and at home.
5. I haven’t been able to sleep well. It’s the same management of the same unruly things that are always threatening to tip the boat over. We patch the leaks, or repair the sails, or whatever needs mending in our nautical metaphor. We bail out the water. We take the hit. Stomachs queasy from the rocking of the storm, we sail on.