Paris bulletin 6 2015

I don’t believe I’ve ever written a bulletin in August before. I’m usually somewhere else by now, as I will be very soon, on a train to London and a few days later, to Scotland.

The things I want to tell about you before I go are as follows:

1.      the re-hung permanent collection at the Pompidou, which French people still call the Beaubourg - I always knew the musée was a treasure house of modern art but what a joy to rediscover those treasures in their new layout. It’s worth the price of the ticket to see the Matisse rooms alone but there is so much more, some of it stretching your – or my - understanding of what is meant by ‘art’ to breaking point, but with helpful notes to guide you everywhere.

                                           

                                                          

                                                                     

                                                           Balthus, Baselitz and Buffet

2.      Peter Brook is bringing his new play, , Battlefield, based on the Mahabharata (co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne), to les Bouffes du Nord, his erstwhile Paris theatrical home. Parisians and Paris visitors get to see it before anywhere else, from 15 September - 17 October (book on-line at www.bouffesdunord.com).

3.      My July ended on a high note. I saw Israel Galvan, enfant de la balle, fils de danseurs, gitan par sa mère, give an extraordinary solo performance in the garden of the musée Picasso two nights ago. Alone, with neither music nor lighting, he spun and stamped and wheeled and shimmied for a dust-raising, spell-binding 45 minutes as the sky turned pink beyond the roofs.  Galvan will be at le Théâtre de la Ville here, between 3 and 11 February next year.

                                                    
                                                                     Israel Galvan

4.      The migrants have gone from the esplanade Nathalie Sarraute. Not long after my last bulletin went out they were swept like so much rubbish and carried off in police vans to centres de rétention around the city. Now there are police on foot stationed at either end of the street that runs beside the esplanade and more in vans parked up on the esplanade itself. You have to state your business and sometimes show your ID to be allowed to traverse that public space. The jardin Rosa Luxembourg is locked. The cafés are empty. All that remains of all those people are bundles of cardboard waste. Where the cantine once stood, the powers-that-be – local or city hall I don’t know which – have installed a children’s carousel. It sits silent and inaccessible behind a high mesh fence, an ironic, even despairing, image of Europe’s handling of the migrant crisis.

 

 

These events have led me to look out a 1993 Scottish Child in which we featured an interview with Palestinian Rifat Kassis, many times imprisoned champion of displaced children. You can read more about him on Wikipedia. Here is a little of what he had to say when I talked to him twenty-two years ago.

“What we are faced with concerns the whole world. It is a problem of race, of racism of the poor of the world. The ‘rich’ world stays silent against what is happening in the poor parts of the world, at its own peril. Consider that now we have about twenty million refugees. In five years time there will be one billion of them – one hundred million people – and they will come to Europe... These refugees will knock on the doors of the people who today sit at home in front of their televisions and watch pictures of the starving in Somalia.  

I may say I felt utterly humiliated when I read in a quality newspaper an advert which said, ‘pay 50p and you will rescue one human being’. This is the cost of a human being, the price of a child’s life – in the Third World. Less than the price of one cup of coffee in a European cafe.”

And that led me  in turn, to the bookshelf to find William Blake:

'What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! It is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath - his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the  market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun,
And in the vintage, and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn:
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season,
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs;

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements;
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;
To see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of Love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemy's house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead;
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity—
Thus would I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me.'

(from the Four Zoas)

Enjoy the rest of your summer.