Recovered Journal Entry, August 2, 2004.
I've spent the summer reading about travel and traveling myself—Berlin, Dresden, and Prague. My reading has included a number of books that speak of both inner and outward voyages of discovery. I have carried around this idea of my own voyage for almost 17 years. I write this number and feel the shock of my surprise at the passing of so much time. My son was six years old when he first told me his story—a great creation myth and voyage from the Old World to the New, to a country called Paris. I hope I someday find the scrap of paper upon which I recorded this child's story. It included Adam and Eve, Native Americans, Pilgrims, and Africa. I've forgotten almost all of it except what the travelers discovered—a land in which the common and expected appearance of beauty in all things is every citizen's birthright.
The vision of Paris as a center of my own journey (its place of both departure and arrival) is as strong today as it was 17 years ago. Since then Paris has become an emblem, a signifier, of a kind of purity of artistic awareness, of the sublime. In that city is is Gustave Eiffel that plays Virgil to my Dante. He becomes the navigator to my cartographer.
I find him, curiously, an historic figure whose material accomplishements are linked to my personal family history. And so I have chosen to search out his bridges, churches, post offices, department stores, and towers, to find traces of ancestors. It is the following of ant trails; something that occupied me in deep concentration as a child. I follow a moving, living, line traced against the contours of earth, trees, and buildings.
I have spent three weeks away, and in that time this country of Paris has, once again, emerged from beyond the peninsula of "too busy." I had not expected to see it, at least not in the way it came to me, in the East. But in Prague there is a scale version of the Eiffel Tower on the hills above the city. We climbed to the top of a great hill overlooking the city and found it there, about one quarter the size of the 300 meter Paris tower. It had been built in 1891—two years after the real one—in the tower mania that swept across the world following Eiffel's achievement. Looking at the simulacra I felt something stir in my imagination: the remembrance of the deep attention that grips every artist when trying to extract from the world what it wishes to have born. I have been a struggling midwife for this "collection of maps" charting this country called Paris.
I have resolved to begin again, although now a new voice wants to begin unlike the one I had imagined would speak years ago. I had begun with Gustav Eiffel himself, gazing out over Paris from his salon / office at the top of the tower. Indeed, I have several journals filled with notes guiding me in this direction, but the new voice has become more compelling and I will acquiesce, at least for now.
The story emerging is my own—my search for a kind of peace in the sublime; a rarefied space that does not shut out the world but helps focus one's attention on its exquisite complexities and beauty. I have lived a most public life to date (for the past 15 years) and have neglected that child following the ant trails, trying to make art serve the common good. Now, more than ever, a shift in course is called for. Or, perhaps not a shifting, but a balancing of the private impulse of the studio and the public outcomes of arts advocacy.
If not now, the return to Paris, then probably never. Would I be able to bear the grief of giving it up for other countries?
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