March 31, 2004
a language arts moment --- je suis le tenebreux
| ROB is walking across plaza before the cathedral of NOTRE DAME DE PARIS, heading NORTH. | ||
Who has had a Language Arts Moment like this one? As a kid, I listened --- about 1,000,000,000 times --- to the songs of Flanders and Swann. Urbane, gentle, witty, Flanders and Swann wrote songs of satire, silliness . . . and sublimity. Among the tunes was Donald Swann's setting of a French poem by the arch-Romantic Gerard de Nerval. I memorized Nerval's poem by ear without having the slightest idea of what it meant. |
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| ROB leads you across the bridge past the THEATRE DE LA VILLE. He SINGS. | ||
"Zhe sweee laaa tay nay brewwwww, la voooo, laaaaaaaank onsolaaaaaayyy" Imagine, then, the pulpy explosions of electricity and chemistry in my brain, when one cloudy day in Paris . . . . . . I was cutting through the park at the base of the spooky, solitary, Tour Saint Jacques, beloved of the Surrealists, in a dark mood, and I suddenly came upon the small monument to Gerard de Nerval. |
| ROB seats you next to him on the small bench facing the monument to Nerval. | ||
A pillar, a sculpted head, and at its feet: a rough romantic stone, carved deeply with the words: "Je suis le Tenebreux, -le Veuf-, l'inconsole, I knew those sounds by heart. A precious secret. For the first time I deciphered them. How could I not burst into tears? "I am the gloomy one, the widower, the inconsolable |