I first wrote these words in 2012 after a profound experience in a small Parisian theater whose name I cannot remember. The accompanying piano pice, however, only recently revealed itself, thus bookending “At the Theater” after twelve years in the making (NB: those who’ve read The Requisitions1 may recognize the origins of the novel’s most important scene in this text).
At the Theater
The day started with, continued to, and ended with rain. A single grey cloud covered the Parisian expanse. Still you walked the streets, wandered the cobblestones, scoured the neighborhoods—there was something there, under the surface, invisible to tourists, a mysterious beach … three years of life in the city of lights, but it wasn’t until you went to the theater much later in the evening after a long day of work and metro turnstiles and paper cup espressos and cheap whiskey, only there, in a dark theater, did you find Paris illuminated, the Paris you’d been looking for, the one you’d heard of in song.
It was a one-act in the Latin Quarter, which one you can’t remember and why you went you don’t recall. But when you entered that theater, surrounded by the melancholic echo of the actor’s voice in emptied space, by the suppressed sniffles, the coughs, the nose wipes, the throat clearances, the heavy wooden footsteps pressing into old wooden floorboards, creaking and groaning like an old man entering his bath, his sigh not one of decrepitude but of the exhausting beauty of life, a beauty borne from the wish to create a moment in this expanse and the infinite solitude which we often call time, there, at the theater, where ovations will fall and plays will be forgotten and evanescent reviews will be tacked upon others on the wall, where but for an instant among the sighs and the creaks and tuning of instruments, within the monologues and the scene changes, far beyond the words and the music and even the actors themselves, to reach further still until we reach that state of grace, of oneness with it all because it’s nothing more than all of this: sitting comfortably in our seats, losing ourselves in creation, not in cities filled with props but in a space pregnant with the in-between; not in treatments or in screenplays but in a space dirigible by life, this galaxy’s creators perhaps watching stoically amongst us—not taking notes, not making improvements, not trying to name to this state of bliss, only taking heed of the faces and the smiles and the joyful tears in this audience—all of this eternal proof that if only for a moment yes, we exist, and if only for a moment, yes, we are watching.
Paris Friends: This Friday Night / December 13 circa 9 PM
I’ll be playing another piano/vocals set at Au Chat Noir (76 Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud). This time, I’ll be sharing the stage with my good friend
, one of the most talented singer/songwriters I know, in at least one way, he helped inspire the song up above. Show up before 9pm if you want to have a seat, as the cellar theater is, indeed, quite small.“History, memory, and love intertwine in this historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland. A present-day narrator trying to make sense of the past recounts the story of Viktor, a disillusioned academic forced into the Łódź Ghetto, Elsa, a captive Gestapo secretary, and her estranged fiancé, Carl, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.” Shout out to
for choosing The Requisitions as his book of the year
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