rituals

Hello,

I’m not a religious person by any means, but I do believe in rituals. Anne Carson in the summer, Mary Oliver in the fall. Winter is dedicated solely to whichever Classic tome I have elected to torture myself with. Spring is reserved for whatever I can still stomach. I’ve never been any good with spring.

Summer is for poetry and peaches. Every summer, I wait for the perfect peach. I inevitably get way too excited about peach season and start eating them when they are still too crisp, too sour. Usually around July, I will eat the perfect peach, and then I spend the rest of the summer searching for more perfect peaches, only to never recreate the taste until the next year. I mourn for the landlocked folks because I believe it’s good for the psyche to touch the ocean at least once a summer, preferably in June by the latest.

This summer in Paris, I’ve started to walk vigils.

I like to walk up to Rue Mouffetard the long way, from the Jussieu metro stop. I like to enter the Jardin du Luxembourg from the north entrance, next to the Senate building, and duck out in the east to take the promenade to the Pantheon. I like to walk from La Motte-Picquet to Commerce, stopping in the middle for gelato, and then circle around to the Eiffel Tower from Charles Michels, ending at Bir Hakeim. Pont Alexandre should only be seen at night, after wandering around aimlessly elsewhere, drawn by the endless lights. One day, I believe the stretch from Republique to Bastille will become yet another vigil.

These are paths well-tread, piece-meal from every time I have lived in this city. I like to attach physicality to important memories. These cornerstones mark our mental geographies. When we remember them, it can feel like being in two places at once. When we ritualize them, our younger selves can live forever in those pockets of time.

Rue Mouffetard and Jussieu for that first summer in Paris. Luxembourg and the Pantheon for freshly-purchased books and the anticipation of newness. Commerce and gelato for Shromona, Bir Hakiem for Marie. Pont Alexandre for J&B whiskeys to-go and picnics by the river. I could make an audio tour of any city that I’ve lived in for the ways it has affected me.

I like to book-end experiences. It gives me the illusion of control, like I can strong-arm meaning into the random instances of life. I call them rituals but really I’m playing a child’s game of association to make the quotidian more engaging. It’s taking romanticization to an extreme, to memorialization.

I went back to Rome in July. Five years ago, I had painted the entire city in this rose-gold of naivety, fed by pining and the Lizzie McGuire movie. My mom and I bought gelatos and ate them on the same church steps that I had in 2019. I tried to explain to my mom why this felt monumental to me — that I had built up something from nothing and chose to worship it for no discernable reason. I’m not sure if she understood me, but nonetheless, she got up and said that she had to take a photo of me eating gelato on those steps — five years older but no wiser. It was another bookend.

The Cathedral is Dying by Auguste Rodin

There’s a series of published essays that I’ve only ever found in the Musée d’Orsay and one little art gallery in Lisbon. The series is called ekphrasis. The word comes from Greek, denoting a written description of a work of art produced as a literary exercise. I’ve made it somewhat of a mission to collect more of this series, so one of the first things I did after I finished my final examination for my master’s program was go to the bookshop in the Musée d’Orsay and buy another one of these published essays. This is another ritual.

Also, yes, this is essentially just an essay about how much Rodin had a boner for gothic cathedrals.

I actually had less free time than I expected the last month, but I’m back in my little studio apartment with little to do, so here’s another newsletter sent in the middle of the night for me because I got bored.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie