De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

Orba and the Musee Rodin

My last day in Paris. I took in the Musee Rodin. This time I brought Orba with me. Orba was the security guard at the museum at I worked at during college. Despite our opposing political views, I became like an adopted granddaughter to him. He made such a huge difference in my life. The Rodins in our museum were his favorite.
If I believed the “villa” that was renovated into the Musee Picasso was grand, then it paled in comparison to the estate that was the Musee Rodin. The one great thing about going to a museum that is solely dedicated one artist is that you really get to take in the journey that artist went through throughout their life. You get a sense of the imprint that the art was leaving.
For example I remember viewing a series of drawings by Picasso at a very upscale resort on Maui…basically I was sneaking onto the grounds to spend time in a world that was so different from my own. I digress. So in one gallery of this resort there were a series of cubist sketches by Picasso that depicted his various female lovers. And eventually the figures morphed into these menacing, blood sucking bug like creatures that hardly resembled the women he originally drew. Maybe Picasso, if he were alive would disagree. But my point is that Picasso constantly inserted himself into his work, he was not just drawing the image of the object in front of him, but also his reaction to the image itself.
Rodin in comparison seems to have captured their emotional states, as if they were standing there a hundred years later confiding to you their deepest pain or lost dream. They were like Orba, resolute in their dignity, yet these statues revealed deeper fissures of great sorrow and emotion. Rodin seems to have have embraced the internal conflict of the women he sculpted, her sense of drama, her charm, her own story. What it must have meant to have been truly seen by this artist. He as the observer didn’t matter as much. He captured moment for us to experience it. Was he that giving and empathetic in life.
What has been most fun is interpreting this work while not understanding the inscription or title. In english speaking museums you view a title and description and immediately you come up with a preconception, a way to react to the work before you even lay eyes on it. When you don’t understand all the words or the intention, all you have are your own ideas. It can be a point of both freedom and perhaps misguided interpretation. But it is outside of all you ever been taught, so that no matter what you have been told you should say, you are free to react as your true self.
Rodin liked angels: female angels, angels protecting the figures below them, angels transporting the dead to a better place. These angels gathered all of the lost souls and by doing so, there is now hope for something more just than what we will ever experience in this world.
So enough museum talk. Here I am, my last night in Paris. I’m depressed as hell. Of course, my imagination is in over drive. There he is the same guy who appeared in my dreams the first couple of nights of my vacation. But if my imagination has carried itself away, it only because at this moment there is a vacuum in that area of my life.
There is one thing that I noticed immediately about the couples that I’ve observed on my vacation. You see how invest the guy is in his partner. He gives her his complete attention as if she is the only thing in the room.
However, I will admit if someone did that to me, I might react badly and run.
I don’t think my biggest problem is finding people who express attraction to me. It is finding someone who really wants to know me, who see me, who I am right now and not the family bs story.
Some men act like it is a betrayal when you express yourself. David loved me to death, expressed love for me that I’ve never experience before, but I don’t think he really wanted to know my thoughts or dreams. He wanted me to fit into his big picture. Which I did not, I guess, when he turned cold as ice. And so here I am today, alone, wondering if this man really exists. Will he see me, love me and protect me, or will we pass each other on the streets like strangers. Whoever he turns out to be I can only be myself.
For days I’ve been looking for the right demitasse to take back with me to the states. I had wondered aimlessly along Boulevard Port-Royal trying to find exactly what I was looking for. Continued onto Rue Monge, when I was approached randomly by a man who smile and then asked me in English what was my name. I ducked into the shop to escape. He was probably harmless but this is not how I meet people. But on the up side, the shop was a porcelain dish shop with many affordable and nice pieces.
However, I’m not sure if there is a right way to meet the opposite sex. I definitely wasn‚Äôt going to talk to a random stranger that smiled and approached me on the street, but was I doomed to live cut off from the dating world for all eternity. No…I couldn’t spend another night alone in my hotel room. I decided to venture out again that night and see if I could reach out from the silent periphery where wall flowers become fragrant roses that attract the masses to them.
I went back to the same bistro and sat at a booth between two couples in full PDA. This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. I moved to a table by the window, drank my pinot blanc and wondered if all this fascination with Paris was mere whimsy. Could I do this? Could this become my life? Would this give me the peace I had not found anywhere else. Would this satisfy that thing that missing from my life. Entertaining the thought of living here would require serious consideration of the English factor. But I had made major changes before. In fact moving to New York six years earlier was one those chances that I took that for a time really paid off. Then I just got on a plane with my two cats and took off to city I had only been to once. Where I had no connections, just a hotel room, and a determination to start a new life. And I did. For once I did succeeded. Was I so tired that I could drop it…just like that…like an old lover…had our time together finally reached its end?
Or was I just dissatisfied with myself. Had I sought so much safety after 9/11 that I had forgotten how to reach out and take a risk. For once in my life I really did have true friends this was another by product of that day…the margin for bullshit got a lot smaller…however a night out was usually reheated left overs and a nine o‚Äôclock movie. This world playing out before me in this bar on Rue Mouffetard felt far more alive. Maybe this was the change I needed to embrace. Did I need to relearn how to live.
It is uncomfortable coming out from the background. I’m so use to sitting in the back of the room. In fact even my production job is technically called ‚”behind the scenes”. It is where I feel comfortable. I know my job and my place and as long as I adhere to both loyally, I have always been taken care of. But was I satisfied? Was this what I came into the world to do? Not exactly. Closer than I had been, but not enough to really say I’ve done it, and now I can die happy.

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