To take the vaster perspective of time and house is at all times an act of resistance to seeing the current as islanded in time — the depiction menacing us from TV screens and information headlines. However it is usually a deeply disorienting expertise, for it plunges us into the immensity of being, asking us to study to swim within the stream of time — or else we sink into our remoted smallness, and drown.
Easy methods to swim within the stream of time with out drowning is what the nice poet, painter, and thinker Etel Adnan (February 24, 1925–November 14, 2021) explores all through her complete physique of labor, however nowhere extra passionately than in her slender, splendid 1993 e-book Paris, When It’s Naked (public library).
Born and raised in Lebanon, Adnan discovered her creative voice in America, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, then fell in love with the artist Simone Fattal and spent the latter a part of her century-long life along with her love in Paris, the place she had earned her diploma in philosophy half a lifetime earlier.
As Notre-Dame reminds her of Aleppo’s Citadel from her Arab childhood and the Seine transports her to her time on the Neva in Russia, she considers the comforting proximity to river and cathedral, the best way it each locates and dislocates the now:
They’re there, defending our meanderings. You don’t concern starvation, in such locations, neither concern poverty of the spirit. Shut, once more, to water and stone, close to the symbols of historic European unity and Arab Historical past, I can dismiss the current as a passage. The difficulty, although, is that I don’t know the place I come from, and even much less, the place I’m heading for.
And but we solely ever find ourselves by getting lost — in time, in house, in being and belonging. Strolling the embankments of the Seine, she writes:
I sense the arms that constructed this open canyon by way of which the town’s blood runs to the ocean. Such magnificence enslaves greater than any conquest. The definition of the soul is made of those locations the place you are feeling that the world got here into being in order that they might exist. That’s what we’re: beings made by way of the contact of water with stone, of a cold sundown with pure geometry. My arms contact the remnants of the day’s heat on cobblestones, partitions, moorings. On this second no boats are going up or downstream. Three components concur right here: the river, the partitions, and me. I’ll sit right here. My considering will attain low hearth, my varied wishes will vanish. Now I’m water, and the wall’s floor, after which I’m a movement, and a line, and additional on I change into many, or one, of the size of Being, perhaps the essential molecule of Time. Right here. It’s at all times right here. It’s solely by way of this final solitude reached by the actual fact of residing, that one can discover the sort of peace that makes tangible the accrued absurdities that represent everybody’s private fact.
Couple this fragment of Paris, When It’s Naked with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on time and the antidote to our existential anxiety, then revisit Adnan on how to live and how to die, the sea and the soul, and the relationship between the self and the universe.
