Interior of Notre-Dame de Paris after the fire of April 15, 2019
A Memory of Notre-Dame
by Christopher Bernard
I had been traveling for many hours from Philadelphia when I was seventeen on my first trip to Paris as part of a package tour for high schoolers I had worked much of the summer the year previous to afford.
It was spring and, despite the exhaustion and excitement after the long journey (my first by plane), when we got to the hotel near the Place Bastille, I decided there was no way I was going to sleep before in some way meeting Paris face to face. So I took my handful of francs and my high-school French, snuck out of the hotel (unknown to our chaperones), scurried down the local Metro stop, and took the first subway to the Île de la Cité.
After arriving at my destination without dropping off despite my first experience of jetlag, I wearily climbed endless levels of exit stairs into the late afternoon. And stood, rooted to the spot, staring almost straight up at the austere towers and the façade known to every schoolchild, and saying over and over to myself for a long, sleep-deprived moment: “Notre-Dame de Paris, Notre-Dame de Paris, this is Notre-Dame de Paris,” before dreamily crossing over to the front steps, and ascending them while taking curious, creak-necked glances up at the tympanum, and then walking gingerly (I wasn’t even sure, as a non-Catholic, I would even be allowed in) through the entrance way – surprisingly small – into the dark, unexpectedly cool interior.
As I entered, the organ burst into music. No services were going on that I could see, and I supposed the organist was rehearsing for Sunday. But it was one of those moments of mystery and magic in one’s life that seem to happen with some frequency in youth, and then less and less often with passing time. My fatigue and caution seemed to fall away. I walked into the cathedral and remember taking a very deep breath, then walked into the music and shadows.
Nighttime Rambling Man by Marcel Herms (Netherlands, marcelherms.nl)
You, who talked of a heart full of ashes and lemon peel, you swept through the world in a flurry of words you pulled apart and reconfigured. You, who wielded an unconventional mind and stole fragments from the universe. Sometimes the journey of your existence looks like one long paradoxical interjection. Your maverick rhetoric was synchronized chaos washed down with a tide of LSD and claims of insight and breaking through. Smoking your way through session after session, you once said that existential psychiatry was just: ‘talkin’ to a bloke and listenin’ to what he says.’* You knew it was never that simple. It’s good to challenge, though and you questioned what is real. You even said that expression of distress was the way to real self-knowledge, that it was the way to change and develop. Yet you left some people more confused than they were before, and I can’t help wondering whether the whole thing was a huge double-bind.
*This is a line from the book ‘Zone of the Interior,’ by Clancy Sigal. Sigal was a good friend of R D Laing, and fictionalised his experiences with Laing in the book.
Henry Bladon is a writer of short fiction and poetry based in Somerset in the UK. He has degrees in psychology and mental health policy and a PhD in literature and creative writing. His work can be seen in Potato Soup Journal, Entropy, Mercurial Stories, thedrabble, Tuck Magazine and Spillwords Press, among other places. His novel, Threeways, was published in 2017 and his recent collection, Donald Trump’s Hair and other stories, published byAlien Buddha Press, came out this year. Henry also runs writing support groups for people with mental health issues.
I assume much the same as you assume,
& I regret as much as you do,
but I’ll be damned before I rocket a brutal stone
above the eye socket of innocence.
I won’t do it,
& if you know what exists in the uncertain hour,
just before, just before,
just before, just before,
& after all that,
before sliding fetus-like into the ether,
just before & afterwards;
afterwards I promise
I’ll sing the blues
like Muddy says, It’s nine below zero with nowhere else to go.
