Writing with the Modernists at the Centre Pompidou

Once I made my plan to slip away from Paris for a couple of days, the rain stopped! The skies were gray but nothing wet was falling out of them, and church bells were pealing out joyously to summon the faithful to worship, as I trotted to the Centre Pompidou, for my third day in a row of writing dates with myself at Parisian museums. This is Paris's modern art museum, with a building that is as extravagantly modern as its contents (internet photo - our sky today was not this blue!).

The escalators taking visitors to the permanent collection on the upper floors are on the outside of the building and futuristic-feeling, as if you might be getting ready to be launched into space. 

When you get to the top there are lovely views down to the plaza below, where old and new meet in a strange embrace.

I especially loved the distant views to the iconic sights of Paris: the Eiffel Tower with its soaring spire, Sacre Coeur on the heights of Montmartre. Most of my photos turn out pretty awful, but the Eiffel Tower one pleased me, with the effect of the raindrops on the glass making it seem even more mysteriously beautiful. 

Despite its later opening time (11:00), this was the least crowded of the museums I chose for writing, and I found a perfect bench in a quiet room on the Contemporary floor (which contains the art that is actually more modern, in the sense of recent, than the mid-20th-century art on the Modern floor). I sat facing Untitled 42 by Alain Seches and had my best writing day of the trip so far.

I worked on the characterization-deepening revisions for my second verse novel that I had started musing about in the company of Rembrandt at the Louvre. Now I had to actually make them happen. The bench I was sitting on was long and wide enough that I could spread out the manuscript pages and plan out exactly which poems I needed to add and exactly where they needed to be placed, so that I could capture the full complexity, ambivalence,  and messy confusion of human life that would unfold at this moment in the protagonist's life. When I had built this crucial bridge to the scenes that follow, I had tears in my eyes, I was so deeply moved by my character's dark night of the soul and how she had worked her way through it. I felt the light radiating up from her like the shafts of color stretching upward from the painting facing me. 

Thank you, painting titled Untitled 42!

Best of all, for the last fifteen minutes or so, a young woman - maybe forty years younger than I am - sat herself down on the far end of the same bench and began writing on the lined pages of her bound journal. We didn't speak through our masks or even have a fleeting moment of eye contact. But I felt a kinship with her, a fellow writer, sitting side by side with me, both of us placing one word after another on the page.

I will skip over the part of the day when I somehow inexplicably lost my Denver Art Museum umbrella but purchased a pricey Pompidou Centre umbrella to replace it. A cafe on the museum plaza was three-quarters empty, so I had a mediocre quiche Lorraine for a late lunch there, with a small glass of wine (what one does in Paris!) while reading the exquisite and heartbreaking poems in my poet friend Ruth Bavetta's gorgeous collection, No Longer at This Address. Step one toward writing better poetry is to read a lot of truly wonderful poems of the sort you aspire to create.

With the sun beginning to peek out, I walked to the Pont Neuf to give my regards to the statue of Henri IV, who offers guidance to Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy series of Maud Hart Lovelace, the books I love best in the whole world, when she is on a trip to Europe - also all by herself - in 1914, on the eve of the first World War. The advice he gave me today was just an echo of the advice I had already given myself: You love writing, so keep on doing it!

As pale sunshine filtered through the clouds, I decided that I might as well make the long walk to the Eiffel Tower. I had told myself that the good of this being my fifth trip to Paris was that I didn't need to "see the sights" in a dutiful way. But after spying the Eiffel Tower through the rain-spattered windows of the Pompidou Centre, it was beckoning to me. Like the mountain peaks I remember from hiking trips in the early years of my marriage, you walk and walk toward the Eiffel Tower and it never seems to get any closer. But then suddenly, you turn a street corner and there it is! 

And then you are standing beneath it, and if you had any doubt that you are in Paris, that doubt vanishes now....