This is the third floor hallway of the Hotel du Quai Voltaire. The first door on the right – number 32 Bis - is the room Oscar Wilde stayed in shortly before his premature death. I have been transferred to this room, thanks to the grudging concession of Bernard, a withered branch with no eyebrows, and jerzy kozinski electro-frazzled hair. Bernard is low potentate of the Quai Voltaire reception desk. Bernard decides who of the unnerved Americans will be allowed to sleep in his three star blighted hovel. In other words, Bernard & I get along all right – which doesn’t stop his conoid eyes, and his pellet teeth from flashing hatred every time he looks my way, or prevent him from trying to shop a closet with the number 33 on it as Wilde’s.
One of Paris’ big selling points is the “I slept in Napoleon’s tomb” experience, the idea being if you sleep in the same moth-eaten mattress as the Corsican dictator, or in my case, as some dissolute Irish scribe, some of the genius will rub off on you.
The worst of it is that it’s true. The catch is you can’t pick it up over the weekend. You have to be prepared to junk everything that was given to you by the gods in exchange for a very unlikely bet that at an unspecified date in the future, you might achieve glory. So, before you embark on this particular tangent, you had best:
a) be damned sure of your genius; and
b) be prepared to fuck up your life anyways.
This is a picture of another genius, Mister Antonin Artaud. If this picture doesn’t convince you the man’s insane, consider this statement in his study of Van Gogh, written from the Rodez asylum:
“I see coming towards me, as I write these lines, the bloody red face of the painter, in a mural of disemboweled sunflowers.”
I didn’t know flowers had bowels. Van Gogh seems to attract self-appointed geniuses, illustres inconnus, like shit attracts flies.
Something about Van Gogh invites sympathy, but he at least managed to escape to France, unlike his poor descendant, Theo, who was decapitated just down the street from our place in the Vondel park for the sharia offence of tattooing a wide-eyed nubian with koranic calligraphy.
On the famous twice removed chart, my Dutch teacher, Lucia is a close friend of Theo Van Gogh’s.
As for Van Gogh, the original, whatever his manic predisposition, he is a vastly sympathetic character, who was dead serious about his art, and suffered as much from the bite of the Provence mistral driven sun and poverty as any inate mental condition. But, this is Artaud’s first volley into the crowd, page one of the book, Van Gogh, le suicide de la société.
“Van Gogh’s mental health is demonstrated by the fact that throughout his life, he only cooked one of his hands, and only cut off one of his ears, in a world where every day, cooked vagina in green sauce is served up…”
Artaud would have a field day today. I think he’d move to England and be a visual artist. He’d be recognized as a genius. A no-brainer.
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