It's about time...

Jim's Musings from Paris April 2023

Each year Kena selects the best photos of Léo from the previous months, designs a calendar, and gives it to us as a holiday gift. Our calendar hangs in the kitchen, above the radiator and below the tin Haitian wall plaque of what I have always assumed to be the loa, Erzulie, goddess of femininity, love, and desire. Debora Totti gave us this striking piece of metal art in gratitude for opening our Akron house to her for the birth of her daughter, Miranda, thirteen years ago in April. Where did the time go?

Back to the calendar. Today is March 31 and I’m not ready to turn the page. I’m not ready for the photo of the smiling boy in front of an artist’s easel, wearing a bright red painter’s smock and cavalierly wielding a paintbrush, to disappear. I think it’s the smile. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and make my coffee without contemplating that smile, that joie de vivre, that carefree and creative attitude. A new photo will change my entire day. A new photo will mean that time is passing.

Remember those old Hollywood movies when pages would fly furiously from generic calendars to depict the passage of time? Or the old newsreel, The March of Time? I was reminded of The March of Time these past days as I watched clips of Putin welcome Xi Jinping to Moscow. It was like watching bizarre, updated footage from 1937 (86 years ago), when Hitler welcomed Benito Mussolini to Germany and ceremoniously ushered him around Berlin. The images give the impression of being almost identical and make me shudder with dread—knowing what happened and fearing what will happen. What if I don’t turn that calendar page tomorrow and instead hold onto the smiling boy with the paintbrush for a bit longer, stop the march of time? Or maybe I should just stop being sentimental and see what the next image brings?

Our friends Chris and Maria visited us from Akron last week. Maria teaches French at The University of Akron and Chris is a long-time collaborator on both student and NWPL theatre projects. Over the years, we enjoyed many dinners together lasting into the wee hours in the dining room of their beautiful Tudor home and candle-lit lawn parties and lasagna in the backyard of our house on Overwood. It was good to reconnect with them over wine and whiskey, fine French food and friendly conversation. We reminisced about various theatre productions and long nights in rehearsal while holding our breath and daring to look forward to a world that is changing more rapidly than we can imagine it.

Chris Hariasz in NWPL’s A Couple of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians by Dorota Maslowska (2012). Photo by Fenna Blue.

Meanwhile, as we discussed the questions of past projects and future dreams around the table in our small Parisian apartment, those protesting President Macron’s pension reform marched in the streets of cities throughout France. Politicians, not just in France, but all over, have decided that it’s better not to listen to the working class. No dialogue, no compromise or negotiation. Macron has smugly dug in his heels and, last Tuesday, the demonstrations came uncomfortably close to our home. Clouds of tear gas hung in the air a few blocks away, as the riot police ran down Rue Titon and flag waving strikers stood their ground and shouted insults at the tormentors on Boulevard Voltaire.

Paris Protests. March 28, 2023. Photo by Jairo Cuesta.

The French Revolution began with a strike in a wallpaper factory that stood where there is now the park, across the street from our apartment. Is time playing another trick as France, which some call the last bastion in the West against rampant capitalism, resists the wealthy elite’s domination of the working class’s health and happiness? How to understand better this divide between the rich and poor in the world and, especially, gather tools to bridge it? Today an announcement about Robert Reich’s upcoming course called “Wealth and Poverty” passed through my Substack feed. It’s the last time he’s teaching the UC-Berkeley class before he retires in June. I’m signing up.

My course “Wealth and Poverty” starts right here next Friday

I also signed up to begin another writing project: an article about NWPL’s 30+ years of performative research involving songs from the Shaker tradition that I’ll be writing in collaboration with Jairo Cuesta, Zhenya Lavy, and Alicja Ruczko. Along with a forthcoming book about NWPL’s The Devil’s Milk Trilogy (including the performance texts) and reworking translations I did long ago of several of Grotowski’s key texts, it seems I have a lot of work to do for the rest of 2023.

Sorry, March, it’s about time to turn that calendar page and get started.