My thoughts are larger than the heavens. They have my body leaping out of itself, bursting forth as do the stars, a return to the dust. Today the sun rose and the sun set. In a city named Paris I wandered streets and tasted clementines in cold markets and sipped coffee as somewhere, by the circular orb and arc of the heavens, it all culminated in this moment and thought.
* * *
This moment is but an instant in a suite of instants.
Like so many who have preceded me here on this hollow ground, Lutetia, I was and am your artist, you sacred catalyst. More and more the world around me grows silent and I need the quiet so.
My singular obsession calls unto me like the sirens of the Greeks.
* * *
I sing of clocks. Lights go out. I am an artist. I cannot be saved. Neither can it. I become more Gallic by the day. Tides I've tried to swim against. Oh, I beg. And plead.
Memory persists.
* * *
That time exists, I am not sure. That it does not exist, I am not sure either. Of what am I sure: that it has me in a head spin, the sort of existential acid trip that winds me up and drops me from the upper stratosphere of my own incredulousness.
I suppose you could say this trip started long ago, and where it ends, or shall end, I do not know, nor may I ever. You may all thank Paul Ricoeur for that.
Of what else am I sure? That there exists a clear, indisputable, and terribly hard to decipher--but oh, at last, I have done it!--difference in American and French perceptions of time.
* * *
The ligne de faille which made it all evident to me, I suppose, has been my struggle to understand just where in the world This One was coming from when we chatted weeks ago. Some of the things he said, though he said them in English, baffled me.
¨ I can't give you what you want right now. But I still want to see you. Maybe I'll regret this decision in two months and be banging on your door. Who knows? You're still here until at least next November, nothing has really changed, but I can't give you more right now. And I can't deal with the pressure of feeling like you expect more from me.¨
He mentioned not going about things the American way, that he didn't want to stop seeing me. The two seemed like a deep and brutal paradox, one in which the underlying presupposition is that if he couldn't be with me, I would not want to continue to see him anymore...which I admittedly agree is fairly true of American dating culture.
But the door did not seem fully closed on romantic involvement either. Why would he spring so far ahead into the future? Why the insistence on the now and the far ahead?
This One was angry with me because I had forced him to play his cards. He was upset because I had done things the American way. ¨You're in France,¨ he insisted. ¨You have to play by French rules.¨
I countered that while I understood where he was coming from, while we were both bilingual, his reactions would never be knee jerk American ones, and that mine would never be knee jerk French ones. That there would always exist a couche culturelle.
What was I missing?
And then, like Athena from the head of Zeus, epiphany sprang.
* * *
The French manner of courtship differs from the American one because of a radically different underlying perception of and subjective relationship to time. The evidence is myriad and clearer than Swarovski now, but it took me three years to grasp the weight of it all; I see it in our languages, in our relationship to space and distance, and in the religious backbones of our larger cultures.
In language, it goes to the very root of the verbal system. If languages are systems that shape our cognition, in the way we structure and perceive the empirical world, then it makes sense that a verb system would structure the way we experience the world and its dimensions. English verbs are based upon Germanic systems without much inflection. Our tenses (the very facet of a verb that locates a situation in time) and our aspect (the part of a verb that denotes how an action relates to the flow of time) do not align.
French, suffice it to say, is Latinate, and not Germanic.
French, suffice it to say, is Latinate, and not Germanic.
With that in mind, it is not surprising that our discourses around time differ so. For the American, time is a precious resource, itself a Master to whom we are made to heel. On birth, we receive a set quantity of this commodity and we chose how we use, or spend, it.
My father used to say that if you don't have time, you make time. Time is money. Don't waste your time. The American prizes punctuality.
Time heals everything.
Only time will tell.
For the American, it is time who has the agency, and not he.
My father used to say that if you don't have time, you make time. Time is money. Don't waste your time. The American prizes punctuality.
Time heals everything.
Only time will tell.
For the American, it is time who has the agency, and not he.
The French find this absolutely ridiculous. They complain that Americans are ruled by their watches and find this disdainful. For the French, man is the Master and Time is the servant and what will be will be. Life is complex; if you spot a friend or a family member on the way to an appointment, it is surely of greater importance to chat with said person than to rush to an arbitrary deadline!
Why then are Americans so insistent upon seemingly arbitrary deadlines and definitions, of defining limits and imposed
It has everything to do with our cultural geography and space. The land and the terroir cannot be excluded from this reflexion. It really is that simple. In a nutshell: America is much bigger than France. The American country spreads across three time zones. If we do not impose deadlines, or boundaries, upon ourselves, we would in a sense glide forever through what Jean Baudrillard calls our primitive desert. We impose deadlines because we cannot function otherwise, us Americans: there is no limit if we do not.
France has not this problem. A country 1/18th the size of America has a more human scale. There is no fear of the limitless because no matter how far one may go on French soil, within several hours, one hits the limit of the sea. Space-time imposes its limits much more quickly on the French psyche, which is safely bound the borders of its hexagon. On such a small scale, the French dominate Time. So why worry? Time is not the Master, Time is the servant. And what will be will be.
Even Proust implies that Time is the servant: the title of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, implies that the narrator Marcel is the Master who, with personal agency, has lost his own time and is actively looking for it. And the French actively look for their time. Ricoeur speaks of the triple present and of the present of the past. In France, the present of the past is everywhere: how many Parisian structures have plaques commemorating someone's birth or death transfixed to their walls?
The capstone for me is the religious underpinning. At the base of it all, America is a Protestant nation and France a Catholic. And religion has much to do with what are conceived as the Six Times Zones that human beings live in, which also has a correlation to geographical space. Protestants tend to be what Phillip Zimbardo calls Future Oriented: they work rather than play because working is a way succeed and to demonstrate that you are God's chosen people, and Protestant nations have higher GNPs because of this. Conversely, Catholic nations tend to be part of the Global South, and the closer one is the Equator, the less one has an impression of seasonal, and hence cyclical, time change. Time becomes homogenized and thus seems to slow. There exists less pressure to produce as time seems longer, more available, with less of a deadline.
I do not mean to say that if one is Protestant one is a workaholic and if one is Catholic, one is lazy, nor do I intend to say that every person in America is Protestant and every person in France Catholic, but more that these are the large scale, historical cultural cradles from which the two nations have risen, and to deny the effect that have had on those cultures and perceptions of time would be foolhardy.
* * *
Why then are Americans so insistent upon seemingly arbitrary deadlines and definitions, of defining limits and imposed
It has everything to do with our cultural geography and space. The land and the terroir cannot be excluded from this reflexion. It really is that simple. In a nutshell: America is much bigger than France. The American country spreads across three time zones. If we do not impose deadlines, or boundaries, upon ourselves, we would in a sense glide forever through what Jean Baudrillard calls our primitive desert. We impose deadlines because we cannot function otherwise, us Americans: there is no limit if we do not.
France has not this problem. A country 1/18th the size of America has a more human scale. There is no fear of the limitless because no matter how far one may go on French soil, within several hours, one hits the limit of the sea. Space-time imposes its limits much more quickly on the French psyche, which is safely bound the borders of its hexagon. On such a small scale, the French dominate Time. So why worry? Time is not the Master, Time is the servant. And what will be will be.
Even Proust implies that Time is the servant: the title of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, implies that the narrator Marcel is the Master who, with personal agency, has lost his own time and is actively looking for it. And the French actively look for their time. Ricoeur speaks of the triple present and of the present of the past. In France, the present of the past is everywhere: how many Parisian structures have plaques commemorating someone's birth or death transfixed to their walls?
The capstone for me is the religious underpinning. At the base of it all, America is a Protestant nation and France a Catholic. And religion has much to do with what are conceived as the Six Times Zones that human beings live in, which also has a correlation to geographical space. Protestants tend to be what Phillip Zimbardo calls Future Oriented: they work rather than play because working is a way succeed and to demonstrate that you are God's chosen people, and Protestant nations have higher GNPs because of this. Conversely, Catholic nations tend to be part of the Global South, and the closer one is the Equator, the less one has an impression of seasonal, and hence cyclical, time change. Time becomes homogenized and thus seems to slow. There exists less pressure to produce as time seems longer, more available, with less of a deadline.
I do not mean to say that if one is Protestant one is a workaholic and if one is Catholic, one is lazy, nor do I intend to say that every person in America is Protestant and every person in France Catholic, but more that these are the large scale, historical cultural cradles from which the two nations have risen, and to deny the effect that have had on those cultures and perceptions of time would be foolhardy.
* * *
What happened between This One and I is nothing more than a gigantic clash of cultural misunderstanding.
As the American, I wanted to impose the limits and boundaries, because I felt enough time had elapsed in order for me to define what we were; I needed to define it and wrestle it so that it would not stretch out indefinitely. I was the Servant asking Time to impose a definition on what we were.
He was the Frenchman with the understanding that relationships evolve naturally and as they are supposed to, so there is no need to impose upon them. As he said it, ¨there are no rules,¨ alluding to the American propensity for dating codes and procedures ( you have to wait three days to call, what?).
As the American, I interpreted his statement of ¨I can't give you what you want right now,¨ as ¨I am not interested enough in you to seriously date you and this is my way of letting you down.¨ I interpreted it this way because my culture teaches me that if a man truly wants to be with me, he will, and if not, he's just not that into me. I explained this to a French male friend, who then replied that it seemed like ¨an easy way to rip the bandaid off and move on,¨ instead of confronting much more nuanced and complex circumstances. The way of making things black or white in the way that Americans do instead of dealing with the ambiguity of grey area, because culturally we like black or white, heaven or hell, instead of black, grey, white, or heaven, purgatory, and hell.
For the Frenchman, ¨I can't give you what you want right now,¨ literally means ¨I cannot give you what you want right now, I am not available in the way you want me to be right this second,¨ with the underlying implication that ¨but that doesn't mean it might not work at another moment.¨
Because truly, the French are more fluid about time and relationships: I'm not available now for whatever reason ( I'm with another person, I have too much going on in my life, I need to figure a, b and c out before...) but it doesn't mean I like you any less, and it doesn't mean that life permitting, we might not work later. Hence, his allusion to my being here until at least November of 2014.
I am not making excuses and I won't not see other people if that's what happens. I am simply attempting to understand, in a more nuanced way, the cultural forces at play.
* * *
Will I sit away pining? Will I play the stranded princess? No. Things will happen the way they are meant to happen. And while this has been tough, I have a profound understanding and way of interpreting all these cultural subtleties. If it's the only thing I get out of the thing that happened between This One and me, then it was worth it.
Que sera sera.
As the American, I wanted to impose the limits and boundaries, because I felt enough time had elapsed in order for me to define what we were; I needed to define it and wrestle it so that it would not stretch out indefinitely. I was the Servant asking Time to impose a definition on what we were.
He was the Frenchman with the understanding that relationships evolve naturally and as they are supposed to, so there is no need to impose upon them. As he said it, ¨there are no rules,¨ alluding to the American propensity for dating codes and procedures ( you have to wait three days to call, what?).
As the American, I interpreted his statement of ¨I can't give you what you want right now,¨ as ¨I am not interested enough in you to seriously date you and this is my way of letting you down.¨ I interpreted it this way because my culture teaches me that if a man truly wants to be with me, he will, and if not, he's just not that into me. I explained this to a French male friend, who then replied that it seemed like ¨an easy way to rip the bandaid off and move on,¨ instead of confronting much more nuanced and complex circumstances. The way of making things black or white in the way that Americans do instead of dealing with the ambiguity of grey area, because culturally we like black or white, heaven or hell, instead of black, grey, white, or heaven, purgatory, and hell.
For the Frenchman, ¨I can't give you what you want right now,¨ literally means ¨I cannot give you what you want right now, I am not available in the way you want me to be right this second,¨ with the underlying implication that ¨but that doesn't mean it might not work at another moment.¨
Because truly, the French are more fluid about time and relationships: I'm not available now for whatever reason ( I'm with another person, I have too much going on in my life, I need to figure a, b and c out before...) but it doesn't mean I like you any less, and it doesn't mean that life permitting, we might not work later. Hence, his allusion to my being here until at least November of 2014.
I am not making excuses and I won't not see other people if that's what happens. I am simply attempting to understand, in a more nuanced way, the cultural forces at play.
* * *
Will I sit away pining? Will I play the stranded princess? No. Things will happen the way they are meant to happen. And while this has been tough, I have a profound understanding and way of interpreting all these cultural subtleties. If it's the only thing I get out of the thing that happened between This One and me, then it was worth it.
Que sera sera.
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