The Blue Wind by Martina Cleary Projects

The Blue Wind

What a contrast it is without you here. It’s as if all the celebrations have stopped. Night is calling me out, but I linger in the emptiness of your absence. The days we drifted out like a party. You standing in the dark corridor of a shabby hotel, eyes so bright. Who were you then? The unexpected fallen to earth, Where are you tonight? How could I believe we were a fair trade for freedom.

Tomorrow I will wander out to chase the wind, the blue wind through the backstreets and under the bridges. But tonight I search the spaces between everything else. What remains, when nothing remains. The sky is opening up now, over the rooftops and chimneys of Paris.

The bookstore on Rue Layfayette is vacant, A place between what once was, and the certainty it will never be so again. I stand outside searching, Every small detail a puzzlement on the anonymous face of evening. I await the beginning, where time turns round upon itself serpent-like. Where the woman and the man meet again, like shades across the hands and face of a clock. The route toward the future is daunting. If I see you I will say, I’m on my way to the Boulevard Magenta.

I’ve always discovered you on the street. emerging, as if surfacing like a thought on the bath in a room without mirrors. It’s as if just by thinking it, I can conjure you, as tangible as an embrace. It doesn’t bother me, that knowing way of a secret smile. When saying your name makes real the substance of dreams. I hold my head high, There is nowhere to go today, And there is everywhere to go today.

When I asked you what it was about me, You said the eyes, definitely the eyes. The rose has eyes even in the teeth of the storm. You followed the trail long vanished, behind those eyes, waiting for clear sight of the depths. You said don’t worry, You would be the oracle-eyed heron banishing shadows I might discover were golden.

So we lived each day in hope of revolution, Waging war on the turn of a phrase. I would prefer tonight to follow the sky, Than argue about the cold emptiness of nothing. When words are easy currency, In a world where they change little of your life, or mine. Tonight you will sleep easy in that fortress of words, As I wander out into cold blue night. But for now I will pretend. I will be your moth, fickle, frivolous and fancy-free. If only you will linger. I say, I was just beginning to understand it, That great idea of yours. I say, it was really a star, A star you were heading towards. You can’t fail to reach it. I felt then that nothing would hold you back, Not even me.

How could you see it then? Like the heart of a heartless flower. I dreamed so much of myself into you, It was never a question of knowing, or not knowing. At Rue Papillion I hesitate, This is what you’ve always been to me, The simple grace of leaving. To walk that thin line between worlds.

Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this: Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. And then, what are they doing? You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether. And where do I go when you’re gone? Back to that last moment, Of what was said and done. Nothing remains. Not the women, not the park, or what they were wearing. Not their number, not their words, or names.

It began this morning as I crossed the bridge. I saw you in the crowd at rush hour. You were almost there, But then you weren’t there at all. My mind is shifting in the air again. How quickly you bring on an eclipse, A great disk of sun collapsing.

Who am I now? A sphinx you say? A sirens call? The spirit of an age? A harpies embrace at the door to oblivion?

At Chatelet des Halls I see an old woman, face up asleep in the gutter. I know you never mind such things. Tower high on marvels and miracle. When did I decide, what would be the myth of me? I could have been some simpler man’s wife. The wind takes the last leaves of the Chestnut trees from Place Dauphine, over the river. In the blue of the wind, I tell myself, that was never for me. I would have always risked it all, I did risk it all.

Even now when all is lost The days are formed by thoughts of you. I’ve addressed so many words to silence. Who decided, that I was mad and you were not? You would say, all those good people who sleepwalk through the morning, noon and afternoon of their lives. But I cannot forget.

The distance between the rise and fall of what is said and what is done. Where artifice fades to cowardice. I lost my mind so you wouldn’t have to, a leg and tail slipped between worlds. With the end of my breath which was the beginning of yours.

I can barely remember your face anymore, I’ve forgotten the sound of your voice. But in this place the days seem to have stopped. Some ghost of you drifts in and out of thought.

Who goes there, is it you Nadja? Is it true that beyond, that everything beyond Is here in this life? I can’t hear you. Who goes there, is it only me? Is it myself?

“Who am I? If this once I were to relay on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt”. So begins the story of Andre Breton’s encounter with the enigmatic, and ultimately doomed figure of Nadja in the poets 1928 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. Nadja, or Leona Camille Ghislaine D. was twenty-four years of age when she met Breton by chance on the Rue Lafayette on October 4th 1926. Struck by the other-worldly detachment of the young woman, her ghostliness and visionary quality, Breton pursued her for the following ten days, tracing an erratic trail through the streets of Paris. Breton chose forty-four photographic plates to accompany his text for Nadja, many by the photographer Jacques-André Boiffard, whom he commissioned to record certain places related to the story. Inspired and also haunted by Andre Breton’s novel, I made two research journeys to Paris in search of Nadja. Over a period of several weeks, using Breton’s text and Boiffard’s photographic plates, I followed the same routes, visited the same places mentioned. I was searching for evidence; any traces remaining, any indication of what she might have been like then, or what she would look like today. In the process I responded to the locations within Breton’s work and created a series of visual and textual maps of my own journey, into memory, archival and contemporary. Using techniques similar to the Surrealist reliance on chance, and the later methods of Derive and Detournment of the Situationalist International movement, I navigated the city by day and night. As I searched for Nadja, I also wrote to Breton, a semi-autobiograpical narrative, in the first person, responding to his recollection of this encounter. My intention was to give voice and image to a side of this story which had been so silenced, so erased. Along with own images I added found photographs, from the market of St Ouen, one of the original locations mentioned in Breton’s novel.