Gymnopedie No. N

Do you ever feel like you fell in love with someone just because you were supposed to go to a particular museum? I at least have no idea how else I would have ever ended up in Honfleur, France or spent an afternoon at Erik Satie’s childhood home. I have a feeling that young love exists to give us a sonar-ish glimpse of our own depth or dimensions, like an early bathymetry map of our inner oceans and coastlines, and that everything that comes after it is a shifting, more tectonic discontentment that opens you much further into yourself than you’d ever initially be comfortable with.

So there I was in Honfleur, a town which according to Google is technically a commune and according to art history incompletionists is the école de Honfleur, a seemingly-imaginary school operating as a catch-all for the regional claim to fame as a birthplace of the Impressionist movement. I’ve poked around on this a wee bit and the best I can say is that French creatives ranging from Claude Monet and Eugène Isabey to Charles Baudelaire seem to have found the area nice to look at and a fun place to drink. If you know anything different feel free to let me know and I’ll correct it in a follow up note.

I’d grown up obsessed with “Gymnopedie No. 1” just like everyone else (I am permanently the depressed neighbor here), and since we were in the area I insisted that we go to Erik Satie’s home which was (and still is) a small museum in the center of the town proper. It was insane in an unexpected way, as only a small European museum can be, and a very small part of me has been living quite contentedly in that little house ever since. When my girlfriend at the time broke up with me a few months later, she told me first that she was doing it because she was afraid I would get bored with her, and then later on that it was because I was embarrassing. Looking back on it, I think she was right. She was boring and I was embarrassing. But it’s often the case that what presents itself as a great heartbreak later confesses after a few therapeutic drinks that it’s just another layer of our lifelong introduction to ourselves, and that was true here as well.

My visit to Honfleur began an uncomfortable dance with my own natural instability which only much more recently settled at last into something of a saddish waltz. A gravitational 1-2-3, 1-2-3 that in sloppier settings I’ve pretended was a mirror of the connection between the earth and the moon, but in truth is in the same key signature as Satie’s famous piece that I sat and listened to for the umpteenth time in my life on a self-playing piano the day I visited his home. I’ve wondered since then if that piano ever stops playing that song, imagining to myself that someone is tasked with keeping its Olympic grief pyre alive through the night no matter the outage with a bicycle generator, and laughing too much to myself about it. But what else is there really to do? Satie famously described one of his pieces as needing to be played “like a nightingale with a toothache”, and I’m increasingly aware of the reality that my time here will be lived the same way. Life may not be about answering the impossible questions, but some of it is very certainly about accepting its inevitable conclusions.