Extraordinary Theory of Objects

 

 

An
E
XTRAORDINARY
T
HEORY
of
O
BJECTS

A MEMOIR OF AN OUTSIDER IN PARIS

S
TEPHANIE
L
A
C
AVA

With Illustrations by Matthew Nelson

Dedication

To those who unwittingly taught me about wonder in the world, to not be afraid of the dark, and to talk to strangers.

 

To Bryan, who taught me how to find them.

Epigraphs

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

—W. B. YEATS

But men should not be too curious in analyzing and condemning any means which nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, butterflies, or fossils.

—MARK RUTHERFORD

Contents

Dedication

Epigraphs

 

Introduction

New York: Fall 1992

New York: Spring 1993

Le Vésinet: Spring 1993

Le Vésinet: Fall 1993

Le Vésinet: Spring 1995

Paris: Fall 1995

Paris: Spring 1996

Le Vésinet

New York: Fall 2009

South of France: Sometime around 2010

Paris: Sometime around 2010

New York: Sometime in 2011

Paris

Paris: More recently . . .

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

 

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

I was always strange. Born with red hair to parents without it, I always thought I was a changeling—swapped at birth because some perfect couple knew they didn't want me, even before I could talk, before I could tell them they were right. As a baby, I was disturbed by the quietest sounds and shadows on the wall. When I was older, a lover would call me out for odd behavior. “It must be a pretty planet you come from.” He'd laugh at how I hated loud music and chaotic places. “You've fooled everyone,” he'd say when I begged to go somewhere private. “People think you're normal.” Years later, a friend would tell me a story about the time a well-known writer asked how exactly to “hang out.” An anecdote meant to mock my lack of social ease. I imagined there was nowhere on earth where I could feel settled.

*    *    *

My outsider status was confirmed when my father took a job in France and my family moved from New York to a cold, empty house in Le Vésinet. I was twelve years old. From then on, I would never be quite American and, by virtue of my birthplace, never truly French either. The unsuccessful transplant began one April in the early nineties. Everything that represented my past life and its predictable ways—my geode collection, a jar of shells from summers in Cape Cod, a box of empty cicada skins—had been packed and placed on a containership slowly crossing the Atlantic. I arrived with my mother and brother, Zach, two months ahead of our belongings, and for that time I slept on a cot and wore the same shirt and pants every day to school. I started to obsess over my missing objects as evidence of what I'd lost. All I wanted was something to look forward to, someone beyond my family to want me, and to capture and tame the forces that caused this change. So, I started a new collection.

Back then, I trusted everyone and everything, but in particular the things I could hold. Most children latch on to the security of objects, but I went further. I was obsessed with cabinets of curiosities, historical efforts to catalog and control nature's oddities. A favorite example was the encyclopedic collection of rare flora and fauna that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II kept at Prague Castle in the seventeenth century. I had a twin passion for ancient mythologies. These stories were another way to make sense of the nonsensical. Alone and unaccepted by other girls, I also loved biographies or fiction about alluring and iconoclastic women who would come to feel like real-life companions. Reading was a Pascalian diversion; stories and facts were a distraction from spiraling thoughts. I had always hated loudness. It was loud enough inside my head.

This mania extended to animals, people, and places—a city, even strangers in the street. I had a game where I liked to imagine what sort of pajamas each passerby might wear. This came from a belief that the more I know about the inner lives of others, the more I might understand the world. Collecting information and talismans is a way of exercising magical control. You can hold a lucky charm and know everything about nature's creatures yet still be terribly lonely.

*    *    *

When I fell apart at thirteen in France, I didn't lose my unfounded trust in others and the naïveté that ruled my youth, but I did misplace innate excitement, hope, and a will to live. A loss of control in my surroundings contributed to an active, throbbing depression. Spending those first full days in Le Vésinet alone—cut off—led to interactions with only objects and stories, which came to form the map of my breakdown and survival. What saved me, in the end, was my fear of change transforming into raw wonder and wanderlust. Intense sensitivity can be debilitating, or it can increase the upside of chance and the power of whimsy—a need for storytelling, strangers, and odd encounters. My strength with the written word is the ability to make unlikely subjects somehow connect, a capacity that has never been my strong suit in life. I had never been patient enough to believe that looking back my sadness would all make sense. But it does now.

It is with all apologies to my mother and father that I tell this story, as our family has always been intensely private. Growing up, I had plenty of love from my parents and brother, but I wanted another kind of comfort. In our family, value was placed in working hard, being compassionate and open-minded, not in frivolities or material indulgences. For me, though, there was safety and security in lovely little objects that appeared in the form of tiny souvenir-like tokens found over the years. My father found this same magic thinking in antiques or museums. Always gone for work, he became a treasure hunter in my imagination, a mustachioed pirate sailing across the world; it was my mother who kept order. As parents, they did nothing wrong, except encourage a lack of cynicism and foster creative spirit. It never occurred to me to be careful of life as a small child, to cultivate a second system of defense aside from my unusual instincts, to be guarded, aware, and patient with people in showing themselves. When I was little, it was sweet to lack social inhibitions and common sense. It became a handicap soon thereafter.

As an evolving adult, I am left with what happens when you grow up filtering the world through a very particular point of view—images are enlarged and cataloged with a classification dreamed up from my crazy years of a short life. I traffic the world using my idiosyncratic senses, so it follows that I'd document my life through a narrative illuminated with objects and their respective stories. The truth is, I can't relay everything exactly as it happened, because I'm not even quite sure of what happened. I remember that time in France in cinematic flashbacks filled with scenery and elaborate sets but rarely any actors. When I first wrote the narrative strand of this story, the objects came to me within the memories. I did not plan for so many connections or for the themes that emerged in this collection. When I was young, I didn't know all of this history. If anything, the only original link was my taste for these objects, an odd sensibility honed from the very events and scenes in which they first appeared. Then a web started to slowly show itself, a net to soften the fall from my memories. I researched the objects to own them by giving each new meaning and exorcising the old. During this process, I found peace in the lack of randomness of what I thought were childish fixations.

The ties between entries came in three distinct ways, and certain people reappeared throughout the stories. There was Lee Miller finding solace in photography and serving as a muse to Man Ray. Meanwhile in Le Vésinet, the Marchesa Casati fashioned her own immortality, captivating and entertaining artists and writers, Ray among them. When I think of a shell, I remember a scene in Françoise Sagan's
Bonjour Tristesse
, which is in itself a story of a precocious teenager learning about the world and sexuality, which also calls to mind Jean Seberg (see Seberg footnote on page 137). Both battled premature success and the pitfalls of fame and projected public adoration. Furthermore Miller was from a small town outside New York City, which happens to be the same place I was born—all three of us found identity in France. I am in no way comparable to these women, but what we share is a tendency toward eccentric or creative takes on our own circumstance.

There was also Oscar Wilde, with a taste for lilies of the valley; scarab rings on both hands; his residency and death at L'Hôtel; and even his novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, as an example of the haunted pictures and phantasmagoria popular in the nineteenth century. The Victorian age and its archaeological obsession and revival of Greek and Egyptian styles lent another common facet to the list, as did the increase in the study of natural sciences like zoology. There was also the nineteenth-century thinkers' obsession with optics and the occult. It was during this time that famed French taxidermist Deyrolle established his business, due to the popularity of entomology and animal curiosities.

I had people, an era, and then finally a theme—an extraordinary theory of objects. As humans we crave beauty and we attempt to hold on to this experience through physical evidence. For religion it may be a relic, for the curious, a found talisman. For me, it is my story of conquering another world, a place where in order to survive I needed to seek out wonder. It was this unchecked romanticism that evolved into an adult skill to challenge sadness with words and a belief that what you experience isn't what is simply handed to you. Maturity means allowing for change and ephemeral feelings. It took a study of objects for me to see that if we are patient and gentle in observing ourselves and others, we will find connection. That has been the greatest comfort of all.

*    *    *

I never imagined I would live as I do today; I don't think I even believed I'd make it past twenty. Romantic love and calm were the great, elusive intangibles. I can now sit still for the length of a film, though my mind wanders. Love has come in unlikely forms and continues to surprise me. And the objects are still there, but only as mementos of more profound observations.

*    *    *

Here is my story, but told in a strange way.

*    *    *

Consider the source.