a plesiosaur in paris

It is Friday and it is the afternoon and so i thought i might stop for a moment and enjoy my lunch of baguette with tuna and salad in the Place Renee Viviens and reflect on Paris while i am still in it. One true sentence is always a good place to start: Good coffee has been discovered and after my breakfast of each morning i make my way to the Quai de l'Hotel de Ville to the Cafe Soluna. A haunt owned and regulared by local jazz musicians, writers and visual artists, Soluna has been a perfect oasis for this lone wanderer. The staff are very friendly, passionate about coffee and music and chocolate truffles compliment each espresso served. A creature of habit when habit feels good, i have been a regular since my becoming learned of the place. Today i chatted about classical music composition and the emotive timing of Bach and Satie with the barista. Then, before i could leave, a young woman asked me if i was Australian and i said i was and she said she was from Sydney and has been living in Paris for 4 months and is a writer and so we talked about books and writing. And of course it is now, at the end of my time here, i start to find myself amid a personal community of sorts.

And community is a very important thing to a lone wanderer who feels that he is no longer a lone traveller and has become transformed into something else by the particularities of circumstance. Yes. It may sound strange, but i think that my travelling came to an awkward halt when i decided to stay with a friend in Paris. Then i was, in a sense, "living" in Paris, albeit for a very short period of time. And to live in a place for a while, semi dependant on the generosity of one's host(s), is very different to travelling independently. Travelling when you have to locate accommodation and you are surrounded by other travellers who don't know anyone else either and go hungry for fear of language barriers and precarious gastronomic experiences. But it isn't quite "living" in the place either, because once you've gone and been a tourist at a few famous landmarks and visited the art galleries and museums, you have to find something to sustain your sanity. Work doesn't exist in this ontological space, and study of any kind is structureless and sprawling at best. Social exchange becomes a matter of luck and routine. I had to go to the same cafe three times before i got chatting with the staff.

That said, the evenings are well accounted for. Last night i joined Morvarid and Suzanne to get reacquainted with an old friend (of theirs) from 1998, rediscovered in the logs of facebook. I found myself suddenly surrounded by the pallid tones of computer geeks and music nerds and knew that i had been travelling for some time because i was the least white and the most blonde at the table. Everyone spoke english to varying degrees which was very considerate and some of us were able to speak the universal language of musical elitism.

Otherwise the days seem to float by as lanterns in the periphery of a tree lined boulevard in the quiet prelude to dawn. And so i invent little routines for myself, filling my mornings with yoga and croissants and books and country music. Then i would visit a friend or decide i shall walk so far there and so far back so as i can see a cathedral or walk in the Luxembourg gardens like Hemingway and Joyce and Stein did back in "the old days." It is easy to get a little bit lost in Paris, as the strange winding streets seem to reflect the coiling corridors of the subconscious rather than the rationale of a grid. Occasionally stopping to cast one's eyes over delicate displays of ornate tools for opening letters in the window of some boutique, or catching a glimpse of some well hidden court yard as an opened door lingers at the outer range of its hinges. The imagination swoops in and fills those sudden images with memories old and recent and i am suddenly aware of where i am and where i was and where i haven't yet been.

And as a personal marker of time i have made a gift of some tiny plastic dinosaurs to my host and to my friend Alice with whom i enjoyed a fantastic lunch yesterday and who i shall see perform in a production staged by Philippe Genty tonight. The dinosaur may seem ridiculous at first, but in a place of high culture i think it has a multilayered complexity about it. For when i make a gift of a tiny plesiosaur as a reminder of a time spent together, i think it is good to recognise that there has been a whole heap of time before now, including a time when the world was inhabited by gigantic prehistoric lizards. So maybe there is a whole heap more time that hasn't happened yet. And who knows what is going to happen in that time. It'd be fun if the lizards came back. No?

And now it is Saturday and it my last morning of "living" in Paris for tomorrow morning i will be getting on that Kuwait airlines flight. I hardly slept last night and i cant recall any dreams, which is only significant because i have been dreaming a lot since i came to Europe. Strange deserts with laughing heads, old friends in white rooms with red carpet and the end of the world on a mountain that is home to everyone. Funnily, last night Mo and i went to see Philippe Genty and Co.'s production, Boliloc. I knew about and wanted to attend the show because my friend Alice was in it and also because in the latter months of 2006 i was involved in a Genty piece made in Melbourne, which is where i met Alice in the first place. Like all of Genty's work, the lush visual piece was a comedic and surrealist meditation on the corridors of the subconscious. A myseterious dreamscape where the relationship between human and object, manipulator and manipulated, gets a thorough inverting. It was a beautiful piece, and i got a real kick out of seeing a friend perform familiar gestures on the professional stage. But, although i thoroughly enjoyed the show, the experience and its associative resonances has taken its toll.

Just because you go and see a production that harnesses the subconscious and the world of dreams as its favoured playground, does not mean that you can then go without sleep for a night. In the wake of the show, i have felt riddled with a strange anxiety - a nausea that still lingers and seems impossible to shake. In part, this may be due to my impending departure. It may also be because i have been IN a Genty production in Melbourne and so seeing one in Paris teased out a whole heap of emotions and memories connected to my past, and with my sense of home. Indeed, seeing the show seems to have provoked an excavation of all the personal reasons for my leaving Melbourne 6 months ago. More information may be required for this to make any real sense. Suffice to say, the period prior to, during and after the Genty workshop in 2006 was, for me, one of most intense periods of self questioning, frustration and eventual destruction. By the end of it all i felt like i had undergone a sort of subjective death. Over the following 18 months, a lot has happened and things are better and i fell like i have been sort of reborn. But i'm still getting my legs to work and my hands to hold stuff and talking is more like blowing bubbles. 18 months sounds like a long time to be in an existential crisis, but not really that long, and especially when you think of giant prehistoric lizards.

Seeing Boliloc, with its myriad compounding associations, seems to have brought home the reality of my actually really gonna happen nearly now return home. That and the fact that i have been away for 6 months and i still have no idea who i am or what the hell i'm doing on this great big ridiculous blue planet. Walking down the Boulevard Sebastopol, reading James Joyce and sipping coffee at the Soluna, sitting here typing at an indifferent computer screen; i feel that strange tremor you get in your throat when you need to cry and nearly do but hold it in because the boss is looking. It is slow and it feels heavy in my stomach. A major case of the "holy shits!" have taken hold. But i still have 22 hours left in Paris and a beautiful woman is cooking a Persian lunch and then there is something on tonight and then some air travel tomorrow and then home... Home. And then my mother and my father, waiting for me. And i'm sure to hell that i wont give a toss if the boss is looking or not. Holy shit.

awkward spiral sentences

My time in Paris has been an interesting one so far. Just before Alex left i got a case of anxiety and sort of felt a bit angry and not good about life in general. After he left it sort of got worse. I think it was largely to do with me feeling a bit scared and isolated in a place where i can't speak the language and i am on my own most of the time and i can't afford to do much to change the situation as it presents itself. And so i had a momentary Tokyo flashback. Tokyo was a very lonely time for me.

I was finding it very difficult to leave Mo's flat. And it is a lovely flat in the Beaubourg district, right in the guts of Paris. But i don't like feeling like i can't do things so i had to suck it all up and put on my sexy pants (and if i was gay i'd have a riot in this part of town) and go out and buy some groceries and a phone card. And you know what? I did it and i didn't die and no body laughed at me at... and i didn' die mum. But it was bloody hard getting up and out of that appartment. And so i made contact with a few of my other friends here and then went out for dinner on Friday night with Fred (who i met in Dharamsala and is a joy to be around) and i felt better for a while but the next day it was like starting all over again and i got angsty because i didn' know what to do with myself and it is a bit difficult to go for walks because my new shoes have given me some very big and painful blisters that keep bleeding when i walk on them. But i was going crazy and i was gonna start eating cleaning products so i went to the first bar that looked like it was full of locals and i sat at the counter and before long i was having a chat in english with a very friendly guy called Larry and he introduced me to the staff and then they gave me some drinks for free which is apparently out of character in Paris. And then i felt fine and went off to a party at my friend Didi's place. There were some people who were happy to speak English there and so that was very good for me. We drank a lot of rum and vodka. The next day i went out with confidence and felt pretty good about being in this heady, romantic city where everytime i look up i get a rush of endorphins. So i cooked for my beautiful, stressed out and very busy host last night and it was a grand meal and we listened to records and laughed about things we have done and people we met.

Today i don't know what i'm gonna do, but i have a recommendation for a good lunch and coffee so i will go there and just enjoy walking around in Paris... which is my new favourite city in the whole world except maybe Melbourne but i can go there anytime. It is so beautiful here, and the croissants and baguette make bakers in Melbourne look silly. I havent found good coffee here yet... Mo says i wont. That is a shame. Good coffee would taste very good here.

I could spell out some more falmboyance about my decadence in the magnificent city of Barcelona: where i got lost in tiny lanes like spilt bowls of spaghetti and saw more Picasso and then Gaudi stole my breath and made still my pounding heart in the rib cage of his La Sagrada Familia. We stayed in a youth hostel and i will never ever do that ever again not in a million and one years if you paid me lots of money and got some tea from china no way. There are some distrssingly ugly people in this human race of ours... and they all have money and travel with Dad's credit card. Perhaps it is the Dad... yes... lets be angry with the Dad. Bad Dad.

Before that we had some intense and border line distrssing moments while trekking in the Spanish Pÿrenees where it is not the walking season yet and if anything had gone wrong on those mountain passes, waist depth in snow and crossing unseen rivers, we would have been in serious trouble. We slept in an abandoned refugio one night which was home to rodents who like the smell of our rubbish bag. But we woke in the most beautiful valley i have ever seen, surrounded by mountains and ten waterfalls sparkling in the sunlight. It was ecstasy to know that it was only the two of us and our four eyes that beheld that wonder at that time. Sorry everyone... it was not as awe inspiring as the incredible size of the Himayala... but it was prettier.

And so i am in Paris for another two weeks and then something dramatic will happen: I have a return flight booked to bring me back to India where i will hopefully have no trouble with immigration as i will only be in the country for a few hours before i get on my flight back to Melbourne on the 30th of June. It is all booked and it is ready and waiting and i oscillate between terror and exhilaration at the thought of returning to Melbourne town and seeing all you beautiful people (if you are there) again. But when someone suggests work at an English pub (as horrible as they are) i can't help but to feel tempted... just a whole heap. Either way, i think i would like to go to Iran in February. It didn't happen this time... but February is a good month. Maybe i'll stop over in India for a bit... why not?

So maybe i will write another blog before i get home and maybe i will not. I would like to transcribe a few more stories onto screens before i stop sending you all emails. I know some pretty good ones.