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.
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