The first time I was in Paris was in 1974. I stepped off the bus and somebody \u2013 a young man, as it turned out \u2013 whispered \u201cShit\u201d in my ear, which surprised me, I must admit. Dumbstruck, I could only shake my head and shrug, assuming he was in urgent need of a convenience, but he just wandered off and stood under a tree, giving me an unreadable look as he did so. I mention this just to show how innocent I was at the time, although one is never wholly innocent of anything.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s 2012 and Paris again. Yes\u00a0Paris<\/em>. You know how it is: you go up Paul Val\u00e9ry, hang a left along Victor Hugo, shimmy off into Lamartine. Ah, the dead. From some angles, Paris resembles nothing so much as an intricately incised memorial to the glorious defunct. A lapidary wreath of clich\u00e9s, as it were. And in a way every city is a clich\u00e9 built on clich\u00e9s, particularly for the pilgrim, that idolater of the id\u00e9e fixe, but Paris – \u2018from some angles\u2019 – is the clich\u00e9 beyond clich\u00e9s, Paris is the clich\u00e9 that eats clich\u00e9s. Cannibal city, appropriating and devouring, spitting out its funerary trophies for the votary to ogle.<\/p>\n Certainly I ogle. In 1974 I wore my boots out, but never quite got around to visiting the Eiffel Tower. Did one need to see it, I rationalised later, having already consumed it in a thousand moving and still images? But this time lounging against the parapet on the other side of the river, I realise, yes, that you really\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0need to see it, close up, in the flesh as the saying goes, because the tower in the flesh does weird things to its known image, augments it,\u00a0exacerbates<\/em>\u00a0it to the point of invisibility. In fact, this is the mystery and the wonder of the Eiffel Tower: it stamps the visible so strongly it goes right through it.<\/p>\n On my way there a young girl offered me a gold ring which she said she\u2019d just found on the path under the trees. \u201cIt\u2019s too big for my fingers,\u201d she said. \u201cYou have it!\u201d But I refused and sloped off, cursing my suspicious nature, thinking \u2013 why didn\u2019t I just accept it, it might have been worth a fortune? Then I saw an older man, rather swarthy like a crook out of Rupert Bear, picking another gold ring off the path and offering it to a couple of unsuspecting lovers. Scam. Of course, I knew and yet I wanted to believe, but couldn\u2019t. I never could believe in the Eiffel Tower, either, the one that was an endlessly reiterated fable, but now I believe in the one it\u2019s impossible to conceive of.<\/p>\n Paris, this time is clean, so clean. It\u2019s as if they have turned a high pressure hose on the place. Last time it was grubby, smoky, there was dogshit everywhere, or so I remember it, but maybe that memory comes from books (except the dogshit). Anyway, now it is very clean indeed, almost white, or shading through various whites into pink, buff, grey-blue, cream. The Sacr\u00e9 Coeur is like one of those mass-produced cakes slabbed with pure white accurately engineered sugar icing. I can\u2019t get over how pristine everything is. It\u2019s as if all the louche crannies, all the smudgy inlets into the netherworld have been filled in and sanded smooth. This is probably an illusion, I think; I think if I walk hard enough and look far enough I will find the inlets, the scars, the embrasures in the immaculately manicured surface. So I walk, relentlessly, as if my life depended on it. Not for me the elegant pleasures of the flaneur, Baudelaire\u2019s relaxed aficionado of crowd life. It\u2019s all far more hectic than that, far sweatier and more compulsive, an overwhelming desire to puncture that fine crust and skewer my way through to the essential city, but also, at the same time, to encompass the thing whole, the entire corporeal and phantasmal shooting-match, to hoover it all up into the portfolio of my own being.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an effort, I can tell you. All the organs of my body are quivering with the strain of this enormous labour of incorporation. But Paris, of course, resists, its pale stones, and the life that goes on around and inside them resists too. Or not resists, but just goes on whistling its own riffs, indifferent to my attempts to synchronize its particularities to the rhythms of some ideal sedimentary cantata. And I recognize this indifference, but it makes no difference. For the pilgrim the task is always more sacramental than topological.<\/p>\n As for me, even eating becomes a kind of quest for the sacred. I spend hours searching for the illuminative morsel. I sit on a bench at the foot of the butte Montmartre munching my way through a miscellany of accumulated snacks, but none of them is quite the right bread or the right pastry or the right chicken teriyaki or whatever the hell that thing on a stick was. At night in my hotel room I gorge on insipid Emmenthal and a tin of mackerel fillets in tomato sauce. The room stinks and I\u2019m no further along, but this doesn\u2019t make me unhappy \u2013 quite the contrary. I\u2019m learning to be here, it\u2019s an art like everything else. One starts with an alienated fumble, and then, perhaps… It\u2019s a question of waiting, of keeping your nerve, but above all it\u2019s a question of keeping yourself available.<\/p>\n Available. Ok, so I walk, I gawp, becoming less and less\u00a0available as the hours pass, down along the boulevards, under the plane trees and the sycamore trees,\u00a0coasting the grand\u00a0immeubles<\/em>, which remind me, for some reason, of containers piled up on a giant cargo ship. Wrought-iron balconies girdle them like ornate barrel-hoops stretched taut against some immense outwardly bulging inner pressure; or like lines of text, of scripture perhaps, calligraphic: a sinuous language of stems, flowers and fruits. Somebody has been writing across the city, a text impossible to decipher but also very easy: that\u2019s to say it says nothing but is just simply writing, just simply eloquence, but the eloquence of elegance, the eloquence of restraint. It\u2019s written all over the metropolis in wrought iron: elegance and restraint, (wit, hierarchy, it implies that too, in parenthesis). The Academy. The mansardes peeping over the tops of the plane trees. Scrolls, flowers, fruit. Nothing here for the wild boys.<\/p>\n Into Montparnasse, where the hell are they all anyway? Soir\u00e9es de Paris, 278 Boulevard de Raspail… The names, names everywhere, everywhere you look, twittering through your head like a cageful of budgies. Les Deux Magots, looking for Camus (etcetera), but they\u2019re not here, in fact none of the people who should be here are here. This matters: of course it shouldn\u2019t do but it does. After all, you\u2019ve already lived a succession of imaginary histories in this place; you come with baggage and it\u2019s a shock to see all that baggage suddenly turn to water and that water running off the surface of the city like water off a duck\u2019s back. All the intensities of a fictive universe teeming down through the streets into the twiddly wastelands of the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde and curling away into the drains with a stifled gurgle. Or is it rain? Is it just raining? Yes, it\u2019s only rain, I think, but all the same it\u2019s a shock not to hear the voices. They would have left a smear, at the very least a kind of smudge on the wall at head height, Verlaine chanting, Desnos sleepwalking his ribbon of saliva. Except that there\u2019s nothing, or at least no more than there ever was.<\/p>\n Never mind, here I am on the trail of the famous bad, sniffing them out, harrying them down the shadow clefts of the night alleys. The strangers, the limit-warriors, the self-damned \u2013 Paris dreamt them and woke up shuddering, although it needs them now, more than ever, it seems to me: the particular kind of dislocations they effect, the warping of those ravishingly monotonous perspectives, the poop in the parterre, the fistula in the hyperthyroidal avenue. Paris dreamt them and drove them to it, the grand reprobates \u2013 the impermeable superficiality of its elaborately articulated and restrained gorgeousness. Filigree and shell, jeu d\u2019esprit,\u00a0the king\u2019s\u00a0lever<\/em>. Villon, Sade, Lautr\u00e9amont, Artaud, D\u2019Aurevilly, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, C\u00e9line, Genet: their\u00a0names roll like a cloud of ordure-vapours through the night streets; you can hear the weird grinding music of their mutilated songs. Rich dense floating offal and vegetable cumulus, the sad sick fug shot through with procreative lightning.<\/p>\n And then in the morning the streets are washed and the bins empty. I\u2019m trying to slow down, to give some space to the details. I\u2019m standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe, doing my best to rouse the thing into existence, not just as a decorated lump of stone \u2013 a monument \u2013 but as a living ganglion, a complex of time-saturated involutions raveling out into this most bafflingly unambiguous of all possible moments. To open the book of the image and to dream through it, into it and beyond it, this is the thing I\u2019m experimenting with. So here comes Adolf preening up the Champs \u00c9lys\u00e9e, and various Napoleons vertical and horizontal, and Victor Hugo overnighting on his elaborate catafalque, and the Prussians after the siege and the French humping back from the great wars, shocked and bristling. And here\u2019s Godefroy\u2019s biplane easing miraculously through, millimeter perfect \u2013 it\u2019s not possible but it just is. Big histories, big, vicious, daft (excruciatingly male) histories, and one keeps trying, but finally the object itself defeats you, insists on itself, its unimaginably depthless present. And Paris keeps doing this. It seems to me that it\u2019s something to do with the way it manipulates space, with the way it strands its epiphanies, separating them out so distinctly from one another, as in those mad barren geometrically OCD French gardens: nothing merging or casting its shadow on anything else, the spaces between so big and so dishearteningly vacant. There is the virulent, chaotic Paris of the imagination, the one every cultural pilgrim carries around inside them, and there is the Paris which has wiped the slate clean, has wiped the slate so clean it\u2019s hard to connect with it except at the very tip of the present where no fantasy can take hold, or barely; the slate which is itself the past fossilized into geologically rigid meta-time. Heritage-time.<\/p>\n All the same, things happen in the proverbial corner of the eye, just there precisely in the direction you\u2019re not looking, although that\u2019s precisely the one place you\u2019ve been keeping available \u2013 for the inadvertent \u2013 without ever really thinking about it. For instance, I\u2019m passing the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, when I catch a slight movement across the street and I turn and half-see a small bald man, yes a small bald man in baggy brown corduroy trousers, cross the street to the door and go in \u2013\u00a0to the Bateau Lavoir!\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 shutting the door behind him as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be doing. It happens so quickly, it\u2019s like a dream, and it is a dream, one which I deliberately make no effort to comprehend, which I just luxuriously permit to mean whatever it does or doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s real, absolutely, but it\u2019s also a kind of dream. A clich\u00e9, yes, like all the others I arrived here with, all the texts and diagrams of my elated transit, but, like them, a clich\u00e9 which seems to quiver on the edge of a space of infinitely immediate potentiality.<\/p>\n Alright, but eventually it starts to dawn on me that, at bottom, this is not a particularly viable way of going about things, all this skittling about like a hyperactive mystic, squinting and straining and communing and double-guessing. Let\u2019s face it, I\u2019m knackered, it\u2019s time to abandon the chase, if it is a chase, or whatever it is if it\u2019s not that, or whatever it is I\u2019m insisting on, if I am, or whatever the hell it is that\u2019s insisting\u00a0through<\/em>\u00a0me. But first, it seems, I have to make some kind of an offering; to pour a libation, as it were. This is how it happens:<\/p>\n I\u2019m in a large city-centre bookshop, standing in a queue for the cashout. In my hand is a book by Henri Michaux,\u00a0Plume,<\/em>\u00a0and, beside the book, I\u2019m carrying a baguette, a bottle of water, an umbrella and a rucksack. At some point I decide I\u2019d like a drink of water, so I carefully unscrew the cap from the bottle, and as I do so I drop the book and as I bend to retrieve the book I drop the umbrella. As I bend to retrieve the umbrella, the water – of course it does – pours out of the bottle in slow motion, all over the shoe of the woman just ahead of me in the queue. Her shoe, which is one of those delicate slipper-like affairs, drinks it up, sudden sodden sovereign of its own little puddle. I look at it, but I can\u2019t quite believe my eyes. I understand that there is some form of causal relation between this pool of water and my own idiotic manoeuvres, but it seems to me there is a lack of fit, a disproportion growing ever larger as the moments pass. The woman leaps back, squeals furiously and turns to remonstrate: perhaps she would like to\u00a0me flanquer un marron*.\u00a0<\/em>Quite naturally. In a way, I\u2019m just waiting for the blow. But in the meantime I\u2019m seriously stumped, as astonished as if I\u2019d just fallen out of the sky onto a new planet.<\/p>\n In the crisis of this arrival I\u2019m as a naked as a flayed baby. She looks at me, the woman with a soggy foot, and as she does so I see a flush of confusion sweep over her tense battle-ready features. She wasn\u2019t expecting me \u2013 that\u2019s clear. Not\u00a0me<\/em>. Or rather I should say that whatever it was she was expecting it wasn\u2019t this apparition without history or co-ordinates, without hinterland, without attitude and without alibi. In other words, this entirely\u00a0given<\/em>\u00a0human individual. It makes her laugh, she laughs! and in that moment it seems to me that she is also\u00a0given,\u00a0<\/em>in the sense that there is nothing in the situation to refuse her, to drive her back into some familiar oppositional position.<\/p>\n I\u2019m speaking of half a millisecond, but it jolts us. She giggles again, partly out of embarrassment, I think, and I can\u2019t help joining in, although I know it\u2019s chancy. Of course I apologize, profusely, but at the same time I have the feeling that I\u2019ve taken some kind of a step in a new direction: a wall opens and I find myself stumbling through, lunging through into somewhere intoxicatingly unrelated to the programme, unincorporable, for this fraction of an instant anyway, and somehow that changes everything, just barely, hardly even at all really, and yet \u2018completely\u2019. Stepping out from the bookshop, the streets feel different, more intimate, more adhesive, as if the light had thickened. It\u2019s as if, humiliated and distracted as I am, I\u2019d forgotten \u2013 temporarily, no doubt, but all the same, forgotten \u2013 how to be the imaginary being who looks on; forgotten that there is even such a thing as looking, that there could ever be anything to look at that did not include me.<\/p>\n I carry\u00a0Plume<\/em>\u00a0to Montmartre, to a scruffy bar I\u2019ve been eyeing up since my first day in the city. It\u2019s narrow with rickety wooden tables and I sit inside by the window and order a Pastis, first one then another, adding water as I see fit. My own little jug of water, my own little cloud in a glass. The barman is disinterested, the waiter slightly scornful, which is how it should be, exactly and ridiculously how it should be. The Pastis goes down, the alchemical reaction commences. My own little goblet of belonging. I open the book.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lyndon Davies is a poet, reviewer and essayist living in Powys. He has published four collections of poetry, Hyphasis<\/em> (Parthian Press 2006), Shield<\/em> (Parthian Press 2010),\u00a0A Colomber in the House of Poesy<\/em> (Aquifer 2014) and Bridge 116<\/em> (Aquifer 2016) He co-runs the Glasfryn Seminars, a series of discussion groups on aspects of literature and art, and was a co-organiser of The Poetry Jamboree, a yearly festival of innovative poetry at Hay on Wye. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first time I was in Paris was in 1974. I stepped off the bus and somebody \u2013 a young man, as it turned out \u2013 whispered \u201cShit\u201d in my ear, which surprised me, I must admit. Dumbstruck, I could only shake my head and shrug, assuming he was in urgent need of a convenience, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[40,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/images-1.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-UE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3512"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5621,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512\/revisions\/5621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}