In Paris
In the fresh depth of the morning the city started its
action without ceremony
In believing in the purpose of the day was a doing
Apart from the muscular routine of actions based around a
system of
Monetary exchange required for survival
The predominant sound the combustion engine
The Seine is a peaceful looking river compared to the
Thames, that swirls and frets against its banks like a revengeful ghost. The
Seine on the other hand oozes European languor and lazily drifts, it has a
different colour also to my home town’s river, a sort of bluish green that
changes aspect in the sun. It sits and waits instead of eyeing you up for
consumption, saying, ‘Go on, throw yourself in I dare you!’
Swallows and Terns abound in the mornings haze, as I look
down I see grey hairs on my forearms today in Paris without out a plan my aim
is to cover as much ground as possible in the early part of the day, before the
life sapping heat descends and smothers the city in its stifling malaise.
A fattening around the middle man of perhaps his mid-fifties
stops by the river’s edge and takes of his white vest, placing it on a bollard.
Facing the sun, he begins a routine of gentle flexing approaching the idea of
exercise.
City of ancient myth, city of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and
Mallarme. City where the ghost of Walter Benjamin haunts the arcades. His ghost
lost in limbo unhappily cut before his prime, shadow on the boulevards.
Legend and desire collaborate inside this maze this
labyrinth of ghosts inside each one
The I is the minotaur, frustrated lost boiling to death
inside its skin.
A motorcycle starts a siren clangs past, some semi silent
padding in clear plastic jelly shoes distracts the gargoyles eye view of it
all.
Looking up from the dust like an unholy man, mad with the
sun bleached ravages of desire, this is historical living for thirty euros a
day.
Retreat to a shady café to consult the map, tomorrow we will
be back in London and this day will be dream of the past a split second frame.
Parc Des Buttes, landscaped slope, jungle in the city, lush
green unfolding before the metro stop, in Mallarme, ‘some golden galleys /
beautiful as swans sleeping on streams of purple redolence.’
The feeding baby in the Picasso museum turns the mother into
a cubist swollen nipple like three triangles an ovoid and an angry hexagon.
Tourists make their way from picture to picture, taking pictures. What would
old man Benjamin make of that digital reproduction, the aura drains before my
eyes, I was never keen on that period of Picasso anyway, they look like stupid
cartoons.
The swollen bodies massed and writhing in the now late
afternoon heat which keeps on rising, it is a dangerous age to live in some
say, no persecution as such but insipid normalised consent and constant
surveillance now. Find some shade to mark time to sprinklers ticking clock,
loungers evaporate into the grass, just see the feet then gone, disappeared
into the ground. In the air the trace of two eyes like frosted snow globes of
Paris, waiting in steaming silence.
At Gard Du Nord way too early the gathering throng outside
the main entrance watch entranced at Afro Robotics, the scene is transfixing,
here is modernism, here is a multi -level section of this modern strata, the
convergence of forces at a point central to its existence.
Transactions are taking place, observations made, eyes
follow eyes, raw survival played with ease, the camp with its rules and order, the
dandyism of it all is central to its point of entry into Europe, a place of
dream exchange of heat and food, sweat and movement.
