paris in 9 moments
a report on my third week living in Paris, excerpted from my Monday night letters to my patrons.
Dear M,
I am going to try something different this week.
instead of writing a lingering letter to thread through the days and embroider out of them some narrative or theme, I will do the opposite.
I will simply show you a collection of moments — in all their simple complexity — and let them fall into space. moments which, decades from now, I will still remember, because by telling you about them, I am saving these moments for that future when.
are you ready? here they are: here is my 3rd week in Paris, in 9 moments.
01. winter flowers at the kotte cafe / tuesday afternoon
I journal at a tiny white cafe with minimalist decor: a handful of old wooden tables, a few framed line drawings, long, thin benches for seating. the young french owner has ongoing conversations with everyone in the cafe as if we were in his living room, and he was making us coffee. his partner is korean. she pours me water. she leaves dressed in her coat and returns twenty minutes later with long winter flowers wrapped in paper. she takes the old flowers out and puts new ones into floor vases. they are delicate, ethereal. suggestive. I think about how different it is, to be korean-french, rather than korean-american.
03. the adjacent closeness of contact improv / wednesday afternoon
my first contact improv class. by the end, I moved - danced, you could call it - with another woman for fifteen minutes. we enter slowly a river beyond thought, beyond ordinary consciousness and self-consciousness, beyond inhibition. now I understand why, when I first arrived, I saw French people rolling on the floor with their eyes floating to the sky, as if on hallucinogens or in some altered dream state. these humans slipped through the rabbit hole, shrunk themselves to fit through tiny doors, and have now fallen here, into this small white yoga studio in Paris. experiencing the world through the body first feels like being drugged. in a good way. why don’t we live like this more often.
the dance was like tango except genderless and leaderless; the sensation of two bodies moving in three hundred and sixty degrees of possibility. I felt a closeness to her which was different from tango: a closeness of simply being human, being here. alive and breathing. it was a feeling of adjacent closeness — a soft intimacy without the dynamism of duality, the male and female energies in opposition. if tango is about polarity, about love and war, about union and disintegration, about intimacy with its opposite, then contact improv is a closeness which has no end and no beginning. if tango feels like a kiss, then contact improv feels like spooning.
07. eating an éclair au café at parc des buttes-chaumont / friday afternoon
that morning a different friend makes a public post about her abuse experience. I reread my old drafts of an unfinished essay. then I read the FBI's definition of rape. “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim” I’m in a bad place, so I leave the apartment to walk for three hours through two parks — parc de belleville and parc des buttes-chaumont. early blossoms are there waiting for me. I buy an éclair au café at the boulangerie and sit on the bench with my face to the sun. I think about how I forgot to put on sunscreen. I eat the éclair au café in three bites. then I think about how I’d rather be laying down. so I lay down on the grass by the pond with the dramatic rock formation in the center and the ducks doing their thing, and I keep my eyes closed until I almost fall asleep. but I don’t.
08. the beekeeper at the farmer’s market / sunday morning
it is stormy weather without the storm, and I am at the farmer’s market. for the first time in three weeks, I see rich and sensual pleasures within arm’s reach — tables of oysters and clementines and endives grown in the ground, a banquet of cheeses and sausages, fried churros and fish, carrying with it the scent of the sea. the market feels like many worlds collapsed like drawers inside a world, tucked between the two streets in Paris. for once, the good things in this city are not hidden behind elaborate doors and facades, protected by glass cases and a flourish of boxes. each stall takes me elsewhere, to suggestions of lives outside of the city - to lavender fields, the country life, mountains of my imagination.
I buy a small jar of honey from the beekeeper. he is an older French man with a soothing voice; the idyllic image of a beekeeper before I even knew that I had an idyllic image of a beekeeper. I wait for him to give me my change and for a moment I am taken there, to his bees and his flowers, to the unknown third place, beyond this place we’re in, past all the places I’ve been.
09. the old librairie / monday afternoon
it is a small room with no empty space but filled with old books. I ask the bookstore owner if he sells journals, and he shows me yellowed newspapers folded and wrapped in plastic - from 1944, Berlin. I only sell old books, he says. he explains that here, bookstores are called librairies, and libraries are called bibliothèques. what you want is a papeterie, where they sell paper. he gives me the address, points to the number and explains that numbers in Paris go up the farther away you are from the Seine river (the problem is with streets that run parallel to the river). then something about numbers or buildings expanding outwards like a snail’s home. he is looking for the word. shell, I said. yes, shell! he says.
on the walk home, it begins to hail. my umbrella breaks from the force of the wind. when I finally get home my ankles are bleeding.
a collection of 4 things I am asking myself
1) how big is the circle of your life? how long, after living in one city continuously, before you draw this circle (in pencil or chalk or permanent pen) put the things in it that make you feel comfortable. and then, what prompts you to redraw it?
4) what makes a city beautiful? when they say that paris is beautiful city, the most beautiful city in the world, where does its beauty live? the buildings? the doors? the pastries? the river?