When I finally left the southern hemisphere, it was to travel to China. The first two days in Beijing affected me so much I spent the third sheltering in the hotel room, anxious to avoid the madness that proliferated outside. What caused me to shelter—this considered, of course, in retrospect—was the sheer incomprehensibility of the city. Beijing and its residents operate based on a logic that has its roots in a system that is as different from mine as one is from zero. Thus, when I tried to rationalise the city, I failed. Nearly all aspects—the shops, the people, the transportation, the footpaths, the rituals, et cetera—did not make sense, and as a result, with Beijing beating down on my chest, I suffocated in the congestion of the streets, the weight of the feeling forcing a sharp intake of breath. After a full day in the room I decided to give up trying to understand the city and instead let it all roll over me like a zephyr. That moment—the moment I decided to give up—was a revelation. The city and its madness could now be viewed in the abstract, viewed with no shadow from above. No longer did I have to try and reduce it all to the limited scope of my own understanding. That revelation remained with me, thankfully, for the rest of the trip through Asia and it remains with me still. This is lucky as there are many other places and experiences on this blue planet—the United States included—that are as unforgiving to the psyche as Beijing was on those first few days.
Nonetheless, it is impossible, I think, to completely abandon the need to make sense of things. Returning to China, the only way I managed to glean any kind of ‘sense’ was to approach the country against the relief of India. China and India are the pair of upturned matching in a game of Memory. No other countries can be aptly compared and, continuing the metaphor, once the two are matched they are removed from the table. Both are colossi, both defy average measurements. Both defy, relentlessly. In this manner China—a mystery by itself—could be understood against India. India, for example, would likely resemble China if it, too, was the subject of a one-hundred-odd-year repressive regime. Both countries top a billion people, together they occupy a quarter the land on this earth, both are controlled—a flag atop a mountain—by governments in Beijing and Delhi, respectively.
It is from this angle that we get to Paris. As with China and India, Paris and New York are an upturned pair. It could be argued that London would form a triumvirate, but I haven’t been there so cannot say. Paris, perhaps, is an older brother to New York, a much older brother who is steeped in the restriction of adulthood and must be taken seriously. New York can act up, can be mischievous and daring. Paris, on the other hand, has reputation and responsibility. It is a bastion of art and culture, a centre of revolution, great battles, monuments, cathedrals, towers, and history. New York is an adolescent. It is intemperate and volatile, prone to violent change and dynamic because of it. Paris is dynamic, sure, but its dynamism comes after its maturity. Paris decided to become dynamic. New York cannot help but be. And therein, surely, lies the difference between the two. Paris has history New York cannot fathom. New York is both scorned and envied by Paris for its youth.
There is not so much different between the cities, however. I suppose that when any two entities share many of the same features, the possibility of divergence lessens. Wherever there is a polis there is politics, and whenever there is politics there are monuments to politicians. Whenever there is a surge in population, there is a concurrent surge in diversity. As diversity increases, people forge identity against the identity of others. Consequently, districts, neighbourhoods, blocks and streets take on personae. The surge in population leads people to demand the many trappings of city life; parks are built for recreation, great edifices for utility. Discarded buildings become historical sites and are eventually usurped by more historical sites and the combined effect of it all is that layer upon layer upon layer of humanity is shovelled onto the city, inching higher and higher and becoming more and more refined, and as the pile turns into a mesa turns into a hill turns into a mountain, like the survival of the fittest, the possibility for divergence from the historical tangent becomes more and more difficult. And for every mountain there is a legend of a mountain. And New York and Paris have been shrewd enough to appropriate the myth of themselves, lay it down and use it as foundation to build anew. In this manner, the myth of Paris and the myth of New York are born.
I arrived in Paris twelve hours late (my grasp of the international date-and-time line is as tenuous as my grasp of the international economic system). Luckily there was no one to meet me at the airport and as such my presence was not missed. That was almost a week ago. A long and exhilarating week of towers, arches and museums, cheap and heady red wine, language difficultly, promenades, restaurants, my family’s largesse, hotel beds, early mornings, crowds, gloves, jackets and hats. Paris is a wonderful city, in the true sense of the word. It is very hard here to do anything but flit one’s eyes from one vision to the next with a kind of religious wonder.
Much time in this city has been spent queuing. The line for the Eiffel Tower was two hours, the Louvre one, the Arch de Triomphe half. For the most part the waiting was tiresome. The alternative, however, is that you would enter immediately, experience immediately, and depart very soon after. There is a commonly-held belief—one which has been proven by various experiments—that chronic gamblers actually prefer to lose rather than win. That is, there is something in the chemical reactions of the brain that belies the fact that gamblers derive more joy from losing than they do from winning. Hypotheses about the psychology of this phenomenon suggest that when a gambler loses, they have an excuse to continue playing, to continue the action, to try and recover losses. Returning to the queues, then, I doubt I would derive the same satisfaction from the Eiffel’s summit or the Louvre’s richness or interior of the Arch if I had been able to access them immediately. Waiting, like fasting before a meal, builds expectation and desire. When you are hungry your body reverts to animalism: senses heighten and most else is forgotten in the carnal desire to eat. When the hunger is sated food tastes better as a result. A world in which every desire was sated immediately would be an insipid world indeed.
My last night in Paris was also that of Christmas Day. Paris during Christmas is a very special time and a place to be a part of. Much of the city I visited was luminous in blue and gold and white lights. A refined choice of colours, one fitting for the Parisian sensibility. Red would be too garish, silver too cliché, green downright common. Paris demands blue and white: every tree along Champs-Élysées glowed with the colours. Countless churches and castles and palaces were lit from below with spotlights so piercing that the entire buildings were lifted off the ground, hovering above their gardens like apparitions. The Eiffel Tower, high-definition in the distance, periodically took on a scattering of lights, synchronised, no doubt, to some grand opera outside the range of my hearing. All of this was set off by a Ferris-wheel at the end of the parade from which I took my perspective. Just a Ferris-wheel, nothing else—like a kamikaze-ride or bumper-cars—that would cheapen the mood. A Ferris-wheel of which every axis and strut was itself emblazoned with blue and white.
The effect of all this colour, of all these ubiquitous sights, was twofold. On the one hand Paris reinforced its mythical status, exhibiting itself as a kind of exploding star, courting the associations of an astral being, raising itself to the level of the cosmos, aligning itself with cosmogony. On the other hand, the city became an elegant and complex show. Half burlesque, a quarter parody, and an eighth each of mime, circus, aloofness and mocking humour. Indeed, Paris laughs at you not with you. The city does not need more friends or admirers. It does not need to court the casual visitor, it doesn’t even need to try and please. Paris is confident and arrogant, its residents the same. And as they should be. I applaud the gall of eschewing world trends to avoid cigarettes, obesity and excess by continuing to smoke indoors, continuing to satisfy the carnal pleasure of eating with the same fervour that many countries devote to military endeavours or patriotism, continuing to lavish cashmere, gold and diamonds on the person atop exquisite dress.
***
Tomorrow I leave Paris for EuroDisney. Forty minutes away from the CBD, it is one of the many iterations of DisneyLand. The place will be, I imagine, as surreal as Paris itself. At the very least it will be an experience in anthropology, a way into the lunacy and folly that characterises our species.
***
It is difficult in these transmissions to find a way to talk about people. My grasp of the craft is still so clumsy that I have not yet learnt how to portray without betraying. This could be a problem. Even the most spectacular photo of a landscape, the most startling photo of architecture, the most emotive photo of anything inanimate falls short—well short—of a photo of a person, any person. Although this phenomenon is likely testament to the arrogance of the human race rather than any innate quality, it is nonetheless a phenomenon that is current and real. Any form of writing, I hazard, is similar. There is very little about non fiction that is interesting when it doesn’t involve people, aside from subjects for specialists such as bird-watching or river-kayaking. Until I have more control over the ‘pen’, however, people shall remain on the peripheries and in the abstract. That does not mean, of course, that these experiences have been experienced alone. This trip to Paris, for example, first involved a dear friend from New Zealand and then an extremely generous uncle and his family. In New York I am lucky to be surrounded by very fine people, some good friends and a couple of enemies. I have mentioned before that the greatest part of this trip has been the people. This, I assure, holds true.
NB: A small selection of photos from Paris is available at (no Facebook membership required):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79126&l=3151b&id=585700346
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79129&l=a6c81&id=585700346
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