Primavera

 O spring has set off her green fuses....

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave but don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly

And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry

And all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be.

Breathe (In the Air)

Pink Floyd

David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Roger Waters

The Dark Side of the Moon

What's not to like? The world still turns. The tyrant is dead (OK that is wishful thinking, but it will happen.....) The Streets [sic] of Hormuz are opening to traffic, and oil is well.....

Apparently you can see the canals of Ken Hill from the dark side of the moon, though you might need a Hasselblad (and a mirror).....  But I am so happy there is a dark side - I was beginning to think it was just a flat cheese plate.  My only worry is that the space portal-loo doesn't seem to work....

Anyway, I have been out in my tractor - a harrowing experience [Stoppit!  Ed]....

Anyway again, I am glad that someone is ploughing the fields and scattering the good seed on the land. [Wir pflügen und wir streuen - Matthias Claudius, 1782 - Ed]....  Someone's got to do it, or the good Burghers of McDonald won't have the ultra-processed Fleurs du mal that Charlie Baudelaire so enjoyed.....

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,

N'ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins

Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,

C'est que notre âme, hélas ! n'est pas assez hardie.

Au lecteur

Les Fleurs du mal

Charles Baudelaire

(Who wrote in French, as Europeans do)

Anyway, yet again, to shut a strong lorry cort, I have been springing to my feets and wandering the pleasant lands around me, breathing the air, and not afraid to care.

I love the spring, largely because of the resurgence of life after the darkness and death of winter [Thank you Jesus - Ed], but also because of the physical warmth of sunshine and the uplifting light that brings us Vitamin D [An essential fat-soluble nutrient that regulates calcium and phosphate in the body, crucial for maintaining healthy bones, teeth, and muscles - Ed].

I love to see nature coming to life.  I love to walk where we have made our homes, and I am so grateful that, so far, at least, we have not been subjected to the extreme violence that is the daily and nightly diet of the citizens of Ukraine and much of the Middle East. I shudder in horror at the indiscriminate killing of ordinary people, the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, bridges, power plants etc.  But, we are fortunate - by chance.  It is a privilege, but that is by chance.  It has not always been so - there are plenty of reminders around us of the Second World War in the shape of concrete gun emplacements, bombing ranges and air bases. 

Say what you like, but this recent vortex of violence was unnecessary.  Forgive me for this quotation, but today's leader in The Guardian was a powerful statement of just how wrong things can be:  The US has squandered tens of billions of dollars, burned through its interceptors and torched relations with allies.  That may not bother Mr Trump, who had premised victory on the conditional reopening of a waterway that was not closed prior to the conflict.  But the war has also spooked markets, raised prices at home and showed signs of fracturing his Maga base.

Mr Trump chose to believe Benjamin Netanyahu's assurance that this would be a short and easy war, but soon found himself seeking an exit......  The war has destabilised the region and normalised talk of war crimes, further trashing the idea of a rules-based order..... 

The tide is out. The earth is scorched. But seven avocets can stand on one leg while Artemis [The ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness  and wild animals et al, sometimes called Cynthia - Ed].... while Artemis spins through space, leaving us breathless....

Near here the clouds add to the reflected beauty of beach scenes:

The wind blows fresh and cool, disturbing little but the dust and what's left of my hair.....

Sea lavender (limonium vulgare) brings colour to the dun and grey of winter:

Alexanders (smyrnium olusatrum), possibly the gift of the invading Roman legions, burst into life by the waysides:

Ramsons, or wild garlic (allium ursinum) fill the air with an unmistakable scent by the Ingol river [for which in 2018 Anglian Water funded the creation of a natural treatment wetland - instead of a traditional chemical upgrade - which now acts as a giant, living water purifier - Ed].

At Dersingham Bog National Nature Reserve [which merges with the now infamous refuge of Wolferton Fen - Ed] birch trees stand guard over rare and diverse species of plants such as bog asphodels, round-leaved sundew, white beaked sedge and cranberry....

We walk at Courtyard Farm, Ringstead, and admire the budding trees, as the sap rises and leaves unfurl. I am reminded of Charles Causley's Spring 1818, which commemorates John Keats's departure from this land, When spring fired her fusilladoes, and then we come across a Taiwan (or Formosan) cherry (prunus campanulata), which is another beautiful reminder of international disharmony and threat....

And then, as the sun slips away to add another layer of yellow to the sickening POTUS, we enter a field of cowslips (primula veris) which brings us back to the natural glory of spring in our part of the world, where delicate shoots go untrampled, and the cycle of life goes on.  In Look! We have come through! D H Lawrence wrote: 

We shall not look before and after.

We shall be, now.

We shall know in full.

We, the mystic NOW.

[NB, He also wrote:

Oh, America,

The sun sets in you.

Are you the grave of our day?

Ed.]

And there we have it.  A row of oaks march down towards the wash in the early morning light:

While our village church stands proud upon the hill, catching the farewell glance of the evening sun, a symbol, even to the unfaithful, that there is a place for differences of belief and practice.  If there is a god, then surely it is the same god that envelops Hegseth and Netanyahu and Khamenei?  

But then in truth the god that really matters is surely Apollo [The god of divine distance - the god who made mortals aware of their own guilt and purified them of it - Ed]? 

Well yes, but Apollo is also the god of light, music, prophecy, and healing, and, perhaps, above all, the god of the sun, without whom/which there would be no life, no spring, no resurrection....

Arrest my case.....

For one who has nothing to worry about:

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave but don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.....

Flanerie in Bold Monochrome

Un flâneur a Paris

The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect [flâneur], for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.....

Charles Baudelaire
The Painter of Modern Life

Paris. L'Être et le Néant: Being and Nothingness....  Benchmarks of life and the living.....

The destiny of every walking man is to immerse himself in the panorama surrounding him, to the point of becoming one with it and, ultimately, to vanish.

Federico Castigliano

Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris

....the city’s modernity is most particularly defined for him by the activities of the flâneur observer, whose aim is to derive ‘l’éternel du transitoire’ (‘the eternal from the transitory’) and to see the ‘poétique dans l’historique’ (‘the poetic in the historic’).

Christopher Butler 

Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900 – 1916

In Les Galeries nationales of Le Grand Palais, Resolutely Modern Toulouse-Lautrec entertains the shadows. Deep absences of colour stand before the being, and the nothingness.....

Encouraged by his photographic passion [and the success of Degas], electrified by the world of modern dancers and inventions, Lautrec never ceased to reformulate the space-time of the image. 

While on the street, optical illusions abound....

And in contrast a limo passes by, with all the sparkle and the grandeur of a leaping salmon, almost obscuring the eyes of wonder.....

In a quiet bar, a quiet un-american sits, confident that his golden era is to come.....

On the Île de la Cité work proceeds apace to restore Notre Dame in time for President Macron's 21st birthday.....

While in the nearby Sainte Chapelle, something of the medieval survives..... 

And so, walking on, for ever in search of magic.....

Looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call 'modernity'.....

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque."

Susan Sontag

On Photography

And in that picturesque world, we find fleeting forms of beauty, the ephemeral, the characteristic traits of modernity.....

Ahhh!  The blessed saints....

Sssshhh!

There are reasons to be optimistic.....

Reasons to try to distil the bitter or heady flavour of the wine of life....

To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.....

Charles Baudelaire 
The Painter of Modern Life

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.....

Charles Baudelaire
The Painter of Modern Life

Jeff Koons

Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres; 

Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!

Charles Baudelaire

Les Fleurs du Mal

*    *    *

The term flâneur has the basic meanings of “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, “loafer”—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”.

The term was used by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) to refer to someone who observes the city or their surroundings, experiencing physical strolling but also thinking and seeing philosophically. Walking for walking's sake and not in a hurry just to get from one place to another.

Paris, City of Light

A Moveable Feast

Don't put on any airs

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there

And they really make a mess out of you

(Bob Dylan - Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues)

If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life —
It is because we are not bold enough!

(Charles Baudelaire - Dedication to Les Fleurs du Mal, translated by Roy Campbell)

Bohemians - il y a quarant'ans

From Edgar Allen Poe to Bob Dylan, from Joyce to Simenon, Baudelaire to Queneau, Paris has touched the inspiration of generations of writers and artists. Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast (unfinished at his death in 1961) wrote that, There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were poor and very happy.....

The Left Bank, early 70s

Paris first took me in some forty years ago.  I think it was a little after someone dismembered Oscar Wilde's tomb and just before they buried Jim Morrison.  We lodged in the Rue d'Aboukir, not realising until afterwards that this seedy street was named after Napoleon's defeat at the hand of Nelson in the Battle of the Nile.  The room was tight, to say the least, up a spiral stair some seven floors, and the open bidet, the first I had ever seen, inspired my first novel (View from a Bidet, still unwritten!)  My innocence at the time was confounded by the hungry women who lined the streets at dusk, stretching out their arms to measure their pitches.  We found bars where absinthe still existed in unlabelled greenish bottles on high shelves.  I learned somethings about the drab canvas of life over moules marinières in the early hours and got a taste for the bohemian that still burns.

Prices in French Francs (10FF = c£1)

We dined at Chartier, and discovered steak tartare at Le Drouot (sadly no longer in business), and in those days Le Commerce, in the 15th arondissement, was also under the same management.  These bistrots were vividly different from anything we had experienced, with an irresistible conviviality. I return whenever I can, and on the day I borrowed the above menu I sat next to a man with a face so wrinkled it seemed to be made of corrugated cardboard.  Here was one who would take the air willingly in graveyards, when take the air he must. I understood then that the end was near, or at least fairly near.  No amount of rognons saute sauce moutarde would stave off the need for his epitaph soon:

Hereunder lies the above who up below

So hourly died that he lived on till now. 

Break bread with Samuel Beckett I did, though we did not speak much. Strangely it was on the very same day, one year later, that he died, and he now lies with Suzanne in Montparnasse cemetery.

Conviviality! This week I sat next to a Parisien who also first ate chez Chartier some forty years ago.

Bouillon Chartier today

At 102 Boulevard du Montparnasse La Coupole conjures a slightly more upmarket sense of history. Here Art Deco reigns, and here, since 1927, the famous have partied amongst the pillars and mosaics. Brassai, Picasso, Man Ray, Derain; Georges Simenon dined with Josephine Baker, whose image adorns the cupola; Matisse drank beer here, Henry Miller took breakfast, and Joyce held court. More recently, since Sartre and de Beauvoir have moved on, Patti Smith played guitar, Serge Gainsbourg lunched with Jane Birkin, and Francois Mitterand took his very last meal, a lamb curry, at table 82.  

I take a p'tit cafe creme at the bar, only to learn that on Bastille Day 2014 this bar will have become history - though the restaurant will survive.

In 1973, as part of President Pompidou's drive to modernise Paris (on the coat heels of Hausmann), the Montparnasse Tower was inaugurated. The 59th floor, open to the sky, is at 689 feet above the street level.  

View from the bridge - the 59th floor, Montparnasse

A lift takes you to the 56th floor in 38 seconds, at 19 feet per second. From here, whatever the weather, you can gaze down across the city, or have your photo taken against les toits de Paris.

Or lean out to touch the sky:

Paris is not a city of skyscrapers. The Montparnasse Tower is really the only modern high point in the centre of the city, though the Eiffel Tower, which was built in 1889, is the highest structure at 1063 feet.

The Arc de Triomphe, which was inaugurated in 1836, is only 164 feet high, but is still a much visited viewpoint, set as it is in the midst of one of the craziest roundabouts in the world.  

It is just possible to glimpse the arch on the wing of this speeding car.....

The Pompidou centre is an attraction in its own right, packed with artistic interest, and framed by tubes. But it does offer a view over the rooftops of Les Halles, where the markets used to fill the heart of the city. It also has some seriously unfinished staircases....

And the lead-clad roofs and chimney stacks continue to fascinate, where there is no smoke, without fires....

You can just about hear Rodolfo tearing paper....

The Basilica of Sacre Coeur de Montmartre is the second highest point in Paris after the Eiffel Tower, standing 200 metres above the river Seine, though the dome itself is a mere 83 metres high.  It was completed in 1912, though not consecrated until 1919.

The oldest viewpoint is at the top of the towers of Notre Dame, completed in 1345. From here grotesque gargoyles contemplate the changing world below them, bemused by the trails of queuing tourists, and puzzled by what they observe through the political windows around them at the heart of French government.

From the heights, the descent into the underworld can be awesome. The sewers and the catacombs attract the curious, but to traverse the city it is necessary to be swallowed by the earth.  

And then you are entombed within the system of tunnels and stations.  Flashing lights, clasping doors and whooshing trains blur continuously around you.

Some trains self-driven, zooming past each other with passengers at the wheel.....

Then, between the extremes, Paris at street level is a bustle of life, with a population of two and a quarter million in its administrative area (and with over twelve million in the metropolitan area it constitutes one of the largest centres of population in Europe). However, with the Seine coursing through the centre and plenty of parks there is always somewhere calm to light up une Gitane....

There is no shortage of sights to see, or of things to do, and there are still red lights, even if not as once famed around Le Moulin Rouge....

In the lull between the twentieth century world wars Paris was cheap for Americans, and the world literary scene was energised by the presence of philanthropists and benefactors like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach. James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway both benefited from the support they found, and others, such as Scott Fitzgerald, joined the party. Cafes such as Les Deux Magots became haunts of the literati. Brasserie Lipp, in St Germain, and La Closerie des Lilas, were favourites of the Hemingways, while the Joyces preferred the more expensive Michaud (now Le Comptoir des Saints Pères).  

Truth is that that was nearly a century ago, and though there are connections with those days, things have moved on. Truth is that Paris has not been cheap for decades, and even Hemingway (one of the last of that generation to pass on) has been dead for over fifty years.  But then the truth is, according to me at least, that there's something vaguely romantic about the scruffier bars of Paris, the ones without the glamorous histories.  Truth is alcohol is a universal truth in the City of Light, and there are any number of bars happy to accommodate the least promising of literary dreams.  Some will be romantic. if plain (though there's always someone reflecting in your glass).....

Others will be more public.....

And some will be more of un cauchemar....

While there are still plenty of places to treat yourself, pretending that the royalties will eventually come through...

Among the Americans who made something of Paris was Jack Kerouac, who hit town just a few years before me, attempting to track his French roots.  In Satori in Paris he records, in characteristic helter-skelter style, his arrival, and his brief sojourn. Like many before him, and since, there was a hint of alcohol about his experience. Towards the end of his stay he tries to see his editor in his French publishing house. 

"He's out to lunch too."  But the fact of the matter was, he was in New York that day but she couldn't care less to tell me and with me sitting in front of this imperious secretary who must've thought she was very Madame Defarge herself in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" sewing the names of potential guillotine victims into the printer's cloth, were a half dozen eager or worried writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves "Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I'll prove it with this here manuscript called 'Silence au Lips' all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh" 

...... Agh, all I feel like singing is Jimmy Lunceford's old tune:

"It ain't watcha do

It's the way atcha do it!"

Chartier, 2010

As Papa Hem said, This book is fiction but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. Over the years I have had great times in Paris; I've met all the great painters, performed in all the theatres, written all the great novels, and drunk all the great wines.  I'm almost buried in all the cemeteries, and, like Mesrine, I have robbed all the great banks. Oh, and like Jean Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil, I have been in all the great films, mais....

Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule

Des troupeaux d'autobus mugissants près de toi roulent

Langoisse de l'amour te serre le gosier

Comme si tu ne devais jamais plus être aimé.....

(Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone)

The empty carousel turns....

Je suis seul ce soir avec mes rêves

Je suis seul ce soir sans ton amour

Le jour tombe, ma joie s'achève

Tout se brise dans mon coeur lourd

Je suis seul ce soir avec ma peine

J'ai perdu l'espoir de ton retour

Et pourtant je t'aime encor et pour toujours

Ne me laisse pas seul sans ton amour

(Jean Casanova et Rose Noël 1971)

Though the light may not always be perfect, and the rain may glisten the trottoirs, I love Paris - always have, and always will!

Doukipudonktan!

(Zazie dans le métro, Raymond Queneau, 1959)