The
Flâneur
The
realisation that I am not in Paris any more strikes me, two hours
after my arrival back to Tallinn, so abruptly that I change my Romeo
status, first from 'date' to 'rencontres', then from 'rencontres' to
'plans cul' ('sex'). Unable to suppress the disquiet caused by this
separation and hoping that a walk would distract me, I set my steps
towards the Old Town, just as normally after the departure of a man
who I have grown intimate with during his visit here...
During
the painful transition from the mental state of one city to that of
another, I discover to my surprise that, instead of a constant
longing for the week I spent in Paris
- and this is how it differs from
the separation from a person! -, I feel happy to be back in Tallinn.
It is not simply because it is good to be back home, back in my
habitual environment, that this home is, with its
smells around cafés and restaurants, with
the peculiar way how its people react to me when I pass them, with
its general urban geography, exclusively or particularly close to me,
that it is there, outside me, where its charm lies. It is
rather that it is good to be back in
Tallinn after having been somewhere
else, and it is I, not the city, that
has been enriched.
So,
far from erasing from my memory the sensations that Paris generously
offered me, my present walk revives them more vigorously than the
voluntary act of recollection could do, bringing about with them, for
brief moments, a clear vision of all the walks I have ever had in
other cities of the world, including those I have had in the past in
Tallinn. These flashbacks are not simply sudden bursts of smells,
tastes and voices from the distance; these smells, tastes and voices
are always alive, they cross with each other in a manner that is
abstract and material at the same time, turning the city I inhabit
into an alive conglomeration of all the metropolitan sensations I
have had in the past, revealing to me the very urban character of my
strollings. In these instances, I am a flâneur
walking in a tremendous joy, not in Paris, not in London, New York or
Rome, and not in fact in Tallinn, but in a City, a super-city and a
zero-city at the same time, created for me, created in me, created by
me. And I understand why at one moment Tallinn manages to put me down
to the point of sickness and at another to enchant me so utterly that
I then call it tenderly "my town". Other cities seem to us
more colourful simply because we are not there, because we lack
familiarity with them, and, provided that we opened our minds and
senses to them in the first place, we always want to revisit the
cities where we have already been. But we also want to, we need
to return to our own city, because it is only there that these other
cities find their full justification, that they really become alive
for us. In a sense, we do not enjoy
other cities, we simply collect impressions there. Impressions that,
like grains, will only flourish, if we take care to seed them
properly, in our own soil.
And
so, when something in the Lembitu park awakes in me the taste of the
espresso I had with Régis at a cosy corner café in the 11th
arrondissement right before my departure for the airport - not more
than twelve hours ago -, or the vision of particular shades of gray
in the morning sky over Montparnasse five days earlier, when I was
waiting for Kenji, shortly, when something reveals to me that my
senses are still in Paris, that I spent the week there in a single
breath, in the continuous present, it is precisely this web of
impressions that helps me survive in the world of the past and the
future, into which I had entered once again.
Proust
In the
morning of our one-day trip to
Chartres and Illiers-Combray,
Kenji hands to me, as soon I have greeted him with a kiss and seated
myself next to him in the first carriage of the line 6 train,
the copy of Du côté
de chez Swann he has brought with him
and asks me to read the opening passage of the second part of the
Combray
section:
"Combray de loin, à dix lieues
à la ronde, vu du chemin de fer, quand nous y arrivions la dernière
semaine avant Pâques, ce n'était qu'une église résumant la ville,
la représentant, parlant d'elle et pour elle aux lointains et, quand
on approchait, tenant serrés autour de sa haute mante sombre, en
plein champ contre le vent, comme une pastoure ses brebis, les dos
laineux et gris des maisons rassemblées qu'un reste de rempart du
Moyen-Âge cernait çà
et là d'un trait aussi parfaitement circulaire qu'une petite ville
dans un tableau de primitif."
Like a notification attached to a present that we have
just received from an anonymous benefactor, these words cause us
tremendous marvel. "La dernière semaine avant Pâques",
the last week before Easter, "Holy Week" in Moncrieff's
translation... it is exactly then that we are, like Proust's
narrator, heading for Combray, a small town of three thousand
inhabitants around one hundred kilometres south-west of Paris!
The
enthusiastic voice of a TV-reporter echoing through thickly-curtained
windows, the lazy gaze of four or five young men spending their
leisure hours drinking on the stairs of the local bank office, a
tractor coming from a field where families are already planting
crops... Illiers would be in no way special amongst tens of similar
settlements in the Eure-et-Loire department, if it were not for
Marcel Proust, who spent some of his summer vacations there as a
child and later wrote it famous as Combray
in his majestic À la recherche du temps perdu.
Then the town simply bore the name Illiers, but in 1971, at the
centennial anniversary of Proust's birth, its connection with the
author - who had, by that time, not only became the favourite child
of the French intelligentsia but also one of the greatest
representatives of European literary Modernism - was solidified by
the addition of the Combray part to its official name.
"On éprouve une sensation
étrange quand on traverse on voiture une ville qui a abandnonné une
partie de ses droits à une réalité indépendante au profit du rôle
attribué par un écrivain qui y passa jadis quelques étés quand il
était petit garçon, à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle. Mais
Illiers-Combray semble y prendre grand plaisir."
(Alain
de Botton, Comment
Proust peut changer votre vie,
Éditions Flammarion, 2010, pp. 213-214)
Illiers-Combray
takes great pleasure from hosting that particular type of people who
could be called Proust tourists, the people who have not just got
through the thousands of pages of his magnum
opus
but who read and re-read him with a natural ease and elegance, for
whom there is no other universe more complete, more dignified, more
real than that of Proust, for whom such journeys are
self-evident, even necessary. The smile that the
administrator of Aunt Léonie's House from afar bestows on us upon
our arrival reflects a recognition of a certain fraternity among
those for whom À la recherche du temps
perdu is the holiest of holy books. And
it is a holy book for me: it is this that I took in bed with me every
night for six and a half months before my trip, it is with this that
I saluted almost each of the mornings, the sole purpose of the rest
of my day being to return to Proust, my only real companion at that
time.
Right
after our arrival at the Illiers-Combray train station, Kenji and I
suddenly become very excited and start looking for our cameras. A
passage in Alain de Botton's brilliant How
Proust Can Change Your Life immediately
comes into my mind, the passage in which he lists the symptoms
characteristic for the readers who are too confident in Proust, who
respect him too much, one of these symptoms being a wish to visit
Illiers-Combray. We know, of course, that our touristic eagerness
indicates just a tiny part of our passion for Proust's novel, that to
pay him full respects we did not have to leave our homes, that
opening the book would have done just as well. In de Botton's words:
"Ce n'est donc pas Illiers-Combray que nous
devrions visiter : pour rendre à Proust un hommage authentique, il
nous faut regarder notre monde à nous avec ses yeux à lui, et non
pas son monde à lui avec nos yeux à nous."
(A.
de Botton, op.
cit.,
p. 218)
But if we have learnt the lesson (as we hope we have),
if we have learnt to look at our own world with the precision,
fluidity and impartiality of Proust's glance, if the stained forks
and spoons in our kitchen inspire us just as much as those at the
Ritz, if the bad painting on a wall of the vestibule of our office is
able to evoke in us a visual world richer than the entire Louvre, why
then are we still tempted to go to Illiers-Combray, to Cabourg, to
Venice? If the entire world has become Proustian for us, why should
we still want to go these towns, towns that are explicitly his?
At a large map of Illiers-Combray, where we find the
directions to Swann's way and the Guermantes way, on a bridge on the
Vivonne, in the rooms of the narrator and his aunt, at St-Jacques
church, in all these places known to me from the novel I do not
encounter simply a ghost whose existence I have so far only believed
in. I can see, I can touch real objects; at every step they confirm
their materiality to me, confirm that the appreciation of Proust does
not have to be necessarily purely aesthetical, that there are
complementary ways to pay him one's respects. And so the ritualistic
aspect of my journey becomes clear to me.
I realise that it is not at all an exaggeration to call
my voyage a pilgrimage...
Paris
Happy to have easily found the
building on 102 Boulevard Haussmann, I smile to myself and take a
photo of the plaque that informs that Marcel Proust lived here from
1907 to 1919. A woman washing the stairs of the next house avoids
looking in my direction, but her unability to understand why I am
here at 7 o'clock on Monday morning cannot escape me.
Down the avenue lined with
trees, Paris bells ring on the breeze...
I
have just paid my respects to Proust at his grave and am looking for
the section of Père Lachaise where Gertrude Stein is buried. Two
women are going to work through the cemetery (it is 8 AM, Wednesday
morning). One of them, absent-mindedly listening to her friend,
smiles at me. A week later in Kadriorg I smile in the same way to an
elderly man who, having forgotten that his nose is running in the
rain, is watching construction workers unpack newly-arrived
materials.
Two
white panels in the dim corner of a museum hall. An oblique string at
the bottom part of each. In front of each a big needle attached to an
almost invisible nylon thread. The needle approaches to and withdraws
from the string in an aleatory fashion. When the needle touches the
string, its vibration generates a trill.
In a convent.
Or an oriental monk alone in the
mountains.
Musicale.
Takis Vassilakis. Centre Georges Pompidou.
People
have books at home. Good literature. Il
faut cultiver notre jardin.
Groups
of two or three smoking at the entrances to buildings. Il
fume toujours dans la rue...
(a phrase from one of the first dialogues in my first French
textbook). I never manage
to buy a pack of Les
Gauloises, though.
"Pardon, monsieur, est-ce que
vous avez une cigarette?" a girl of my age, seeing me smoking,
asks me in front of the Opera.
"Merci, monsieur!"
"Monsieur reflechît,"
Régis replies for me when the vendor at a sandwich stall is ready to
fill my order.
At the entrance to the women's
department of Galeries Lafayette, a woman is yelling on the phone at
someone who she calls "monsieur" while her friend is
smoking in a two-metre distance. Her anger is short-termed, very
precise, not all-encompassing; it will not poison her life. As soon
as she hangs up, she is back to normal.
In the line to Sainte-Chapelle, a
middle-aged couple and a single mother from the United States have
been talking for fifteen minutes with indignation about the fact that
the special permit someone has given them could not guarantee a quick
entry.
"I don't
like the subject matter," an American woman says to her son on
her way out of the salle
of Musée d'Orsay where the paintings of Paul Gauguin are exhibited.
The eyes of an American teenager
in a baseball T-shirt are blank not because he has not noticed the
gay couple holding hands pass by (as he wants us or them to believe)
but because he has been taught that it is not polite to ogle.
They talk enthusiastically about
someone who they know at home.
The Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower,
Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Americans in Paris...
Young women are not afraid to use
lipstick. Men often wear a close-fitting jacket, a carefully tied
scarf and trousers rolled up at ankles. Shoes of good quality, always
clean. No fear of colours.
When I eventually dress up like
this, two girls at a German bookstore in Mortmartre want to take a
photo of me.
"You
want to take a photo of me?
Why?" I ask, flattered.
The
banks of Boulevard de Clichy are occupied by noisy groups of rebeus.
"Madame, madame, madame,"
one of them addresses me, turning his head like a clock hand, as I
pass, while the others go on with their chat.
Near Place de la Bastille, a man
waiting next to me to cross the street says something. It is only
after he has added "Ah bon?!" that I realise that his first
words were directed to me, the words that I recognise now as "Tu
es joli".
A man with puppy eyes has just
been quarreling with, or is being consoled by, his boyfriend at a
street corner in the Marais. My passing interrupts them for a few
seconds.
It
is then that I decide to buy the
latest number of Têtu.
"Bonjour,
beau garçon,"
a young woman salutes me on Rue des Rosiers on the second day of my
trip. "Beau garçon"
and not "monsieur", because I am in the Marais, wearing a
huge V-neck on a bare chest, because young gay men are flattered when
somebody compliments their appearance, because she wants to sell me
something.
"Je
m'appelle Aurore, je suis lesbienne," she introduces herself and
tells me that she represents an organisation that supports young gays
and lesbians who have been disowned by their families. She asks a lot
of questions about me and my trip, shows a self-made magazine titled
Gavroche,
and then returns to her presentation, which she ends with the words
"la solidarité gay-lesbienne".
Although indifferent to LGBT
issues and not particularly interested in the magazine and the free
entry to an exhibition it permits, I give her ten euros.
"Ah, vraiment?" she
exclaims as if she cannot believe her ears.
"Pourquoi pas?" I
respond and smile to her. My smile is a little forced.
After
I have left her I realise that it was in my French rather than in
what she told me that I made the investment. My unease dissolves. And
Gavroche
turns
out to be a good introduction to the local folklore.
In
a open box of old books on Quai Voltaire, an old Gallimard version of
Le Temps
retrouvé
catches my attention. I stop.
"Ça
aide bien à s'endormir," a bouquiniste with long curly hair and
a swollen face approaches to me.
"Et pas seulement à
s'endormir, mais aussi passer la journée, passer toute la vie
effectivement," I respond, surprised by the ease with which I
utter these words.
Encouraged
by my eloquence, the bouquiniste goes on to express his regrets that
people do not read as much as they used to, that book stalls have to
give way to sandwich stands, that his old and honorable profession is
quickly dying. He points at a white building opposite the street -
Hôtel
du Quai Voltaire, I read - and says that it was there that Baudelaire
wrote some of Les
Fleurs du mal.
He then seems
to have something to do at his other boxes but whenever I grab a book
for browsing he is back next to me not only recommending it highly
but also throwing in, just as in passing, bits of literary history
related to it. In case of cheaper books he only indicates the price.
"Si
vous auriez Du côté
de chez Swann...,"
I begin, mistaking with the tense of the verb, to explain why it has
taken me so long to decide what I want (for it is only that volume of
Proust that I would be willing to buy unhesitatingly, considering my
journey to Illiers-Combray less than twenty-four hours ago and the
fact that I have already bought lots of books during my trip and do
not want to make any impulsive purchases any more). At the same time
I am fervently looking for a book that I could buy to thank the
bouquiniste for everything that he has showed me, for all the stories
that he has shared with me, for the stimulating conversation on one
of the very few subjects in the world that I am really passionate
about, a conversation the kind of which I have never had in any
language with a random person on the street.
"Au revoir!"
Did I hear him right? I go on.
"Au revoir, monsieur!"
the bouquiniste repeats, as if preparing to close his boxes and
deliberately avoiding any further eye contact with me.
Something is not right. I put the
book back. Did I offend him somehow? Perhaps I should go...
I go.
When the bouquiniste sees me
slowly walk away, what was real amiability just an moment ago quickly
turns into a rainbow of emotions: from professional pride ("Au
revoir!") to a commercial disappointment ("Putain!")
expressed as if by a schoolboy who has just lost his bet, then to
real fury ("Vous vous foutez de ma gueule?") and
indignation that I do not want the books that he has.
I
do not know if I should smile about the fact that Proust also manages
to cause me trouble in Paris, or if I should simply increase my pace.
I am already far from the man and cannot catch his words any more
except for the title of the volume I mentioned, to his vexation:
"Du
côté de chez Swann,
Du
côté de chez Swann..."
Two
or three girls laugh about what they probably think is an obscure
literary quarrel. I suddenly become very happy. For the next half an
hour, when loitering on the banks of the Seine, I cannot conceal from
the passers-by a big smile on my lips.
Paris...
On the next day, the bouquiniste
has, like a king, regained his position. Looking sadly into the
distance on a street empty of people, he has only his books to rule.
Vieux
bouquiniste, belle fleuriste, comme on vous aime, vivant poème ! Sur
les quais du vieux Paris...
The
distinctive nose I immediately recognise on Pont au Double belongs to
a famous gay porn actor who, dressed almost entirely in black and
lacking any sign of pretentiousness of fashion, is heading through
the crowds towards Notre Dame. Even though French, and probably
Parisian, he is as timid as a person who is learning to get to know,
with an open mind, and without too much touristic enthusiasm, the
town in which he has found himself on his own for the first time. I
forget my hunger and, instead of setting off to look for a brasserie
in the Latin Quarter, follow him.
Old
men and women walking very slowly with crutches on the narrow
passageway of the market of Boulevard Edgar Quinet on a Saturday
morning. Ils
se tiennent la main, ils ont peur de se perdre et se perdent
pourtant...
Lots of bags of Gucci and Louis
Vuitton on Boulevard Saint-Germain. The bourgeois, really bourgeois.
J'habite
à Saint-Germain-des-Prés, et chaque soir j'ai rendez-vous avec
Verlaine...
A couple in their thirties stops
at the entrance to a peep show on Rue Saint-Denis. The woman pretends
that she is looking for something else, but the man, knowing his wife
better, smiles and enters the establishment, forcing her to do the
same.
People smile more in Goutte d'Or.
At a green iron bridge over Canal
Saint-Martin, a group of people are standing around what I eventually
recognise as a man with a wound in the stomach. Blood stains on his
hands and clothes, on the pavement. Two men kneel and say something.
About him? To him? Some minutes later the man is covered by a woollen
blanket.
Full moon over Place de l'Opéra,
illumining the Seine, the silent courtyards of old apartment
buildings; not shy, not indifferent, a little proud, even insolent
perhaps, to take interest in the city and its people...
If I did not know about the role
of Parisian cafés in the history of Western art and philosophy, I
would not probably even notice, on awnings above round iron tables
and rattan-style chairs, the letters that indicate that I am now at
Le Select or La Rotonde, now at Les Deux Magots or Le Flore.
"Je
sais pas, je suis désolé," I apologise when
two girls ask me, at my first night in Paris, for directions to some
restaurant.
"Île Saint-Louis?" a
woman whose mother tongue is not French asks me some days later on
Quai de Conti. I think I know in what direction she should go. I
reply that I am not a local and cannot help her.
A man is looking for the next
metro station in front of the Palais Garnier. I tell him, although
adding that I am not entirely sure.
At Balzac's grave in Père
Lachaise in the morning of the penultimate day of my trip, an old
woman is looking for the crematory. I show her the way.
Paris
is not the world's biggest city any more, but it is the most granular
one. I am impressed by the grandeur of the Louvre and the Hôtel
de Ville, but it is only after I have walked an entire boulevard with
its cafés, kiosks, galleries, boulangeries,
épiceries,
apartment buildings, post offices, fish stalls, supermarkets,
laveries
- none of them showing any sign of superfluous pretentiousness - that
I feel that I have seen the world.
"Paris
is a delicate city, a city with curves. It lacks the solidity of
North-American cities, the rigidity of London, the dignity of Rome."
I
should rather try to describe my first impression of Paris through
the image of budding tree leaves, crooked branches and the wintery
sky at the exit of the Richard-Lenoir metro station.
I
clean my shoes at least twice a day. Someone has stepped on dog poop.
Always
lost, especially in the Marais. No map, no habit of using Google
Maps. Even if I have a map, Kenji says that I am un
peu comme une femme
with it.
To
meet Régis at Cirque d'hiver, I need to go to Boulevard Beaumarchais
and walk in the direction of Place de la République. Instead, I see
the golden statue of Place de la Bastille.
Having
established that I am on the border of the 3rd and the 4th
arrondissement, I set my steps up north to return to my flat. But
half an hour later I have no other option but to take the metro,
because a street sign indicates that I have arrived at Rue de Rivoli.
Happy
to have discovered parts of the city that I would have never known in
case of a strict planning.
Like
an author organising details to properly conclude his novel, the city
leads me at my last night back to Île Saint-Louis. It is here that,
a week ago, a girl with dark complexion and bird's eyes proudly
introduced herself to me:
"Je
m'appelle Paris, vous êtes qui?"
And
as always, on my last flânerie,
the city itself presents to me the churches, the passages, the
monuments that I had already given up visiting...
Intersections
The
French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm
pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is
so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from
chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if
he can only become a Parisian he will at least master the art of
living. Paris intimidates its visitors when it doesn't infuriate
them, but behind both sentiments dwells a sneaking suspicion that
maybe the French have got it right, that they have located the juste
milieu, and that their particular blend
of artistic modishness and cultural conservatism, of welfare-statism
and intense individualism, of clear-eyed realism and sappy
romanticism - that these proportions are wise, time-tested and as
indisputable as they are subtle.
If
so, then why is the flâneur
so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over
this city with the gilded cupola gleaming above the Emperor's Tomb
and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on
the roof of the Grand Palais? This city with the geometric tidiness
of its glass pyramid, Arch of Triumph and the chilly portal imprinted
by the Grande Arche on a cloudy sky? Why is he unhappy, this foreign
flâneur,
even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Notre
Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it
looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains?
(Edmund
White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through
the Paradoxes of Paris, London:
Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 50-51)
He
(or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major
Sights and ticking them off a list of standard wonders. He (or she)
is a Parisian in search of a private moment, not a lesson, and
whereas wonders can lead to edification, they are not likely to give
the viewer gooseflesh. No, it is the private Proustian touchstone -
the madeleine, the tilting paving stone - that the flâneur
is tracking down [--]. The weathered threshold, the old tile...
In
any event, as Benjamin explains, the flâneur
is in search of experience, not knowledge. Most experience ends up
interpreted as - and replaced by - knowledge, but for the flâneur
the experience remains somehow pure, useless, raw [--].
[H]e
or she is indecisive, unsure where to go, embarassed by the richness
of his or her choices. As Benjamin puts it, 'Just as waiting seems to
be the true state of the motionless contemplative, so doubt seems to
be that of the flâneur.'
Frequently the flâneur
is tired, having forgotten to eat despite the myriad cafés inviting
him or her to come in, relax and partake a drink or a snack: 'Like an
ascetic animal he roams through unknown neighbourhoods until he
collapses, totally exhausted, in the foreign, cold room that awaits
him.'
(Edmund
White resuming Walter Benjamin's concept of the flâneur
in
The Flâneur: A Stroll through the
Paradoxes of Paris, London: Bloomsbury,
2008, pp. 46-48)
Sest
lõpuks, vähemalt läbielamise ühes sfääris, on läbielatud
sündmus millegi mäletatuna piiritu, olles üknes võti kõige
juurde, mis oli enne ja mis tuli pärast teda.
(Walter
Benjamin, Prousti-pildi juurde.
- Valik esseid,
Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu, 2010/26-29, lk 52)
Igavik,
mille nägemiseks Proust aspekte avab, on ristunud, mitte piiritu
aeg. Tõelist osa võtab ta aja kulust selle kõige tegelikumal, aga
see tähendab ristunud kujul, mis ei valitse kusagil teesklematumalt
kui mälestuses, seespool, ja vananemises, väljaspool. Järgida
vananemise ja mäletamise vastandit - see tähendab tungida Prousti
maailma südamesse, ristumise universumisse.
(Walter
Benjamin, Prousti-pildi juurde.
- Valik esseid,
Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu, 2010/26-29, lk 60)
Je
voyage pour connaître ma géographie.
(Marcel
Réja, L'art chez les fous,
Paris, 1907, p 131,
viidatud:
Walter Benjamin. Pariis, XIX sajandi
pealinn - Valik
esseid, Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu,
2010/26-29, lk 107)
