From what I gather
"I mount! I fly!" – Mr. Pope, 1712.
It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not. - Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, cited as epigraph in Albert Camus’ The Plague.
Last night’s found us again hobbling – like this, but physically – down the overcrowded sidewalk of Belleville, past the so-called Handsome Man, so-called because, years ago, when we first moved to this part of the city, he was indeed handsome. A decade on, however, he has lost his Hong Kong action star qualities. He now looks like every other Bellevillois greengrocer, but with better produce, and grumpier, especially if engrossed in TikTok when you approach his till.
Down from there to the Cave de Belleville, which in January, in response to the growing insecurities of the precariat, started selling palatable wine en vrac for 6 euros a bottle.
Not stopping there, either. No wine is needed tonight. There is something more intoxicating at the bottom of the hill, pooling like black water around the CRS trucks in a blazing, smoking, tear-gassed mirror of hell. I sense it – we all feel it – a collective rebellion – un moment Spartacus – looming beyond the horizon at Place de la République and every constituent in the crowd pours down en masse towards it, digging up paving stones and tearing the boards off facades and benches, throwing body, heart, soul and fire into what Voltaire called the only just war in history – but then, suddenly, just as suddenly, becoming aware – an awareness both startling and serene – that my leg no longer hurts. That the tendinitis plaguing my right hip since mid-November is gone. Gone! No out-toeing hobble, no outward splay of gait, no compensatory shuffle. Like a flying dream – the ecstasy of flight – only better because I know I can’t fly, that I will never fly, and that this – this blissfully painless walking state – is thoroughly grounded in the possible. In the real. It is happening. The sensation – no pain! – is so powerful it half wakes me, but I fight the urge to surface and break into a run, my first in months. Fast. Effortless. Faster than all those that have broken into panicked sprints around me.
Then the pain hits, and I wake.
2.
“Vaccination certificate, grade cards from school, milkman downstairs, his first love: a horse, water outside only, bathtub on Saturday evenings, playing funerals with a violin case.” – Arnold Schoenberg, Notes Toward a Biography, 1949.
I am reading Kafka’s dairies.
April 2025 5 o’clock in the afternoon Tried all day. Sap, pap. Deleted the lot. Will take a breather and start again as soon as a subject presents itself. Some form of automatism, perhaps. Words following perceived phenomena. Noises, for example, out the open transom of the front door, a loose-chained bicycle’s clicking zips, then a car with something loose rattling on its undercarriage. Bottles smashing into the glass recycling bin. Applause from a window, a meeting adjourned, a suitcase on rollers, a scooter, a street washing truck. Mandarin, Arabic, church bells, two kids with a basketball. Two women speaking English. “Yes, but that’s not what he said.” “I know, but that doesn’t –” A crying baby. A dog tethered or caged in an empty apartment on the boulevard. Two hoarse voices, smokers’ voices – “Oui, mais qu'est-ce que tu veux?” The other answers, “C’est pas tes oignons !” The garrulous drunk with half-bunned hair and high-heeled boots who manned a bench all lockdown in Place Sainte Marthe. The only female among the roofless regulars, holding court, holding her own, impervious to contagions and conventions alike, the strongest character in the zone. We haven’t seen her for weeks. It is good to hear her still in form, her cracked, Arletty voice shouting insults at the muggles who decline her pleas for coins, making the two men with her laugh till they cough and splutter, till red wine geysers from their noses.
Garrulous or querulous?
Both.
3.
“Règle V: N'utilisez jamais une expression étrangère… si vous pouvez trouver un équivalent.” – George Orwell, 1946.
Rolled over, thought of Pluto, thought of things that started with the letter p, thought of pictures of these p-starting things, fell asleep. Dreamt I was doing the translation due this morning. Skipping the surface like a flat stone in a pond, a task dream, repetitions of the same sequence. Filling slots. Two cops at the side of the bed, tapping their clubs into their palms with deliberate rhythm, watching me closely, waiting for an excuse to react.
Exhausting, so, I surrendered to sleeplessness and opened my computer. Did the translation. Fell back asleep. Dreamt that I overcooked a turbot. I was livid with myself for being so stupid and forgetting what I was doing, but I took it out on everyone around me, my daughters and my wife, all the while knowing that it was my fault. What an asshole, someone thought, or maybe whispered, and it was true, I was. Not a, the. Spent the rest of the night trying to concoct a sauce to hide my failure. Woke up, ate some peanut-buttered toast. Drank two cups of coffee. Than another. Did some exercises. Leg lifts with the elastic and what is called the old man’s shuffle. All of it half-assed.
I look at old differently now. Old men, especially. Old me. When young, when passing a shuffling example of decrepitude, my friend B. would whisper, “Me in five years.” And we would laugh. The joke no longer has any meaning. Me now. Me for some time now. In five years? A lifetime. The bat of an eye.
Rule I: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. George Orwell, 1946.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague. William Safire, 1978.
4.
“I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection. In grammar it is a pronoun of the first person and singular number. Its plural is said to be We, but how there can be more than one myself is doubtless clearer to the grammarians than it is to the author of this incomparable dictionary. Conception of two myselves is difficult, but fine. The frank yet graceful use of “I” distinguishes a good writer from a bad; the latter carries it with the manner of a thief trying to cloak his loot.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906.
Paris better than ever this morning. Sun, breeze, streets emptied of cars. Hobbled down to the canal and lay in the grass, looking up at the new growth spiralling out of the trees. A beautiful woman was doing yoga in the park’s pagoda. Was asking myself a dumb question – if I follow her with my eyes and imagine doing the same movements, will I reap similar benefits? – when an air-raid siren sounded. We scanned the sky and remembered, just for that split second, the government’s forthcoming shipment of survival manuals. Like those already distributed to every household in Sweden, Belgium and Austria. Then remembered it was the first Wednesday of April. The monthly air siren test. Which lasted, as always, one minute and 41 seconds. But sounded different.
Dinner. The absurdity of expat-ois. London friend pronouncing Air France like a Frenchman. Ehrr Fronce.
5.
Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français ; ce qui n’est pas clair est encore anglais, italien, grec ou latin. Antoine de Rivarol, L’Universalité de la langue française, 1783.
Alone at home. Sunny day. I should be out in it, but first I would like to share something equally insignificant: is Descartes’ Je pense donc je suis I think therefore I am, or I think therefore I follow? The verb être, the verb suivre. Je suis, je suis. I am, I follow, like a lamb to the slaughter.
After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, Jean-Luc Godard: Tous les gens disent comme des imbéciles: ‘Je suis Charlie.’ Moi, j’aime mieux dire: ‘Je suis Charlie’, du verbe ‘suivre’. Et je le suis depuis quarante ans. [...] C’est mieux de suivre que d’être.» (“Everyone says like fools: ‘I am Charlie.’ I prefer to say: ‘I am Charlie,’ from the verb ‘to follow.’ And I have been for forty years. [...] It is better to follow than to be.”)
“Je monte. Je valide.” This is the message that flashes on the front of every bus in Paris on its destination display screen. “I board. I validate.” Meaning when I get on the bus, I validate my travel card by tapping it on the reader near the driver until I see a green light. But why “je”? Why I? Is it the bus talking? Of course not. A hortative. A spur to action, to change behaviour, to get someone to do something. Like our let’s. The “je” makes the message personal and relatable. It makes us visualise ourselves doing it. Just do it, the Nike version, but less confrontational. It expresses shared responsibility, a sense of collective action – another Spartacus moment – whereby everyone contributes individually.
Je monte. Je valide. Not authoritarian. Oui, je vote. Moi, je pense vert. Sentences that exhort us to do or think or stand for the right thing. Collectively, but as individuals. Moi, je vote oui. Je trie mes déchets (I sort my waste). Je respecte les autres, je respecte la route. I respect others, I respect the road.
Je suis Charlie. Je ne suis pas Charlie. Je suis juif. Je suis musulman. Je suis policier.
Ich bin ein Berliner.
I am Friday.
We prefer please: Please validate your ticket. Do not go quietly into that good night. Let us not become weary in doing good, for we will reap a harvest at the proper time if we do not give up. Lend us your wings, I mount! I fly!
But why would a bus say “I” when it means “you”? And what does this “I” really mean in “Je suis Charlie” or “I’m Spartacus” or “Je pense donc je suis” or “J’accuse”? Does this not hortatively change forever the Sun King’s “L’État, c’est moi” or De Gaulle’s “La France, c'est moi et moi seul” ? Also, “monter” can mean climb on top for copulation. In this context, what does “valider” mean?
Madame Bovary, c'est moi… Was Godard right? Is it better to follow than to be?
Then there’s tu. McDonald’s, years ago: Viens comme tu es (Come as you are), the French version of “I’m lovin’ it”. Adidas now, on the RATP tunnels snaked beneath Les Halles: “You got this” subtitled with the equally lame Tu vas y arriver.
My two favourites of late: 1) The slogan of the Nouveau Front Populaire, the left-wing coalition which won a relative majority in last summer’s legislative elections but wasn’t able (or wasn’t, some would argue, allowed) to form a government: “On s’engueulera après!” meaning “we’ll argue later!” which proved prescient; and 2)
And, of course, the standard bearer, again, Nike: Just do it. Gary Gilmore’s last words on death row.
Fais-le.
Do what?
Fais-le pour toi. Fais-le pour elles. Fais-le pour Paris.
Do what?
Do it. Stop talking about it. Stop trying or dreaming about it.
Do what?
Monter une rébellion. Valider une idée dangereuse.
Hobbling down the hill now.
6.
More gatherings.
Le Figaro broke the story about the French government’s upcoming kits de survie (“survival kits”).
“The timing can easily suggest a reaction from the state to the unstable international situation. On March 5, Emmanuel Macron called on the ‘nation’ to ‘engage’ in the face of the ‘Russian threat’ during a televised address. Since then, the government has insisted on the need to rearm France… On the military front, the booklet aims to explain to the French how to protect themselves and to encourage them to get involved in the community, whether it be the fire brigade, the military reserve, the health reserve, or the Civil Security.”
A week or so later, in a Figaro piece on the EU’s upcoming new preparedness strategy, Éric Delbecque, the former security director of Charlie Hebdo after the 2015 attack, complained about “technocrats who have so far been unable to conceive of the defence of our continent and who then think of suggesting to [European citizens] the idea that they must take charge of their survival since the bureaucratic machinery proves incapable of achieving it”:
“The worst thing about this burlesque episode is that it reveals leaders of the European mammoth who are normative but powerless to act concretely and strategically. They despise the nations, the beings of flesh and blood that constitute them, they are oligarchists incapable of thinking about the power relations that structure the planet, and visibly do not have the beginning of a serious idea on how to prepare populations, seriously but without an exaggerated anxiety-provoking perspective, to face the world to come.”
The Dassault Group, a major player in the defence and aerospace industry, owns Le Figaro.
I read. I validate.
Better and more thoughtful writing in the English language you will not find. It’s good precisely because it’s not clear (not French).
I'd never thought of that "I think therefore I follow" possibility. Coolio. Glad your leg is operational again. Forward march!