Thursday, February 4, 2016

notes on a city


The taste of Paris was still on her palette and the ache for the city churned her gut. The intense over-tired frenetic almost ecstatic desperate energy with which she had devoured her time there was still tangible in the memory of her heavy eyelids and the almost drugged stupor with which she watched that city go by at night though the warped pane of glass on the bus. The hum, the thunder, the pure unrelenting power that is released, reverberating as though it pours from the very cracks of the city streets. A city so packed full of history, beauty, love, art, tragedy, music, disease, pain, power and life that the very foundation hums with the centuries of people who’ve lived there. One does not live in Paris, one simply exists along side it. Paris is not a municipality or a postal address and it cannot be found on a map or pointed out from the air. Paris is a state but not one governed by officials. Paris is an element an experience an enigma built not by bricks and mortar but through ideas and creations and theories. The walls of each ancient building are kept from caving in, not by strong masonry but by the force of ideas held within. The streets are filled not with traffic and its pedestrian sounds but with the ebb and flow of music and prose. moving between the buildings, surrounding and enfolding everything in it’s wake. Paris filled her up and emptied her out simultaneously leaving her weak and empowered. If such beauty and perfection was attainable on this earth what chance had she?

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