Flowing of water, throwing of Names

A screaming comes across the sky of Europe. There I've said it here, because I cannot say it anywhere else. A boulevard wrapped in wind from the Seine, weather 'strong as a woman' as I, for example, walk slowly down. Flaneuring is an art I have not accomplished yet. I have also, not yet learnt to say new things about Paris. Things Edmund White hasn't mentioned already. A book I picked up in a village outside Paris quotes 'wonderful country France.. pity the French!" I shouldn't have put that in quotes, it may have been "wonderful city Paris, pity the Parisians!" I forget which. A few years ago I might have said, a little hard-heartedly, "Wonderful city Calcutta, pity the Calcuttans!" I'm not so sure anymore.

The walker finds a fair French person walking down from the otherside. Impassive, set face; if she's a woman, maybe a bit of decolletage, if he's a man, a tight pair of jeans that barely reach his ankles. A bit of Arthur Rimbaud about his hair. Bonjour I say, not hoping for much. She or he, remembers me from the so-and-so gathering(Asie Extreme Society, maybe, making me feel like a Takeshi Kitano character) and smiles, comment ca va, etc. As she or he turns to go I see, quite by chance, an angry cut covered carelessly by a band-aid on the ankle. I'm left standing on the pavement, suddenly plagued with memories I have never had- of great Wars in colored textbooks, meanings created out of coffee stains, rains that have nothing to signify, hard-veined leaves from sweeping, rich trees and a river stocked with wine-bottles and humain despairs.

With chocolatey hands I pick out a book from a shelf in a house on a cobblestoned hill. I have a difficult time attuning this image of the hill to memories from movies. The book is strangely stirring. I seldom admit to reading poetry, but I do now to myself. The poet is Attila Jozsef, Hungarian, never-heard-of. He writes the usual laments I think. Not new to a connoisseur like myself- reader of Herbert, Seifert, Milosz, Szymborska, even Kertesz. Then I'm caught off-guard with a storm image in a poem:

"In a dull field the wind is getting dressed,

its fingers, in a flurry, stop and fumble,

and drop the branches that were pressed

to its bosom: enraged, brittle leaves tumble"

With a name like Attila, he had proletarian sympathies of the Freudian kind. He had stayed in Paris in his youth and returned to Hungary brimming with gauschist ideas. This reminds me of a student who volunteered to explain his work to us with a socialist party in Paris. 'We hope to overthrow Capitalism', he said shyly. This quote I remember.

There are traces of people having lived, smoked and walked in this city. In the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Co., among Henry Miller's graphitti and Gonzo books, I noticed a post-it asking for help with a Thanksgiving party. I wondered if it was written by a resident writer, writers who are obliged to read a book a day (two days if it's War and Peace) and write a page to earn their baguettes and sleeping holes. It's difficult to smell Hemingway's beard in Shakespeare and Co. or have a cappuccino next to the shop with an existential cigarette because material things like coffee and cigarettes are expensive and immaterial things like Hemingway's ghost is constantly batted into corners by flashing cameras and do-you-have-Sophie-Kinsellas. In this atmosphere, while no-writers like me quietly write, a writer like Hemingway would pull out his gun and shoot.