The Rats of Paris

Paris, France

"Brief Encounters with a City" (unrevised first draft):

I arrive here in a place, Paris, that feels like Disneyland.  The sights of a site already recounted in recollections, twinkling reality in a foreigner's eyes, refracting on each instant, on each immemorial image, the memory of a fictional place, read in well-known textguidebooks; the commercialism of imagination is not yet convicted as a crime. The escapees of suburbia tourists themselves, clothed and disguised in patterns of popular fashion on the street stage, ready to be photographed as me with the modern landmarks of collective memory (erasure). But this is 2013; humans in costume take the flight of abstraction to higher pinnacles of individuation where even truth cannot touch.  A church, a garden, a tower of epic historic proportions becomes the background for a life on digital display at Disneyland.  What else is there to do but look, smile, and say cheese, Mickey Mouse?

Wondering and wandering, I drift like a flaneur, like some lovers of language might say (what I say and what I do, are they the same?). Eventually, I arrange an emergency encounter with a Couchsurfing host who, as it turns out, is the prime example of the dangers of which others warned for a woman traveling alone. I leave the Montparnasse apartment at 5 am; at 5:30 am, I find a poubelle plein de pain in front of a boulangerie artisanal and eat. I receive an email from Virgile who is in Paris en route to Nantes, and we rejoin once again.

During the sleeping hours, we attend an all night psytrance party dans Les Caves. It is the time and space where zombies aroused, awaken, appear to dance; what kind of mindbody paralysis do you want to smoke, snort, swallow and lick tonight? Someone is selling what you want to go there. Everywhere everyone is looking to buy here to go there. But to lose yourself in this cave is to force an illumination of the social self among drooping, drunk eyes who see only a smile that says yes.

For the sober slipping between us, all there is to feel is the sweet sweat of bodies, if you can call this perception. The music refuses to keep a rhythm, for while supposed 'trance' sound waves blast through bass speakers, the DJ mineralizes the momentum of time as if in a Top 40s Nightclub, where every three minutes the beat is shifted and shafted to another set of superstar sensorial patterns marking the moments of here and NOW! and later (who wants to listen to this shit and this shit and this shit?). This music alone does not put the mindbody into its own dimensions of trance, but deeper into the subterranean of spatiosocial surroundings (ZOMBIES ARE ALIVE). I desire a rhythm that keeps its beat and brings it to the edge of psychophysical perception – unfortunately, the dubstep drops every two minutes do little to satisfy my rapturous dreams of dancing reverie, though the crowd persists that this is pleasure. After a morning stroll through boulangerie wastebaskets and locked parks, we take sleeping siestas with the dawn’s early light.

Walking, walking, walking, wondering, wandering, more days of little sleep. The body is tired. We do not take the Metro because we cannot afford (to pay or to jump). We eat from the garbage and the farmer’s market, because they are there. From the Eiffel Tower to the boulevard of the rich and its shopping playground, I remember: Paris is for the poor, too. (Isn't that what you said, Victor Hugo?)

-                                      Roma kids asking for donations to a cause (to each his own)

           Indian scammers selling free roses (they’ll come and collect the money)

                         Nepalese refugees squat the Seine riverbank (though together, home is far away)

                                       African street souvenir sellers vending Chinese produced keychains of the Eiffel Tower well below the tourist shop price (the true value of an iron tower in a late capitalist age of low cost mock makeups and industrial waste speculation)

                 Bum travelers eating garbage bread and canned ratatouille soup, families living on the streets, babies tucked into the shoulders of starving mothers, who gives a fuck? (not you, in your private car)

Yes, this life here is an endless exposition of inequality and poverty meeting at street corners, though rarely shaking hands. On the journal covers and headlines, the economic crisis is described as effects without causes. Well, the causes do not speak to the effects lying on the streets, simple answer. Question: Should I pay 3,000 euros a month to live next to the Eiffel Tower? Answer: Sure, but I'll sleep and squat here for free, waking up to the iron cage of the industrial age inscripted in the history books of an imperial monster yet to have awaken from the nightmare of its gory, glorious past; I will not be the first to do this --- fictional ghosts, homeless in history, continue to haunt the underground. Above me, the monster of memory smiles and I snap a photograph to remember that I, that you, were here. .