South Star

So I walk long ways down Bergstaße and follow in my mind this girl’s silence, as if this were the only way she could communicate with me. And so far it has proved to be, other than the whinging and mournful unsaid complaints I hear only by the by.

But toward Südstern, in the middle of night, a quiet weekday night, those same friends who translate these silences are not present. I am walking and doing my best to be happy but I am dumb, isolated, lost as a little boy without his mum: I am thinking of a way to get a bed. Or the next best thing.

The steps of the church are cold and we grace them and we embrace each other but it gets colder, a wind strikes up, the odd passer by catches our attention. We are silent.

There is a cemetery just there across the road, but the most I can muster is to piss against the high wall surrounding it.  And it hurts to urinate, and the Living can’t get into the Dead’s playground, and I am sick and silent and by Südstern in darkness I play but the fool, unable to be more than I am.

IV

She had a sad face: all curling over into itself. Protracted in a rounded way, it folded in accordance with the sign of melancholy. Her eyes likewise were, although large and even bulging, lifeless: she was staring listlessly at nothing at all. In a blue smock that seemed somehow childlike, like an old milk maid or Alpine actress, fashion seemed to be also in a depression. Hers were simple cares, pared down by what brought her to this like park just after dawn, so looked after and dressed up, so alone with her blue Mills and Boon book.

VI

Place de l'Estrapade: A madman, poor man, and a large 8' x 12' rug is spread out over the cobbles just back from the fountain. There is a spray of sunshine just off from it, dappling the ground. And this man, dressed in a suit, blazer, shirt, tie and jeans, wearing shades and a baseball cap, lifts the large leaves fallen due to the coming season and places them atop the beige rug. The genus of tree is unknown to me. As is the point of this scene: does this man carry this rug around with him, and most of all, what is the meaning of his little game? I wish I could spend my autumns doing likewise.

VII

2h50: What happens when these inscriptions are too much to believe? Do they become lies? Like this man in his red t-shirt and gooky glasses in the middle of the night doing his robot noises through a force of breath and clenched teeth and blowing, puffedout cheeks.

We all tell lies. Reality becomes too much so we lie about it. People come and go.

A man leaves his home behind me (24 rue des Patriarchs) and goes over to the videoautomat (cinebank) to return a video, maybe to get another.

Another man, balding with bermuda jean shorts comes down the hill and crosses the square, suddenly breaking into a run.

Secret lives.

Real lies lived out honestly.

IX

A man sleeps outside Monoprix, I saw him earlier on my way up the Avenue; he has all his detritus laid out in front of him, a record of his refuse, his self abuse, of all he had today. He is honest, unlike me wears his disposable side of life for all to see.

X

An art display from a clodo. an umbrella in leopard skin with bottles etc sliding out from the ends. Cups, bottle tops, like an altar. Underneath a phone surrounding it is a display of food, old food from the Paul.

XI

Place Monge.

At the top of the escalator a man in a red jump suit hands out ParisVendu. The lady ahead jaunts by, a begger with his arm adrift the obstacle. His gaze follows the tails of her coat; he turns and spits a gob, missing me as drizzle would, or the urination of pigeons.

And where the kiosque du presse, where the organized romance of Claude Simon’s cinquieme? The push and shove of literary rumour, order, the world of words. I think of Ibsen and his walk down Karl Johann Gate, the public setting their watches to the routine of secluded writers. I’m back in the Fifth, eking out a routine as best I can.

XIV

A beautiful evening, the last of its kind for another year. The clocks change their pace with a jump in another day or so but now evenings still last a little longer, the sun low but strong, calling in evenings and autumn.

I have seen no clodos today.

On a bike I got repaired, the maiden voyage and suddenly I am arrested on Rue Monge and to distract myself from my disability to cycle the thingummy I peer into a dustbin from above. My eyes bring me to these places:  it’s like that, will be always like that, everywhere. I see an empty bottle of rosé, the cork neatly pushed back in. A job well done.

Preparations for winter, for the clock change, must begin soon.

XV

Left handed and it pleased her. Ambidextrous, cerebral advance. Early morning. Learned that the cafe on the Avenue opens at 6h00.

Pourqoui sans culutte?

XVI

A kiosque du presse. The Economist: a French flag adorns the front cover. Maggie Thatcher is stepping out of its center, a finger pointed, a ghost of another age, a fucking psychopath on the loose. WHAT FRANCE NEEDS?

And the world swirls. It is a new millennium, glory comes, glory goes and there is still so much wrong and even more going wrong. Who's behind it anyway I ask myself, who's funding it? Why? I'm wrong, your right. Tell me what to do and I'll do it. We're all doomed anyway, just tell me, and I'll cross the Avenue and pop into Starbucks and have an American heart attack in honour of Maggie Fucking Thatcher

XVIII

Beauty in Paris is a shade of brown. And there is no shortage of Beauty in Paris, it’s in nearly every set of eyes, almost; dark eyes of chestnut brown, hidden say behind the nicest, most well defined natural brown hair I know. Something the wash of home hadn’t prepared me for. Skin is brown, every shade of brown you could make up, from black to white, the ladies of Paris are beautiful, they are dark, coy, sexually pristine. Even the light lisp of ‘l’eau coule forcement’ in the brown dark of city-night sounds of caramel, running provocatively toward nobody save Beauty herself. The sandstone is brown, as are the trees: when I arrived in autumn the chestnuts shone, toasting on brown garbage bins, two euro a carton; the leaves turned and showed what they had stole from the sun, now they expose their bark, and in weeks they’ll bloom again and the sand at their base will be a beautiful light brown of Tuilleries path, the chocolate in the windows piled high, as ever, for le fete de Paque and the burnt coffee tasting as sharp as ever while the brown dark tobacco of the city’s one million burning cigarettes help give the full stop to meals of gizzards and duck and crème soufflet, beautiful brown all, like the beige brown of the wicker chairs, the fag burns on this bar’s toilet cistern, like the smell of the RER or the number fourteen metro line, the dull shit brown of la tour Eiffel and bobbing brown of Paris, at night, from the steps of the Sacre Couer. Paris is beautiful and I love everyone that’s in it because it is – they are all – so brown, every hue and pigment of this too oft neglected reflection. It’s why the Front National will never take Paris, will never be national, it’s why brown, at last, is the new black. Black Beauty showing me home…

XXI.

I am waiting for someone whom I have never met before. By the Canal Saint Martin, the entrance to the metro. A clodo comes along and sits down next to where I stand, having brought some magazines to add to his cardboard nest. He drinks chestnut coloured liquid from a glass bottle and smokes a filter cigarette. One of his shoes is half off his gray foot. Three young people come along, rollicking through the turnstiles and say a big good evening to him, offer him pastis from a plastic water bottle: one sits down cross legged, earnest in her jest.

I, waiting listlessly by now, throw my regard over them. They are Bakunin’s kids, as much as he has any these days: punks perhaps. One stands aside, a tall girl in long shorts and a hoodie. I see she is pretty and our eyes meet. After a time she comes towards me where I lean against a telephone, offering me up the end of her cigarette. I explain I have lots of tobacco, but ask her what they are up to for the night. A party somewhere. She asks me where I’m from. She is a printer. Agrees that work is but work. She compliments my French. I say she is too nice.

Then she demands that I look her in the eyes. She is very pretty: I can’t help regret the oversized clothes, the layers of grunge hiding her. I ask why. She says I have beautiful eyes and I laugh at her, into her face, into her eyes. She is drunk so they are soft and open. I explain I would like to join them but already have plans, am waiting for someone (who in the end never shows). She says it’s ok she has a boyfriend, <<I love him, bla-bla>>. I say I meant only to party together. She smiles some more. Compliments me on my French again. I tell her she is too nice. Her friends finish their chat with the clodo and they all move off over the bridge.

Look at me in the eyes. You have beautiful eyes. You are too nice. I love him, bla-bla.

Friday night.

[Bla-bla: bavardage, verbiage sans intérêt….]

XXIV

Two years before just by Café Panis I heard Notre Dame’s bells toll the passing another grand Papa, the earthly trace of the All-Maker. I received a text message from my mother: ‘The Pope is Dead’. Point finale as they say, and point start again. Let us be lucid and sad and take the moment to recognize the import of a life in death. Ring the bells, enjoy the respite, we’ll start again tomorrow. Ne les lachons rien!…

XXVI

Language as Means of Being Selfish

The greediest learners of English ever crossed were crossed in Paris, and the most disinterested too while we’re at it. It’s not a casual thing to learn, improve and maintain, a second language in your home-country – one has to ruthless. Take every chance, never let a mother-tongue word slip through. All speak the English to me, bastard-son speaker that I am. For I thought today after making a rendez-vous with an English teacher for the following day, early, so we can talk, so he can get his little fix, I saw the dame man begging whom I had seen on my way and I thought it must be a dangerous business to relay on the same givers from any day to the other. You let a language slip and you’ll lose it; you give me a word or two in French and the illusion we should speak English is lost.

XXVII

This the world this day/

A place where everyone is king and queen and wears a scarf with grace/Where everyone asks why and how and who am I/Where to care about yourself means to care about all others, possibly, it has say, four hundred years of governing principles available for individual good use, consultation/The accoutrement of the self says more about you then the first seven words you will say to me: whether that be about the need for more toilets in an overcrowded bar or the heat of the day that suggests the end of all things to come/ This is where you question everything because there is nothing left to be displeased about; where leisure is a full time job and beauty and goodness pay the bills as much as your nine to five travails/The streets are full of assurance self contained moving orbits in the pull of buildings great and small and coded so as to be in fact unknowable/The unity of apperception is consciously employed: chaos shifts into a shape that is inhabitable: a bus driver opens the door for a woman who strolls along eating a sandwich, coolly ascending into a little calm shuttle of civilisation/

Everywhere lurks the unattainable and that means nothing at all/This the world changing like the evening sittings of an up-market restaurant where order taste and manners reign right the way up to the un-swept shit-stained toilet floor/

This the world still hoping in the gone before/

Cadaverine Magazine 2009

John Holten’s Inscriptions is published by Parking Meter Press and can be purchased here. To find out more about John, visit http://johnholten.blogspot.com/