April 16 | Feast or Famine?"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." ARTISTS and writers seem to pour through Paris. I didn't meet a lot of writers while I was here; it was easier to find artists, but then, you can find them in art studios (such as 59 Rivoli, well documented in the 2005 galleries), whereas writers tend to work alone in rooms. And art is easier to see than writing; it's often quite large, and hung on the wall and people are invited in. Dead writers were all around me in Paris. Where I sat and wrote hundreds of horoscope columns was on a little plaza, Contrescarpe, situated on the path to where Hemingway and Orwell had lived. I could feel them walking on the paving stones and through the passages. They kept me company far more often than the living ones. Shakespeare & Co. Books, one of my spiritual bases at different times, had not only been home to tens of thousands of writers over the years, for a week or three or a few months, but also the scene of visits from many of the old Beat Generation writers. It was always interesting to be in a place where Allen Ginsberg had read, slept, written and got off. But as a creative hotbed, the place often feels like last night's barbecue. It is difficult to imagine this city as the place where Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein and William Somerset Maughm found the community, inspiration and intellectual freedom that they did. It was difficult to see this as the place where James Joyce found so much acceptance and respect. I kept asking myself where Simone de Beauvoir would fit in. When you study art and literature, Paris takes on mythical dimensions. Of the 'great names' we know, many were touched in some way by Paris. It's true there's a lot of art here, and people think that means it's a place that 'supports art'. But I've had to give the talk on living vs. dead artists a lot of times. The dudes hanging in the museums, who get most of the attention, are the dead ones, and typically they get all the money. A place that supports art supports its living artists. This is not, of course, exclusively the problem of Paris. When was the last time you heard of a van Gogh sold at Christie's where half the proceeds went to support living painters? You could sell one of those paintings and endow an arts foundation for 25 years. To call the currrent atmosphere of Paris antintellectual is a most courteous understatement. There is still an energy to tap into, this thundering surge of power; and there is a crystallized quality to the environment that focuses the written word, at least in my experience, and according to the librarian. But on the surface, in 3D, in the current here and now, the mental climate verges on banal. I am not speaking for the youth movement. I have no idea what it felt like to be in their planning meetings for the recent Reve General, the most exciting strikes and protests since 1968. I bet it felt pretty good. But I am talking about Paris itself, not the underground. In many ways it's as if anything that matters doesn't matter. I had relatively few discussions oriented on real problems or real solutions; I could rarely talk about what I was doing for more than a few moments. It does not help that most people feel that astrology is a specific area of expertise and out in meatspace, the physical world and not the Net, I don't meet astrology fans, meaning energized students, every day. It's strange, as I'm saying this now to myself for the first time, I actually have felt a bit selfconscious being an astrologer. I also felt pretty selfconscious having any alternative views of sexuality -- alternative as in something besides marry your first boyfriend. Thank the Goddess there are a few people I can really talk to, but let's put it this way: I don't think it's a town where it's easy to be out of the closet. Gay is gay and gay is an accepted part of life. Gay is no longer queer. Swinging is a business (plenty of swing clubs in Paris, too). I mean queer. You might say, well, sex is so taboo, but we need to expect a bit more from our world cosmopolitan centers. In essence, I am talking about the freedom not just to be oneself, but the freedom to express oneself within a contained social environment and actually be accepted. Perhaps I am not the greatest judge of this; and it is also true that the world gets more Disney DNA injected every hour; and that most people don't know how conservative they actually are -- or why. Ah, but where in the world is freedom the community ethos? Where is it really possible? Where do we not have to walk that fine line between prejudice and envy that seems to crowd our originality off of the mental bandwidth? Where isn't Prozac the drug of choice? There must be someplace. Must we always have to make it? Perhaps this is the requirement of creativity, to create the space where it can be itself, and then to bring the energy to keep that expression going. I know there are places where strong cells of affinity foster growth; there are always those who make it a point of holding open a space for creative expression and for the community to interact with it. But I'll tell you one thing about Paris that won't make you faint -- it's bloody expensive. You don't have to be rich to live there, but you also cannot exactly be on an experimental path unless you have some serious means of support. And most of the world doesn't. So the very expense of being in Paris prohibits those who want to experiment from staying there. When I first got to town, I met these youngsters named Heather and James. They were recovered Witnesses and were some of the most enlightened people I've met since, well, high school or summer camp. James had read every word of Wilhelm Reich, and was a kind-hearted, emotionally centered intellectual. He spent something like 25 euros buying me an ancient copy Reich's The Function of the Orgasm while they were staying in my living room, talked me through some of the main points and gave me some helpful advice for studying it: read a page a day if you have to (it took me six months to read). Heather and James really only had one problem in Paris, which is they could not afford to stay. I'm going to guess that scares off 95% of Paris's brightest young recruits. Trust me, you could feel them missing. You know -- thank heaven for the Internet. That is what I say. I know I have not poured out my heart on this subject, but the Net, for all its spam, scams and bullshit, and people who want to charge by the letter, is one of the most extraordinary places in the universe. If you can get here, you can be free here. You can find people here who say,'Yes, I know what you're talking about'. Maybe they're 3000 miles away. But yes is yes, and somehow in our over-the-edge moment of neocannibalistic world politics, where the walls get narrower and a new law against what you do is passed on a daily basis, where you're always on camera and every word you type is recorded in a database somewhere, you can pretty much say what you want and somebody's going to hear you. That is, if you're brave. But that's always the price of admission. Anyway, what does Paris give? I don't know, but it gives something and it gives a lot of it. Oysters are very popular. It may be just one enormous oyster, and when you get trapped inside, you become something else. | ||||||
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