Dictee

Dear Cantankerous Neighbor Who Lives In The Apartment Below Ours,

I imagine that you are an 80-year-old reclusive, calico dress-wearing, coupon-cutting, wary-of-the-world woman.  You probably wear your hair the same way every day (severe-ish topknot with a few strands meticulously loosened to frame your face and give you the appearance of that “careless au naturale” look) because you are afraid of people thinking you’re too vain for your age. You probably find Lady Catharine from Pride and Prejudice a kindred spirit. Judging by the way you belligerently bang on our floor when our music or laughter or chatter gets too loud, you seem to detest all audible manifestations of youthful mirth. I can just see you climbing up on your dining table chair, broom in hand, face contorted with evil concentration, prepared to jab your ceiling as forcefully as the plaster will permit, jabbing as though it is our very gaiety you hope to penetrate, to deflate. We’re not even that loud. It’s not as if we throw boisterous dance parties, or, at least we have not yet. We just have small dinners with friends and listen to The Shins. Occasionally we croon along with Florence And The Machine. Mostly we just drink cheap Franprix wine and nom on baguette from our corner boulangerie. Don’t you do the same? None of our other neighbors seem to mind us, so why such anger from you? Perhaps you resent a type of hopeful, girlish happiness you feel is lost to you now. Maybe all you have left is quiet conversations with the three ceramic dogs that watch you from your coffee table while you, alone in your little, immaculate Parisian apartment, bake enough pound cake to feed a family of four.

But your wrath is not reciprocated. I do not detest you the way you detest us. You may have angrily jabbed for 37 straight seconds at 11:15 pm last night and I may or may not have sent insensitive expletives your way, but little do you know how much I empathize with you. There is a version of you— less irritable, less curmudgeonly— that lives inside my body. Sharing corporal space with her has never been conducive to the type of jaunty spontaneity I’ve been exhibiting as of late. I’m not one to do crazy things and I never have been. Before I came here, I, too, led an incredibly circumscribed life defined by pragmatism and “doing what I have to do to get to where I want to get.” I know what it’s like to stay inside and resent echoes of frivolity inaccessible to me by my own accord. But Paris is different; I’m different. I’m more open here— more willing to “go out” in the sense of really being in the world. I actually talk to strangers in bars, in cafés, in bookstores, even at school, and no longer do they remain strangers. I find myself engaging in conversations that are at once profound, at once absurdly funny (often due to the downhill quality of my French when I get nervous). I lock eyes with people I don’t know across crowded rooms and I don’t feel silly for reeling in the transient beauty of those moments. The cliché is proving true experientially— romance is in the air here and everyone operates within its allure. Even walking home barefoot in the pouring rain at 4:45 am because we were completely out of money and the metro was closed was a romantic escapade of sorts. The bottoms of my feet looking raw hamburger meat? Not so much… but dancing for hours to live jazz music at the historic Caveau de la Huchette? So, so worth it. I know we have only been here a couple of weeks and there is so much awaiting us, but I already know that the dear and mysterious stone walls of that jazz club, the twirling skirts, the dapper clapping men, and the way the ragtime beat felt in my hair will stay with me for years after I will have left these twinkling Parisian lights behind in a rose colored haze.

So dear neighbor, out of respect for your imagined age we really will try to be quieter, but if I could beg of you one thing, it is this: please let me have this time to just be. We will go in a couple of months and then you’ll fall asleep to stony, lonely silence once again. The soft tittering of happy youth you miss enough to hate will again be lost to you. And where will you direct your anger then? Ceramic dogs stand no chance against your dynamic broom.

Bisous. 

La Premiere Fois

On a bleak and rainy morning 19 days ago, I, sitting in the back of a commensurately dreary airport shuttle taxi commanded by an irate driver, was treated to my first view of Paris. Rather anticlimactically, there was little aesthetically remarkable about that moment. The taxi was at some sort of complicated freeway junction where it looked like 27 different highway lanes were simultaneously merging and diverging into 16 different exits in 9 different directions. Everything was or seemed to be slate colored- the sky, the cars, the industrial looking buildings sitting like so many solemn children on timeout, the imposing concrete web of freeway lanes the taxi was leaving behind so rapidly. My ears were filled with a bizarre mélange of Tamilian accented French curse words (God Bless The South Asian Diaspora) spewing generously out of the driver’s choleric mouth. We could have been in any country, really, save for one particularly austere sign that spartanly— one could say even flippantly—announced that we were about to enter P A R I S. The view of the incredible Hausmannien streets, the charming sidewalk café culture, and of course the great icons La Tour Eiffel, L’Arc de Triomphe, and La Cathédrale de Notre Dame would come much later, but in that instant, in that brief, flitting moment when I caught an unadorned glimpse of a simple traffic sign introducing me to the city that was to become my home for the next few months, I found an exquisite sense of gravity, of awareness rooted in a tangible reality, that I feel has eluded me since. I remember thinking to myself as the wide set block letters flashed by— This is actually happening, I am here and I feel as if I will be able to understand what that means. And I felt hopeful, for the first time in days, that immediacy in my own life awaited me; that if Paris and all the largeness, and grandeur, and beauty that it encapsulates could be connoted by a nonchalant, laughably familiar diagonal arrow on a highway sign similar to those I’ve lived my life by at home, then I too might have a chance of holding The City of Lights in my arms. Twenty minutes later we were into the heart of the city and it was almost as if I had left that sign and that freeway, emblematic of all that is real and ordinary, behind in another life.

            There is so much beauty here, so much charm, so much poetry, that I find myself keeling over before it. It is deeply overwhelming and unsettling to be immersed in such magnificence. Everything here is a piece of art— the metro signs, the random graffiti stencil of Caillebotte’s “The Floor Scrapers” on the side of a nondescript immeuble, the wrought-iron balconies, the lampposts, the Seine carving a regal arch at the foot of La Fontaine Saint-Michel. I have not gone into the Louvre yet, but I find the idea of it terrifying. You could spend years of your life looking at only the building’s façade; how then am I supposed to bring myself to step inside and try to understand, to hold onto all the treasures within? What terrifies me even more than the beauty of Paris is the idea that my experience of its loveliness might only be accessible in anticipation or in retrospect. I fear the present lost to me— things here seem too unreal to be true. Yesterday I went on a run around my neighborhood in the 6^th arrondissement and decided to check out Le Jardin du Luxembourg. As I ran around the park grounds on that brisk morning, I passed exquisite Greco-Roman busts, quaint bocce ball courts, gurgling fountains, and hidden cupolas. At one point, I stopped and turned around to take one last look at the incredible palace in its entirety, and I saw that it was framed on one side by La Tour Montparnasse and on the other by La Tour Eiffel.It was such an arresting sight. If my heart had not been pumping so furiously in my ears from the run or if my breath had not been materializing in front of my face, I would have lost all recognition of reality.

            I realize now that that last view of my neighborhood Palace (absurd, right?), framed as it was in that moment by La Tour Montparnasse and La Tour Eiffel, is proving to be more emblematic of my time in Paris than the dinky highway sign could ever have hoped to be. Just as the Luxembourg palace is flanked by two landmark structures representing two very different ideas of Paris— Montparnasse as the newest rather coarse and painfully modern addition to the Parisian skyline and La Tour Eiffel as a timeless icon of amour and light— I, too, find myself vacillating between two worlds: one of gritty real world problems and one of romantic artifice. The former encapsulates “The Struggles(/Adventures) of Prachi and Sasha” which include paying a Euro a minute to talk on our cell phones because we cannot get a plan until we get bank accounts and you cannot get a bank account until you get a permanent address and having finally found an apartment after a couple weeks of near homelessness and cramped youth hostels, it was not until yesterday that we finally got internet set up which was sort of necessary to have in order to take care of any of the above (#Frenchbureaucracyblows). The latter evokes the magical nights I’ve had here: beautiful rooftop conversations I’ve shared with intelligent and kind people; ducking into Pamela Popo at two in the morning to grab a glass of Bordeaux from the cute, scruffy bartender working a fedora in the most natural way I’ve ever seen a man do it; moments of silence at the foot of Le Sacré Coeur at midnight;wandering through the Marais and accidentally stumbling upon Victor Hugo’s house; reading a moth bitten copy of literary criticism on Dostoevsky and Virginia Woolf in a corner of the Shakespeare & Co Bookstore; eating traditional Swiss Raclette with Sasha’s grandparents in their home in Basel; and drinking cheap wine from twist cap bottles on the banks of the Seine. Both worlds are strange and exciting, and suspended as I am between them, I feel the stuff of my heart changing. I’ve needed such a change for so long. A few lines from Dictee, the postmodern novel by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in whose honor I’ve named this blog, come to mind. “Expel. Ne te cache pas. Révèle toi. Sang. Encre. Of the body’s extension of its containment.” It is with these words sewn into the fabric of my constantly shifting soul that I end this inaugural post. I didn’t expect for it to be so heavy, but I guess that’s just what needed to come out, so it did. Next time will probably be a catalog of complaints on how irritatingly attractive and fashionable all the people are at SciencesPo. Or maybe I’ll write an ode to Camembert, my new lover. Who knows.

 

Bisous.