Quo Vadis?

I always manage to forget the immense toll travel takes on the body. After flying across the ocean, staying awake for over twenty four hours, I am shocked that my body doesn’t know what to do with itself. The nausea and the fever which have been the unfortunate and unignorable reality of my first 48 hours at home. Whether exhaustion or some obscure pathogen is making me feel this, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I feel this way and continue to travel anyway. This kind of miserable, total-body exhaustion does not deter me from wanting to travel again as soon as I can. The body says no, but the soul says yes.

Travelling is a luxury in terms of expense, but it is different from most other luxuries in that, when done right, its purpose is to push one outside of their comfort zone. I indulged in some luxury in Paris and London: fancy meals, 10 euro cups of hot chocolate, et cetera. But it wasn’t these things that really made the trip for me. It was the burning feeling in the front of my calves after a long day walking the winding streets, and the callouses on my feet, which ended up feeling like the point of the trip. The times when I did get to sit back and look at the sky were made so much better by the constant movement, by the glorious fatigue of this project.

I don’t sleep well the night before travelling. Whether I have to board a plane or train, or get behind the wheel and drive, some ineffable restlessness comes over me. I don’t know if it’s a feeling of excitement or nervousness, but I just can’t sleep. Thousands of miles crossed with blinding speed, over hardly enough time for the mind to understand just how big this world is. It is the knowledge that life, temporarily, will change in enormous and unpredictable ways, which precludes me from sleep. There is a great precipice with every mile, and I must close my eyes and trust that my stride is long enough to cross each one.

“Quo Vadis?” An apocryphal bit of scripture quoted on an advertisement in the window of the luggage store on the Rue de Passy puts it so succinctly: “Where are you going?” This phrase, used here to embody travel, does not entail pleasure or luxury, but pain. Christ responds to Peter’s question, “I am going to Rome, to be crucified again.” The most significant long-distance route in Les Miserables is Jean Valjean’s journey from Montreuil-sur-Mer to the court in Arras. Jean Valjean, quo vadis? He goes back to the court, to be crucified again. I know this seems a bit far-flung, but stick with me.

When Mark Twain said that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”, he was suggesting that travel can expand the human soul, and I would argue that kind of expansion does not happen so easily by way of luxury and pampering. It is just this kind of exhaustion, this little bit of suffering, that allows the traveler to grow as a person.

The Louvre and Artistic Synapses

When Andrew told us that we were welcome to spend all day in the Louvre, he specifically called it, “one of the greatest treasure houses in the world”. Art is undeniably valuable, but the assignation of this value has been troubled throughout history and in the modern day. Fine arts, through the labor and expertise put into them, have a primary designated value. If the art piece means something to enough people or displays an exceptional level of talent, the piece then gains a secondary cultural value which is further reflected in monetary terms. This cultural value compounds as the piece’s fame grows in time until it becomes almost inconceivable what a piece would be “worth”. This is when a piece of art becomes “priceless”.

But much of the discourse I’ve seen from people who are “anti-art” and specifically “anti modern art” is a condemnation of this monetization. I have seen countless people refer to modern art as a money laundering scheme devoid of skill, and I refuse to believe that is true. Art is valuable because it holds beauty and because it allows us to share the experience of its splendor.

---

For me, literature holds a very similar kind of value. In class, we were talking about how reading Les Misérables made us feel, and when a certain touching moment was mentioned, I saw the room’s eyes light up in recognition, as we all recalled the feelings inspired by that scene. We had all lived in one moment, in different places and different times, and now we were being brought together in a special way by the simple act of recollection.

Art is a treasure, but it does more than gold or silver. Those contain external beauty, the beauty of the natural world. But a piece of art contains a glimpse of the beauty of the human soul.

This power struck me profoundly when I saw the statues of the Ancient Greeks and Romans at the Louvre. There was something inimitable, undeniable in them, which the neoclassicists of the 18th century couldn’t replicate. The Victory of Samothrace and the Venus of Milo, standing proudly dismembered, brought me that sense of wonder and connection with the ancient world that less immediate things like historical accounts and even the poems and plays could not. When I say that an Ancient Greek statue feels eternal, I don’t mean it in the literal sense, because of course some day it won’t be there, but it does feel symbolic of some deeper human eternity. The interior infinite that Hugo extols so highly is somewhere deep inside of us, and the further we march in space and time from the most profound expressions of that infinity, the greater the magnitude of its reflection.

When we got to the 19th century French painters, I saw the intersection of these two worlds as we matched the faces of the 19th century to our visions of the characters in Les Misérables and A Tale of Two Cities. This opened up a whole different way of interacting with art. I am already a visual reader, but suddenly these books came to life in a way they hadn’t before. Seeing period clothes and artifacts portrayed in every day scenes, as well as the painters’ ideas of what a quotidian drama would look like. There was a generative, combinatory effect of these artworks, almost moreso than of the prints directly inspired by the novel, which we saw in Victor Hugo’s house.

I believe that art should be studied, but more than anything I believe that it should be experienced, and one should open themselves as broadly and vulnerably as possible to hear what others have to express.

Attention Aux Pickpockets !

In 2003, singer-songwriter John Darnielle, better known by his alias “The Mountain Goats” was in Paris for the MOFO festival, and was told out of nowhere that he was to record a new song, which he had not written, nor prepared for. On the wall of the studio he saw a sign, “Attention Aux Pickpockets!”, a purposeful mistranslation of which would yield the title of the song, “Attention all Pickpockets”, a short and bittersweet ballad about two people parting ways from a relationship fueled by hard drugs and the very heights of passion. It currently holds a place of high honor as my favorite song.

“So there I go, not the same person that you used to know
Peeking through the fish-eye lens at you

And the coronet blows
Where the oleander grows
And us two, not the same people that our old friends knew

And so down the street, you head, in the high summer heat”

— "Attention All Pickpockets", The Mountain Goats

There is a purposeful obscurity to the song, as Darnielle said in 2007 at a concert in New York, that when you are an indie artist sometimes you have to do things that are “contrary to your own purpose”. Even though it is worthy of being an album, or even a single, the song only exists on the B-side of the CD release of a single called “Letter from Belgium” from the album We Shall All Be Healed, and as a result it isn’t available on any streaming service except Youtube, where it was uploaded by a fan. I’ve looked for a copy of the CD online, but the only listing is from a seller in Belgium, for 4 dollars and 98 cents, who cannot ship to the United States. Its obscurity gives the song an undeniable charm, a kind of status as a hidden gem, and leaning into this kind of paradox, of occasionally going against my own instincts as an artist, in the hope that I end up with something I didn’t even know I was capable of.

I can’t really pinpoint what it is I love so much about this song. It just has this kind of rarefied aura of wistfulness that I associate with my own summer nostalgias and departed friendships. There’s a particular line, “And so down the street / you head, in the high summer heat”. Something about Darnielle’s work has always reflected my Los Angeles upbringing, despite gaps in time and distance (he spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Claremont, in the east, while I was all the way west in Calabasas. But I think there is something about that shimmering high summer heat that is so particular to Los Angeles that is like an emotional sinew between people.

Sitting in my Parisian apartment, writing this, the high summer heat is written on the sweat-dripping backs, the open windows and more than anything in the tranquil Sunday lethargy of the late afternoon. I can trace this heat back to so many memories, bathed in golden light, and I can trace it back to this song, “Attention All Pickpockets”. I have my own gallery of rogues with whom I’ve whiled away the summer evenings. This is the same Parisian high summer that inspired the lyric which when I first heard it, brought me visions of our shared valleys back in California.

There is also something about the title which speaks to me in a strange way. I’ve never picked a pocket in my life, but the idea of a sign which calls out to the people who are normally warned against, to outcasts and misfits, has a certain poetic resonance. This kind of message is a recurrent theme in Darnielle’s work. Many of his albums, probably most prominently 2008’s Heretic Pride, contain themes of pariahdom and the psychological burden of the outsider. But strangely, the role of the outsider is one of the most universally shared. I believe almost everyone has been put on the margin at some point, or has at least felt that way. So when the call goes out, “Attention All Pickpockets”, more heads would rise than one might expect.

My apartment in the 16th arrondissement is right near the Eiffel Tower, and so on a casual stroll down the Pont d’Iena I see plenty of “Attention Aux Pickpockets !” signs. Then I look around for a second and think about who might be the one to pick my pocket, then I expand my mind a little bit and think, who might my fellow pickpockets be? Who might be sharing this experience with me? What kindred spirit walks along this bridge over this glass-green river, who I never even had a chance of knowing, and who, as we part might look at the back of my head walking down the street just moments after I turned to look at theirs?

What Exactly are We Looking for?

When we go to another place, what are we hoping to find? I guess it depends on who we are and what we value. Do we want to see different things? Feel different air? I think, to an extent, when we travel we are looking for simple variety, but in a place like this, like Paris, I think there is something more at stake. After all, what is the mythology of this place? There is more than steel and stone on the banks of the Seine. It is a city of intellectual vibrancy probably unmatched through the entire world.

Photo provided by parisjazzclub.net

The other day we went to St. Germain de Pres in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and we came across Les Deux Magots, a self-proclaimed “Café Littéraire”. It is an image I am deeply familiar with, of the exchange of ideas, of the coffee-steamed air practically electrified by great minds. The great minds of the 20th century gathered here. For the first time I got more than just a hazy image of the places these people I admire frequented in Paris. And past the initial reference towards this place, I found it to be just another cafe. It was in a beautiful area, but there wasn’t anything particularly inspiring or enervating about the place itself.

In the garden of Eugene Delacroix, near Les Deux Magots

I realized, then, that these communities of intellectuals whose works have made me cry and laugh and lose sleep were not indeed attracted to Les Deux Magots. They were attracted to each other. Many of the people I am thinking of were expats (James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) who, to come here, had to forsake their home countries and the familiarity and safety those places bring, all in the name of finding likeminded people. I am comforted by this idea of intellectual communities as centered around people, instead of places. It makes me think that of all the wonderfully smart, lively, courageous people I have surrounded myself with, we have created our own little circle of minds in Los Angeles. There is nothing inherent about Paris that makes these kinds of ideas possible (or if there is, it’s probably negligible), but there is a spirit of freedom that we must allow ourselves to have. Because of this mythology, it can be easy to say that the ideas born here have extra weight. But it is a fact in the birth of the ideas that they must be allowed to hold their whole weight. One must allow for the risk of minor pretension to let the truly genius ideas be set free. One must never equivocate or shut themselves down through doubt. The greatest inhibition towards intellectual freedom is self-doubt, and to be immersed in a place like Paris, to be counted among such a people, I don’t know how anyone could doubt themselves.

Whence the Echoes Come

Preface: In this post, I say many disparaging things about Los Angeles and many nice things about London. I reserve my right to speak badly of the city I belong to, and acknowledge that whatever I say negatively about Los Angeles here, I return threefold in my love for it. Londoners may or may not agree with my analysis of their city, since it is rather idealistic, and many of them are rather not. They too reserve their rights to hometown whinging, and I would never dare to deprive them. This piece is an intellectual response to an emotional quandary of the past week, and should be considered in that light. The LA sun will always shine brightly.

Dickens wrote of the echoing footsteps of the future bearing down on his protagonists in their quiet Soho refuge. Fear and anticipation of the tumultuous world to come haunted these characters in an almost spectral way. Walking through London today, I do not hear the footsteps of the future, but those of the past.

At night, leaning against a building which predates even the notion of my nation, as the city veers finally homeward and the quiet slowly grows, I can hear the faint sound of footsteps echoing through the otherwise sepulchral neighborhood. Footsteps. Not the sticky crackling sound of tires on the pavement, not the low hum of an engine, not a wailing siren. Footsteps: an unmediated sign of life.

A place that is promised and a place that simply is. I live in the promised land, or at least a promised land. Alta California, the Golden State, was a place of great wealth, a harbor against the bitter chill of the East and Midwest. Americans were supposed to find their salvation here. We were a material Zion. But places of great promise, when they fall short, create a base and bitter resentment. Too many Americans grudge California every one of its faults, because it doesn’t live up to the dreams of its founding legend. London, in what seems to me a stark and radical contrast, holds little pretense at all. Of course, on the surface, there are grandiose facades to which no people, whatever their history, could ever live up. But the actual substance of the city itself is frank, honest.

In a world focused on the future, in the promised state of the promised nation, what choice do we have but to yield to modernity? What choice do we have but to reject the old ways and embrace the new? What choice do we have but to encase our meager river in cement, but to again widen the freeways, but to strike the iron again and again? We built a city that contained the very soul of the American Future, and it is a devastatingly lonely place.

Here in London, I have seen what a city built for people (not corporations, not real estate trusts) can look like. I can walk ten minutes and see the convivial. I can see people laughing together, sitting under sycamore boughs. I can see a human richness foreign to the furthest dream of my sprawling valleys.

This kind of denseness perpetuates a literary mode of existence. A certain kind of writer may be tempted to think that in order to achieve greater verisimilitude, a kind of mimetic inaction need occur (or rather not occur). Life can seem plain and boring, and it can seem that nothing ever really happens to anyone. A writer would need to eschew a sequential plot with action and tension, in order to achieve that depressive sense of stasis. It is a misguided thought, of course. Great, terrible, awesome, sublime, dramatic things happen every day, worthy of those great Aristotelian words Hamartia, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, Catharsis. It is the writer’s job to find the ones worth telling about. This was Charlie Kaufman’s thesis in his film Adaptation. I don’t think it’s any great accident that these were the feelings he struggled with after moving from New York to Los Angeles. It is a place with so many people, separated from each other so severely, that a kind of surreal despondency overcomes the reality of our human geography, and we turn on the one hand to frivolousness (our main export), and on the other hand to alternate mimetic strategies. The alienation of the west makes it the great home to the American sect of magical realism.

In a city so tightly packed, you are forced to live among, to exist facing outwards. To drive in a car, to frolic only in one’s own private lawns, to hide from passersby across vast stretches of road, is to conceal oneself subconsciously from the other members of the community. The writer’s advantage in a place like this, where the display of humanity is a public good, is not only to see and become inspired, but to be seen.

Reading A Tale of Two Cities, or any book, is primarily a solitary endeavor, but bookpacking these places, I have found, is everything but. Shrinking away from London feels like a futile exercise, and as a constant practice would require true sacrifice to maintain. At every moment I am thrust into the social spheres of this place. There is no option to look away and pretend that life does not continue around me: antithesis to the solipsist. In bookpacking, these feelings of immediate relation are magnified by the closeness of the historical relations of the novel. There is a constant sense of “so it was here” or “so it was like this”, when I see Soho Square or The Old Bailey. The veil of academic distance is removed in a profound way, and I am reminded why the academic studies of these works appeared in the first place: because they are so immediately and truthfully borne from the experience of these places. It is a dialogue, to read a book in its very setting. You get to ask the cobbles constant whys, and if you look closely, you find answers. There is no alienation there, even across a gap of two hundred years. The footsteps of the past still echo loudly here.