The City of Light Taught Me Ennui
There, in the heart of the dark, there is an opaque wading pool of water, and at the end of the other shore is only a mirror, which reveals...
I went to Paris next and lived there like a writer: alone. M. told me that when she was here she felt burdened by an emptiness. “All everyone does is eat and smoke and sleep. I forgot how to be happy there.” I saw some of that myself. Despite the noise of the city my head is quiet, resounding not with ambitious direction but simple realization: This is not my home.
I am wandering about during the day looking everywhere I can, snapping pictures under my arm like a spy instead of a tourist, like I’m looking for a target or maybe a ghost. In a way I am. In a past life I was killed here, in this city or its countryside; here my soul is in schism. Maybe forty years ago, maybe four hundred, but I know what I felt.
I visited the Cafe Select inspired by The Sun Also Rises but the host didn’t even know the book when I mentioned it to her. As soon as I stepped foot in the country the airport security looked at me under suspicion and insisted on checking all of my bags. To no avail. (They didn’t find the drugs I actually did have hidden.) Hundreds of people are seeing me every day but no one’s really looking at me. I’m pasting posters for METROPOLIA and Hot Literati on cool walls with chipped paint and windows of abandoned stores and I have a feeling someone is trailing behind me ripping them down as soon as I turn another corner. I’m holding the weight of the world in my hands, it feels like, and when the wind blows through the curving buildings here I let it go loose and silklike.
I’m still fascinated with the quantum mutability of time, how working into the future and immersing into the past can enrich and enlighten the present. After learning of the format of Brazilian crônicas, I’m realizing this Substack platform and my approach to it is nothing new, it is another pillar of avant-garde tradition that I’ve stumbled into, and even a coincidence is decided by stars. In that way there are no coincidences, only emanations.
And at night I am back to steeping myself into my usual mysticism, that is, I’m performing the role of being peoples’ therapist again. It feels important that I work while I’m here. Working as in being my therapist self. When I enter the state my feet cease tapping, my expression becomes calmer, my eyes grow wide. It is very similar to the state in which I do my best writing. M. was surprised when I slipped into my channeling state in an instant Saturday night in the Plaça Reial. It’s as much a part of myself as the hedonism, this cosmic-open state, a pureness from which I do not speak, I only produce revelation, observation, direction, awareness, insight.
I don’t want to hurt you. But I’ve been carrying such weight all by myself and in my changing I need to shed some skin. Here from behind the veil are a few of the confessions I’ve heard just in a week from my clients:
“I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be happy when there’s so much pain in the world.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do without her. For years, she was my world. Now she’s gone and it’s all my fault.”
“I hate my parents for making me be born and then leaving me here all alone. Why do I keep going on? What’s the point of anything?”
“It’s hopeless. Happiness is a delusion. I should be able to end myself if I want. That’s why I’m isolating from everyone, so that when I go they feel grateful, not grieving.”
“My life is always chaotic. There is no peace.”
“I didn’t really do anything in the last week. I don’t really have anything that’s fun anymore.”
“While I’m at this weight, I don’t deserve to be happy. That’s what I think. If I’m ugly, I shouldn’t be allowed to be loved.”
“My home has always been toxic. I’ve accepted that I’ll never learn what love is.”
…Listen to the cries of the subjects of this brutal bloody empire. Do you feel their subatomic weight? Sorrow has a feel and a sound. Their wails echo from deep within the Temple of Desire. Souls like children are cradled and huddle close together in the ribcage labyrinth of the Godbody. There, in the heart of the dark, there is an opaque wading pool of water, and at the end of the other shore is only a mirror, which reveals to the viewer of all our misfortunes.
I don’t have answers or solutions which float up to the surface of the water. I can give my patients nothing but another hand to help hold their burdens. To me, the pool reveals: happiness is a kind of choice. You can’t really choose to be happy or not but you can choose to act on what you know gives you pleasure. You can choose to ignore the news, the squabbling of your siblings, the bait left by your enemies to bring you into argumentation. We alone have the ability to hurl and manipulate aestheticism. There is no objective reality but what we see through our eyes, filtered through our brains, put in conversation with our ideas… we are adaptable. We can see the beauty in anything. We can manufacture it. Romanticize it. Not only can we do this but we must do it. Otherwise the world and its cruelties will orphan us. Depression is the mind withering as do plants deprived of the sun. Loneliness is the lack of human connection we were supposed to be intertwined with since birth. It takes a village et al.
Sometimes my clients look at me and I can see in their eyes that they think I don’t understand. That I’ve never crumbled under the weight of that darkness, that isolation, that vast and heart-tickling fear of oblivion. Some of them are painful to talk to. The uninterested, the mandated-attendees, and worst of all, the terribly wounded. No one wants to sit in a pool of heavy grief. No one wants to look directly at viscera exposed for any longer than they have to. I am realizing I push my clients to move, to evolve, to heal, out of a desire to challenge them, yes, but also a shivering of my own, a wish to leave all this mess behind as soon as possible.
I went too far with one of them. They shut down, they started to cry, they asked to leave early so they could compose their self before their partner returned home. I apologized — and instead of denying the content of my apology, as most would do, they simply accepted it. That almost made me feel worse. They’re afraid, I know, they’ve been donning vulnerability armor (you can’t hurt me if I never let you in), but that doesn’t keep life from delivering us pain, it only keeps our tongues swollen, as they never get to taste the sweetness out there that this experience has to offer us.
Paris is rife with sweets and cigarette smoke. It is a vain city. Everyone is always fixing their hair, looking in mirrors, dwelling in leisure. Listlessness. Luxuriating. Romance is bloated and lazy and perfumed, back-supine on fluffed pillows and robed only by tobacco haze. Saints pose half-destroyed in their niches, hands and torsos blasted apart by time and occupation. I’m not one for desserts and the national pastime of sitting at a cafe just makes me restless. I’m spending as much time inside on my computer as I did back in New York. I don’t quite see the appeal that has traditionally enchanted many of my literary idols and influences. Within that is a creeping feeling I don’t like the taste of — would those that I study have found me unremarkable, as well? In that regard: am I heretical?
All signs point to a new tradition which does not exist yet, which I must construct myself from the mysterious dark matter within myself.
Having a unique nature is as much a choice to be made as the pursuit of one’s happiness.
There is no point beyond the meaning that we make ourselves. And the meaning is different for all of us. And the meaning must be made and remade continually in response to disaster, new adolescences, sudden obsessions and relentless revolutions. There is no point to a comet or a flash of lightning or a life: it comes, it stuns, it leaves.
For some of us there is a need to wrench something from the cold hands of the world. I want rubies in my hand, so I'm going deep into the quarry and digging them up myself. You won't even notice if I bleed over them — if anything that would enhance their luster.
Yes — the mortifying ordeal of being known — almost as horrid as the debilitating pain of being unknown.
It is unknown to me what I have to say here, just that I have something to share. I am working on everything and finishing nothing. By the time you’re reading this, I’ve already left Paris behind. The sorrows of others pass through and leaving me empty, winded. The city is exhausting me with its size, its brevity, its refusal to descend into a meaning of any particular depth. I have enjoyed my time here, but I don’t think I’ll ever need to return.
Wow, this story stings and shines in both its lucidity and haunting pain. No wonder the weight of the world presses into your fingers; reading the therapy lines left me breathless. A person told me once: when therapy is done right, at one point the therapist will accidentally offend their client. Sometimes truth hurts and it hits a nerve. My lil sis lived in the immigrant quarters of Paris for 5 years. She returned home to the US gaunt and hallow, like a ghost in a shell, with a fearful look in her eyes loaded with the hurt of the world. Your past life description is visceral. The line about lightening and life will stay with me. Your words glow like a light on the page.