Friday night

On a friday night there are excellent and wonderful things to see all over Paris. Walking up the rue d'Assas, headed for the gardens and thinking about the great Strindberg who used to live here, going through his inferno of fear and suspicion, you pass so many good looking people. There are boys and girls dressed up for a night on the town, all looking colorful and stylish and so vibrantly full of life and lust. If you keep your eyes on a girl for too long, she'll smile faintly, knowingly, and turn her eyes down and perhaps slow down just for a fraction of a second when you're passing, letting you feel her presence and then pull away and let time come back, you shaking your head and smiling, because it's awfully fun, even though it's a figment of your imagination.

Inside the gardens there's a comfortable quiet, letting you think and deliberate as you trudge along the intricate paths. Over by the museum the old men are playing chess, looking serious and thoughtful and moving invisible pieces with their heads and hands. Now and then a youngster comes along and beats them, and they throw up their hands and smile and shake their heads, all the while congratulating the young man who doesn't know what to say and starts looking embarrassed at winning. He might have the fastest brain, but life is still unknown to him, he's not a man yet and he feels it when the old and hard hands of the chess players tap him on the shoulder.

As you walk on, you think of Edvard Munch's words about painting: "I'm not painting what I see, I'm painting what I saw." They're good words, describing words - telling of a man whose life is an inner one. As opposed to depicting the model in her current state, she is used as a vehicle of expressing how he felt at some moment in space and time. Hence, of course, expressionism, you say out loud, and start humming.

There's a new sculpture up today. It wasn't there yesterday, you're sure of that. It's a modern piece, something intangible and impossible, boasting of nothing except being matter, having existence. The title you've already forgotten, all you can remember is that gray of granite or marble of whatever sort of rock was used, and you wonder why on earth someone would spend valuable time making something like that.

Walking on, feeling lighter now, less pressured. Your steps are lound in the shingle under your feet, your thoughts floating freely, touching on all kinds of pretty and comfortable subjects, letting you make up good stories about all the people you pass. There's a man singing a french song as he walks along the path up ahead. He must be a lawyer, you think, and you smile at him as he passes. He doesn't see it, but you still did it and that goes a long way. There's a red haired girl with a camera coming towards you now. You wonder if she's going to ask you to take her picture in front of the palace, but she passes, looking at her shoes. You think about her hair, wondering why it is bright red like that, trying to see her idea. Maybe there is no idea, except that red is a pretty color and it makes her feel special, knowing she's got that red hair for everyone to see. Maybe she's very shy, and fights it by doing something out of the ordinary.

The best thing to watch in Paris are all the wonderful lovers. Young and old, gay and straight, they're always tangled in hugs and kisses and tender words spoken so close they go right into the other persons mought. Their hands are all over, silently making love to their lover, eyes carefully watching as light sounds of pleasure bubble out and into the hot and cold air of the evening. Right now you're watching a couple that have been running laps together. They've stopped under the trees, already sweating and panting from the run, feeling lovely and tired and wanting the other person close. She's thin, with wide good looking hips and a mild, loving face. He's bigger, with a broad chest and well formed hands. She's holding him close, whispering into his mouth some secret for them to share, licking his lips between words. He looks dreamily into space, feeling happy and lucky and loving the evening and their tired breaths. All this you see in just a second, feeling deeply happy and melancholy.

Parallel to the rue d'Assas of Strindberg runs rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Somewhere in that rue Hemingway used to live back in the 20's. He's not there anymore, you can't even find his house, and the Café des Lilas is so expensive now you can't help but burst into laughter. Walking home you pass the Rotonde, ideally placed for people watching - and people in Paris this evening are looking exceptionally good. A beer is 9 euros. That's 2 days worth of decent food. There's no way you can do that. Rummaging around your pockets you find some coins and start counting. It's not looking so good. 20 cents, 25, 30, 40 - 46 cents. They won't even let you smell the coffee pot for that silly sum. You stand outside for a while, looking in at the lights and people of the café, and out at the Boulevard Montparnasse, keeping your ground. It's your corner now, you can stay there for as long as you want. So many wonderful people, looking so well dressed, full of style and joie de vivre. At home you have a good shirt, clean and decent pants, and a nice pair of shoes, just waiting to be worn. With a smile you think of the last time you wore them, a night of jazz at the Caveau de la Huchette that ended with someone needing to put your shoes back on for you.

Trudging home you admire a group of kids - 15 or 16 years old, maybe - drinking wine under some trees, looking silly and happy and yelling at eachother. Grinning, you come to think of Roberto Benigni in "La vita é bella" - such a wonderful figure - beautiful, beautiful. What a night! Now back to work, happy.

Angst

And there are the days where a sort of empty feeling of loneliness consumes you and makes you bored and unhappy and wanting to spend your last money in a café or bar, just so you can feel that there are people around you, talking and laughing and not being dead. You sit in your room, staring at something you've written or drawn, wondering if it's any good - if it's got worth - wondering if it'll ever be any good, and what kind of price you'll have to pay to get there. Reading Van Gogh's letters, mostly to his kind brother Theo, feeling his loneliness like you feel your own, looking at his sombre, earthy drawings from when he was about 30 and living God knows where - certainly not Arles. Always of poor people, people handling potatoes and peas and sitting on ragged chairs being tired. A man of the people, then.

There's no energy when you start feeling sad. You don't want to be miserable, and you certainly don't want to feel sorry for yourself, but it's still there, refusing to go anywhere but stay right here and now. You draw a self-portrait in the mirror. It's not very good, though better than your last, and even there your eyes and your mouth come out sad and tired, looking like you might cry any second now.

The noises in the street, the long seemingly never ending Boulevard Raspail, scare you. Are they looking for you? Do they remember you - and, did you in some crazy second give them your address, just so you could escape into the night? Not likely. The fear, the worldfear one might say, is never rational, never well founded and thought through. And you think someone has bitten you in the arm and given you some virus - even though the wound is too small, and would be only upper or lower teeth, not both. Who manages to pierce your flesh with only one of those two? You don't know, but your mind doesn't follow normal lines at this moment. It's got the fear in it now, and all you can do is ride it out, jousting with the windmills like our dear old Don Quixote of La Mancha (if only you had a Sancho Panza!).

You want a drink when it's like this, but you can't have one because then you'll have two - and once you've had two, you start feeling safe and warm and fuzzy and a third really can't hurt. Then the world is looking bright and funny, a good place to be, friendly and alive. Pretty soon the bottle is empty and you've ruined not only your chance at working well today, but probably tomorrow too. So you let that bottle of wine sit there, looking sullen and tempting like a naked girl who pretends she won't give you any even though you both know that's a lie.

She said she knew we'd have good sex that night as soon as we started discussing art. God knows why I started talking about art, I have nothing to say about it. Maybe my subconscious mind knew about the good sex but didn't bother telling me, as I'd screw it up if I knew. We fought about it. Battled it out like two alley cats. Certainly as drunk as a couple of alley dwellers. Atleast I was, but I always am when I'm feeling nervous. She was looking beautiful with that fuzzy black hair of hers and those cool grayish blue eyes. Not to mention the rest of her, of course. At some point I was screaming something or other, and I startled myself, because I don't talk about art. It's something I think about, to the point of obsession, but what is there to say about it? It is a tool with which I can communicate loneliness and fear without talking out loud, because no one ever understands what you're trying to say, Wittgenstein and all that.

And then you start writing something - a note in a makeshift diary perhaps to chase the fears, and for a good while it's working, letting you feel good about your words and the world. You can't draw when you're like this, because drawing is too slow and when you stop to be exact, you start thinking again, and then it all goes to hell and your drawings start to look bad. Trying to read some silly american crime novel doesn't work, but it gets you thinking: "what will I do when I've run out of both money and books?" You see yourself sitting in a chair staring at the wall, looking like a dunce - but then a new thought pops into that ever vigilant mind: "Why - I'll have to write more!" - and you laugh out loud, the sound echoing under the ceiling and leaving you a little happier.