Mid-summer, and deciduous leaves; paintings of synthetic ponds filled with nymphéa shipped from Egypt and the Far East, in colours never before seen. Everyone in Paris tells me they want for the green of London but I see life all around in this city. I wish I had never left, or rather wish I had never been. Apples sprout through the fertile cracks in the pavement and nothing washes their taste from my mouth.
Most of the space between Paris and London is farmland; on the Eurostar you pass through acres of fields at speed, folding around the carriage in valleys and troughs. Entering the channel, the sterile air blows cold into the carriage. Arriving at Gare Du Nord, I push past the swathes of people. My Britishness doesn't leave my side, it carries a heavy sweetness undeserved on the French palate. On the nose it is round and full, almost indolic – begging for release. I try my hand at French at the bar and, for a moment, they believe me before the smell gives me away.
At Frenchie, I am given a stall to sit in front of the extraction unit and drink Alsace Cremant, the hot air blowing the smoke from between my legs. Service in this country is natural, a custom before it is a courtesy. I eat Vietnamese with a Dutchman looking for the best pho in Paris. He works between the Alps and Paris, and he comes to the city twice a month; when this began, he tells me, it was the worst part of this month, but he has grown to love the city between cups of hot broth. I tell him about Deptford; or really I don't but I want to.
I scarcely sleep in Paris – I spend nights drafting words and playing with the French language. In the half-light of this Marais apartment, everything and nothing is mine. The city comes to life before me. From the mud and bones below she rises, stirring breezes in the heat; I wake to four Nespressos and a chicory coffee and at Musée d'Orsay, I move through the rooms without pause. I stop only at a Hammershøi – a painting of the same room as my favourite painting at the National Gallery back in London. In this version there is no figure. In the London work, a woman stands with her back to us; in this version, we look through the doorway at an empty table. It reminds me of the large marble table at my borrowed apartment, longer than my arms can stretch.
Rain shrouds the city, lapping at her heels. The Seine grazes them, and diaphanous skirts plasticise against her legs. Following hemlines down street after street, I find myself in search of the perfect sunrise. Every stop I make is a bootless errand to bookmark her flowing want, and in the queue at Notre Dame, every breath drawn is hallowed and hopeful with that same want. In Paris, even the beggar is different; he too wants differently. One asks me something in French as I leave the station and I am unable to decipher what it is that he is saying. I mumble that I don't understand and move on. Writing about Paris, I obsessed over every detail, trying to recall every event but it didn't build a full picture. I Lime back and forth along the Seine; anything between is transient.
Inside Notre-Dame the lights are too bright, and stone too fresh. Her face is renewed but at its rear, steel scaffold hides its ugly body. Reaching the back, the whir of machinery can be heard outside. There is no halt for prayer: at its edge a stream of people mimic the river below. In this Godless place, a church is just another errand. In the distance, I can hear the blue murmurs of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Bourse de Commerce sound between the striking of bowls.
I don't go to the Sacré-Cœur because I don't want to explain to the hustlers that I don't have the cash to pay for their €20 piece of string. I don't send the text I drafted last night telling M to meet me there wearing all white. I remember I telling me that locals say the Tour Montparnasse has the best view in Paris, because it is the only place from which you cannot see its steel form cut open the skyline. Between winding streets and drinks in the rain, I like the view best from where my two feet are planted and I like it more with every step.
I take my last meal at Le Dauphin: a bar designed by Rem Koolhaas with a natural wine list and lunch menu. The marble and mirror walls cast a thousand images of self through the bar and I see myself, for the first time on the trip, sat at countless bars on innumerable nights, as if I could be a Parisian. The countertop at Le Dauphin is lipped such that a glass cannot easily fall off it. This indicates to me that it is a place designed for serious drinking and, as such, I feel at home here. Paris, with her glass ceilings and yards of bones, I love. Time is measured by the body – how it folds into wicks and burns both sides. I run out of time for Café de Flore but think of the photograph of Kate Moss there and how you can see both pleasure and time reflected in her face now.
Back in London, advertising fills every inch of the city. My London swallows me and I forget the trip all too quickly. Paris becomes a mirage that I can only half-form in these notes and what I can conjure from smell of the Thames.
never even in calmer times have I ever dreamed of bicycling through that city wearing a beret and Camus always pissed me off.– Bukowski
At the end of my street is a three-sided fence measuring 2 x 2m. Its purpose is for piling waste into, which is collected biweekly by the local council. Sometimes I see my neighbour sifting through it, this wire mausoleum, looking for something to lay claim to. Sometimes they are looking for something, but often they are wading through to find anything of use. I know of several of these spaces in the estate, and find it hard to understand how we can let go of so much.
I couldn't think of anything I have taken, but since I moved here, five years ago, I have left only a few things in the cage; my grandmother's old slow cooker; a damaged bike wheel; a dozen cigarette butts; 4 large cardboard boxes. Everything else I have disposed of since living here has fit within a standard-issue Southwark Council general waste bag. Still, I look acutely at the indistinct rubble every time I cycle past it. I'm hoping to find a mid-century oak table or a $5000 leather sofa like those fake NYC Reels you see on Instagram. I never find anything; what I am looking for isn't there, if it is anywhere at all. But I didn't stop looking. Sartre said forlornness is when we learnt God did not exist and we must learn to deal with it. I hadn't learn to deal with the fact what I wanted wasn't real, and so I kept looking.
In the last few weeks, I've been clearing out my own flat. I started with a single cupboard, and then I couldn't control my compulsion to expel everything. The goal was, in my mind, to reduce everything I had to a suitcase. I had no intention of telling anyone this, and I had no intention of travelling. I gave away too much of myself on the Timeline – I loved the immediacy of it. I filled my iCalendar so that I was always on the move. There was no separation between general waste and recycling/reposting, between real and virtual. Everyone could look into it. I found a love for the cruelty of others and it kept me moving from person to person like an old side-table.
All that is exempt from this culling are my books, which I am unable to get rid of even if I have, truthfully, no intention of reading. In fact, my feeling of spiritual loss could be largely attributed to a total lack of reading in the last year since I started working in Culture. Most of my career is centred around a few dozen stale images in a temperature controlled room. Spending all this time hopping between openings and screenings, I found myself feeling entirely inauthentic. When I watch James Baldwin in Paris, it feels like we must learn to abandon ourselves from the anchor of history in order to move forward. I mean this personally, not politically, though it is always political. I gave away too much of myself on the Timeline and when I came back to collect the heap, I found that I had been taken to a thousand places in a hundred rooms.
Ravished between theatre cloth, thin Set dressing, curtain call. Pillars of light Like windows of skin, or cow and kitten licks In empty halls. Spotlit thighs, lifted by the arcs of limbs. Again, I play a fool.
My relationship with time is obsessive. I keep time as a habit rather than as a tool. I ask Siri what time is it? constantly, as if this exchange with the machine could slow time down. On the way to the gallery, I pass Big Ben — as I do twice a day, every day between the hours of six a.m. and midnight. As I sat down to read On Kawara's One Million Years, I started limiting the timing of my body; licking my lips; twisting the cap from my bottle; raising the glass to my lips. Eventually it all becomes automatic. I don't recall breathing between the years.
That morning, frost had covered the city. It is the first time in the while that I have seen such an expanse of white. I thought back to walking across the school field, back to soft feet over firm ground. I think also of the storm of time, a storm where I am unable to see into the future and unable to alter the past. The two blend into one. It is in schools that we first instil Time into youth in a real, palpable sense. Until then, there is nothing that they can truly be late for.
Before reading, I struggle to remember when I had last lost track of time, despite lying about doing so often. I didn't listen to R, my co-reader, as she read each even number between my odds. When asked who could read with me, myself standing-in at the last minute, there were no questions as to who I would ask. And yet, it became easier to ignore the downbeat and let the pendulum keep ticking.
The sequence becomes apparent without thought for chronology. Time unfurls in patterns, rather than integers. Intervals between the spoken years vary but we settle on an entropic rhythm. Patterns are predictable in a way that languages (and numerical values translated into language) are not. With each date, I am opening up the possibility of the unknown.
Otherwise, with each date I read, I am creating a gap in which my co-reader can slip up — swapping numbers in error and having to repeat herself. I do the same too, losing track far more than R. The readers before me took notes as they read. I started the session wanting to think nothing but didn't dare disrupt the purity of the dates. Instead, I opted to draw columns through the odd numbers, my numbers, and mark only where I spoke in error. Time is better marked by the event than the passing. I stopped crossing out each number so I could focus more clearly on the pattern.
Recently I tried counting sheep walking through fields to beat my insomnia, but I instead became fixated — obsessed over trying to remember what a sheep looked like in vivid detail. I pictured myself following the curve of its horns and trying to understand their perfect mathematics. I finish the reading the same way as that dream: euphoric, as if drunken with time itself.
I can't imagine the dates I read or what the world will look like when they come. As with passing time, the start and the end date felt irrelevant. What I am reading is post-historic time: entirely imaginary but dictated by order.
When I finish reading, I joke that I need to scroll Tiktok to bring myself back to reality. It was all over so quickly. It's funny how different time is now — when scrolling, so much content can be consumed in so little time. I wonder what it will feel like in a million years.
