thomas m wilson

I’ve been in Paris for a few days. Yesterday I arrived in Stockholm, but before I write about Sweden I want to reflect on my recent time in France.

Paris, as everybody has probably told you, is a beautiful city. I spent a few months there six years ago, I’ve had a few Parisian friends, and I can speak a bit of French, so I know the place more than some tourists. One of my first impressions of Paris this time around was that the city doesn’t have enough trees. Compared to the streets of where I was in Montreal, it feels all stone, and it is very densely populated. So being in the centre, where the traditional conception of ‘belle Paris’ emerges from, made me feel like I was far from the natural world I love so much. It is interesting to find myself critical in this respect of this city. So many, including myself, have so much praise for Paris. But despite the beautiful old architecture, I wouldn’t want to live there permanently, deep in the middle of the work of humanity. I would crave more space. I would miss untamed ecosystems.

Now after my brief bit of complaining, I will say that I do like walking around certain areas, like St. Germain des Pres. For those who don’t know, central Paris is about two million people living inside a ring road amongst five or six story eighteenth and nineteenth century apartment buildings. St. Germain is close to Notre Dame and the Seine. I like to be close to the Seine, as being by a river reminds me of the natural world a bit. I know that the days of Hemingway and Sartre and Camus are gone when it comes to this quarter, but I still like its art galleries and narrow streets and stylish cafes.

I looked into the shop window in St. Germain and saw reflected the classic Parisian activity: sitting in a cafe.

There is a bookshop on the other bank of the Seine from Notre Dame that I often visit: Shakespeare and Co. They have a piano amongst the books for any passing musicians to sit down at. On Monday morning I was browsing in the back of the shop when I heard some clear and bluesy notes coming from the piano. I looked over and there was a guy with a white beard playing. I kept looking at books, but my attention was completely taken by what he was playing. He was improvising. What he played was perfectly conceived jazz improvisation, with fades to contemplative, well spaced thoughtfulness, and then rises to soulful, twisting movement and force. I stood there behind the piano and amongst the books and felt my heart become lighter. My spirit relaxed as I felt the play and delicate emotions of his phrases. The space of the book shop took on a new quality, much more than a place for old parcels of paper.

That is his son I think, waiting for his dad to finish playing. After he had finished playing I congratulated him on his music and asked if he played in a group, expecting to hear some famous jazz trio as the response. No, he said, in a North American accent, he just noodled around on his piano at home. I couldn’t believe it. Some of the most beautiful music I’d ever heard, stuff that I’d happily put beside Keith Garrett’s work, had just been played by some North American guy who liked to play at home. The music hadn’t been recorded. It had just happened in a bookshop in Paris. I will never here that bit of music again. I left with a new appreciation for music as an event, an event that need have no connection with concerts or studios or CDs, or even with a written score. Just the right set of fingers on an old set of keys. A moment I will not forget for a long time.

At this time of year many Parisians go away on holiday, and sometimes it seems like every second person in the street is an American with a guide book. Or one of their kids.

That is Pont des Arts in the above photo.

The number of tourists that must stream over the paving stones of this city per year must be astronomical, but who can blame them? Paris is beautiful.

I wanted to represent the ‘flow’ of tourists through Paris visually, so I stood beside one of the most amazing doors in the world, the front doors of Notre Dame, and took a photo. Great old Age welcomes transient and restless Modernity across its threshold…

Ok, I’m not the first person to have taken the next photo, but it is an image I like nonetheless. From the top of Notre Dame I look westwards. The devilish gargoyle plots and broods over the denizens of the city far below.

If we are to look for a devilish plot with a greater basis in reality, the newly elected president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, might have something up his economic-growth-festishizing sleeve. That at least is what this bit of stencil art on the pavement of the Latin Quarter intimates.

OBEY

WORK

CONSUME

AND SHUT UP!

In the space of those last two images I moved from the Paris of the tourist to the Paris of the resident. What of the residents? They are more likely to be hanging out in places like rue Jeane-Pierre Timbaud, where I was in the 11th arondisement. They talk more quickly than your average Australian, being in general a bit more stressed. I can’t vouch for the men, but the women are very stylish, often with muted colours, interestingly cut skirts and comfortable, dark, flat-soled shoes.

These are my friends Solene and Julie in the 11th, a scene not found in the guidebooks.

My baggage hasn’t made it here yet, but I at least am in Sweden.

After flying over Germany and seeing an endless patchwork of fields (as well as plenty of wind turbines by the way), I was glad to look down on Sweden and see forest cover being a more dominant element of the landscape. Clearly I had left the more hyper civilized parts of Western Europe behind me.

Upon arrival in Stockholm on Tuesday I ambled around downtown by myself, without a map and with the eyes of a stranger recording the scene. There are immigrants from Iraq and Iran and other places, but most people have the traditional Swedish features: thin faces with slightly pointy noses and blond or light coloured hair. I’d heard the Swedish were very fashionable, but I can’t agree: the guys are very often to be seen in a pair of jeans which hang off their arse and then become really tight around their legs. To top this off they often sport a tight, light coloured t-shirt and a cap sitting on their head at a wild angle. Sorry guys, but I’m not digging it.

The architecture seems to be full of straight edges after the curved embellishments of Parisian apartment buildings. Like German towns, and unlike English or French ones, the buildings are painted bright colours. I prefer the unpainted stone and the more intricate facades of further south in Europe.

The streets of Stockholm’s downtown are strangely either shopping streets, full of commerce and people, or not shopping streets, and if you make a turn all of a sudden there is nobody around and no shops to be seen. There are many waterways running through Stockholm, and the presence of the Baltic sea never far away is nice. The sound of Swedish in my ears is a kind of honest, charming sing-song which proceeds ‘da-da-da‘ with an emphasis on the last syllable.

From the moment I arrived, looked at the airport and talked to a polite, intelligent, friendly and articulately Anglophone Swedish woman at Scandanavian Airlines, I knew I was in an organised country. This place is full of clean public places and fast and easy to use public transport. Maybe one of the reasons I have encountered happy and smart people in the service industry here is that these guys actually have a robustly supported Society. Think tax funded child care, parental leave (for both the mother and the father), a ceiling on health care costs, free education up to and including university, extra taxes for the very rich, and proportional representation. With all that no wonder you don’t encounter too many bitter underdogs, or outright criminals, as you walk around the place. If you look after the whole society, and not just the abstract Me of right wing politics, then a trip down to buy some milk from the shop will be a better experience.

In my final bit of praise for the Swedish nation state, I am pleased to see that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences agrees that global oil supplies are peaking and that Sweden should get itself off the oil addiction. It isn’t impossible that Sweden will be oil free by 2020 as the government has promised. They already get most of their electricity from hydro and nuclear and biomass. It is so heartening to see a national government well on the road to doing the only sane thing when it comes to dealing with the environment: preferential taxation to encourage environmentally benign patterns of consumption (for example, the more polluting your car is, the more you pay to own it). The feeling that the people upstairs are actually moving forward on sustainability is refreshing.

My next photo from Stockholm was inspired by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote.  My little poem below isn’t just about traveling.

Dub Me a Knight

 

I’d rather be tilting at windmills, than pronouncing life a known factor.

 

I’d rather be questing over the horizon, than ticking boxes at the desk.

 

I’d rather have an imagination, than a BMW.

 

To the giants!

Yesterday I visited Skansen, the world’s first outdoor museum, situated on an island next to Stockholm.  The idea of an outdoor museum is here intended to show you what the trappings of life looked like for those people living in the Swedish countryside in centuries past.  As I walked around a couple of the things I saw reminded me of scenes from John Fowles’s books.

The first was from the first chapter of Daniel Martin.  It is harvest time in the south-west of England, and the villagers are stooking the wheat.  This sheaf of wheat below shows how the principal grain to nourish humanity was collected into a bundle.

The next few photos are not directly related to Fowles’s novels, but they are interesting nonetheless.

As you walk around there are people in the farm houses doing various things.  Here a girl was knitting some wrist warmers.  They talk in their strong Swedish accents and you really feel like you’re in the Swedish countryside.

Lactose intolerance is the normal state of humanity.  A few European groups have developed a genetic trait that lets them keep drinking mammalian milk after infancy.  The Swedes as a population have one of the lowest levels of lactose intolerance in the world.  To me that says that these people have been pastoralists for longer than nearly anybody else in the world.  Here is a scene from a northern pasture.  Traditional sheep hang out around a byre.

The earth roof was often seen…

The idea of using whole logs to make a dwelling is so simple and so obvious.  They are cut so that the logs simply sit on top of each other, locking into each other at the corners.

And now another scene from a novel by Fowles.  In The Magus the character of Maurice Conchis recounts the story of his time journeying through the wilds of northern Scandanavia.  He tells of coming upon a small farm in the remote north.  Up the river from the farm lived the blind brother of the farmer.  This brother believed that he communed with God on a nightly basis, and lived a bare and ascetic existence.  When I saw this old Swedish man in this tiny wood cabin, my memory went back to this powerfully narrated tale from The Magus.

The smoke in the cabin sits under the ceiling before leaving through the door, and radiates heat down into the rest of the cabin.

This next picture is of a tradtional bookbinders shop.  I took it for Sam, my brother, as he used to do bookbinding.  Now he’s creating digital books of a kind in cyberspace.  There seems to be some kind of continuity there.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks outside Gare St. Lazare in Paris.  Yes, Paris, nowhere else have so many gone about their daily grind with so much ancient and beautiful masonry towering above their shoulders.   It is hot and sunny outside and I was forced into this chain as the classic Parisian cafe does not deign to offer wireless internet to its patrons.  Yesterday I sat on a boulder with a couple of friends in the evening sun on an island in the Swedish archipelago.  Today I’m en route to Normandy.

In just over a week – 15 August – I’ll be back in Australia.  I’m looking forward to the banksia trees and the peppermints, to seeing a few good friends and feeling the sand under my feet as I jog along Leighton beach.  I won’t have much internet access in Normandy, so this blog may have to recommence in a little over a week.  Then I’ll have time to reflect on more of the journey.

I’m hoping to visit St. Mont Michel in the coming days.  Let Providence make Luck be on my side.

Well the digital book that is my blog opens up its pages for the world once more…

This is actually me in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm a few days ago.  Alfred Nobel was, like myself, a man with a keen interest in both science and literature.  Thanks to him we have the Nobel Prize awarded in five categories, which include science and literature.  I knew that Jean-Paul Sartre had rejected his Nobel Prize, but I didn’t know that each one came with 1.5 million U.S. dollars.  Ah the folly of sitting too high on the existentialist’s moral high horse!

I’m in a small coastal town in the north of Normandy, Fecamp.  I’ve found a little bar/cafe with wireless.  To my right is the bar’s counter, with a handful of French men standing and chatting over their morning’s cafe.

Before I mention Normandy, I thought I’d share a few of my photographs of the archipelago off Stockholm.  Four hours on a big ferry winding our way through pretty waterways, and finally we made it to the island of Moja.

Granite is everywhere on these islands…

The runic alphabet of life…

The forests of these islands are full of pines and birches.  They don’t seem to grow very tall though, maybe because of the underlying soils not being deep.  The Swedes often have little cabins, painted red, to retreat to for summer holidays.  This path led to the cabin of my friend Robert.  Lucky soul that he is, he is living there till September, amid the silence and the water and the trees.

Speaking of Swedish retrospectives, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen’s favourite director died a few weeks ago.  I have never seen a Bergman film, and Robert suggested I watch two films from the 1950s that aren’t quite as bleak as many of his works: Wild Strawberries and Smiles of a Summer Night.

This is not a photo of Normandy.

I have started an entry on Normandy with a picture of the opulent shadows of the inside of Opera Garnier in the middle of Paris as I want to highlight the difference between city and country. The zenith of traditional European architectural grandeur: red velvet, towering statues and candelabras. Then I stepped off the train into the countryside of Normandy…

Paris is not all beautiful interiors. All of a sudden I’ve left the heat and the noise and the tourists of the streets of Paris behind.

Fagus silvatica, or the European Beech tree. It has been interesting to see the same symmetrical veins on beech leaves on species in New York, Canada, England, France, New Zealand and Tasmania. Veins of continuity which cross the planet, as I travel eastwards. Beech leaves linking the continents with their slanted striations.

This is Eu, a small town in the north of Normandy. Half-timbered houses are common  around here, with their black beams and wattle and daub walls painted white.  Many of the coastal towns with their old stone buildings, gulls crying, green and rolling hills around and cool and often rainy sky remind me that I am in the France that is so well known and evoked by English literature over the decades and the centuries. This is the France that is just on the other side of the channel from England, a big stone’s throw away. So the landscape is just the same. It is the first foreign bit of land generations of English men and women have seen down through history. Julian Barnes’ ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ springs to mind. It is much easier to feel at home here than if you were English and you’d gone down to Avignon or the south of Europe.

Just outside of Eu…

The first couple of nights I stayed at the house of the parents of a friend. It was an old farm house in a valley with green woods and fields around. Lovely. Waking in the morning and sticking my head out of the window it was beautiful to be surrounded by green hills and forests and fields and no other houses or people. I’d look out after having just woken up, still feeling groggy, and have the invigorating vista of green and outdoor life below and before me, with Austan the Breton Spaniel running across some field to the right, and the cool air brushing against my face. The house still has its exposed oak beams, hundreds of years old, in the kitchen.

I recently visited a chateau in Normandy from the late medieval period, apparently a classic instance of the military architecture of the era. My visit lead to this little poem:

The Unguided Tour of Chateau Rambure

Chateau Rambure,
a place where the recreated castle atmosphere evoked the epoch of French chevaliers to all of us on our guided tour,
but made me imagine the explorations that were still waiting to be made in jungles and deserts all over the planet,
as a French lord sat down to eat dinner in the dining room,
or a nineteenth century gentleman padded down the stairwell with pigeons cooing outside,
then the lady in her long dress going down the wide stone stair case past the worthy oil ancestors while the sun fell outside,
as it did year after year on the villages of Normandy in summer,
the immemorial peace of the oak leaves still there to the east, century after century.

And the still mysterious Amazon standing entire,
the unphotographed highlands of Papua New Guinea, still bursting with tongues,
the massive shoals of cod still swimming off the coast of Canada,
the thylacine savaging a frog on the bank of a Tasmanian marsh,
the albatross sailing and falling, unthreatened through the smooth blues of the South Pacific,
blank spaces on the map,
dark spaces in the mind of a chevalier.

A rustle of breeze in the green oak leaves beyond the window,
the murmur of Europe’s twenty-first century as I turn and rejoin my companions on our guided tour.

We also visited the Chateau de Digeon, a much smaller nineteenth century chateau. My friend’s cousin has ownership of this place. We stopped and talked with them. Both in their sixties, grey hair, animated and friendly. Bruno Goisque-Thienpont showed us his gardin potager. It is a formal garden in the Italian style, but with a very important twist: all of the formal hedges are there to accentuate the beauty of the flourishing vegetable garden that lies within the borders. Bruno talked of how vegetables are beautiful plants, and how he likes to display them, having cucumbers climbing along a little fence on the borders for example, or laying down seeds in horizontal lines. He and his family eat mainly vegetables, and little meat. It was refreshing to find the owner of such an apparently aristocratic house so in touch with the earth. Beneath his finger nails was a thick layer of black soil, and beneath his ownership of part of Frances cultural patrimony lay a green political agenda. They actually have a couple of rooms for people to stay in a bed and breakfast setting, and I’m going to recommend to my friends to stay at this place. If William Morris’s dictum to have nothing in your house which isn’t beautiful or necessary is true indoors, then Bruno has shown how to take this idea into the garden. The ‘jardin potager’ (kitchen garden) is a masterpiece, constantly maintained by Bruno and his wife, a masterpiece of garden design. Beauty for the eye and nourishment for the body sit quietly and synonymously within the old garden walls. In a well looked after garden in the middle of the Normandy countryside grow tastes for the plate and the gourmet’s palette and pleasing shapes for the aesthetic idler. That evening we ate salad leaves and beans and other produce from the garden for dinner around a long table in the kitchen, and drank a kind of pear cider Bruno’s son had brewed in an old wooden cider press earlier in the year from pear trees in the garden. Slow food movement devotees eat your heart out. What is more, these guys have been doing a kind of French aristocratic permaculture from before Bill Morrison even published a handbook. Not much English here – to hear Bruno talk about it in his enthusiast and articulate French you’ll have to learn a decent amount of the native tongue.

Here is Bruno searching for something he was going to show me.

Beauty and utility…

I’m in Fecamp and the air feels fresh and the gulls are crying. I wish Australian sea gulls sounded so nice.

Sitting up on the cliffs just outside Fecamp a couple of nights ago… It was like the allied forces were just over the water, and could disembark on the pebble beach sixty metres below our feet at any moment.

With the white cliffs of Dover not far away France and England will stand forever face to face against each other. The gulls banked and slid across the upwellings of air. One sat a few metres from me on the precipitous ledge of white chalky rock. Below the gulls the odd bit of grass clinging to a hollow or dimple in the sheer surface. It was good to sit up there and eat baguette with pate and salad, and enjoy the feeling of height above Fecamp away to the east and the sun dazzled Atlantic below to the left. Those are wind turbines on the far horizon.  I really don’t think that they ‘spoil the view’.

Fecamp is known in France as the home of the liquor Benedictine.  This horror movie style bit of Rennaisance Gothic architecture contains the distillery, and the big boxes of spices from all around the world that go into the drink.

Speaking of drinks, last night I sat in a creperie by the port, looking out on all bobbing masts, ate sea food galletes, and drank local cidre Normande, apple cider, from ceramic bowls, and spoke French.  I talked with my mum on the phone recently and she told me that my English grandfather once drank plenty of cider in Normandy in this region, along with a fair amount of Calvados, and danced with street signs on his merry way home.  Those are tall precedents to live up to!

I’ve done the final hop down to the southern hemisphere and to Perth. For what its worth, Singapore is the best airline I’ve flown with: friendly, helpful people, and hundreds of things to watch on the screen in front of you. On the plane over I read the French newspaper. The Figaro’s front page is about the success of the Velolib program in Paris. Ten thousand bikes, and twenty thousand by the end of the year, are being hired out to people for a Euro or something equally cheap for short distant rides. As I caught the Roissy bus to the airport I saw a besuited and fattening old business exec glide past in front of some salubrious, shiny golden gates. It seems everybody is coming onboard with this initiative of the Green and gay mayor of Paris. They need to as the air in Paris smelt and looked bad after the fresh sea air of Normandy.

Speaking of the Figaro, I’d like to publicly congratulate the French for producing newspapers, such as this one, which devote only two pages to sport (and plenty of that goes to sailing at that) and plenty of pages to culture and the arts. They also have many international stories and put them up in the front of the paper, as well as having in depth environmental coverage. The chronic geographical ignorance, both statistically verified (in a recent survey by National Geographic) and well lampooned from a British perspective by Ali G, of the majority of the American people is well known. It is not to be found in the pages of one of France’s major newspapers.

Continuing the pro-French note, I hear Michael Moore’s new film Sicko praises the French health care system. Then there is the extensive and very cheap train network: the SNCF. And little bit of gallantry I’d not noticed in the past that I noticed last week and that I like a lot: when French people leave a restaurant they will sometimes say (in French of course, and not in a loud voice) ‘Goodbye ladies and gentlemen’ to all the assembled people in the eatery, not just thanking the waiter they’ve just paid. I’m not uncritical of France: among other things they have a problem with criminality on the streets (although Normandy didn’t seem to have this problem to the extent of Paris or the south), and they can often be over-stressed. They often talk too fast and seem to need to take a deep breath and get a massage – although here they beat us Ango-saxons on a systemic, if not cultural, level in that they introduced the 35 hour work week a while ago. My praise for French dress sense can’t be extended to Normandy: the understated cool turns out to be a Parisian thing, as well as a few of the cities in the south.

I’ve experienced a lot on this trip around the world. I haven’t written about all of my travails with different airlines: for example, turning up at Charled de Gaulle to fly to Stockholm and being told that it is impossible because of my ticket guidelines and arguing with the staff for an hour and half and then running to catch the plane just before take off, or spending literally days and days on the phone in Geneva or Montreal trying to change dates or routings, or having my luggage lost twice, flights cancelled twice and flights delayed tens of times. I’m not joking when I say that anybody contemplating a trip around the world should get an extensive briefing before departure on the complex rules and regulations of contemporary airline ticket structures and codes. Apart from the well known environmental evils of air travel there is another reason not to do it: at some stage it will result in a plentitude of teeth-grinding frustration.

But there is something special about a circumnavigation of the globe. To have traveled around the world makes the planet seem more tractable as an entity. Although I can’t compare this trip to Charles Darwin’s in the nineteenth century on his wooden sailing ship The Beagle, I can say that this circumnavigation increases my sense of intimacy and ownership over the whole biosphere. Then there is the simple fact of having become a lot better as a traveler – knowing when is the right time to change currency, or how to master a new public transport system in a new city, for example. The more one travels, the more one has confidence to travel. And I’ve also often had the feeling that, yes, sure it is exciting to be in this place right now, say South Carolina on the beech one evening, but this time in four days I’ll be in a country I’ve never visited, say Canada. This feeling of the journey onwards has been invigorating. My travel in the past has been to one place for a few months usually. Often early on, say in Samoa, thinking of the trip to come was like thinking of the attic full of suprises I was soon to burst on into. Those moments of full attics to come are some of the best in a strange way. The road to come… The stairs to climb up…

My views of the nations and landscapes of the world has altered. I see that Australia and North America are some of the only first world places that have large amounts of wilderness left. My love of the tropics has been slightly decreased due to potentially dangerous mosquitoes and their maraudings. My other value-laden rantings on various nation states are obvious from previous entries over the last three months.

One of the best things about this trip around the world though has been staying with friends – you are never alone when staying with friends. (I hope they all come and stay with me!) In fact although I’m back in Perth now, for the first couple of nights I’ve stayed at a friends place – until my place in Fremantle was available again. Camaraderie once more. And there lies my suitcase on the bedroom floor again, lid open, full of clothes. There sits my camera bag and my black day pack next to it. And looking at the suitcase with its well known collection of shirts and the like, I wish it would go on like this. I wish that this would keep on being all I have. Having this set up makes you feel like you’re dynamic and en route, and not sunk in a domestic, possession-encumbered situation. I wonder if I can camp out, as it were, in my old bedroom in Fremantle?

Impressions of Perth, Australia… It is a bit like being in California, except that the cars aren’t quite as big, there isn’t much crime, the people are friendlier, and the night life isn’t as good. The culture is a kind of re-textured British working class culture with an legacy of egalitarian sentiment (recently marred by a creeping economic growth fetishism and its status symbol race). The sport-obsessed, working-class tenor to Australian culture is redeemed by jazz groups like The Necks, poets like Michael Leunig and witty cultural critics like Clive James. The weather is excellent, and the city is very dispersed, so that everybody has room in their house, not to mention their back garden, to move around. But most people are addicted to using a car and burning off fossil fuels on a daily basis. And because of the dispersed suburban living in Perth – the amount of medium and high-density living being very small here – the critical mass of people living together doesn’t get generated which ultimately achieves a downtown ‘city’ vibe. The trees and plants here aren’t green. They are olive coloured. And it is generally very flat. A few hours ago I arrived back to live in the port city of Fremantle and there is a bit more of an atmosphere generated here, with plenty of nineteenth century architecture, lovely proximity to the sparkling Indian ocean and a few artistic types loitering around. Fremantle is an oasis backed by the banal aggregations of materialistic suburbia lying to the east of it. But I will still admit that it is, as part of Perth, very isolated from other cultures and metropolitan centres. I think if I didn’t have the appreciation, intimacy and knowledge of the natural world that I do, I’d probably get sick of this ‘isolation’, and leave town. But I do have that link with nature, so rather than feeling isolation, I feel connected to the landscapes and life forms of this huge Western half of the oldest continent. Lucky for me. And of course I also have some interesting, cultured and cosmopolitan friends here, and fast internet.

According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology the Aboriginal categories for the seasons of the year are much more appropriate for use in this country than the four seasons we are accustomed to use as transplanted-Europeans. At this time of year in the south-west of Australia it is Meerningal. Many birds are singing in the forests at the moment. Soon there will be a vast coming forth of wild flowers across hundreds of kms of land north of Perth. The world will take on a multi-hued coat that I will be witnessing with my camera in hand. For the moment I’ve walked out into a small bit of local woodland and broken a eucalyptus leaf and put it to my nose to smell the scent of this country. I think that is more appropriately symbolic than the fact that I can plug my computer lead into the power socket here without using an adapter plug.